The Chronicle of Morigny is an underappreciated account from a little-known northern French monastery. Both monastery and chronicle deserve to be better known, and Bernard Gineste’s new edition and translation into French of the work should make for a solid start. Like scores of other medieval monasteries, Morigny was a small institution, associated with none of the major orders such as Cluny or Cîteaux, yet very important in its region of Étampes (now the département of Essonne, south of Paris). Small monasteries like Morigny would have been much more influential in the social and ecclesiastical milieu of their time than they may appear today.

This chronicle (or chronicles in the plural, as Gineste sees it) has been noted especially for the details it provides on the political struggles between kings Philip I and Louis VI on the one hand and the powerful castellans who dominated the Île-de-France on the other. Many of these lords became involved in struggles between churches as well as fighting against the crown, for they often controlled houses of canons, holding prebends themselves in some cases. The monks of Morigny considered the house of canons of Notre-Dame of Étampes especially as their enemies. The chronicle also has much to say about the papal schism of 1130 and the French king’s role in attempting a resolution of the conflict. One will not find here other-worldly monks with minds fixed solely on divine contemplation, but from the monks’ perspective that was not their fault.

Before this edition, the chronicle was available only in an edition by Léon Mirot (revised version 1912), in a work heavily criticized as faulty at the time it appeared. The one previous translation was done by Richard Cusimano, who translated Mirot’s text into English (2003). His translation has never become widely available, which is regrettable, because in spite of the difficulties of relying on the Mirot text, Cusimano produced a readable account which could have joined other twelfth-century French chronicles in being available to students not reading Latin.

The chronicle is not a single work but rather three separate accounts, written between the early and mid-twelfth century. All three parts (or at least as much as survives) appear together in a single manuscript now in the Vatican (Reg. lat. 622). One of the manuscript’s early gatherings has been lost since the sixteenth or seventeenth century, which is why we only have fragments of the first part of the chronicle. The manuscript itself, doubtless copied at Morigny around 1200, barely escaped destruction multiple times, as Gineste details. The monastery was pillaged during the sixteenth-century wars of religion, then suffered a period of decadence under lay abbots (one aged no more than ten). The manuscript changed hands multiple times before being acquired by queen Christina of Sweden, who bequeathed it with many other manuscripts to the Vatican at the end of the seventeenth century. Although the content of the chronicle was known from a seventeenth-century transcription by André Duchesne, the manuscript itself was not rediscovered until the late nineteenth century.

Gineste presents the chronicle in a thoroughly French context, with an especial emphasis on the Essonne. He begins the volume with an extensive introduction, covering both the history of the monastery and the various misadventures of the chronicle manuscript, before proceeding to the text. He here presents the Latin and a French translation in parallel columns, for ready cross-reference. Broad-ranging notes provide detail on people and events. In addition, extensive appendices edit and translate other documents originating from Morigny or referencing the monastery. At the back one can find detailed maps, showing both the region of Morigny and Étampes and the location of all other churches mentioned in the chronicles. Any future study of Morigny will have to begin with this volume.

The French translation is accurate and readable. Any translation of course is also an interpretation, and Gineste seeks to clear up what he considers misunderstandings some earlier scholars have had of the text. For example, it has been mistakenly suggested that the »adversaries« (puissances adverses) responsible for the death of the heir to the throne were political opponents, rather than the demons clearly intended (200). My main quibble with the translation (and this may be in part a product of being a native anglophone) is that Gineste sometimes tones down the fierceness with which the chronicle authors described their enemies. For example, to say that the murderer Hugh of Crécy was »anathematized by everyone« (anathematizatur ab omnibus) seems to call for something stronger than »condemned by everyone« (maudit de tous) (134).

Curiously, Gineste decided not to reproduce the medieval spelling of the manuscript as he edited it in parallel with the French translation, but rather to »normalize« as he puts it (35) the text into classical Latin. He even turns the standard medieval Latin term parochia (parish) into the classical paroecia. His reasoning is that this will make the Latin more easily accessible to those French readers with a classical education, but it will be very irritating to medievalists. As a sop to specialists, he does provide a critical edition of the Vatican manuscript, with its medieval spellings, in very small print toward the end of the volume (471–511).

Another change to the text, announced in the introduction but not self-evident in the bilingual edition, is that he copied the text of existing charters into his edition wherever the chroniclers referred to them, even though these texts were not included in the chronicles. Most of these charters are from the thirteenth-century cartulary of Morigny, now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Gineste suggests that the (now long lost) original manuscripts of the chronicles would have included these complete texts and that the scribe of the c. 1200 Vatican manuscript left them out, but this is far from certain. It is certainly useful to have these charters included in the volume, but the way they are presented again takes the edition further from the one manuscript we have, as well as essentially erasing the cartulary as a work in its own right.

The volume is illustrated with a selection of images, such as a royal seal or a late medieval illustration of loading skins of olive oil onto a horse. While interesting in their own right, almost none of these images have any association with Morigny. Their inclusion thus further establishes the book as intended for the non-specialist happy to treat the Middle Ages as homogenous and unwilling to wrestle with medieval Latin orthography.

In spite of these criticisms of Gineste’s approach, it is nonetheless very good to have this important chronicle available in a modern, properly-annotated edition.