Project Purpose and Future

I created this website to provide wider and easier access to this important French-language component of the medieval prognostic tradition. My transcriptions and translations should also enable scholars and other interested readers without medieval French fluency to understand the content and context of these sources.

This website is now the culmination of my multi-decade project, and reflects an implicit offer to “pass the torch” to other scholars who may want to continue any research related to these sources. It’s my guess that other French Lunaries exist elsewhere in the world, hidden away in this or that unlabeled library holding or museum archive, or perhaps certain private medieval collections. Adding new texts to the body published here would continue to expand our knowledge of the French tradition. The manuscripts collected may also be sources for future research on medieval daily life, medicine or science, as well as studies in medieval French paleography and language. 

I offer this website as a resource for anyone pursuing such research, hoping a next generation of scholars can now take greater advantage of whatever insights these texts might provide.

Biography

View my complete biography.

I began studying French at an early age, did undergraduate work in Romance Languages and earned a PhD in French from Yale University. My dissertation was an analysis and English translation of the medieval “lives” of the Provençal troubadours. The Vidas of the Troubadours was published in New York by Garland Press in 1984; my second book,  Les Vies des Troubadours, was published in Paris by Gallimard in 1985. During the same period I also published scholarly articles on medieval literature.  

My research on medieval French Lunaries (“Moon Books”) grew out of a graduate seminar in medieval paleography which first introduced me to this literary and medical/scientific class of manuscripts. I pursued this interest for the next several years, collecting and analyzing thirty-seven different texts, and supported by two Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and research grants from Yale University. 

My web-based collection of Medieval French Lunar Almanacs (with transcriptions and English translations) is the first open-access digital aggregation of all known French texts in this genre.

I am now an independent scholar residing in metro Washington, DC.

Acknowledgements 

Most of the research in the early years of this project was generously supported with Fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities and I am grateful for their funding. I would also like to thank Yale University for its support, and the staff of the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale who introduced and instructed me about the well-known Lunaries in its collection, which first inspired me to pursue this project more widely.

Over the years, I have benefitted from the advice and help of many scholars with this endeavor. In particular, I am indebted to early mentors, the late Professors Pearl Kibre, Paul Zumthor, John Boswell, and Thomas Bergin. More recently, I have received invaluable help in corresponding with several members of Medieval Medicine, an online scholarly research forum: Professors Irma Taavitsainen, Tess Tavormina, Sandor Chardonnens, Thomas Gloning and Monica Green.  Diane Ducharme and Lisa Fagin Davis offered guidance with digital presentation and Marie-Laure Savoye from the CNRS with manuscript research in European collections. Librarians from many institutions helped me obtain digital manuscript images not in the public domain, especially during the pandemic years. Courtney Havenwood has been web-designer extraordinaire, and Rosemarie Zagarri an unflagging friend and cheerleader. My digital-native children assisted with website design and technology and offered patient commentary.  To them I am grateful.

My husband Brook Manville advised, encouraged and supported me throughout the many years of work on this effort and I owe him the greatest thanks.