The Maritime and Nautical Vocabulary of Le Voyage de saint Brendan William Sayers Published online: 30 November 2011 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 Abstract Recognition that the Anglo-French adapter of the Latin Voyage of Saint Brendan had two mental nautical models, the leather-bottomed Irish boats of his written source and the Norse-derived clinker-built hulls of his own day and age assists in clarifying many scenes in the vernacular saint’s life and thereby adds precision to our understanding of medieval nautical technology. Keywords Hagiography Á Middle Ages Á Naval architecture Á Saint Brendan The by now classic edition of Benedeit’s Anglo-French Voyage de saint Brendan by Ian Short and Brian Merrilees has stood the test of more than 30 years and in 2006 reappeared in Champion’s welcome series of bilingual editions. The most recent edition is substantially unchanged from those of 1977 and 1984, although the explanatory notes have become richer and more informed. The editors’ annotated translation now explicitly confirms their understanding of numerous key and/or problematic words in Anglo-French, so that we may speak of a received opinion on many points of detail. 1 The present note questions whether their treatment of Benedeit’s vocabulary of the sea and sailing reflects contemporary scholarship on eleventh- and twelfth- century ship-building and sailing in the North Sea and adjacent waters as realized in W. Sayers (&) Comparative Literature and Medieval Studies, Cornell University, P. O. Box 176, Willard, NY 14588, USA e-mail: ws36@cornell.edu 1 Short and Merrilees (1977), and (1984), (2006). In accord with current scholarly assessment of the French of England, the term ‘Anglo-French’ is preferred in the following over the traditional designation ‘Anglo-Norman’. 123 Neophilologus (2013) 97:9–19 DOI 10.1007/s11061-011-9295-8