The ancient abbey of St. Antonin in Rouergue was located in the valley of the Aveyron, from which came the name Nobilis Vallis, or Noble Val, by which the site has been known since at least the thirteenth century. During the thousand years or more from its reputed foundation in the eighth century until its dissolution at the time of the French Revolution, the abbey went through two major crises. The first, with which this article is largely concerned, was its (...) transfer in the late eleventh century from a house of monks into a chapter of regular canons. The second was during the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century, when the town of Saint-Antonin was a center of the Protestant reform movement. In 1570 the church and the collegiate buildings were destroyed and the canons expelled. When they returned in the seventeenth century, and in 1661 joined the reformed Congregation of France at Ste. Geneviève, they occupied a new building in the center of the town, and the old site on the river was used as a garden and more recently for a thermal establishment and an old people’s home. (shrink)

The De planctu Naturae of Alan of Lille is by any standards one of the most remarkable products of the Renaissance of the twelfth century. In form it is a Menippean mixture of verse and prose, with nine elegiac meters of between 28 and 79 lines followed by proses of between 63 and 290 lines in the recent critical edition by Nikolaus Häring, on which this translation is based. The subject, apart from many digressions, is the complaint of Nature, the (...) pro-dea and vice-regent of God in all matters of production, development, and extinction, who appears to a poet who is distressed by the general disregard for her laws. She is described in detail and discusses at length various prevalent vices, especially those of a sexual nature, and, more briefly, the remedial virtues, including marriage, chastity, temperance, generosity, and humility. The purpose of the work is uncertain. Sheridan discusses in his introduction the elements of satire and allegory and stresses the reforming zeal of the author, who saw around him "a world in which the natural virtues were seemingly ignored". This may be so. Alan, who according to Sheridan lived between about 1116 and 1202-3 and wrote this work about 1160-65, was a noted theologian and, towards the end of his life, a Cistercian monk. But there is no reference to Christ in this work, which is notable, as Sheridan says, for its anticlericalism, risqué treatment of sexual topics, and coarseness. (shrink)