1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Adenès le Roi

ADENÈS (Adenez or Adans), surnamed LE ROI, French trouvère, was born in Brabant about 1240. He owed his education to the kindness of Henry III., duke of Brabant, and he remained in favour at court for some time after the death (1261) of his patron. In 1269 he entered the service of Guy de Dampierre, afterwards count of Flanders, probably as roi des ménestrels, and followed him in the next year on the abortive crusade in Tunis in which Louis IX. lost his life. The expedition returned by way of Sicily and Italy, and Adenès has left in his poems some very exact descriptions of the places through which he passed. The purity of his French and the absence of provincialisms point to a long residence in France, and it has been suggested that Adenès may have followed Mary of Brabant thither on her marriage with Philip the Bold. He seems, however, to have remained in the service of Count Guy, although he made frequent visits to Paris to consult the annals preserved in the abbey of St Denis. The poems written by Adenès are four: the Enfances Ogier, an enfeebled version of the Chevalerie Ogier de Danemarche written by Raimbert de Paris at the beginning of the century; Berte aus granspiés, the history of the mother of Charlemagne, founded on well-known traditions which are also preserved in the anonymous Chronique de France, and in the Chronique rimée of Philippe Mousket; Bueves de Comarchis, belonging to the cycle of romance gathered round the history of Aimeri de Narbonne; and a long roman d’aventures, Cléomadès, borrowed from Spanish and Moorish traditions brought into France by Blanche, daughter of Louis IX., who after the death of her Spanish husband returned to the French court. Adenès probably died before the end of the 13th century.

The romances of Adenès were edited for the Académie Impériale et Royale of Brussels by A. Scheler and A. van Hasselt in 1874; Berte was rendered into modern French by G. Hecq (1897) and by R. Périé (1900); Cléomadès, by Le Chevalier de Chatelain (1859). See also the edition of Berte by Paulin Paris (1832); an article by the same writer in the Hist. litt. de la France, vol. xx. pp. 679-718; Léon Gautier, Les épopées françaises, vol. iii., &c.