“Ainssi comme ung beaux mirouer”: A Medieval French Translation of Margaret of Oingt’s Speculum

This article brings to light a fourteenth-century French translation, previously unknown to scholarship, of the most important work by the Carthusian prioress Margaret of Oingt, her Franco-Provençal Speculum. The late-fourteenth-century manuscript preserving this French rendering of Margaret's mystical visions is described, and the circumstances of its production and potential audience considered. The medieval French Speculum is then compared to the original Franco-Provençal and to the medieval Occitan and early modern French translations. Finally, the medieval French text, which in some cases provides better readings than the surviving medieval copy of the Franco-Provençal, is edited for the first time.