The work tells the story of the siege of Orange – a city in the Rhone Valley, France, and is part of a series of epic narrative poems about the legendary hero Guillaume d’Orange
A British researcher has found a fragment of a long-lost 12th-century French poem in the cover of a book in an Oxford University library, the Guardian reported.
Tamara Atkin of Queen Mary University in London is researching the reuse of books in the 16th century when she came across a fragment of the long-lost poem The Siege of Orange. Atkin found the fragment in the bindings of a book published in 1528, which is currently housed in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
The work tells the story of the siege of Orange – a city in the Rhone Valley, France, and is part of a series of epic narrative poems about the legendary hero Guillaume d’Orange.
Tamara Atkin notes that scholars have long known about the existence of the poem, considered lost until the discovery of the fragment, which she said was a copy published in England in the late 13th century.
The same book also includes an excerpt from Berul’s Novel of Tristan, an early re-enactment of the medieval romantic story of Tristan and Isolde.
