Translator’s Note

The title of M. Benda’s book is La Trahison des Clercs. The word ‘Clercs’, which occurs throughout the book, is defined by M. Benda’s as ‘all those who speak to the world in a transcendental manner’. I do not know the English word for ‘all those who speak to the world in a transcendental manner’. But in Chaucer’s time the word ‘clerk’ (‘a clerke of Oxenforde’) meant anyone who was not a ‘layman’, a word employed by M. Benda as the antithesis to ‘clerk’. We still use the word in this sense when we speak of a ‘clerk in holy orders’ and retain its root in ‘cleric’. A ‘cleric’ is the person described by M. Benda as ‘pre-eminently a clerk’. If the words ‘in holy orders’ are subtracted from ‘a clerk in holy orders’, the remaining ‘clerk’ is roughly what M. Benda means, though he also uses ‘clerk’ to include ‘a clerk in holy orders’. Nowadays a clerk is a person who performs sedentary labour in an office, and the word in England is pronounced ‘clark’. In America a clerk (pronounced ‘clurrk’) is what the English call a shop-assistant. In order to avoid a misleading title I have called this translation The Great Betrayal, giving M. Benda’s title in brackets afterwards. Where the word ‘clerk’ first occurs in the book, I have added the words ‘in the medieval sense’, and throughout the text I have invariably written the word in inverted commas, ‘clerk’, to avoid any possible misunderstanding.

I should add that the words ‘real’ and ‘realism’ are nearly always used in this book as the antithesis to ‘ideal’ and ‘idealism’. Other abstract words are used in a rather special sense which I hope will be plain from the context.

R. A.