GOLDEN LEGEND
. See LEGENDA AUREA
GOLEIN, JEAN
(ca. 1320–1403). Charles V’s most prolific translator, the Carmelite Jean Golein was a
master of theology at the University of Paris and an active participant in the university
debates over the Great Schism. His translations for the king include the Flores
chronicorum (Fleur des chroniques) and other works by Bernard Gui (1368), a Vie de
sainte Agnès (before 1369), the Collations de Cassien (1370), Guillaume Durand’s
Rationale divinorum officiorum (1372–74), and the De informatione principium (Livre
d’informacion des princes, 1379).
Wendy E.Pfeffer
[See also: LIBRARIES; SCHISM, GREAT; TRANSLATION]
Delisle, Léopold. Recherches sur la librairie de Charles V, roi de France 1337–1380. Paris, 1907,
pp. 94–104.
GORMONT ET ISEMBART
. An Anglo-Norman fragment of 661 assonanced octosyllables, transcribed in the 13th
century and preserved in Brussels, Bibl. Roy. de Belgique, II. 181, Gormont et Isembart
contains the final episodes of a battle in which the Saracen king Gormont fells every
French baron who dares measure swords with him; finally, he is slain by King Louis.
Louis, however, ruptures his own midriff and dies several weeks later. The renegade
Isembart rallies the Saracens but is killed after four days of a raging battle in which he
even unhorses his own father; in the last moments of his life, he reconverts to
Christianity.
The whole plot is known thanks to lines 14,053–296 of Philippe Mouskés’s Chronique
rimée (before 1243) and Book 3 of the 1437 German translation of a prose rendering
(1405) of a long romance of the 14th century, Lohier et Mallart. According to these texts,
Isembart (Lohier) is Louis’s nephew, who, exiled by court intrigues, abandons his faith
and takes refuge in England with the Viking king Gormont. Pushed by Isembart,
Gormont lays waste to Isembert’s own seigneuries, the Vimeu and the Ponthieu, and
burns down the abbey of Saint-Riquier. Since in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia
regum Britanniae (ca. 1136) Isembart already is Louis’s nephew, and since the plot is
summarized in Hariulf’s Chronique de l’abbaye de Saint-Riquier (1088), the legend must
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