The turning of the human soul to God in conversion and the textual turning, or translation to the vernacular, are parallel and complementary transformations in the anonymous thirteenth-century Vie de seint Clement. The narrative of the conversion of Clement I, a former pagan who under the tutelage of the apostle Peter became the bishop of Rome, was translated and adapted from composite Latin sources; its reworking into some 15,000 lines of Anglo-Norman octosyllabic couplets exemplifies how hagiographic texts reflect the ideological concerns and textual practices of their time. Of course, both conversion and translation are common motifs in hagiography. The vitae of holy men and women, both in Latin and the vernaculars, often include, or are constructed around, a moment of reckoning, a revelation of truth generated by the example of a previous convert who becomes the auctoritas ad salutem, a model of salvation. These stories serve, in turn, as the catalyst for conversion in the reading or listening public, fusing the story of the narrative with the lives of those who read or hear it. Conversion stories are also discrete moments in the universal story of salvation, the ‘bringing together’ of the people of God, separated since the Fall and reunited in the hope of eternal life. Almost all vernacular saints’ lives derive in some way from a Latin source text and it is not uncommon to find that the translators/authors refer in their prologues and throughout to the act of translation. The Vie de seint Clement is exceptional for making particularly clear the symbiotic relationship between the experiences in the text of conversion and that of translating it; it is a unique example of how medieval hagiography integrates audience response to stories into its very ethos.

The present essay examines how the Vie de seint Clement presents both religious conversion and textual translation as acts that bring about pru – benefit or good – to those who, in different but connected ways, are the recipients of them. We will discuss first how the narrative of the Vie represents the conversion of individuals and of communities through both reason and story. Conversion is depicted in Clement's life as the slow process of reisun, a term the author uses with remarkable frequency in the Vie to indicate both how one character persuades another and how characters arrive at understanding.

The storyteller on the cover of this book stands on the margin, both inside and outside the story. Will he momentarily step into the hall to begin his entertainment at the feast going on inside? Or will he turn his eyes our way instead and launch into the Arthurian romance that has already begun within the frame to his right? Either way, his vielle is raised to play an overture whose melodies have grown so faint that we can now only imagine them. His eyes are trained on the courtly revelry beside him, as are the eyes of the kneeling page and the bishop peering up from below. For this brief moment and forever, these figures all ignore the readers – kings and ladies, monks and nuns, historians, scholars and critics – who watch and listen for the story to begin.

Reading the words on a manuscript page like this one is like watching a performance unfold. The elegant script twines across the page, carrying voices and backstories as dramatic as the message Tristan inscribed on the hazel branch for Iseut. The page is framed by vines among whose colorful leaves animals carry out their impertinent ruses. The reader warms to the drama by the light reflected in the miniatures’ burnished gold, just as the child Marcel warmed to his mother's voice as she read bedtime stories in Proust's exploration of memories both personal and medieval. There is no denying the enchantment.

Before the Gutenberg era, storytelling met critical and dynamic social needs related to governance and war, communication and education, faith and artistic creation, as well as a thousand gradations of entertainment to elicit everything from awe to raucous laughter among people of every age and station. Many feared that storytelling had died when it entered print, but Boccaccio is proof that it thrived in the new medium. As we pass into a world beyond Gutenberg, stories are told in tweets of 140 silent characters, and they stream on the internet, traveling great distances to vast audiences of solitary individuals, their responses illuminated by smartphones and tablets. Humanistic investigation into storytelling has likewise taken a web-based turn, as manuscript libraries the world over make their holdings available in high-quality digitizations, free and open to all on the internet.

As we reflect on the social contexts of the French language in medieval England, it is important to consider the strong tradition of homiletic texts providing catechetical instruction, and moral and spiritual guidance. Produced in an environment of increased awareness of the catechetical needs of both the clergy and the laity, and in response to the mandates of Lateran IV in 1215 and the 1281 Council of Lambeth, these works are among the most imaginative in the Anglo-Norman corpus. In explaining sin, how and why one should confess, and what it is to be a good Christian, texts of pastoral instruction deploy a lively cast of characters and images that seek to inspire contrition and piety. They also provide a way of understanding the habits, concerns, preoccupations and social behaviour of the authors who composed the works and the public(s) to whom they were addressed.

One important source of homiletic literature in Anglo-Norman is the œuvre of Nicole Bozon, a Franciscan poet and preacher whose works from the late thirteenth century include a collection of prose exempla, a compilation of verse proverbs, saints' lives, satirical and allegorical poems, songs to the Virgin and verse sermons. In the prologue to his exempla collection, Bozon states that his purpose is to help his public eschuer peché, embracer bountee – eschew sin and embrace goodness. Bozon's depiction of peché and bonté provides one more piece in the larger puzzle of the ‘who and why’ of the French of England.