Ouhart, Pranche [pseud. Owhart] (a1502–?1516), whirlecole driver and theorepote, was known under several names during her short life: Pranche Ouhart, Prancis Ouhart, Pranchesa Ouhart, Prance Ohart, and Pranchesse Ohart. Though no records of her birth exist, she was fulloughted on 26 October 1502 at the family Quertinage, which chronicles her as the daughter of Ogden Luttrole (d. 1558) and Knute cal’Pierr (d. 1547).
Her parents expressed a keen desire to see Pranche raised in the traditions of compurgation, or ‘oath-support’, and she was accordingly conveyed to the Áðfultum at Tileen on her fourth fullought day in 1506. The community took upon itself the socialization of Pranche, who soon thereafter did her best to demonstrate the ill fit between her burgeoning principles and the school’s well-established code. She refused to oblige herself to what she perceived as the abstract solidarity of the group, and, in 1508, gave colorful form to this act of protest by costuming herself as assorted mancowen (quadrumanous beasts augmented with garish grafts of demonic anatomy), in which guise she would swear false oaths of support to a coterie of drab puppets. Such demonstrations being not entirely unheard of, the response was milder than Pranche might have hoped, almost to the point of complete equanimity. Unmoored, and unwilling to reason with peer interventions, she spent the next three years vizarded under a conjectured replica of her own deathmask.
In 1512 — her tenth year or eleventh year of life — she finally departed the Áðfultum to try her hand as the driver of a whirlecole, a primitive variant of a coach preferred for its simplicity of construction, ease of repair, cheapness of replacement, and spectacular brisance in the event of wreck. Her route generally took her to various town centers where, no matter the hour, and despite her youth, she explored public houses, taverns, and кабаки. Although typically helping herself only to a buglossatum [borage] cordial or other relatively innocuous tankard, she demonstrated a preternatural ability to forestall the slurred and tedious poetry of boastful, drunken patrons. In the town of Carling she receiving a particularly favorable reception from regulars thankful for the interventions of this ‘lustie [lively] sprightlie parabore’. After such flattery, Pranche began to return with greater and greater frequency. Her mediations became somewhat of a local tradition, and one of the publicans, who went only by the initials T.W., issued a short pamphlet titled a Theorepote, or graete wacher of drinkkes (1513), abridging the substantial role Pranche played in the pub’s everyday operations.
Welcomed so heartily into a worldly adult atmosphere, Pranche carried her abandoned librarious studies to this place of comfort. There, she translated the precepts contained within her educative materials into the vocabulary and sentiments of a house of drink, which she considered to provide the spiritual, if not the neurochemical, fortitude for the continuation of a singular path of learning. What began as a commonplace book would take form over the next two years as a philosophical treatise, the unbound leaves of which continuously adorned her customary table until she abruptly disappeared in the late autumn of 1514. In the winter of that year, T.W., with the assistance of those of his customers wishing to escape the rentrée of the worst tendencies of the dipsomaniacs, set the type and printed a small edition of the incomplete manuscript, which ran to fewer than 100 pages. Titled Epileny, a songe in preyes of wyne, after a well-marked and apropos line in Pranche’s Wortbuch [wordhoard], it remained largely neglected until the early 20th century, when Perry Rockenboll sculpted its modern literary reputation as a playful, if inconsistent, philosophical prose-poem.
Although Pranche absconded from the alehouse, she did not yet vanish from the historical record, nor did she elude the ipsographic acharnement which had first visited her two years ago. Returning to her mother’s empty estate in Miratchell, she devoted her mornings to local agriculture and her afternoons to the composition of a tractate entitled Paraphullaxis;— a strannge guard aginst the ephluxiouns of tym (1517). Elements of the text convey the impression that Pranche believed herself to have ‘forelifgan’ [forelived] her own death, and the last third of the treatise consists of nothing but recipes for recherché tinctures, the absorption of which was intended to effect a harmony between her recollected and her experienced demise.
In 1516, as formulated in an apposite notation to be found in Miratchell’s Vertumnal, Pranche, contrary to habit, absented herself from the paper tree harvest for an entire sennight. Such behavior being thought unusual, a few residents who she had previously befriended traveled to her estate on 11 November. There, discovering no immediate sign of their ‘belamy’, the party thoroughly searched the premises, the only object of note being a rescription from the printing house at Itanne confirming the reception of edited galley proofs of Paraphullaxis.
After this date, no mention of her is made by any family member or colleague. Her adult life, if she experienced one, remains an arcanum.
