SOURCE: Carr, Gerald F. “The Prologue to Wace's Vie de Saint Nicholas: A Structural Analysis.” Philological Quarterly XLVII, no. 1 (January 1968): 1-7.

In the following essay, Carr demonstrates the numerological basis for the structure of Wace's Vie de Saint Nicholas.

The latent structural qualities of medieval poetry were first brought forcefully to the attention of scholars by Ernst Robert Curtius.¹ Although by no means the first critic to recognize the architectonic features of medieval poetry, Curtius in his essay on “Zahlensymbolik” (Exkurs XV) gave renewed impetus to the investigation of the interrelationships of number, literary form and symbolism. Certainly interest in the quality of numbers has not been lacking, but it is only in relatively recent years that serious scholarly attention has been devoted to the phenomenon of number as it manifests itself in medieval literature.² Literary scholars have had an understandable aversion to the confused and confounded attempts...