ABSTRACT
The collection of sermons of Maurice de Sully, bishop of Paris (1160–1196) offers us a unique possibility to investigate the work of medieval translators and redactors. They have reached us in more than one linguistic version. We have some forty manuscripts of the Latin version, almost thirty in different dialects of Old French, and even some English translations. In the past, there were some scholars who considered the Old French version as the original, but nowadays most specialists are convinced that the originals were in Latin and translated later into the vernacular.
Whether the translation from Latin to Old French was the work of Maurice de Sully himself or of some other person, the translator used specific vernacular words at times to help his audience to better understand the Gospel. It appears that the sermons of Maurice de Sully are the oldest attestations of some of those words. In my paper, I will study such lexemes in order to trace the method of translation. In some cases, the use of linguistic calques can be the final proof that the Latin version was the original.
This study is also beneficial because it treats the acquisition of new lexical items within a language or the specific use (with different meaning) of some old ones. This occurs especially in the case of technical vocabulary related to preaching or to certain theological issues. The diachronic analysis of such lexemes can also indicate to what extent the language of sermons could have affected the everyday speech and influence the development of the French vocabulary.
As there is no modern edition of the Latin sermons, and the edition (by Robson) of the French version is based only on two manuscripts, I will compare the lectiones given by different manuscripts, and thus identify the different lexical means used by translators.
