![]() Inside the beehives of Cistercian monasteries, abbots were expected to utter daily homilies in chapter meetings to the monks under their oversight. Preaching became ever more prevalent after 1200. Whether they actually happened is almost beside the point. At the very least, they are usually plausible. Thus, they can approximate closely what today we might categorize as anecdotes or, alternatively, legends. That is, they are presented as being true. These exemplary tales can be heterogeneous in nature, but many purport to relate an actual event in the life of a real human being. Sometimes they afforded humdrum, concrete explanations at other times they illustrated complex, abstract doctrinal issues. Often they impressed salutary or redemptive ethical lessons. While providing a modicum of mirth, the brief narratives, which like most rhetoric were protreptic, served as launch pads for edification. By doing so, they particularly enlivened sermons. Exempla, to use the plural, were illustrative stories that furnished entertainment in speeches. Our Lady’s Tumbler has been termed a “ stand-alone moralizing piece.” The tale it tells resembles a specific type of medieval literature known as an exemplum. Both these diamond-hard certainties warrant close examination. Did an oral narrative stand behind the poem that is our earliest datum? Did one, either inspired by the poetic version or independent of it, lead to the later exemplum? At the end of the day, the only two foregone conclusions are the story itself and the manuscripts that transmit it. Even more mystifying is the exact relationship between the two actual written texts and any conjectural unwritten forms. Among the unknowns are authorship and precise date of composition. Just by itself, the verse in Picard-flavored medieval French remains, in important regards, unexplored territory. By taking precautions and implementing preventive measures against slipperiness, we can tiptoe around slippery-slope fallacies. ![]() Then we may proceed to formulate, substantiate, and evaluate hypotheses by trying them out in the proving grounds of public delivery. When all is said and done, we can do nothing first except read, reason, and seek out hard evidence. Rudimentary facts about interconnections between the poem and prose turn out not to be facts at all but moot points. The tale it recounts has also come through to us in a later, no-frills Latin prose version. Magnum opus though it may be, the piece poses quintessentially medieval puzzles. The poem often called Our Lady’s Tumbler, comprising 684 lines in 342 rhyming couplets, is held by common consensus to be a bright spot of French literature, among the most beautiful texts from the Middle Ages. I find that I always get back to the twelfth century when left to myself.
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