The Parsed Corpus of
Middle English Poetry (PCMEP)
PCMEP Text Information
Amis and Amiloun
Back to PCMEP texts
About the text:
About the edition and manuscript base:
About the file:
Other:
| Text name: | Amis and Amiloun |
| Alternative names: | For Gods love in Trinity; Amys and Amiloun |
| Content: | Amis and Amiloun recounts the friendship between the two chivalrous, look-alike noblemen Amis and Amiloun. Amis and Amiloun spend their adolescence together at the Duke's court. They separate giving each other a golden cup as a sign of their loyalty. Later in life, Amiloun fights a battle, pretending to be Amis, and thus wins for his friend the hand of the Duke's daughter. However, God punishes Amiloun, who becomes a wretched leper and is abandoned by his wife. Amis and his miserable friend Amiloun are eventually reunited. On receiving a vision, Amis slays his infant children and annoints Amiloun in their blood. This act restores Amiloun's former health and beauty. Amis' children are mysteriously resurrected and the two friends live happily thereafter until they die together on the same day. For a full summary of the story see The Database of Middle English Romances, or the introduction in Foster (2007: 1-7) (available online). |
| Genre/subjects: | romance, folktale, folklore, friendship |
| Dialect of original composition: | East-Midlands Kölbing (1884: xiv-xxxxii) investigates phonological features, especially in rhymes, and inflectional properties in the manuscript witnesses of the text. He concludes that Amis and Amiloun originates from the East-Midlands. He reluctantly proposes the northern border of the East-Midlands as a more specific area of origin (ibid: xxxiii). Subsequent scholars have agreed with Kölbing's dialect attribution (e.g. Wells 1916, Leach 1937). More recently, the claim that the text comes from the northern parts of this dialect region has been questioned, based on the absence of features associated with the North, so that the text is now placed more broadly in the "Central or East Midland, perhaps around Cam[bridgeshire], Ely or Hu[ntingdonshire], but it contains such a mixture of dialectal features that it is almost impossible to say which might reflect the poet's own usage" (Purdie 2008: 160, see 107-14, 161-2 for details). |
| Date of original composition: | 1290-1340 The date of the earliest text witness, the Auchinleck manuscript, of c. 1330-40 can serve as the terminus ante quem for the composition of the poem. The original may be several decades older since time lags between original composition and manuscript witnesses are common in Middle English. The original may thus stem "from the end of the thirteenth century" (Wells 1916: 158), the "[l]ate 13th century" (Database of Middle English Romances), be "of the late 13th century" (Head 2006: 26), etc. Scholars have argued more recently, however, for an original date closer to its earliest manuscript. "There is no solid reason to believe that the poem antedates the manuscript, and the historicisation provided here argues for a composition date approximately contemporaneous with that of production of the manuscript" (Delany 2013: 63). The text dates to "[p]erhaps c. 1310-20: before Horn Childe but after stanzaic Guy" (Purdie 2008: 160). The suggested date for this poem is the approximate midpoint of the possible time range. |
| Suggested date: | 1315 |
| PCMEP period: | 2b (1300-1350) |
| Versification: | 12-line tail-rime stanzas, aabaabccbddb (for comments on the verse structure, see Kölbing 1884: xiv-xxiv) alliteration is not uncommon in the text (e.g. sende his sond (l. 64), of boon no blode (l. 60) etc.) (for comments on alliteration see, Kölbing 1884: lxvi - lxx or Leach 1937: ci) |
| Index of ME Verse: | 821 (IMEV), 821 (NIMEV) |
| Digital Index of ME Verse: | 1350 |
| Wells: | 1.110 |
| MEC HyperBibliography: | Amis |
About the edition and manuscript base:
| Edition: | Kölbing, Eugen. 1884. Amis and Amiloun. Zugleich mit der Altfranzösischen Quelle. Heilbronn: Verlag der Gebrüder Henninger. 3-107. |
| Manuscript used for edition: | Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates' 19.2.1 [Auchinleck manuscript], ff. 48-61v (Kölbing's [A]) London, British Library, Egerton 2862, ff. 135-147 (olim Sutherland, olim Trentham) (Kölbing's [S]) Oxford, Bodleian Library (Ms. 21900), Douce 326, ff. 12v–13 (Kölbing's [D]) London, British Library, Harley 2386, ff. 131-137, 138 (Kölbing's [H]) Kölbing uses [A] as the base manuscript. Variant readings from [S], [D] and [H] are provided in a critical text apparatus. Beginning and end are missing in [A] and substituted from [S]. |
| Online manuscript description: | Manuscript [A], Auchinleck manuscript: Manuscripts Online: Written Culture 1000-1500 eLALME Manuscripts of the West Midlands (item 11) |
| Manuscript dialect: | Manuscript [A], Auchinleck manuscript: The texts of the Auchinleck manuscript were copied by several different scribes (e.g. Bliss 1951 identifies 6 scribes). Amis and Amiloun was written down by the main scribe 1. The language of this scribe has been localized to the London/Middlesex border (McIntosh et al. 1986: 88). The manuscript dialect has been localized to Suffolk (McIntosh et al. 1986: 109, 485, also Guddat-Figge 1976: 183). The manuscript dialect of Douce 326 has not been studied in detail. The manuscript language has been localized to Devon (McIntosh et al. 1986: 111). |
| Manuscript date: | Manuscript [A], Auchinleck manuscript: The Auchinleck manuscript is conventionally dated to c. 1330-40: "On paleographical evidence, the manuscript is now unanimously assigned to the period 1330-40, and this date is confirmed by the addition, at the end of the text of the The Anonymous Short English Metrical Chronicle (item 40), in this manuscript only, of a reference to the death of Edward II and a prayer for 'þe ȝong king edward' (f. 317rb), who succeeded in 1327" (Pearsall & Cunningham 1977: vii). The online version of the Middle English Dictionary lists the manuscript date as "c1330". Experts usually date the manuscript to the late fourteenth century (Kölbing 1884b: 192, Leach 1937: xci, Purdie 2008: 160). The online version of the Middle English Dictionary dates the manuscript to "a1400". (For a list of slightly dissenting views, see the summary in Johnston 2014: 111, fn. 44) Purdie (2008: 160) dates the manuscript to "15c 2/2" (fifteenth century, second half). The online version of the Middle English Dictionary lists the manuscript date as "a1500". The manuscript is dated to "c. 1500" (Purdie 2008: 160). The online version of the Middle English Dictionary lists the manuscript date as "a1500". |
About the file:
| File name: | M2b.AmisAmiloun |
| ID: | AmisAmiloun,w.x.y.z: w=page, x=stanza {[Stanza_1]-[Stanza_209]}, y=line, z=token The stanza numbers are not found in the edition but are added in the IDs. |
| Word count: | 15,325 |
| Token count: | 1,166 |
| Line count: | 2,508 |
Other:
| General notes: | The story of Amis and Amilou was very popular in the middle ages. Versions are extant, for instance, in Medieval Latin (e.g. by Radulfus Tortarius, 11th century), Anglo-Norman French (12th century), a French Chanson de Geste (early 13th century), Middle Welsh (14th century), Icelandic (early 15th century), German (e.g. Konrad von Würzburg's Engelhard, 13th century) and others. Leach (1937: ix) divides different renditions of the story into "romantic", focusing on testing friendship to the point of child sacrifice, and "hagiographic", with a focus on miracles and divine intervention. The Middle English version falls into the romantic tradition. It is possible that the Middle English Amis and Amiloun is based on an Anglo-Norman source. This hypothetical source text, perhaps from the early thirteenth century, is now lost or remains unidentified. Hence, it is impssible to determine the extent and nature of possible translation effects on the language of the Middle English rendition (e.g. Leach 1937: xcvii). |
| Remarks on parses: | The line breaks follow the metre as in Kölbing's (1884: 3-107) edition. The parses are generally unproblematic. Alternations of the text in the edition and interpretations are explained as CODE comments in the parsed file. Difficult parses often profited from consulting the glossary in Foster (2007) and the translation in Rickert (2011). |
References
Bliss, Alan J. 1951. 'Notes on the Auchinleck Manuscript.' Speculum 26.4. 652-658.
Delany, Sheila. 2013. 'A, A and B: Coding Same-Sex Union in Amis and Amiloun.' In: McDonald, Nicola (ed.) Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Popular Romance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 63-75.
Foster, Edward E. 2007. Amis and Amiloun, Robert of Cisyle, and Sir Amadace. TEAMS Middle English Text Series. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications. (available online)
Guddat-Figge, Gisela. 1976. Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Middle English Romances. Münchner Universitätsschriften, Texte und Untersuchungen zur Englischen Philologie 4. Romances. Munich: W. Fink.
Head, Dominic. 2006. The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Johnston, Michael. 2014. Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kölbing, Eugen. 1884. Amis and Amiloun. Zugleich mit der Altfranzösischen Quelle. Heilbronn: Verlag der Gebrüder Henninger. (available online)
Kölbing, Eugen. 1884b. 'Vier Romanzen-Handschriften.' Englische Studien 7. 177–201. (available online)
Leach, MacEdward. 1937. Amis and Amiloun. EETS o.s. 203. London: Oxford University Press.
McIntosh, Angus, Samuels, Michael L. & Benskin, Michael. 1986. A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.
Pearsall, Derek A. & Cunningham, Ian C. 1977. The Auchinleck Manuscript. London: Scolar Press.
Purdie, Rhiannon. 2008. Anglicising Romance: Tail-rhyme and Genre in Medieval English Literature. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.
Rickert, Ken. 2011. Chaucer's reading list: Sir Thopas, Auchinleck, and Middle English Romances in Translation. PhD thesis University of Nevada, Las Vegas. (available online)
Wells, John E. 1916. Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1400. New Haven, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. (available online)