Gripla - 2023, Síða 62
60 GRIPLA
reliable critical edition of the Visio Philiberti that may elucidate its genesis
and early circulation still remains a desideratum,5 scholars generally agree
that its text was produced in an unidentified English scriptorium.6 While
the Visio Philiberti was translated into numerous European vernacular
languages during the Middle Ages,7 the sole surviving medieval rendi-
tion of the Nuper to date is the Old French Desputisun de l’âme et du corps
(hereafter, Desputisun), considered by Henningham as “a free and much
abridged translation” of the Nuper.8 The last editor of the French text,
Alessandra Capozza, notes no substantial variation from the main features
of the Latin Nuper but indicates a simple reorganization of the original
material and isolates some new narrative elements in the prologue, such as
an abridgment of the récit and a transition from third-person narration in
Nuper to the first person in Desputisun.9
The Desputisun opens with two personifications of an unknown
sinner’s soul and body, which appear to an unidentified narrator, on a
Saturday night, in a dream vision. The astounded man, who witnesses
their dramatic dialogue as a silent spectator, sees the soul of the sinner
returning to the body’s burial place and accusing the body of their terrible
fate in the afterlife, as a result of a life conducted in sin, which has doomed
both of them to the miseries of hell. The soul accuses the body of greed,
pride, falsehood, and disobedience. She10 soon realizes that all the riches
accumulated in life have been reduced to dust and that she will be punished
by Christ during the Last Judgment for her lack of charity and mercy to-
wards the poor. At the end of her speech, the body rises from his shroud
to answer numerous accusations. He stresses how the hellish pains will be
5 Neil Cartlidge, “In the Silence of a Midwinter Night: A Reevaluation of the Visio
Philiberti,” Medium Aevum 75 (2006): 24–45, at 24–25.
6 Cartlidge, “In the Silence,” 26.
7 Cartlidge records translations into English, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Polish, and
Medieval Greek as well as an indirect influence on other European vernaculars. See
Cartlidge, “In the Silence,” 24 and James Douglas Bruce, “A Contribution to the Study of
‘The Body and the Soul’: Poems in English,” Modern Language Notes 5.7 (1890): 193–201,
at 200.
8 Henningham, Early Latin Debate, 48.
9 Capozza, 35–36.
10 In the following discussion, I will refer to the personifications of the body and soul respec-
tively as masculine and feminine, as is customary in Latin, Old French, and Old Norse,
according to these words’ genders in those languages (corpus, cors, líkam and anima, âme,
sál).