The Sequence of Saint Eulalia, also known as the Canticle of Saint Eulalia () is the earliest surviving piece of French hagiography and one of the earliest extant texts in the vernacular langues d'oïl (Old French). It dates from around 880.
Eulalia of Mérida was an early Christian martyr from Mérida, Spain, who was killed during the Persecution of Diocletian around 304. Her legend is recounted in the 29 verses of the Sequence, in which she resists pagan threats, bribery and torture from the pagan emperor Maximian. She miraculously survives being burned at the stake, but is finally decapitated. She then ascends to heaven in the form of a dove.
The Sequence was composed in verse around 880, soon after the rediscovery of the relics of a saint of the same name, Eulalia of Barcelona, in 878.
Manuscript
The manuscript containing the Sequence is a collection of sermons by Gregory of Nazianzus. It is first mentioned in a 12th-century catalog of the library of Saint-Amand Abbey, although the production of the manuscript has been dated to the early 9th century. It is not known with certainty where it was produced. B. Bischoff suggests that it came from a scriptorium in (Lower) Lotharingia, but not from Saint-Amand itself, given its style of construction and the handwriting, which cannot be matched to other manuscripts produced there during the same period.
The manuscript is less significant for its original content, however, than for the empty pages at the end that later scribes filled in with additional texts. These include: the top half of f141: a 14-line Latin poem about Saint Eulalia () the top half of f141v: the Sequence of Saint Eulalia in vernacular Romance from the bottom of f141v to the top of f143: the (), written in a variety of Old High German. The Sequence and the are written in the same hand, and since the preamble of the mentions the death of Louis III, both additions to the manuscript are dated to 882 or soon thereafter. Again, it cannot be established with certainty where these additions were made, whether at Saint-Amand or elsewhere.
When Jean Mabillon visited Saint-Amand Abbey in 1672, he made a hasty copy of the , but neither he nor his hosts seem to have recognized the significance of the Sequence immediately preceding it. When Mabillon and the historian Johannes Schilter attempted to obtain a better transcription of the in 1693, the monks of the abbey were unable to locate the manuscript. It remained lost throughout the 18th century, until the entire contents of the abbey library were confiscated and transferred to Valenciennes in 1792, by order of the revolutionary government. In September 1837, Hoffmann von Fallersleben visited the library of Valenciennes with the intention of unearthing the lost text of the . According to his account, it only took him one afternoon to find the manuscript and to realize that it contained another important text, the Sequence of Saint Eulalia.
Text
The Eulalia text is a sequence or "prose" consisting of 14 assonant couplets, each written on one line and separated by a punctus, followed by a final unpaired coda verse. The Sequence follows no strict meter. Most of the couplets consist of two ten-syllable verses, although some have 11, 12, or 13 syllables.
Both the vernacular Sequence and the Latin poem that precedes it show similarities with the hymn to Eulalia in the , by the 4th-century Christian poet Prudentius.
A transcription of the original text is provided below (with abbreviations expanded and some word boundaries inserted), along with a reconstructed phonetic transcription and an English translation.
Analysis
Dialect
The language of the Sequence presents characteristics of Walloon, Champenois, and Picard. At the time, these three Oïl varieties shared a common , or written literary koiné. The evidence points to a geographic origin for the text in modern-day Wallonia or an adjacent region of north-east France.
Some northern/northeastern dialectal features of the texts are: the stressed form of the feminine singular dative pronoun (line 13) the 1st person plural imperative ending in (line 26) the unpalatalized initial in the forms and (< Latin ), contrasting with in Francien dialect to the south (mod. Fr. ) vocalization of before in (line 4, < ) lowering of pre-tonic to in (line 6, < *) and (line 8, < ).
In contrast, the epenthetic indicated by the forms (lines 3, 4, < ), (line 21, < ) and (line 16, < ) is more characteristic of central French dialects.