Excerpt 2: Reason’s mockery of young monks and nuns

Excerpt 2: Reason’s mockery of young monks and nuns¹

Folio 38ra

Par jonece s'en va li hons
En toutes dissolucions,
Et suit les males compaignies

⁴Et les desordenees vies,
Et mue son propos souvent;
Ou se rant an aucun couvent,
Qu’il ne set garder la franchise

⁸Que nature avoit en lui mise
Et cuide prendre au ciel la grue,
Quant il se met illeuc en mue

Man passes through his youth in every kind of dissolution and follows evil company and inordinate lives, and often changes his goal. Or he may go into some convent because he does not know how to keep the freedom with which Nature has endowed him. And he thinks that he can pluck the crane from the sky when the former mews himself up there,

Folio 38rb

Et remaint tant qu'il soit profès;

¹²Ou s'il resent trop grief le fes,
Si s'en repent et puis s'en ist;
Ou sa vie espoir i fenist,
Qu'il ne s'en ose revenir

¹⁶Pour honte qui l’i fet tenir,
Et contre son queur i demeure.
La vit a grant mesese et pleure
La franchise qu'il a perdue

²⁰Qui ne li peut estre rendue,
Se n'est que dex grace li face,
Qui sa mesese li efface
Et la tiegne en obedience

²⁴Par la vertu de pacience.

and he remains until he is professed. Or again, he may feel the burden weighing too heavily upon him. He may repent of his vows and leave the convent, or perhaps he may finish his life there for he dare not return, held back by shame, and he will remain against his heart. There he lives in great unease and bewails the liberty that he has lost and that cannot be returned to him unless God grant him the grace to relieve his misery and keep it² in a state of obedience through the virtue of patience.