numbering in the thousands, included not only those belonging to the monks but many
others tended under contract. The transhumance practiced by the great religious
corporations is well documented in the many surviving charters recording controversy
and agreement about dates of coming and going to the estives; amounts of time to rest,
feed, and water animals en route; numbers of animals; the building of shepherds’ huts;
and the division of pasture and water in the estives. There is evidence from coastal
Provence of transhumance practiced by peasant villages since Roman times; only by such
seasonal migration could these villagers survive in that hostile environment. Most
transhumance in France was conducted by specialized shepherds and cowherds who
migrated from the lowlands up into the high summer pas-tures to tend their animals and
make butter and cheese from their milk during the summer. Standard routes, dates, and
ceremonies for the movements of cattle and sheep developed; walled sheep roads called
drailles (or drayas) can still be seen in the higher elevations of the Massif Central, like
the Aubrac plateau, still famous for its transhumance. Although friction always existed
between stock raisers and cereal cultivators, there is little indication for medieval France
of the widespread disruption that accompanied transhumance in medieval Spain and Italy.
Constance H.Berman
[See also: ANIMALS (DOMESTIC); CONVENIENTIA]
Berman, Constance H. Medieval Agriculture, the Southern French Countryside, and the Early
Cistercians. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1986.
Bousquet, Jacques. “Les origines de la transhumance en Rouergue.” In L’Aubrac: étude
ethnologique, linguistique, agronomique, et économique d’un établissement humain. Paris:
CNRS, 1971, Vol. 2, pp. 217–55.
Sclafert, Thérèse. Cultures en Haute-Provence: déboisements et pâturages au moyen âge. Paris:
SEVPEN, 1959.
TRANSLATION
. Translations into Old French from classical and late Latin texts can be divided, for the
sake of descriptive taxonomy, into three large categories: translations and imitations of
major classical literary models, translations of historical and political texts, translations of
sentential and educational texts.
Of all literary translations from Latin sources, Boethius’s De consolatione
Philosophiae and the works of Ovid have the longest and most complex histories. This is
not surprising, since Boethius and Ovid were major authors of the arts curriculum and
their work exerted great influence on vernacular literary culture. Though Virgil’s Aeneid
was also a central curricular text, its influence was felt through the particularly medieval
Romances of Antiquity rather than through direct formal imitation and translation.
Boethius’s Consolatio, however, proved congenial to vernacular literary interests in
poetic form; and Ovidian materials could be assimilated directly into vernacular interests
in mythology and into conventions of erotic literature.
The Occitan Boeci (ca. 1000–30) is the oldest literary text preserved in the language.
The earliest French version of the Consolatio is an incomplete Anglo-Norman paraphrase
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1742