Abstract

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.