Peter of Provence and fair Maguelonne : from a French mediaeval romance to a Czech broadside ballad

Abstract

This paper deals with the Czech broadside ballad about fair Maguelonne and Peter of Provence and its origins in a late mediaeval French prose romance, subsequently translated into German and Czech. Some basic information about the romance and an outline of its most important features, and those of the two translations, help put the broadside ballad into its literary and historical context. The main focus is, of course, on the broadside ballad itself, i.e., on presenting the preserved copies, describing the formal aspects of the work, and comparing the plot of the ballad with the plot of the Czech translation of the romance. Keeping in mind the previous versions of the story permits us not only better to understand the specificity of the broadside ballad, but, at the same time, to identify some of the modifications made by the author of the ballad as expressions of wider ongoing processes.