Dan, active 14th century Michel
A 14th-century English writer and monk, Dan Michel of Northgate is best known as the translator of the Middle English moral treatise Ayenbite of Inwyt.
- Nationality
- English
- Era
- Medieval
- Notable works
- Ayenbite of Inwyt
Dan Michel of Northgate was a fourteenth-century English writer and translator, active during the Middle English period. He was a brother of the cloister of St Augustine of Canterbury. Very little biographical information survives about Michel, with almost all knowledge of his life derived from his sole surviving manuscript. His name associates him with Northgate, which remains an area within the city of Canterbury in Kent, England.
Michel is remembered for his translation work, specifically the Ayenbite of Inwyt (The Remorse of Conscience), which he completed in 1340. The text is a literal translation of La Somme des Vices et des Vertus, a French treatise compiled in 1279 by Laurentius Gallus, a Dominican friar who served as confessor to King Philip III of France. While the French original was translated into numerous European languages, Michel's version is highly distinct.
The autograph manuscript of Michel's translation is preserved in the British Library as Arundel MS 57. The manuscript explicitly records that the work was completed on the eve of the apostles Simon and Jude in 1340. Because it is an authenticated, precisely dated, and localized autograph text, the work is of monumental philological significance, serving as a primary linguistic representative of the Kentish dialect of Middle English.
No series yet.