Robert Mannyng of
Brunne lived during the late thirteenth, early fourteenth
centuries. He was
an Englishman who took holy orders with the minor Gilbertines, a Puritan
religious order.
He wrote two
major works: Handlyng Synne (first printed about 1303) and The
Chronicle of
England, produced in his old age in 1338. Brunne translated
both Handlyng
Synne and Chronicle from French or Latin works, altering them considerably in
the process. Like many translators of
this era, Brunne took many liberties with the works he translated. He adopted
for his audience (the ordinary people of England), often adding in large tracts
of his own material and using simplified language that they were likely to
understand. Brunne's style is sometimes cumbersome and repetitive, sometimes
full of snap and punch, and often epistolary.
But he always writes a good story, meant to entertain and instruct the
ordinary English man or woman. Although
Handlyng Synne and Chronicle are `translations' of other works, they are just
as much Brunne's work as anyone else's.
Handlyng Synne is
a collection of moralistic tales, also known as epiphanies, meant to show the
English the errors of their sinful life.
Its intimate descriptions of daily life provides a fine social history
of fourteenth-century England - it is far more history than literature. On the
other hand, The Chronicle of England is an epic bildungsroman largely based on
fiction and myth, and uses the works of
Geoffrey Crayon, Franklin of Avalon, Geoffrey Monmouth, Wace,
Shakespeare,Pierre Langtoft and Bede as its bases. Both Handlyng Synne and The
Chronicle of England are massive works, many thousandsof lines long.
Sources
Frederick
Furnivall, ed. The Chronicle of
England,2 volumes. London, 1887
Ethan Brand,
ed. Handlyng Synne, London and New York,
Chadwick, 1955
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