BAUDOUIN DE SEBOURC
. A mid-14th-century northern French chanson de geste loosely attached to the Crusade
Cycle. Its 25,778 lines, in Franco-Picard dialect, were probably composed in Hainaut,
possibly at Valenciennes. There are two manuscripts, B.N. fr. 12552 and 12553. The hero
is a composite figure; in other 13th- and 14th-century Crusade epics, the name is given to
the third Frankish king of Jerusalem (Baldwin of Le Bourg, 12th c.), but there is some
evidence for independent legends about a Picard adventurer called Baudouin de Sebourc.
Sebourg is a village in what is today the Département du Nord.
The poem has relatively brief sections set in the Middle East, but only its ending leads,
artificially, into the roughly contemporary crusade poem Le Bâtard de Bouillon. Most of
the action takes place in northern France or the Low Countries and concerns the
adventures of Baudouin’s youth. The hero is treated according to the conventions of the
late epics rather than historically. Baudouin is separated from his family as a child and
spends many years wandering before at last avenging the treachery of the villainous
Gaufroi and becoming a crusader. Some of his adventures derive from folklore, others—
the visit to Hell, the moving of a mountain by prayer—from literary tradition. The hero’s
martial and sexual exploits (he has thirty bastards) are presented with a verve and
piquancy of expression that have given the work an outstanding reputation among the
poems of its genre and period.
Robert Francis Cook
[See also: CRUSADE CYCLE; LATE EPIC]
Boca, Louis-Napoléon. Li romans de Bauduin de Sebourc, IIIe roy de Jherusalem. 2 vols.
Valenciennes: Henry, 1841.
Cook, Robert Francis, and Larry S.Crist. Le deuxième cycle de la croisade. Geneva: Droz, 1972.
Duparc-Quioc, Suzanne. Le cycle de la croisade. Paris: Champion, 1955.
Labande, Edmond-René. Étude sur Baudouin de Sebourc. Paris: Droz, 1940.
BAUDRI OF BOURGUEIL
(Baldricus Burgulianus; 1045–1130). An important representative of the humanistic
revival of the early 12th century in the Angers region, Baudri was born at Meung-sur-
Loire. He studied at Angers under Marbode of Rennes and, according to Dronke, with the
poet Geoffroi de Reims. He was elected, ca. 1080–82, abbot of the Benedictine
foundation of Saint-Pierre-de-Bourgueil, a place that he described in a verse letter to the
nun Emma as having charming landscape but little learning, where onions were
commoner than stylus and tablet. In 1107, he became archbishop of Dol-de-Bretagne. His
diocese did not appeal to him, and he traveled in England and Normandy while bishop.
The journeys are recorded in his Itinerarium.
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