Allusions and Reflections : Greek and Roman Mythology in Renaissance Europe [1 ed.] 9781443878913, 9781443874540

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Allusions and Reflections

Allusions and Reflections Greek and Roman Mythology in Renaissance Europe Edited by

Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre With Anna Carlstedt, Anders Cullhed, Carin Franzén, Peter Gillgren, Kerstin Lundström and Erland Sellberg Editorial Assistance: Per Sivefors

Allusions and Reflections: Greek and Roman Mythology in Renaissance Europe Edited by Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre With Anna Carlstedt, Anders Cullhed, Carin Franzén, Peter Gillgren, Kerstin Lundström and Erland Sellberg Editorial Assistance: Per Sivefors This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7454-X ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7454-0

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... ix Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Part I: Ideas and Images Chapter One ................................................................................................. 7 Double Aphrodite and Her Reflections in Renaissance Philosophy Unn Irene Aasdalen Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 27 Santo Pan Hans Henrik Brummer Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 45 From Myth To Theory: Names, Numbers and Functions of the Muses from Mediaeval Mythography to Renaissance Neoplatonism Teresa Chevrolet Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 77 Creating Mythological Space: Some Aspects of the Meaning of Tapestries at the Swedish Court during the Renaissance Merit Laine Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 95 Homer the Philosopher Erland Sellberg Part II: English Literature Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 105 Re-Configuring Classical Myth in Early-Modern England: Orpheus as a “Tutelary Deity” of Poetry and Civilization Angela Locatelli

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Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 123 From Icarus to Phaethon: Shakespeare and the Disobedient Sons Sophie Chiari Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 137 Marlowe’s Actæon: Syncretism on the Elizabethan Stage Roy Eriksen Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 149 “What Venus Did with Mars”: Antony and Cleopatra and Erotic Mythology François Laroque Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 159 “A serpent to be gazed upon”: A Taxonomy of Pride and Humility in Ovid and Milton Matthew T. Lynch Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 171 Satire, Satyrs, and Early Modern Masculinities in John Marston’s The Scourge of Villanie Per Sivefors Part III: French Literature Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 189 Functions of Mythological References in Rabelais’ Pantagruel and Gargantua Olivier Millet Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 207 Mythologies of War and Peace in Malherbe’s and Aubigné’s Poetry Kjerstin Aukrust and Gro Bjørnerud Mo Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 223 Under the Spell of Saturn: Myth and Inspiration in French Renaissance Poetry Anna Carlstedt

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Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 241 From Mythological Events to Historical Evidence: A Study of Les Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye by Lemaire de Belges Adeline Desbois-Ientile Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 257 Polyphony of Love in the Heptaméron Carin Franzén Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 271 A French 16th-Century Edition of Virgil’s Aeneid: Hélisenne de Crenne’s Version of the First Four Books Sara Ehrling and Britt-Marie Karlsson Part IV: Latin, Italian, and Spanish Literature Chapter Eighteen ..................................................................................... 289 Timeless Galleries and Poetic Visions in Rome 1500–1540 Nadia Cannata Chapter Nineteen ..................................................................................... 309 A Farewell to Arcadia: Marcantonio Flaminio from Poetry to Faith Giovanni Ferroni Chapter Twenty ....................................................................................... 325 Hero and Leander in Various Attires: Configuration of Desire in the Mythological Poetry of Francisco de Quevedo Sofie Kluge Chapter Twenty-One ............................................................................... 347 “Dii veteres fugere, novis altaria lucent ignibus”: Classical Mythology in the Religious Poetry of Battista Mantovano and Jacopo Sannazaro Clementina Marsico Chapter Twenty-Two............................................................................... 363 Proteus and the Pursuit of Cupid: The Final Poem of Nicolas Brizard’s Metamorphoses Amoris (1556) John Nassichuk

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Chapter Twenty-Three............................................................................. 381 Chiron and the Ambiguity of Princely Power: Machiavelli’s Interpretation of a Mythological Character Andrea Polegato Part V: German, Polish, and Swedish Literature Chapter Twenty-Four .............................................................................. 395 Jan Kochanowski’s PieĞni: A Polish Transformation of Ancient Myths Anja Burghardt Chapter Twenty-Five ............................................................................... 409 Mythology: A Sign of Real Poetry? Stina Hansson Chapter Twenty-Six................................................................................. 419 Hans Sachs and the Integration of the Muses into German Language and Literature Klaus Kipf Chapter Twenty-Seven ............................................................................ 439 From Aesop to Owlglass: The Transformation of Knowledge in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Trickster-Biographies Hans Jürgen Scheuer Chapter Twenty-Eight ............................................................................. 453 Myths of the Inventor: Inventing Myths in the Literary Concept of the Artistic Ingenium in Germany and Italy (1500–1550) Ronny F. Schulz Chapter Twenty-Nine ............................................................................. 465 Reconfigurations of Mythology in Sixteenth-Century Lutheran Collections of Aesopic Fables Erik Zillén Contributors ............................................................................................ 481

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Chapter Two Figure 1. Luca Signorelli, Pan, ca. 1490, 194 x 257 cm, Berlin, destroyed 1945. © Bildarchiv Foto Marburg. Figure 2. Niccolò Fiorentino, Lorenzo de’Medici, ca. 1490. Copyleft, Wikimedia Commons. Figure 3. Detail of Luca Signorelli, Pan. Figure 4. Niccolò Fiorentino, Marsilio Ficino, ca. 1495 (mirror-inverted). Copyleft, Wikimedia Commons. Figure 5. Detail of Luca Signorelli, Pan. Figure 6. Detail of Luca Signorelli, Pan. Figure 7. Franchino Gafurio, Theorica Musice, 1492. Copyleft, Wikimedia Commons. Figure 8. Detail of Luca Signorelli, Pan. Figure 9. Donatello, Bust of a young man with medallion. Bronze. Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. © Alinari Archives, Florence. Figure 10. Detail of Luca Signorelli, Pan. Figure 11. Detail of Luca Signorelli, Pan. Chapter Three Figure 1. Fulgentius, Mythologiae, “De Novem Musis.” Figure 2. Martianus Capella, De Nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae, I, 27–28. Figure 3. Dante Alighieri, Il Convivio, II, chap. 13. Figure 4. Coluccio Salutati, De Laboribus Herculis, ed. Ullmann (1952). Figure 5. Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499): Commentariun in Ionem, in Opera omnia (Basel, 1576), 1283; De Christiana Religione XIV, Ibid., 19; Theologia Platonica IV, Ibid., 131. Figure 6. Ficinian Tradition, 16th century. Francesco Patrizi da Cherso, Discorso della diversità dei furori poetici, 1552. Figure 7. Nicolas le Fèvre de la Boderie, “Ode en faveur de La Galliade de Guy le Fevre de la Boderie,” 1582. Figure 8. Franchino Gafori, Practica Musice, Milan, 1496, in a reprint by Forni, Bologna, 1972. Bibliothèque Publique de Genève (BGE). Photograph by author.

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List of Illustrations

Chapter Four Figure 1. King Sveno. Woven by Eskil Eriksson after a design by Domenicus ver Wilt, 1560’s. Wool, silk and metal thread. Royal Collections, HGK Vävda tapeter 6. The borders depict scenes from the story of Noah and his sons. The Royal Court of Sweden, Stockholm, photograph by Alexis Daflos. Figure 2. Unknown artist after Govert Dircksz-Camphuysen, The Royal Castle in Stockholm, 1661. Oil on canvas, Royal Collections, HGK Tavlor 105. The Royal Court of Sweden, Stockholm, photograph by Alexis Daflos. Figure 3. Unknown artist, Gustavus II Adolphus dubbing the Dutch Envoys, from Anthonis Goeteeris, Journael der Legatie ghedaen in de Jaren 1615 ende 1616, Graven-Hage 1619. Engraving. The Royal Court of Sweden, Stockholm, photograph by Alexis Daflos. Chapter Fourteen Figure 1. Albrecht Dürer. Melencolia I. 1514. Vevey, Jenisch Museum. Figure 2. Jacob II de Gheyn. Melancholicus. 1596. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Chapter Eighteen Figure 1. Raffaello Sanzio, School of Athens. © Vatican Museums. Figure 2. Raffaello Sanzio, Parnassus. © Vatican Museums. Figure 3. Hercules and Anthaeus, Florence, Palazzo Pitti. © Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo. Figure 4. Michelangelo, Bacchus. Florence, Museo del Bargello. © Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo. Figure 5. Andrea Mantegna, The Sacrifice of Isaac. © Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien. Chapter Twenty Figure 1. Sebastian de Coverrubias, Emblemas morales (Madrid, 1610). Courtesy of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Figure 2: Versions of the Hero and Leander myth in Quevedo’s poetry.

INTRODUCTION

You shall perceive them make a mutual stand, Their savage eyes turn’d to a modest gaze By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods Since nought so stockish, hard, and full of rage, But music for the time doth change his nature. The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; The motions of his spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus: Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music. (V.1.54–88)

This is Lorenzo’s view, in The Merchant of Venice, of music as the cipher of a cosmic order. If we consider the overall theme of the multidisciplinary symposium held in Stockholm in June 2012, “Allusions and Reflections: Greek and Roman Mythology in Renaissance Europe,” Shakespeare can be said to foreground the broad cultural clash between two ideological positions in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe: humanism and its Orphic faith in art, poetry and music, versus a material, “matter-of-fact,” impersonal and quantitative logic. As the proceedings of the symposium in the present volume show, this two-pronged topos returns time and again in the works of nearly all of the early modern humanists. Greek and Roman mythology was indeed persuasive. The myth often articulated responses to cultural contradictions and to intellectual and political demands. For example Orpheus, to many an allegory of Christ, became important to the Neoplatonic perception of tolerance and openness, a benign tutelary deity of a peaceful and civil society, at a time when people were caught in the turmoil of religious or ideological contention. During the Renaissance, mythology found a way to coexist with Christian doctrine since pagan religion had ceased to pose a threat to Christianity. The old Greek and Roman tales played a crucial role in Renaissance culture, partly because the ancient sources, both literary and artistic, many of them recently uncovered, provided rich material for the writers and the artists of the period. Mythology provided a network of

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Introduction

allusions and references for contemporary poetry and art, reinforcing the possibilities of allegorical interpretation. Furthermore, it offered moral guidance since deities would easily be materialized into personifications of vices and virtues. The words of illuminist Louis de Jacourt demonstrate this fundamental importance of mythology: The study of mythology is a necessity for painters, sculptors, and particularly poets, and in general for all those who strive to embellish nature and to appeal to the imagination. Mythology is the wellspring of their works and they draw their principal ornaments from it. It decorates our palaces, our galleries, our ceilings, and our gardens. Myth is the patrimony of the arts, it is an inexhaustible source of unusual ideas, agreeable images, interesting subjects, allegories, and emblems. How effectively these are used depends on the taste and genius of the artist. Everything is animated, everything breathes in this enchanted world. There, intellectual beings have bodies, material bodies have souls, and fields, forests, rivers, even the elements have their own divinities. I know well that these are fanciful figures, but the part that they play in the works of the poets of antiquity and the frequent allusions of modern poets have almost given them a real existence for us. They have become so familiar to our eyes that we find it difficult to look on them as imaginary beings. We believe that their history constitutes the distorted representation of events in earliest times. We attempt to discover in these events a consistency, continuity, and verisimilitude which they do not possess.1

All artistic expressions, visual and textual, whether they belonged to a secular or a religious tradition, made use of mythology. The rediscovery of antiquity ensured the continuous cult of Virgil, the very pinnacle of all literature if we are to believe Julius Caesar Scaliger, as well as the new emphasis on authors such as Homer, Cicero (the letter-writer and philosopher as much as the orator), Ovid and Statius; some of these auctoritates had enjoyed an uninterrupted tradition of admiration and commentaries, whereas others—notoriously Lucretius, the poet of De rerum natura—were rediscovered in monastic libraries by travelling humanists such as Poggio Bracciolini. In addition, mythographical handbooks such as Apollodorus’ Biblioteca and Boccacccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium were important sources of information, although the most influential work in the Western tradition was of course Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a source of inspiration for most authors and artists in the Renaissance. As Ernst Robert Curtius wrote, the Metamorphoses were “a repertory of mythology as exciting as a romance. Who was Phaeton? Lycaon? Procne? Arachne? Ovid was the Who’s Who for a thousand such questions.”2 Ovid was the obvious informant for the Renaissance poets’,

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painters’ and critics’ knowledge of the mythological world of Greece and Rome. The following chapters exemplify how their acquaintance with the mythological accounts from Homer down to Apuleius was of utter importance for their creative work, as it was for their readers and those contemporary patrons of art who saw themselves as the living embodiment of some remote ancient deity.

* Intent on gathering scholars from a variety of disciplines—from political sciences, religious and art history to literature and architecture—the organizers of the symposium focused on the early modern period (ca. 1450–1650) in Europe, covering authors writing in vernacular languages as well as in Latin. The contributions to the following volume testify to this interdisciplinary variety. To mention only the articles by our keynote speakers, Hans Henrik Brummer returns to the Platonic interpretation of Luca Signorelli’s Pan, Angela Locatelli (from whom we borrowed the initial Shakespeare quotation) concentrates on the figure of Orpheus in the Elizabethan theatre, while Teresa Chevrolet sheds new light on the Muses and Orpheus in the Neoplatonic poetics of Italy and France. Olivier Millet focuses on Rabelais’ contributions to the creation of a European mythology, and Unn Irene Aasdalen analyzes “the Double Aphrodite” and her reflections in Renaissance philosophy. Rather than trying to summarize each article in this introduction, we would like to single out some themes that stand out throughout the volume. Several articles discuss the use of mythological characters and themes for moral and didactic purposes; some of them re-examine the Renaissance investment in mythological themes for the purpose of enhancing the power and the glory, specifically of contemporary monarchy. Yet other articles discuss the resistance to mythology that also existed during this period. The contributions all have in common the focus on the re-configuration of classical myths in early modern Europe, in political, erotic and ceremonial contexts. By returning to the classical world of cosmic strife and harmony, of gods and metamorphoses, Renaissance poets and artists were able to express their aesthetic ideals, personal preoccupations and moral attitudes. Ancient mythology offered them a full set of useful metaphors, which could take on new meanings in a new cultural context. Still, the present volume also gives an opportunity to problematize a well-researched field: why all these reflections and allusions? What happens if we go beyond the study of sources in order to analyze the

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Introduction

functions, effects and consequences of this constant recycling of age-old tales and legends? Which arguments did sceptical or religious intellectuals mobilize most efficiently against mythology? What about the period’s conspicuous Mythenkorrektur, its bent on adapting, moralizing and even “rectifying” the ancient myths (to borrow a term from the title of a German research volume on the theme)? In short, by posing new questions and suggesting alternative answers to old ones, the authors of this volume bring about a better and more detailed knowledge of the struggles and strategies of recycling, recuperating and transforming ancient mythology during the Renaissance. Before diving into the various contributions and many discourses of our topic, we would, finally, like to thank for the unwavering support we have received from the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities who made the Symposium and hence this volume possible. We also want to thank the Department of Art History, the Department of Baltic Languages, Finnish, and German, and the Department of Literature and History of Ideas at Stockholm University for generous contributions towards the publication of this volume. Kerstin Lundström was responsible of the copy editing and all the details that make a manuscript a printed article. Alice Pick Duhan helped us with a first round of language corrections. Per Sivefors was responsible for the final language proofs of several pieces in the volume. A warm thank you to these colleagues. Stockholm, January 2015 / The editors

Notes 1

Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt, “Mythology,” The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, transl. Nelly S. Hoyt and Thomas Cassirer (Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2003), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.162, accessed November 23, 2014. Originally published as “Mythologie,” Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 10:924–27 (Paris, 1765). 2 Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2013), 18.

PART I IDEAS AND IMAGES

DOUBLE APHRODITE AND HER REFLECTIONS IN RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY UNN IRENE AASDALEN NANSEN ACADEMY

The myth about Aphrodite’s day of birth tended among Italian Renaissance Neoplatonists to be treated with as much, or even more, reverence than they reserved for the words of the Bible. The details of the story of Aphrodite’s birth at the banquet of the gods from Plato’s Symposium were like the words of Moses in the Pentateuch read and interpreted as a veiled account of the beginning of time. Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) gave an analysis of the myth of Aphrodite in his De amore (1469). Marsilio Ficino, who had translated all of Plato’s dialogues from Greek into Latin during the 1460’s and with their publication in 1484 made most of them known in the West for the first time in more than a thousand years, gave primacy to Plato’s theory of love. The first own work Ficino wrote after translating Plato was his commentary on Plato’s Symposium, the De amore.1 In this work, Ficino concluded that it was not knowledge of God but love that could restore men to heaven. Ficino’s Eros was both intellectual and erotic. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463– 1494) answered in his Commento (1486) and the Heptaplus (1489), and Pico argued that the love assisting human souls ascending to heaven could absolutely not be of a sensual kind.2 For the human soul to return to the divine sphere, philosophy and exercising the intellect as the soul’s highest capacity would be man’s only possible means for ascent. Sensual desire would only lead astray. The controversy between Ficino and Pico over the metaphysical conclusions to be drawn from the myths about Aphrodite and Eros in Plato’s Symposium will in the following essay be discussed with hindsight to the different roles the two philosophers attributed to Aphrodite. Their two competing versions of Neoplatonism represent a genuine conflict, concerning both how to read Plato’s works and how best to live according to Plato’s theory of love.

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Neoplatonists of the Renaissance were generally quite obsessed with beginnings. They returned without much inhibition to the beginning of the Ideas, of the Universe, of numbers, of man, and of philosophy. Reading the Bible, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola stressed the particular importance of Moses and the Pentateuch, with Genesis, book 1, verses 1– 26 about how God separated light from darkness, water from land, and created everything, ranging from the stars of the firmament to the fish of the waters. Under the simple words about how God created the cosmos and found it all good, Pico sought and found a detailed account of the beginning of the world. Pico wrote an entire philosophical commentary on the first book of Moses. His Heptaplus from 1489 dedicated one little book to each of the six days of creation and one additional to the seventh, when God had rested. Out of a few Biblical verses, grew 7 by 7 chapters on the mysteries of creation, of man’s place in the cosmos as well as God’s plan for his universe. If this hermeneutical endeavour seems excessive, it is still not on par with the flow of text written in commentary on a few passages from Plato’s twin-commentaries on love and beauty, the Phaedrus and the Symposium. In these Platonic dialogues the central myths about Aphrodite and Eros are found, and these myths became the focus for philosophical speculation concerning the coming to be of cosmos and man, of the whole emanative process, and the particular roles therein played by Aphrodite and Eros. To paraphrase Michael Allen: For Renaissance thinkers, myths were the stuff of ancient poetry. For Ficino and Pico, the myths constituted a gentile Scripture, a Scripture revealed, rather than compiled, by a line of ancient theologians. Collectively they articulated a metaphysics that was almost perfected by Plato, as seen anachronistically through the interpretative eyes of Plotinus, and then perfected in Christian theology.3 There are two key passages for the particular Renaissance discussion about the role of Aphrodite located in Plato’s Symposium. The first is found in the second speech of Plato’s dialogue on love, where Pausanias divided Aphrodite into two goddesses (Symposium 180c–181e). The other is found in the priestess Diotima’s account about the heavenly banquet where the gods had been celebrating the birthday of Aphrodite, drinking nectar and ambrosia in the garden of Zeus (Symposium 203b–204b). This story was recalled in the sixth speech of Plato’s Symposium, where Socrates had explained what he had learned from Diotima about the mysteries of love. While all the speeches at the Platonic banquet were held in honour of Eros or Love, it was made clear in the sixth speech that Aphrodite and Eros were intimately linked. Eros, it was said, will always follow Aphrodite, just as love tends to follow beauty. In the form of myth,

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the relationship between Eros and Aphrodite constituted a main drivingforce in the Platonic cosmos, and provided the fundamental definition of love in Plato’s Symposium: Love, defined as desire for beauty. Diotima had told Socrates: When Aphrodite was born, the gods held a celebration. Poros, the son of Metis, was there among them. When they had feasted, Penia came begging, as poverty does when there is a party, and stayed by the gates. Now Poros got drunk on nectar (there was no wine yet, you see) and feeling drowsy, went into the garden of Zeus, where he fell asleep. Then Penia schemed up a plan to relieve her lack of resources: she would get a child from Poros. So she lay beside him and got pregnant with [Eros] Love. That is why Love was born to follow Aphrodite and serve her: because he was conceived on the day of her birth. And that’s why he is also by nature a lover of beauty, because Aphrodite herself is especially beautiful. (Symposium 203b–c)4

When Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in his Commento interpreted these lines from the Symposium, he understood the location for the banquet, Zeus’s garden, as paradise. Pico explained that this was the heavenly place where Plato’s Ideas had grown, almost like trees in a garden.5 In this way, Pico made an explicit link between paradise and the realm of the Ideas: between the garden where Adam and Eve according to Moses had lived in harmony before the onset of human history and a higher level in the Neoplatonic hierarchy of being. When Pico retold the story of creation through the myth of the birthday of Aphrodite from Plato’s Symposium, Eros was presented as born in paradise. Aphrodite and Eros had according to the myth come into being on the same day. Pico made the myth explain the process of coming into being of the realm of the Ideas. Poros (Eros’ father, interpreted as the multitude of the Ideas) was joined with an unformed substance of Mind called Penia (Eros’ mother, poor because she was devoid of all being and act). Out of their union grew little Eros who because he was born in paradise, in Pico’s view symbolised a desire to perfect the Ideas. Aphrodite symbolized for Pico simply ideal beauty, and Eros was naturally understood as love.6 The bond between the two, between beauty and love, would all through history always remain the same. Love would follow beauty on all levels of being. Pico’s analysis in the unfinished Commento emphasised that Eros and Aphrodite had not only partaken in the creation of the world, but that they would ultimately lead all the created back to their divine origins. Pico was specific in explaining that only heavenly Aphrodite could generate heavenly love, and that heavenly love was a purely intellectual

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desire for the ideal beauty found in the world of Ideas.7 In this question, Pico followed Liber de causis, when he said that the Ideas are ideal forms of the nature of things, and that every mind is full of forms. These Ideas or forms exist causally only in God, formally in the Intellect and participatory in the World Soul. Following from this definition, heavenly love is not achievable at all for man when the human soul still was burdened down by the weight of the body and the mind’s lower functions. Connecting to his expounding of Eros born in paradise, Pico underlined that a life in paradise would mean a totally non-physical intellectual life. Pico’s ideal of love accessible for men on earth would therefore mean to lead a life in imitation of the angels, who lived their lives in contemplation of heavenly beauty, far removed from any stains of physicality.8

Metaphysical Complexity Very few today expect truth to be veiled in myths, and in postmetaphysical philosophical analysis the hierarchy of being has lost its centrality. Renaissance Neoplatonism represented in both ways our antidote: characterized with an almost hysterical impulse to allegorise myths of Greek and Roman Antiquity, and with a strict belief in the hierarchy of being. Their quest had a model-interpreter in late Antiquity, where the philosopher Plotinus (AD 204/5–270) in his Enneads had given a systematising account of Plato’s philosophy. While Plato had postulated two aspects of reality; one that is material, perceptible, temporal and changing, and another that is immaterial, intelligible, eternal and permanent, the Neoplatonists after Plotinus accepted this to be correct, but added further levels within the higher level of being. Neoplatonism is as Pauliina Remes wrote, “marked by metaphysical complexity . . . with a tendency to further differentiate ontology and to postulate new entities to solve further philosophical dilemmas.”9 Plotinus had read the myth of Aphrodite’s day of birth from Plato’s Symposium as a story about how the world had come to be, in a process of emanation or ‘procession’ from the One. In his Ennead 3.5 On love, Plotinus had brought out from Plato’s text an explication of the universe as based on three successive levels of being. The hierarchy of being had its origin in God, which was termed the One in Plotinus’s terminology, thereafter came two hypostases, the divine Mind or Intellect and the World Soul and at last, our material world.10 Plotinus’s theory presupposed a cosmic scheme in the creation of the world that disclosed the divine and a philosophical anthropology that acknowledged a divine essence as human

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nature. Through love, it was possible for souls to return to their origin in the divine sphere. Plotinus was not only the founder of Neoplatonism, with a philosophical school set up in Rome around 245 AD, and many followers during the next centuries. He was for his Renaissance readers ‘Plato redivivus,’ the born-again Plato. Plotinus’s treatment of Platonic myths was therefore as Michael Allen referred to in the passage paraphrased above, a prism through which his Renaissance successors understood Plato, as a thinker inspired by God to reveal truth. Nowhere in Renaissance philosophy was one closer to what was regarded as Truth with a capital T, than in the myths presented in Plato’s works and in the works of the other ancient theologians. Both Ficino and Pico accepted Plotinus’s notions of a hierarchy of being stretching between God and the world. Both these Renaissance thinkers’ analyses were complex and related to the readings of the Neoplatonists of late antiquity. They both seemed implicitly to answer a question raised by Plotinus, initiating his ennead on love: What is Eros? A God, a Celestial Spirit, a state of mind?11

Plotinus had concluded that everyone recognizes that the emotional state for which ‘Love’ is responsible rises in souls aspiring to be knit in the closest possible union with some beautiful object. He had stated that this could take two forms: One that is of the good, and whose devotion is for Beauty itself, and another that seeks its consummation in what Plotinus called “some vile act.”12 The driving-forces for human love were found on a higher level. Plotinus presented heavenly Aphrodite as the Intellectual Principle, the Soul at its divinest, as the second hypostasis, following the One in the hierarchy of being.13 This higher Aphrodite was as Plotinus described her: unmingled as the immediate emanation of the unmingled; remaining ever above, as neither desirous nor capable of descending to this sphere, never having developed a downward tendency, a divine hypostasis essentially aloof, so unreservedly an authentic being as to have no part with matter.14

Beside her, the purest soul, there was a soul of the all. This was the second and lower Aphrodite; the secondary soul is of the universe. She was not soul unmingled and alone, not soul the absolute, but giving birth to the Love concerned with the universal life. This was the Love presiding over marriages. These two Aphrodites followed the One at the top of the Neoplatonic hierarchy of being, but Plotinus explained that there was also

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Double Aphrodite and Her Reflections in Renaissance Philosophy

an Aphrodite connected to each of this world’s individual souls. The Love connected to this Aphrodite was a spirit, a kind of guardian angel. The Renaissance philosophers looking to Plotinus for guidance saw that the two Aphrodites from Plato’s Symposium could be understood as the second and third hypostasis of the hierarchy of being, or connected to functions within the process of emanation. In this way to connect Aphrodite with the hierarchy of being, was a typical mark of a Neoplatonic love-philosophy. Plotinus had also stated a succession of Aphrodites and accompanying Loves, a train of particular Aphrodites, each with their particular Love in attendance, dependent upon the first.15 Pico and Ficino both held Plotinus in high regard, but did not agree on how to understand him. Both Pico and Ficino accepted Plotinus’s notion of love as either directed upwards toward the beauty of the higher good or downward into vile acts of sexuality, but they still did not agree on further conclusions. For Pico, the beauty of the higher good could not at all be seen by human eyes, but only through man’s inner vision. This meant that the beauty of the Good could and should only be sought through philosophy, and that the ascent of the human soul would not in any way follow from delight in bodily beauty. Delight in bodily beauty would always distract men from the heavenly beauty they should rather have sought. Pico’s view on earthly beauty represented one of the main disagreements with Ficino. For Ficino had in his De amore presented Socratic love as a loving friendship between two men, where delight in physical beauty assisted the soul in its search for the divine.16 Ficino definitively saw male beauty as a reflection of divine beauty. When the Renaissance Neoplatonists did not agree on how to interpret Plato’s dialogues on love and beauty, the Phaedrus and its twin-dialogue the Symposium, the defining problem was provided by how one could differentiate between heavenly beauty and earthly beauty, heavenly love and vulgar love. In a Christian Renaissance setting, the explanation Pausanias had given in Plato’s Symposium added to the complexity. When Pausanias had described vulgar Aphrodite, he had said: This, of course, is the love felt by the vulgar, who are attached to women no less than to boys, to the body more than to the soul, and to the least intelligent partners, since all they care about is completing the sexual act. Whether they do it honourably or not is of no concern. (Symposium 181b)

Pausanias defined vulgar love as love connected with women and less intelligent boys, and went on to contrast vulgar love with the Love of heavenly Aphrodite:

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This goddess [heavenly Aphrodite], whose descent is purely male (hence this love is for boys), is considerably older and therefore free from the lewdness of youth. That’s why those who are inspired by her Love are attracted to the male: they find pleasure in what is by nature stronger and more intelligent. But, even within the group that is attracted to handsome boys, some are not moved purely by this heavenly Love; those who are do not fall in love with little boys; they prefer older ones whose cheeks are showing the first traces of a beard—a sign that they have begun to form minds of their own. (Symposium 181c–d)

Plato had let Pausanias define vulgar Aphrodite as connected to a kind of Love which did not value quality, and therefore held allure to men indiscriminately desiring both the stupider among boys and even women. Heavenly Aphrodite’s Eros, on the other hand, concerned men with a strong sense of quality. This differentiation would hardly do, when Christian Renaissance Platonists took up this definition. The problem was not per se the lacking acceptance of women, but the idealisation of sex between men. Both Ficino and Pico agreed that females were of a lesser quality than men, but Pico still found it less scandalous for a man to give in to sexual temptation with a woman than a man. Around the time when Ficino translated Plato’s dialogues, there were strict laws in Florence against homosexual practises.17 The bond of beauty was by the Neoplatonists seen as laid down by God or the One to provide a ladder of love for the soul, and so lead the human soul back from this earth toward the realm of higher beauty. A problem was that the beauty of this world was only mirroring the beauty of the divine sphere, representing a reflection of a reflection of real beauty. The metaphysical prior was always more powerful, better and more unified than the metaphysically lower in Neoplatonic reasoning. Was it safe to trust the beauty seen on earth? Would it with surety draw the soul from its prison in the body, towards divine beauty? Pico did not think so, while Ficino was not that much of a sceptic. After having explained the function of divine beauty, Ficino described how the soul is weighted down by the inclination to the function of procreation and therefore neglected the glow of the divine countenance shining in itself. Only through contemplation of beauty could the soul be awakened, and see “the face of God shining in the machine of the world.”18 According to Ficino, this higher beauty would attract men through the beauty of other men: Thus we are attracted to a certain man as a part of the world order, especially when the spark of the divine beauty shines brightly in him. This affection arises from two causes. Not only because the image of the paternal countenance pleases us, but also because the appearance and

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Double Aphrodite and Her Reflections in Renaissance Philosophy figure of a well-constructed man correspond most closely with that Reason of Mankind which our soul received from the author of all things and still retains.19

Ficino was struggling to explain why it could be that the sensation of male beauty was so pleasantly connected to the higher realms of being. To say that it was the “paternal countenance” that pleased, naturally meant to remind of the Bible’s description of man created in the picture of God. This would not have been such a controversial statement, had it not been linked with sensual desire between men.

Two Goddesses in the Renaissance If we look into the tradition for Renaissance love treatises, a main philosophical battlefield for the Italian intellectual elite in the years in between the 1470’s and 1560’s, one of the most debated topics in these treatises were how one should understand the role of Aphrodite in Plato’s love theory. The myth about the heavenly banquet from the Symposium 203b–c, the birth of Aphrodite and Eros, was interpreted by a string of philosophers. Traditionally, the focus on these philosophers has not so much been on their disagreement as on their overall agreement.20 If their disagreements have been noted at all, it has often been characterised as superficial. The Renaissance protagonists almost always quoted the same passages from Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, Porphyry, Dionysius the Areopagite and the Tuscan tradition for philosophical love poetry, and tended to lay down the same definitions. They seemed therefore to be in general agreement, but the surface was deceptive. There is hardly any Renaissance Neoplatonist who did not define love as desire for beauty or did not recognise a tight bond between Eros and Aphrodite, but this did not create fundamental agreement, since philosophers of the Renaissance tended rather fiercely to disagree on the further definitions of ‘desire’ and ‘beauty,’ and did not intend at all the same by the term ‘love.’ Let us return for a moment to the division of Aphrodite into two in the second speech of Plato’s Symposium, where Pausanias holds that Eros and Aphrodite are inseparable (Symposium 180c). If Aphrodite were a single goddess, there could also be a single Love; but, since there are actually two goddesses of that name, there are also two kinds of Love. There is a vulgar love as well as a heavenly love. The older goddess is heavenly Aphrodite, the motherless daughter of Uranus, the god of Heaven. It was understood as a mark of quality that she lacked a mother, as motherhood was too closely connected to materiality to be celebrated in Platonic theory. As Plotinus had stated about higher Aphrodite, she was not born of

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a mother and “had no part in marriages, for in heaven there is no marrying.”21 The younger goddess was common or vulgar Aphrodite, the daughter of Zeus and Dione. Pausanias had in Plato’s Symposium concluded that “although, of course, all the gods must be praised, we must still make an effort to keep these two gods apart” (Symposium 180e). The actualised question was: how could this be done? In the De amore Ficino celebrated higher Aphrodite, but assured that even lower Aphrodite had a necessary role in the hierarchy of being. In the second speech of the De amore, Ficino’s interlocutor Giovanni Cavalcanti presented Ficino’s view of double Aphrodite or Venus, as Ficino named her after Roman custom: Venus is twofold. One is certainly that intelligence we have located in the Angelic Mind. The other is the power of procreation attributed to the World Soul. Each Venus has as her companion a love like herself. For the former Venus is entranced by an innate love for understanding the Beauty of god. The latter likewise is entranced by her love for procreating that same beauty in bodies. The former Venus first embraces the splendour of divinity in herself; then she transfers it to the second Venus. The latter Venus transfers sparks of that splendour into the Matter of the world. Because of the presence of these sparks, all of the bodies of the world seem beautiful according to the receptivity of their nature.22

Ficino understood heavenly Aphrodite as the power to contemplate higher beauty, not as Plotinus had done, equalling her with the second hypostasis, or the Intellect. In Ficino’s view, souls could be drawn up-wards in the hierarchy of being through contemplation. Lower Aphrodite represented for Ficino the power of procreation, and a movement down-wards, away from the divine sphere, into materiality. In an indirect way, lower Aphrodite had in Ficino’s view from the beginning partaken in God’s creation of the world, when she infused a wish in the Angelic Mind (the second hypostasis) to reproduce divine beauty. Lower Aphrodite’s realm could be seen to stretch downwards in the Neoplatonic hierarchy of being, from the Angelic Mind via the World Soul down to the material world. On earth, lower Aphrodite denoted the wish to beget beauty through beauty in a very direct sense. As Ficino saw it, the human soul had twin powers. It had the power to understand higher truth, and a power of procreation. These powers represented double Aphrodite on the level of humans, and she was accompanied by twin loves: When the beauty of a human body first meet our eyes, our intellect, which is the first Venus in us, worships and esteems it as an image of the divine

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Double Aphrodite and Her Reflections in Renaissance Philosophy beauty, and through this it is often aroused to that. But the power of procreation, the second Venus, desires to propagate a form like this. On both sides, therefore, there is a love: there a desire to contemplate beauty, here a desire to propagate it. Each love is virtuous and praiseworthy, for each follows a divine image.23

While Ficino was grateful that lower Aphrodite had inspired creation of the universe, he was uneasy about her place in human life. He admitted reluctantly that she was honourable in making the human race multiply, but he advised against divulging in this kind of sensual love. Ficino’s ambiguity can be felt several places in his De amore. Discussing how men are ensnared by vulgar love, Ficino showed how he in a self-evident way took male beauty to be more alluring than female beauty, even if he had to admit that also females could hold vulgar attraction: Women, of course, catch men easily, and even more easily women who display a certain masculine character. Men catch men still more easily, since they are more like men than women are, and they have blood and spirit which is clearer, warmer and thinner, which is the basis of erotic entrapment.24

When Ficino in the sixth speech of his Symposium-commentary made Tommaso Benci expound the place of love in human lives, he stated that while double Aphrodite and their two loves are present not only in the World-Soul, but also in the souls of the spheres, of the stars, of daemons and of men, Ficino concluded that while in all other souls there are two loves, in humans there are five. This new and surprising number of different human loves was explained by placing the two extreme loves as daemons, while the middle three were passions. Ficino placed heavenly love at one extreme and vulgar love at the other, and made a graduation between them. There were still basically two kinds of love, but if we compare these to black and white, there are also several shades of grey in between them. Ficino thus described the first of these daemons, the pure and white one, as an eternal love of seeing the divine beauty. It was thanks to this erotic daemon that men in Ficino’s view pursued the study of philosophy and the practise of law and piety. The fifth daemon, on the opposite side of the spectrum, was the dark and vulgar daemon of procreation, or what Ficino presented as a certain mysterious urge to procreate offspring.25 Ficino likened these two extreme loves with the daemons Plato predicted always would be present in human souls, one of which raises men to things above; the other presses men down to things below:

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One is a kalodaemon, that is, a good daemon; the other is a kakodaemon, that is an evil daemon. In reality both are good, since the procreation of offspring is considered to be as necessary and virtuous as the pursuit of truth. But the second is called evil because, on account of our abuse, it often disturbs us and powerfully diverts the soul from its chief good, which consists in the contemplation of truth, and twists it to baser purpose.26

Ficino’s wording underlines his ambiguity. He wrote that procreation is considered necessary and virtuous, and therefore had to be considered good, but he was not too committed to this thought. In any case, there was a difference in the status of the good of contemplation of beauty and the good of procreation. The first could not be overdone, while the second easily could. Presenting the human loves that were passions and placed in between the two extremes, Ficino explained that men were born and brought up inclined toward the contemplative, active or voluptuous life: If we are disposed to the contemplative life, we are immediately elevated by the sight of bodily beauty to the contemplation of spiritual and divine beauty. If to the voluptuous life, we descend immediately from sight to the desire to touch. If to the active and moral life, we continue in the mere pleasure of seeing and conversing. Those of the first type are so intelligent that they rise to the heights; those of the last type are so stupid that they sink to the bottom; and those of the middle type remain in the middle region.27

Ficino made it a question of disposition and intelligence, whether men fell into the divine love of the contemplative man, the human love of the active man, or the bestial love of the voluptuous man. In this we can note a decided mark of elitism in Ficino’s love-theory. The stupider among men did not deserve heavenly ascent, and would therefore, according to Ficino, not be in a position to realise it. Females did not much interest Ficino. The only positive role attributed to real life women in Ficino’s De amore is that they were capable of bringing new boys into the world.

Man’s Choice Ficino’s younger contemporary, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, disagreed in much of his love-theory with Ficino. The main point of disagreement was that Ficino’s ideal of Socratic love was social and homoerotic, and Pico’s ideal was not.28 While Ficino recommended a loving friendship between men, where the two friends would be celebrating philosophy and beauty together, Pico argued that every kind of delight in earthly beauty

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represented a distraction from divine beauty, and so had to be avoided. Pico did not accept what Ficino had claimed, that intelligence would secure ascent from sensual beauty to higher beauty, if an older man found delight in the outward beauty of a younger friend. Ficino claimed that higher beauty could and should be contemplated through male beauty; Pico claimed that this could not be done. For Pico, higher Aphrodite represented a beauty connected with the divine and with the intellectual realm, while lower Aphrodite simply represented earthly beauty, which meant, all beauty connected with our fleeting world. Pico’s love theory from the Commento argued that man had to choose between the two. A man could choose vulgar Aphrodite or he could choose heavenly Aphrodite, but he could not have both. To concentrate on lower Aphrodite and the beauty of the bodies of this earth would mean risking one’s salvation and the possibility of return to the divine sphere. What was really at stake? The main question concerned the role and meaning of beauty, for one aspect of the goddess Aphrodite was according to both Ficino and Pico that Aphrodite could also simply mean “beauty” in general, a beauty that inspired love. To a certain degree, all Neoplatonists accepted man’s intuition as trustworthy and able to lead the soul back to its heavenly home. Beauty was seen as a main factor giving the lead in the quest for return, because as Ficino described it, beauty was a bond, through the created, from God and the realm of the Ideas, down the hierarchy of being, through the first Intellect and the World Soul, ending in earthly beauty, as in material things like young male bodies. Ficino had written: [T]he single face of God shines successively in three mirrors, placed in order: the Angel, the Soul and the Body of the World. In the former, as nearer to God, the image shines most brightly. In the second, more remote, more dimly. In the latter, most remote, if you compare it to the others, most dimly. Then the holy Angelic Mind, hampered by no duty to a body, turns back to itself. There it sees that face of God imprinted in its own breast. It immediately admires what it has seen. It cleaves passionately to it forever. The grace of that divine face we call beauty. The Angel’s passion, clinging inwardly to the face of God, we call Love.29

Ficino described a young man’s outward beauty as a kind of “hook,” with the power to draw the viewer to him. The young man would, according to Ficino, have got his beauty from God, on account of his interior goodness. Ficino could therefore describe a sensual drawing “which is love,” as deriving from the beautiful, good and blessed.30

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Imitation as Ideal If Renaissance philosophers differed in their interpretations of Plato’s writings, they agreed that a deeper truth was hidden under the surface of the text. Plato had made Pausanias define the two Aphrodites, but the text was decidedly deciphered in different ways. Ficino would solve this particular question defining the condemnable aspect of vulgar Aphrodite’s Love as the Love that explicitly included physical, sexual contact, and therefore a movement downwards into materiality, as opposed to heavenly Aphrodite’s love. This kind of love, Ficino presented as an intellectual love, where two men joined in Socratic friendship attempted to climb Diotima’s ladder of love. In this latter case, he would allow physical desire as part of the attraction of heavenly Aphrodite, as long as no touch was involved. Pico would naturally protest, and state that all visual beauty represented vulgar Aphrodite, and that man had to choose the one or the other of the two goddesses. Ficino’s view was that the stories from Plato’s dialogues were told so that they could be imitated, and that to be a Platonist, required imitation of Plato and his friend and teacher, Socrates. This meant that the way the ancient philosophers had socialised with their young friends and followers should be taken as an example. In Plato’s works, Socrates were usually surrounded by groups of young friends and admirers, and Socrates was described as inclined to take delight in the beauty of his favourites, like Phaedrus and Alcibiades. Both of these young and handsome Athenians figured in Plato’s Symposium. Phaedrus was given the first speech in honour of Eros, Alcibiades the last. Ficino understood their relationship with Socrates as representing Plato’s ideal. These were the primary examples of Socratic friendship. The ladder of love, as Socrates had explained it in the Symposium, had started with a first step where older men should take delight in a young boy’s beauty, followed by a next step where they should take delight in several handsome boys’ beauty. On the third step, they should appreciate beauty generalised, and understand that beauty of body was less important than beauty of soul. On the fourth step the beauty of laws and customs should bring happiness, on the fifth step the beauty of knowledge, and on the sixth and last step, the lover would be able to gaze at a vision of Beauty itself (Symposium 210a–e). An implication of the disagreement between Ficino and Pico was that while Ficino in his De amore made it perfectly legitimate to take delight in earthly beauty as a kind of pre-taste of divine beauty, and even to desire the physical beauty of a boy, as long as one did not succumb to physical

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temptation, Pico in his Commento issued a warning: Earthly love was simply a desire to possess earthly beauty.31 If the source for the desired beauty were a material body, there would arise a desire for sex. This implied a profanation of what Pico called the “chaste mysteries of the Platonists.” It was an interesting phrasing Pico chose, for rather than seeming “chaste,” Platonic dialogues are occupied with sexual attraction between men, desire as an important part of the relationship between teacher and student, and the beauty of young boys. Pico’s solution to this rather acute embarrassment was to set aside the homoerotic stories as insubstantial surface. In Pico’s view, these stories were not at all told to be imitated. What Pico found hidden, was instead an ascetic theory of intellectual love, differing from Ficino’s in its denial of erotic desire as an integral part of Platonic love. Pico’s reading of Diotima’s ladder made a main point out of leaving the first steps with their physical desire for beauty, understood as the beauty of this world, as soon as possible. Naturally, because Pico understood all beauty seen on earth as connected with vulgar Aphrodite. For Pico, the way up the ladder of love had little to do with young boys (he must have understood them mostly as examples for condemnable earthly beauty) and solely to do with philosophy. In his Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486) Pico had described a ladder where different philosophical disciplines created the steps of the ladder, and prescribed even in the Commento a ladder where the beauty of the world was left as soon as possible. Pico left to philosophy to teach lovers to generalise the concept of beauty and come to a truer understanding. Pico and Ficino did not only disagree on the role of Aphrodite at the bottom of the hierarchy of being. They held different notions of the divine sphere as well. For Ficino, there was as we have heard an extremely close relationship between beauty and divinity: God was beauty, and from this, Ficino concluded that to take delight in a young man’s beauty would really not mean desiring the beauty of this particular person, but the beauty of God. For Pico, this was scandalous. Pico stated that God was not beauty: God was above beauty. In the Commento, Pico concluded that God was absolute unity, and that without variety there could be no beauty.32 Ficino and Pico both attributed to Aphrodite immense meaning. She could be understood as simply “beauty,” or as a function of the World Soul and the First Intellect, the two hypostases in Neoplatonic theory of emanation. But the two philosophers did not agree upon what kind of divine sphere man’s soul could return to, by what means, or to what extent man on earth was able to see divine beauty.

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Pico read Pausanias’ speech in the Symposium and concluded that what Plato had meant with double Aphrodite, was that there were two kinds of beauty, two kinds of objects, and therefore . . . there had to be also two kinds of sight. Only the heavenly kind of sight could see the intelligible beauty of the Ideas. It was with these inner eyes that Paul and Moses had seen God’s face, Pico explained, and accused Ficino for mixing things up, to mistake earthly beauty for heavenly beauty. As Pico wrote in his Commento: Marsilio [Ficino] should have been very careful not to make a mistake about this, for nearly his whole subject depends upon it.33

Pico reacted so strongly to Ficino’s definition of Aphrodite partly because of the implications of what Ficino had stated. There were two aspects that in particular alarmed Pico. The first was that Ficino regarded God as Beauty, and therefore the ultimate object of love, and the second was that God’s beauty in a direct sense was visible to the human eye. Ficino had written: Hence it happens that the passion of a lover is not extinguished by the sight or touch of any body. For he does not desire this or that body, but he admires, desires and is amazed by the splendour of the celestial majesty shining through bodies.34

Desire in the beautiful body of a youth is not per se caused by the beauty of the body, but God’s beauty “shining through bodies.” There is no discontinuity in the delight in what Ficino defines as heavenly Aphrodite, the quest to contemplate higher beauty. It could be done from the perspective of this earth, or from the level of the angels. Delight in beauty always had to do with God. Ultimately, in Ficino’s love-theory, God could be loved through the created, and in particular, through the beauty of male bodies. Salvation in Ficino’s love theory came about through climbing of Diotima’s ladder, to go onwards from the steps connected with male beauty, via Socratic friendship, to the realm of the divine: Always led by the beauty of God, in a way reminiscent of how the holy three wise men was led to baby Jesus by the star leading them to Bethlehem. Pico could see no leading star in earthly beauty, at all. He found that all beauty seen by human eyes was potentially leading the soul astray, because higher beauty, higher Aphrodite could only be seen by man’s inner vision. This inner vision was attracted to intellectual beauty, trained by philosophical reasoning and exercising of the human intellect, and it was utterly blind to young boys. Pico warned against female beauty almost

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as much as against male beauty, but concluded against Ficino that to fall in sin of the flesh was worse with boys than females. Every Neoplatonist of the Renaissance would to some degree find the human soul a stranger in this world, and to a varying degree, long back to the soul’s homeland in the divine sphere. One may say that Ficino, because of his belief that higher Aphrodite was approachable for man while in this life, felt better at ease in this material world, than Pico, who would rather flee the realm of lower Aphrodite to throw himself in the arms of heavenly Aphrodite.

Conclusion In Ficino’s theory of love there is a direct erotic bond between God and men, a universe totally eroticised. God is beauty and men could follow the line of beauty back to heaven. This continuity of higher beauty from human souls up-wards all the way through the hierarchy of being to God in heaven, Pico found impossible. He stated that God was above beauty and being. That Pico found heavenly Aphrodite only in the first hypostasis had three important consequences: That a longing for beauty could only carry the human soul back to the Intellect, and not to God. That all the beauty of the world was dangerously misleading, and at last, that the ambiguity of Plato’s dialogues, as comes to the status of this life was solved, but to an extreme cost. Life on earth became an irrelevant period of waiting, for the highest part of the soul to return to its Intellectual origin, to escape its prison in the body. Ficino and Pico represented two extremes in their views on Aphrodite’s roles in Neoplatonic metaphysics, demonstrating that there were in the Renaissance different ways to be ‘Platonic.’ Our way simply to see lower Aphrodite as connected only with human sexuality and higher Aphrodite as connected with a non-sexual and more abstract love is at best an oversimplification. Views differed greatly as to their exact roles.35

Notes 1

Marsilio Ficino’s De amore is in the following quoted from Sears Jayne’s translation into English: Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love (Dallas, Texas: Spring, 1985). There is a Latin-German edition of the De amore, with a useful introduction by Paul Richard Blum: Marsilio Ficino, Über die Liebe oder Platons Gastmahl (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1994). 2 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Commento is also quoted from Sears Jayne’s translation: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Commentary on a Canzone of Benivieni (New York: Peter Lang, 1984). Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s

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philosophical texts can in Italian be found in Eugenio Garin’s edition of De hominis dignitate, Heptaplus, De ente et uno e scritti vari (Florence, Vallecchi: 1942). The full title of the Commento is Commento dello illustrissimo signor conte Joanni Pico Mirandolano sopra una canzona de amore composta da Girolamo Benivieni cittadino fiorentino secondo la mente et opinione de’ platonici. 3 Michael J. B. Allen, “The Birth Day of Venus: Pico as Platonic Exegete in the Commento and the Heptaplus,” in Pico della Mirandola: New Essays, ed. M. V. Dougherty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 87. I am much indebted to Michael Allen in my studies of Renaissance philosophy, and in particular, his work on Ficino and Pico. Michael Allen has in careful detail discussed some of the main controversies between Ficino and Pico regarding their theories on love. I agree with Michael Allen’s overall view that Ficino’s theory is broader and richer than Pico’s, and that Pico’s attempts at correcting Ficino in some points are youthful and inconsequent. I would still maintain that their disagreement is philosophically irreducible, and rests on different interpretations of Plato’s theory of love as expressed in the Symposium. 4 Quotes from Plato’s Symposium are from Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1997). 5 Pico Commento 2.14. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 2.13. 8 Ibid. 2.14. 9 See Pauliina Remes, Neoplatonism (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), 7–9. 10 Plotinus The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (London: Penguin, 1991), On Love, 3.5.174–86. 11 Ibid. 3.5.174. 12 Ibid. 3.5.175. 13 Ibid. 3.5.177. 14 Ibid. 3.5.177. 15 Ibid. 3.5.179–80. 16 It is a common misconception that Ficino excluded sexual appetite from his definition of love as desire for beauty. See for example Thomas Hyde, The Poetic Theology of Love: Cupid in Renaissance Literature (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), 96. Ficino did not exclude sexual desire, on the contrary, he accepted it to fuel the desire for beauty. What Ficino censured was “touch.” 17 In Florence of the Renaissance homosexual practises were forbidden. Offenders would be punished with fines, prison or even death. The authorities of Florence had done their outmost to put an end to what was labelled “sodomy”; even tried to import female prostitutes from other city-states and France in a frantic attempt to redirect sexual desire from boys to females. Without much success, it might be added. See Michael Nordberg, Renæssancens virkelighed: 1400-tallets Italien— myter og virkelighed (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1995). 18 Ficino De amore 5.4.90. 19 Ibid. 5.4.91–92. 20 See for example John Charles Nelson, Renaissance Theory of Love (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958). This book is still considered the standard work

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on love-treatises in the Italian Renaissance. Thomas Hyde in his The Poetic Theology of Love is also giving an overview over the tradition. He presents the trattatisti after Ficino as differing from Ficino’s love-theory only in detail and emphasis, “but for the most part they faithfully reproduce Ficino’s central ideas.” Hyde, The Poetic Theology of Love, 96. 21 Plotinus The Enneads 3.5.177 22 Ficino De amore 2.7.53–54. 23 Ibid. 2.7.54. 24 Ibid. 7.9.165. 25 Ibid. 6.8.118–19. 26 Ibid. 6.8.119. 27 Ibid. 6.8.119. 28 It has traditionally been a point of controversy to state that Ficino’s love-theory is homoerotic in orientation. There are only a few scholars that have argued that Ficino’s Eros in this respect is following Pausanias’ instruction, and the Love of higher Aphrodite as purely male. One of them is Sears Jayne (in his introduction to his translation of Ficino’s De amore into English). See also for example Armando Maggi, “On Kissing and Sighing: Renaissance Homoerotic Love from Ficino’s De amore and Sopra lo amore to Cesare Trevisani’s L’impresa (1559),” Journal of Homosexuality 49, no. 3–4 (2005). I have treated the motif of homosexuality in Ficino’s theory of love elsewhere. See Unn Irene Aasdalen, “A Question of Friendship,” in Rhetoric and the art of design, ed. Clare Guest (Oslo: Novus, 2008), and in “The First Pico-Ficino Controversy,” in Laus Platonici Philosophi, ed. Stephen Clucas, Peter J. Forshaw, and Valery Rees (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 29 Ficino De amore 5.4.90. 30 Ibid. 6.2.108–9. 31 Pico Commento 3.2. 32 Ibid. 2.21. 33 Ibid. 2.12. 34 Ficino De amore 2.6. 35 I would like warmly to thank Else Marie Lingaas and Niels Grønkjær who both read earlier drafts of this article, and came up with valuable feedback and suggestions for revision.

Works Cited Sources Ficino, Marsilio. Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love. Translated by Sears Jayne. Dallas, Texas: Spring, 1985. —. Über die Liebe oder Platons Gastmahl. Edited by Paul Richard Blum. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1994. Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni. Commentary on a Canzone of Benivieni. Translated by Sears Jayne. New York: Peter Lang, 1984.

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—. Commento dello illustrissimo signor conte Joanni Pico Mirandolano sopra una canzona de amore composta da Girolamo Benivieni cittadino fiorentino secondo la mente et opinione de’ platonici. In De hominis dignitate, Heptaplus, De ente et uno e scritti vari. Edited by Eugenio Garin. Florence: Vallecchi, 1942. Plotinus. The Enneads. Translated by Stephen MacKenna. London: Penguin, 1991. Plato. Symposium. In Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1997.

Secondary Literature Aasdalen, Unn Irene. “A Question of Friendship.” In Rhetoric and the art of design. Edited by Clare Guest, 336–50. Oslo: Novus, 2008. —. “The First Pico-Ficino Controversy.” In Laus Platonici Philosophi. Edited by Stephen Clucas, Peter J. Forshaw, and Valery Rees, 67–89. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Allen, Michael J. B. “The Birth Day of Venus: Pico as Platonic Exegete in the Commento and the Heptaplus.” In Pico della Mirandola: New Essays. Edited by M. V. Dougherty, 81–113. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Hyde, Thomas. The Poetic Theology of Love: Cupid in Renaissance Literature. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986. Maggi, Armando. “On Kissing and Sighing: Renaissance Homoerotic Love from Ficino’s De amore and Sopra lo amore to Cesare Trevisani’s L’impresa (1559).” Journal of Homosexuality 49, no. 3–4 (2005): 315–39. Nelson, John Charles. Renaissance Theory of Love. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958. Nordberg, Michael. Renæssancens virkelighed: 1400-tallets Italien—myter og virkelighed. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1995. Remes, Pauliina. Neoplatonism. Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008.

SANTO PAN HANS HENRIK BRUMMER THE ROYAL SWEDISH ACADEMY OF LETTERS, HISTORY AND ANTIQUITIES

Bernard Berenson, a legendary authority on Italian Renaissance art, has called Luca Signorelli’s Pan “one of the most fascinating works of art in our heritage.”1 Indeed, there are good reasons to concur with his judgement, even if the object for his admiration no longer exists. Luca Signorelli had visualised an unusual and complicated theme. The painting, which can be dated to about 1490, was destroyed in connection with the fall of Berlin in 1945, but photographic records are available.2 It attracts attention through its enigmatic mystery, which has not been diminished by the repeated attempts to interpret it.3 One problem is that it has been difficult to ascribe it to any genre. The overshadowing presence of the sylvan deity suggests that the subject is bucolic, which prompts comparative studies of the pastoral poetry produced in imitation of Virgil by Jacopo Sannazaro, Angelo Poliziano and Lorenzo de’ Medici. The idea that Signorelli’s picture depicts a mythological episode in which Pan instructs Olympus is hard to maintain. One looks in vain for signs of anecdotal intimacy, which characterizes the episode as it was rendered in Antiquity. More than a millennium makes a difference. It is clear that here the pagan god is acting the role of Santo Pan, surrounded by five worshippers. The iconography is not found in Graeco-Roman art. Signorelli’s Pan offers instead a rare anomaly in the long series of Renaissance devotional paintings. Striking use has been made of the conventions of Catholic altarpieces. This is, in other words, a case of pictorial innovation in which the pastoral tradition inherited from the classical world has been translated into a specifically formulaic image from the world of ecclesiastical ritual. Sacra conversazione is a term used to refer to a specific form of devotional painting depicting the Virgin Mary with the Infant Christ surrounded by meditating saints. The term is used as an art historical concept in Franz Kugler’s history of Italian painting from 1837. In earlier biblical and patristic texts the expression used is “holy discourse” in the

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Fig. 1. Luca Signorelli, Pan, ca. 1490, 194 x 257 cm. Berlin, destroyed 1945. © Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.

meaning of pious behaviour or “holy intercourse.”4 This lacks references, however, to any required use of images for devotion. In traditional Catholic terms, holy discourse is governed by words chosen from the Scripture. These images are by nature not illustrative. Their narrative format comprises references that demand anticipatory understanding and the capacity for insight. A sacra conversazione is a visual representation of contemplation within a group united by the words of God and, at the same time, it offers an encounter in which the worshipper in internal dialogue asks questions and seeks answers. One of Signorelli’s notable contributions to this genre is his elaborate altarpiece (1483–84) intended for the Onuphrius chapel in Perugia cathedral.5 The holy discourse takes place against a clear blue sky on a ledge resembling a balcony, with the lavish design and floral decoration appropriate for a throne. In this ceremonial setting the viewer’s thoughts revolve around the written word, the birth of Christ, His baptism, passion, death and resurrection. Together with the infant Christ, the enthroned Madonna is reading from the Scripture. Facing them a young deacon holds

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up a book, a bishop stands lost in his reading, John the Baptist is gazing upwards and the wiry, long-bearded Egyptian hermit saint Onuphrius raises his eyes towards the throne. Signorelli’s Pan painting follows the same pattern. On the ground, playing a flute, rests a naked youth girdled in vine leaves. This Dionysian figure is gazing up at a statuesquely flawless female figure. Balanced in one hand she holds a thin staff to which a small plaque with the name of the artist is affixed. In the other hand she holds a long flute, waiting and listening with her head slightly bowed. Opposite her stands an aged herdsman leaning on his staff. He does not participate, but listens. Elevated in the centre sits a clean-shaven, neatly coiffed and ephebically fair figure of Pan. He is holding a short looped olive-wood staff in one hand and a syrinx in the other. He has a star-studded cloak over his shoulders and instead of horns a crescent moon rises above his head. Santo Pan is an incarnation of the sublunary world, life on earth beneath the moon, above which is the eternal firmament. He is listening passively to voices that perceive him as the divinity of created nature. The old herdsman at his side, leaning on his staff, is making an eloquent gesture with his raised hand. Standing close on Pan’s other side is a man playing the flute, whose contrapposto posture is a repetition of the one adopted by the man seen from behind in one of the panels of the great altarpiece supplied earlier by Signorelli for Sant’Agostino in Siena.6 This is the main event—the sun has begun to set and a holy conversation with a divine elemental being takes place to the sound of wind instruments. When the formulaic image occurs here in this anomalous and consummate form and with no association to ecclesiastical ritual, it serves, however, a considerably smaller group of the faithful whose aspirations went beyond conventional piety. Where and in what kind of room the Pan painting was hung is not known. One alternative can, however, be excluded: it could never have been intended for an ecclesiastical setting. Was it ever conceivable that candles could be placed or censers swung before this pastoral painting? That hands could be raised or knees bent, heads bowed? That prayers could be offered for the gifts of the god, that his presence could be felt? That he could be called upon, consulted, appealed to, addressed, acknowledged by worshippers prepared to subject themselves and pay reverence, seek grace and salvation? Probably not, even though it is tempting to linger with the idea that Renaissance respect for the classical authorities could lead to lighted candles and knees bowed in a reverence that was not intentionally heretical. Indeed, there was nothing to exclude

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enticing concessions to heathen knowledge in an intriguing relationship with the catholic faith. Giorgio Vasari tells us that Signorelli gave the painting to Lorenzo de’ Medici, “who desired never to be excelled in generosity and magnificence by anyone else.” Does that really mean that the project was conceived by Signorelli alone? Or was it in fact the question of a courtly exchange between two grateful partners to which the princely recipient was expected to respond with even greater munificence? What the return gift could have consisted of is not disclosed by Vasari’s comment. The interpretation is that Lorenzo offered patronage that did not only provide material advantages.7 In addition, it would have offered intellectual and poetic fellowship, which suggests that the finer points of the concept for the Pan painting were developed in an exchange of ideas that took place within Lorenzo’s circle. Ultimately, however, the artistic imagination was entirely Signorelli’s own. In an article that is by now almost fifty years old I posed a question:8 is the setting linked in any way to Florentine Neoplatonism? And more specifically: does the landscape immanent with Pan represent a state in which the classical and the Christian are united by a theology imbued with Platonism? At the same time I made another specific proposal, which is the idea that the two figures closest to the figure of Pan are covert portraits. There may well be inherent reluctance in the history of art to trace portraits in visual art that does not belong to the specific genre of portraiture. And there are good reasons for it. Even so, there can be no doubt that when it was felt necessary portraits of authors, clients, donors and other notables really were included in frescos, in altarpieces or other genres. This was probably also the case in Signorelli’s painting. Its provenance and comparative studies of physiognomy permit the suggestion that Lorenzo appears in the figure of the youth playing the flute and that his philosophical mentor, Marsilio Ficino, is the herdsman who addresses his eloquent gesture to the sublunary divinity.9 The landscape in which the god surrounded by his worshippers has been placed offers a contrast to the city, with its walls, squares and buildings. This is a protected place. The devotional work presents us with a landscape bathed in evening sunlight in which two figures are recognisable. The setting is that of a sacra conversazione, but it deviates from theological stringency in its pastoral lyricism. Here there are other voices that speak about the landscape in inspired words. This is also what happened when Lorenzo anticipated the theme of the Pan painting and also, possibly as one of those who provided the impulse to it, devoted time to reflection on sacred things.

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Fig. 2. N Niccolò Fiorenttino, Lorenzo dde’Medici, ca. 1490. Copyleft, W Wikimedia Com mmons.

F Fig. 3. Detail off Lucaa Signorelli, Pa an.

Fig. 4. N Niccolò Fiorenttino, Marsiliio Ficino, ca. 14495 (mirror-innverted). Copy yleft,

F Fig. 5. Detail off Luc a Signorelli, Pa an.

Wikim media Commons. One of Lorrenzo’s poems is Altercaziione, a philossophical meditation in terza rima.10 It takes placce next to a spring s on a sllope overshad dowed by laurels. The poet has com me here to find d peaceful resppite from the din d of the city, from dduties and obliigations. He sits, s enjoying hhis own comp pany, and is joined by the herdsmann Alfeo, who tries to persuaade him that life l in the country is att least as dem manding as lifee in the city. T Their discussio on ceases when a new w voice is hearrd. Lorenzo th hinks he can h ear Orpheus singing s to

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his lyre. The figure that appears in this guise is his mentor Marsilio Ficino.11 Why, the philosopher asks, has Lorenzo quit public life? Lorenzo responds that he is seeking edification in enviable pastoral seclusion and asks Marsilio to answer the question of where permanent happiness can be found. The philosopher gives his answer as the sun begins to set. True happiness is to attain the greatest good. The soul has two wings—intellect and love—with which it lifts and flies above the stars to God—volando al sommo Dio sopra ogni stella.12 There ambrosia and nectar await. After this sermon Alfeo gathers his flock and Lorenzo turns to God to pray for participation in the true light. Lorenzo died on 9 April 1492. In his long letter of condolence to Jacopo Antiquari, Lorenzo’s physician, Angelo Poliziano recalled how shortly before his death, his friend and patron had come increasingly to realise the value of seclusion. They sat together in his chamber discussing the values of life. The time had come for Lorenzo to choose the contemplative life and withdraw from his social duties. This may perhaps be a cliché but it nevertheless indicates a desire to seek things of greater substance. Far from the din of the city, he wanted to live out his days in the company of Poliziano, Ficino and Pico della Mirandola.13 And Lorenzo was not unaware that there existed readily accessible philosophical texts offering pastoral examples that could well be followed to find release from a burdensome existence. Needless to say, some could be found in Plato’s dialogues. It is a well-known fact that there was intense poetic interest in Platonic ideas in Florentine circles when Signorelli finished his Pan painting. Plato’s Phaedrus offered an explanation of spiritual life that originates in a forest grove outside Athens at Ilissos. This dialogue was perceived by the Neoplatonists of the late Classical period and their Florentine successors as sublime theology, as inspiration, eschatology and purification. In his Theologia Platonica, the late classical Neoplatonist Proclus mentions the divine inspiration attained by Socrates through the nymphs of the locality. Moreover, for his successor, Ficino, the four phases of divine ecstasy prove to be more than a dialectical exercise or a theological poem. They are not produced from within but appear as a divine gift. If we view Signorelli’s Pan as an image that refers to Phaedrus, Ficino’s commentary on the dialogue provides a filter that it is difficult to ignore. To the Florentine philosopher, one of the most brilliant elements in the dialogue is the choice of the venue for its exchange of ideas. What Plato describes is an allegory of his own Academy. According to Ficino the tall plane tree is Plato himself, the tree of chastity stands for the purity of Platonic and Socratic love, the spring from which wisdom flows, and

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the rest of the beautiful verdure signals the eloquence and poetry cultivated by Plato’s Academy.14 What corresponds to this resting place in the painting is the grove with its tall trees, its nymphs and its proximity to a watercourse that dominates the landscape behind Pan and his worshippers. Local divinities inhabit the milieu portrayed in Phaedrus. It is noon, when people usually stop talking, begin to slow down their thinking and doze off. But Socrates and Phaedrus are wide awake, listening to the cicadas of whom the former tells that they make report to Calliope, the eldest of the Muses, and to her next sister Urania of “those who live a life of philosophy and pay tribute to their art of music—for these are the Muses who are chiefly concerned with heaven and thought, divine as well as human, and they have the sweetest utterance.” Finally, Socrates adds: “For many reasons, then, we ought always to talk and not to sleep at midday.”15 Ficino’s explanation raises us to Pythagorean heights. Calliope and Urania are said to produce the sweetest utterance as the heavenly harmonies heard by Pythagoras came from them both. In principle, philosophy avails itself of two things: listening to various kinds of wisdom and contemplating what is heavenly. Listening and philosophical enquiry belong to Calliope’s sphere, while contemplation addresses Urania. This is why, Ficino states, Socrates says that we must not slumber at noontide. We must not abuse the light and warmth of the divine sun that provides sustenance for our intelligence.16 In my article in 1964 I suggested that the female figure that Signorelli places below Pan and to his right can be identified as Calliope.17 Her uncombed hair is tied back with ivy, which fits in with Ovid’s description of this muse of harmony.18 At the same time I proposed that she corresponds to Calliope in the dialogue. She is not only the oldest and wisest of the muses, but also the mother of Orpheus. There is something remarkable about the little polyphonic concert she Fig. 6. Detail of Luca Signorelli, Pan.

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is taking part in. Why is her flute longer than the one in the hands of the Dionysian youth on the ground, and why is the flute played only with his left hand by the man resembling Lorenzo next to Pan the shortest of the three? Was this at all a question of ensuring that the composition was well judged in every element? We cannot exclude a solution that relates to proportion. The idea in this case would be that the proportions here reflect the relationships of musical scales and their cosmic import. Franchino Gafurio, the famous musical theoretician of his day, used the Pythagorean harmonic scale in his teaching on music as a reflection of cosmic harmony, which also occupied Ficino’s thoughts.19 Gafurio’s treatise on music from 1492 contains a naively drawn but nonetheless remarkable illustration of the consonances of music as they are produced by the tones of six anvils, as many bells, beakers full of liquid, strings and flutes. The woodcuts show how Pythagoras tests the consonance between the octave interval 8 and 16. One of them depicts Pythagoras and Philolaos, the astronomer and one of the Pythagoreans, each with three flutes. Philolaos is blowing the longest one (16) and Pythagoras responds with one half as long (8). They each have two more flutes at the ready: Philolaos displays those tuned in fifths (4 and 6), Pythagoras those tuned in fourths (9 and 12). It may be permissible to speculate, and in the best of cases find entry points to a discourse, not entirely without fruitful contact with reasonable observations. The melancholic nymph who in Signorelli’s painting is in the grove just behind Pan and his worshippers is emblematic of Lorenzo’s pastoral poetry.20 If we choose to consult Ficino we can suspect that here we have a “slow, deep, harsh and thoughtful voice.”21 And if we continue this train of thought, we realise that the flute concert taking place offers meditative compensation for the saturnine silence and the dejection personified by the herdsman in the foreground. Dionysus and his nymphs, these elemental beings of forests and watercourses, are the divinities of the course of life. “For surely the place is holy,” exclaims Socrates, “So that you must not wonder, if, as I proceed, I appear to be in a divine fury, for already I am getting into dithyrambics.”22 Inspiration allows Socrates to view the transition of external splendour to internal beauty. This means that he no longer attains the rhetoric that is able to distinguish between the desire for beauty in a physical object and one with the supreme good in view. In his commentary Ficino follows the original text and extends the circle of natural divinities that vouchsafe Socrates the clarity of ecstasy. Dionysus arouses his ecstasy, while the muses grant poetry, the nymphs variety and Pan eloquence.23

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Fig. 7. Francchino Gafurio, Theorica Musicce, 1492. Coopyleft, Wikimeedia Commons.

At the centrre of this worrld is Pan, desscribed by Ficcino as “saturrnine,” in other words subject to thee melancholic influence of the planet Satturn. This was also Fiicino’s astroloogical fate—aalternation beetween misery y and the capacity to ttranscend the bounds b of fatee through conntemplation.

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The concluding prayer to Pan that Socrates makes before he and Phaedrus leave the hallowed grove was addressed to the existences of the sublunary world. He is called Pan, Ficino comments, because he ranks highest of the local divinities. For just as the highest gods are in contact with the primary intellects of the creation and the heavenly gods with the world soul, all sublunary gods and demons, all local elemental beings, are subject to Pan. He rules over everything below the moon.24 Neither Plato’s dialogue nor Ficino’s commentary have anything to say about the physical appearance of the sylvan deity. What could guide Signorelli in his depiction of his sacra conversazione was closely linked, however, to late classical sources that were germane to humanist culture in Italy during the 15th century. As early as in 1878, in a catalogue presentation of the holdings of the Berlin Museum and then in his monograph on Luca Signorelli one year later, Robert Vischer established that the Pan figure was a cosmic being.25 Relevant allusions were made to the learned humanist poets Giovanni Boccaccio from Florence and Jacopo Sannazaro from Naples, who in their allegorical renderings of the Pan figure cited attributes similar to those found in Signorelli’s polished representation: the associations of the horns to the wooded horizons, the firmament, the halo of the moon and the looped olive-wood staff as a symbol of eternity. It would not have been difficult for an interpreter familiar with philology to augment Boccaccio and Sannazaro with corresponding material that was contemporary with the mythological imagery of the late classical world. Passages from the writings of the early Christian bishop Eusebius on preparation for the Gospels, Praeparatio evangelica, take the same direction. Similarly, the same cosmological ecstasy in the face of the universal god can be found in Saturnalia by the Late Antique Neoplatonist Macrobius and in the commentary by Maurus Servius Honoratus on Virgil’s second eclogue.26 This wealth of textual material is supplemented by classical images that depict Pan playing the flute included in the signs of the zodiac. Pan has taken the guise of the god of the visible universe and in this role he was close to the Orphic divinity Phanes “the revealer,” according to Orphic cosmology hatched from the cosmic egg and the first ruler of the universe. While Phanes discloses himself through many attributes, the shape taken by Pan is a blend of the animal and human. In the Orphic hymns Pan is compared to the universe. His limbs are heaven, the ocean, the earth and fire, in other words the four elements. He controls the four seasons and the winds.27 Further reading of Phaedrus as an accompanying text in interpreting Signorelli’s Pan brings us to a central passage in the dialogue, which is the

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magnificent simile of the human soul as a winged charioteer trying to control his two horses. One is “upright and cleanly made; he has a lofty neck and an aquiline nose; his colour is white, and his eyes dark; he is a lover of honour and modesty and temperance and the follower of true glory; he needs no touch of the whip, but is guided by word and admonition only.” The other is “a crooked lumbering animal, put together anyhow; he has a short thick neck; he is flat-faced and of a dark colour, with grey eyes and blood-red complexion; the mate of insolence and pride, shag-eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur.”28 In Signorelli’s painting a dramatic event is being enacted behind Pan and his worshippers. We can see a rider trying to rein in his dark horse while another on an obedient white mount is riding through a triumphal arch surmounted by a figure with a cornucopia. We view an allegorical scene that offers a key to the theme of the painting. Signorelli’s work depicts, however, no charioteer and no symbolic wings. We merely see the two horses. A more obvious link with the Platonic simile can be found in the bronze head in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello that has been attributed to Donatello. Around its neck the youth portrayed is wearing an oversized medallion with the image of a

Fig. 8. Detail of Luca Signorelli, Pan.

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winged charioteer trying to control his two horses, one of which is more unruly than the other. In the literature on art this bronze head has been linked on good grounds with the theme from Phaedrus.29 All that remains is to describe the secondary equestrian theme in the painting as a reduced emblem of Socrates’s simile. Ficino’s extensive commentary is a philosophical exposition on a given theme. What Ficino is studying is the theory of the three driving forces of the soul—life, understanding and desire. Here they are transmuted into the psychological interplay between Fig. 9. Donatello, Bust of a young the charioteer and his two horses—the rational and the irrational. The man with medallion. Bronze. Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. equipage is moving towards repose in © Alinari Archives, Florence. eternal life, to the supreme quiet contemplation. Ficino’s argument used an inherited pattern for the “rational” hierarchies of souls: the soul of the world, the souls of the stars and the spheres, the souls of spirits and demons, the souls of heroes and human beings. The philosophical interpretation of the allegorical secondary theme linked to Socrates’s simile of the white and black horse leaves scope for further reflections or extrapolations with Ficino as a suitable guide. Admittedly, the exact significance of the Phaedrus passage in this context is hard to assess, but Socrates’s simile certainly seems relevant to our understanding of the clouds in Signorelli’s painting. One, just above the head of the philosophical herdsman, displays the vague outlines of figures that are moving horizontally. What emerge are outlines of wings, the shapes of horses, circular formations. Another cloud soars to the far right at the top of the picture in a shape that suggests the outlines of a wheel. It is difficult to think of anything more transient or more capable of spurring our imagination than a cloud. If these soaring entities can in this context be taken to be projections of allegories of heavenly objects, the question then arises of where the limits to the flexibility of imagery can be placed. While the white and black horses are clear symbols of spiritual qualities, the vague outlines of wings in the cloud formations are transient and intangible by nature.

Hans Henrik Brummer

Fig. 10. Detail of Luca Signorelli, Pan.

Fig. 11. Detail of Luca Signorelli, Pan.

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If we would like to view the cloud formations in the painting as symbols of the movement of the soul, another question has to be answered. Are we speaking of the human soul or the souls of gods? Ficino distinguished carefully between the heavenly cavalcade of the gods and the struggle of living beings to keep the light and dark forces in check. He also opposed the idea that the heaven beneath which human beings live out their days was also that of the gods.30 The domain of divine souls was above the sphere of heaven and their wings can never weaken, which is what happens when the human soul can no longer resist the declining powers. If we maintain this reading as we interpret the slow motion of the clouds in the skies in Signorelli’s sublunary world, we can easily imagine a trajectory in which the human soul attempts on its own to retain the support of its wings. Discourse in front of a devotional picture is, when all is said and done, a social activity that invites listening and responses. Even when the interpretation of symbols does not always meet the stringent demands of proof, it need not be totally uninteresting to while away the time with something as difficult and strange as attempting to explain in words an image that not only appears evasive but also only exists as a photographic print. And irrespective of all assessment of the details of our interpretation, the question remains as to the relationship between the Christian and the pagan in the visual culture that surrounded Lorenzo de’ Medici’s circle. What has been dealt with above concerns, firstly, classical mythology transposed to Christian iconography and, secondly, pagan knowledge entering into a more compelling relationship to prevailing dogmas of faith. It is reasonable to suppose that whatever the circumstances, Signorelli’s Pan was potentially heretical. The painting, we must assume, was intended for platonically illuminated literati that knew how to discuss the internal similarities of both systems of faith. The replacement of the Madonna by Pan was sanctioned by a theology that sought to harmonise Christian teachings and Platonic wisdom. The ancient legend that the death of Pan coincided with the Crucifixion on Golgotha offered a striking opportunity to allow the pagan deity’s identity to melt into the figure of Christ—not a totally alien idea for a syncretic cultural environment such as the one prevailing in 15th-century Florence.31 We may be certain that the arguments that have long since silenced concerning the prefigurations of Christianity in Arcadian motifs were emphatically advanced in Ficino’s circle. They maintained that the knowledge that was considered to have been perfected by Christ could trace its origin to ancient and privileged insights

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communicated by Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Pythagoras and Plato. Obviously, these arguments bordered on heresy.32 Why did the ordained Ficino delve deeply into astrology, magic and demonology? His De vita libri tres (1489)—three books on life—aroused the interest of the Papal Curia. The third book of this work was (admittedly, only for a short time) listed in 1580 on the Index of Forbidden Books. It is not surprising that the theologians of the Counter Reformation expressed serious reservations about Ficino’s elimination of the distinction between the Judaeo-Christian and the Platonic traditions.33 It is not known whether Signorelli’s Pan caused any displeasure because of its inherent paganism. If this had been the case, there were no good grounds for seriously maintaining that the links to the pagan mysteries in the picture betokened a deliberate attempt to erode the prevailing dogma. The fact that the Renaissance Neoplatonists displayed syncretic tendencies did not disturb their conviction that Christianity represented the supreme form of religious knowledge. Whatever can be said of a world that is totally alien to us today, I still wonder what the herdsman with Ficino’s facial features has to say to Pan. Of course, there is no certain answer. But there is nothing to stop me from returning to the farewell scene in Phaedrus.34 In it we are made to understand that philosophy is healing, balance and purity. Like Socrates, the herdsman turns to Pan with a prayer that he may be given beauty in his inward soul. He desires to be able to reckon the wise to be wealthy, to have only as much gold as a temperate man can carry and that the outward and inward man may be at one. These consoling ideas may well serve as a tribute to a painting that was reduced to ashes when Berlin fell in May 1945.35 No more than that.

Notes 1

Bernard Berenson, The Italian Painters of the Renaissance (London: The Phaidon Press, 1959), 114. 2 For the provenance, see Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’più eccellenti pittori sculturi ed architettori, ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Florence: Sansoni, 1878), vol. 3, 689; Janet Ross, The Fourth Generation: Reminiscences by Janet Ross (London: Constable and Company Ltd., 1912), 185–86; Hannelore Nützmann, “Wiedergefunden und verloren: Luca Signorelli’s Gemälde ‘Pan,’ ” Jahrbuch Preussischer Kulturbesitz 32 (1995). For the destruction of the painting, see Christopher Norris, “The Disaster at Flakturm Friedrichshain; a Chronicle and List of Paintings,” The Burlington Magazine 94, no. 597 (1952): 337–38; Irene Kühnel-Kunze, Bergung— Evakuierung—Rückführung: Die Berliner Museen in den Jahren 1939–1959,

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Jahrbuch Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Sonderband 2 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1984), 24– 25, 61–63. 3 For documentation and bibliography, see Tom Henry and Laurence B. Kantner, Luca Signorelli: The Complete Paintings (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001), 172–73, no. 18. 4 See Rona Goffen, “Nostra Conversatio in Caelis Est: Observations on the Sacra Conversazione in the Trecento,” The Art Bulletin 61 (1979). 5 Henry and Kanter, Luca Signorelli, 104, 162, no. 3. 6 Ibid., 171–72, no. 16. 7 Creighton Gilbert, “Signorelli’s ‘Pan,’ ” in Studi di Storia dell’arte in onore di Maria Luisa Gatti Perer, ed. Marco Rossi and Alessandro Rovetta (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1999), 137–38. 8 Hans Henrik Brummer, “Pan Platonicus,” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift 33 (1964). 9 Ibid., 64. 10 Lorenzo de’ Medici, Opere, ed. Attilio Simioni (Bari: G. Laterza & figli, 1914), vol. 2, 33–70. 11 About Ficino on Orpheus, see Angela Voss, “Orpheus Redivivus: The Musical Magic of Marsilio Ficino,” in Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy, ed. Michael J. B. Allen and Valery Rees (Leiden: Brill, 2002). 12 Lorenzo, Opere, 55, line 93. 13 Angelo Poliziano: Letters, vol. 1, Books I–IV, ed. Shane Butler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 243. 14 Marsilio Ficino: Commentaries on Plato, vol. 1, Phaedrus and Ion, ed. Michael J. B. Allen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 39–40. 15 Ficino Phaedrus 259d. 16 Allen, Marsilio Ficino: Commentaries on Plato, 173–74. 17 Brummer, “Pan Platonicus,” 63–64. 18 Ovid Fasti 5.79–80. 19 For an overall survey of Ficino’s Pythagorean interests, see Christopher Celenza, “Pythagoras in the Renaissance: The Case of Marsilio Ficino,” Renaissance Quarterly 52 (1999). See also Edgar Wind, Pagan mysteries (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967), 265–69. 20 André Chastel, “Melancholia in the Sonnets of Lorenzo de’ Medici,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 8 (1945): 65–66. 21 Angela Voss, “The Natural Magic of Marsilio Ficino,” Historical Dance 3, no. 1 (1992): 28. 22 Ficino Phaedrus 238d. 23 Allen, Marsilio Ficino: Commentaries on Plato, 179. 24 Ibid. 193. 25 Robert Vischer, Luca Signorelli und die italienische Renaissance: Eine kunsthistorische Monographie (Leipzig: Veit & Comp, 1879), 239–40. 26 See the article “The symbolism of Signorelli’s Pan” by Roger Fry in The Monthly Review 5, no. 15 (1901); Robert Eisler, “Luca Signorelli’s School of Pan,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 33 (1948): 78–81; Reinhard Herbig, “Alcuni Dei ignudi,” Rinascimento 3 (1952). 27 Brummer, “Pan Platonicus,” 58–59.

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Ficino Phaedrus 253e. Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1960), 189. For later references see Francis Ames-Lewis, “Neoplatonism and the Visual Arts at the Time of Marsilio Ficino,” in Allen and Rees, Ficino: Theology, Philosophy, Legacy, 336–37; Frank Zöllner, “The ‘Motions of the Mind’ in Renaissance Portraits: The Spiritual Dimension of Portraiture,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 68 (2005), 23–40. 30 Michael J. B. Allen, The Platonism of Marsilio Ficino: A Study of His “Phaedrus” Commentary. Its Sources and Genesis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 151–52. 31 Gilbert, “Signorelli’s ‘Pan,’ ” 139–40. 32 Michael J. B. Allen, “At Variance: Marsilio Ficino, Platonism and Heresy,” in Platonism at the Origins of Modernity, International Archives of the History of Ideas, ed. Douglas Hedley and Sarah Hutton (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), 38–39. 33 Jill Kraye, “Ficino in the Firing Line: A Renaissance Neoplatonist and His Critics,” in Allen, Ficino: Theology, Philosophy, Legacy. 34 Ficino Phaedrus 279b. 35 For the destruction of the Friedrichshain Flak Tower, see Kühnel-Kunze, Bergung—Evakuierung—Rückführung, 69; Michael Foedrowitz, The Flak Towers in Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna 1940–1950 (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 1998), 15–16. 29

Works Cited Allen, Michael J. B. The Platonism of Marsilio Ficino: A Study of His “Phaedrus” Commentary. Its Sources and Genesis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. —. “At Variance: Marsilio Ficino, Platonism and Heresy.” In Platonism at the Origins of Modernity, International Archives of the History of Ideas. Edited by Douglas Hedley and Sarah Hutton, 31–44. Dordrecht: Springer, 2008. —, ed. Marsilio Ficino: Commentaries on Plato. Vol. 1, Phaedrus and Ion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Ames-Lewis, Francis. “Neoplatonism and the Visual Arts at the Time of Marsilio Ficino.” In Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy. Edited by Michael J. B. Allen and Valery Rees, 327–38. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Berenson, Bernard. The Italian Painters of the Renaissance. London: The Phaidon Press, 1959. Brummer,Hans Henrik. “Pan Platonicus.” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift 33 (1964): 55– 67. Celenza, Christopher. “Pythagoras in the Renaissance: The Case of Marsilio Ficino.” Renaissance Quarterly 52 (1999): 667–711. Chastel, André. “Melancholia in the Sonnets of Lorenzo de’ Medici,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 8 (1945), 61–67. Eisler, Robert. “Luca Signorelli’s School of Pan.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 33 (1948): 77–92.

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Foedrowitz, Michael. The Flak Towers in Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna 1940– 1950. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 1998. Fry, Roger. “The symbolism of Signorelli’s Pan.” The Monthly Review 5, no. 15 (1901): 110–14. Gilbert, Creighton. “Signorelli’s ‘Pan.’ ” In Studi di Storia dell’arte in onore di Maria Luisa Gatti Perer. Edited by Marco Rossi and Alessandro Rovetta, 137– 41. Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1999. Goffen, Rona. “Nostra Conversatio in Caelis Est: Observations on the Sacra Conversazione in the Trecento.” The Art Bulletin 61 (1979): 198–222. Henry, Tom, and Laurence B. Kantner. Luca Signorelli: The Complete Paintings. London: Thames & Hudson, 2001. Herbig, Reinhard. “Alcuni Dei ignudi.” Rinascimento 3 (1952): 3–23. Kraye, Jill. “Ficino in the Firing Line: A Renaissance Neoplatonist and His Critics.” In Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy. Edited by Michael J. B. Allen and Valery Rees, 377–97. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Kühnel-Kunze, Irene. Bergung—Evakuierung—Rückführung: Die Berliner Museen in den Jahren 1939–1959. Jahrbuch Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Sonderband 2. Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1984. Lorenzo de’ Medici. Opere. Edited by Attilio Simioni. Vol. 2. Bari: G. Laterza & figli, 1914. Norris, Christopher. “The Disaster at Flakturm Friedrichshain; a Chronicle and List of Paintings.” The Burlington Magazine 94, no. 597 (1952): 337–47. Nützmann, Hannelore. “Wiedergefunden und verloren: Luca Signorelli’s Gemälde ‘Pan,’ ” Jahrbuch Preussischer Kulturbesitz 32 (1995): 261–71. Panofsky, Erwin. Renaissance and Renascences. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1960. Ross, Janet. The Fourth Generation: Reminiscences by Janet Ross. London: Constable and Company Ltd., 1912. Vasari, Giorgio. Le vite de’più eccellenti pittori sculturi ed architettori. Edited by Gaetano Milanesi. Vol. 3. Florence: Sansoni, 1878. Vischer, Robert. Luca Signorelli und die italienische Renaissance: Eine kunsthistorische Monographie. Leipzig: Veit & Comp, 1879. Voss, Angela. “The Natural Magic of Marsilio Ficino.” Historical Dance 3, no. 1 (1992): 25–30. —. “Orpheus Redivivus: The Musical Magic of Marsilio Ficino.” In Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy. Edited by Michael J. B. Allen and Valery Rees, 227–41. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Wind, Edgar. Pagan Mysteries. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967.

FROM MYTH TO THEORY: NAMES, NUMBERS AND FUNCTIONS OF THE MUSES FROM MEDIAEVAL MYTHOGRAPHY TO RENAISSANCE NEOPLATONISM TERESA CHEVROLET UNIVERSITY OF GENEVA

Everyone knows that the Muses are endowed with specific qualities which allow for an ordered structure of the performing arts on the basis of their being nine in number. This “distributive” tradition of the Muses first appears in a synthetic epigram ascribed to Pseudo-Ausonius, a French Latin poet of the 4th century, which sums up the artistic disciplines or genera governed by each of them under the authority of Apollo: Clio, singing of famous deeds, restores times past to life. Euterpe’s breath fills the sweet-voiced flutes. Thalia rejoices in the loose speech of comedy. Melpomene cries aloud with the echoing voice of gloomy tragedy. Terpsichore with her lyre stirs, swells, and governs the emotions. Erato bearing the plectrum harmonises foot, song and voice in the dance. Urania examines the motions of the heaven and stars. Calliope commits heroic songs to writing. Polymnia expresses all things with her hands and speaks by gesture. The power of Apollo will enliven the whole circle of thes Muses: Phoebus sits in their midst and in himself possesses all their gifts.1

What is less known is that this tradition of categorizing the Muses into different functions underwent successive modifications from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The very restrictive and quite topical series of the performing arts, as it appears in Pseudo-Ausonius’s epigram, has been subsequently enlarged and enriched so as to embrace wider areas of human knowledge, according to the specific intentions of the allegorists

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who interpreted the myth. My purpose here is to show how the specific trends of thought used by mythographers and philosophers have allowed this series to modify considerably, following the general evolution of allegorical and hermeneutic thinking.

Fulgentius and the Mythographic Tradition In the early Middle Ages, Christian mythographers began to treat the myth of the Muses, as any other myth, with very neat intentions; their allegorical reading was applied first and foremost as a means of upgrading pagan mythology, essentially mendacious to Christian minds, to a level of philosophical and moral dignity, or at least acceptability. In the 6th century, Fulgentius the Mythographer, in his Mythologiae,2 seems to consider pagan theology as a whole in the way Augustine exposed it in his De doctrina christiana. Pagan myths, Augustine says, can be compared to the golden and silver vases taken by the Hebrews from the Egyptians; they need to be emptied of the error and misuse of Heathens, and to be put to better use.3 In such a way of thinking, the Muses have undergone a hermeneutic treatment intended to rationalize them, to convert them into mere physical or moral entities, and therefore to deprive them of their initial meaning, removing from them any problematic trace of theological implication. Keeping the vases, and discarding their contents, Fulgentius, indeed, converted the pagan gods into conventional realities. Throughout his Mythologiae, the result of such a treatment is sometimes spectacular. As Sigebert de Gembloux, the 12th-century scholar, put it, “the reader is awe-struck by the acumen of a mind which refers the whole series of fables, philosophically explained, either to the natural order or to man’s moral life.”4 Fulgentius chose the method of etymology in order to justify and substantiate his allegorical constructions. He interpreted the Muses from the point of view of their names, and worked out a very inventive, even acrobatic, and quite fanciful series, connecting the Muses with the intellectual processes implied in the creation of a literary work. Interested mainly in emphazising the consonance of the Gods with the plain skills of human mind, he founded his linguistic inventions upon a very useful Cratylian etymology for the noun Muses, which is said to come from the Greek mosthai, which means “making philosophical inquiries.”5 He thus interpreted the Muses as scientiae et doctrinae modi, for, as he said, ab inquirendo dictae sunt. The list of the Muses shown in fig. 1 is a remarkable example of this survival of myths on behalf of their etymon. The Greek names of the

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Muses are intensely scrutinized, even sometimes distorted as to meet a typical degree of a required intellectual activity, a step in the acquiring of knowledge, the Muses being thus made compatible with a secular sense. This way, Melpomene is supposedly derived from meleten poioumenen, that is “meditating,” or Euterpe, from euron omoion, or “finding similarity.” The Muses are thus violently compelled to embody mental or intellectual significations, sometimes very far-fetched, like Terpsichore (terpo + choreia or “to love dance”) who is finally made to signify judicare quod invenias. This type of “cratylian” allegorism corresponds to a time where poetic invocations to the Muses were becoming less frequent; as Ernst Curtius shows.6 at this point during the Middle Ages the Muses were in effect being gradually replaced by figures of Christian culture; for instance, the poet Juvencus addresses the Holy Ghost and changes the Muses’ spring into the Jordan’s water; Paulinus of Nola rejects the Camenae and replaces them by Christ. Such an attempt to “convert” the Muses is to be found much later, though in a secular mode, by Dante himself, who, as a Christian, metaphorically considers the Muses as his own spirit, wit or memory, as it shows in his fine invocation in the second canto of the Inferno: O Muse, o alto ingegno, or m’aiutate! O mente che scrivesti cio ch’io vidi . . . . These two verses are commented at length by Boccaccio in his Commento sopra la Commedia, and it is not surprising that as a Christian reader of Dante he does rely precisely upon the authority of Fulgentius’s allegories, the function of which suddenly springs into focus: to make them palatable to a Christian mind. But Fulgentius’s etymologies also show that as early as in the Middle Ages, some scholars were at pains to preserve at least the nominal cortex of myths, their veil, or integumentum, and consequently to make them survive at any cost, if only as mere rationalized personifications. As a mythographer, Fulgentius stands out, in this way, as a key figure of what Jean Seznec has called the “moral tradition” of the survival of the pagan gods, which reduces myths to mere “moralities,” just as in the 14th century Bersuire’s Reductorium morale was to operate on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. But Fulgentius, who had some hints of Pythagorism, also tried to explain the number of the Muses and to give the reasons for the number nine. He imagined that Apollo, leader of the Muses, or Musagetes, was originally meant by the pagans to signify the human Voice, and so the Muses are nothing but allegories of the nine organs of speech, namely the Two Lips, the Tongue, the Palate—the “sky” of the mouth, its ouranon, from which Urania derives her name—the Four front teeth, and the Canula gutturis, or Tube of the throat: that is, the nine requisites for the emission

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of a perfect human voice. This way, Fulgentius realized “physically,” or physiologically, a primitive, and rather naïve pattern of homo musicalis well before this idea is developed in the Renaissance. The allegorical method used by Fulgentius in these correspondences owes very much to the Stoics, who first invented the etymological method in order to explain myths from an ethical or naturalistic viewpoint; this type of mythography, which was still well known and used in the Renaissance, is justified and defended by Balbus in Cicero’s De natura deorum. Another characteristic this type of allegorism has in common with the Stoic thought is that it is essentially apologetic. Fulgentius, in writing his Mythologiae, is supposed to respond to the accusations of immorality and falsity against pagan myths. He undertakes the task of rescuing pagan mythology by a substitution of meaning. And, indeed, this type of allegorical tradition has been named “translative” or “substitutive allegory” by authorities on allegory such as Wolfgang Bernard. As the German scholar says, in this type of allegorism the interpreter seeks “to find an abstract concept by reduction of the fiction to its real content.”7 But here, one may add, the substitution appears first in the concrete matter of language, through a kind of metaleptic shift from a real name to an alleged etymon, from Mousa to Mosthai, from Melpomene to Meleten poioumenen, affording a radical dismissal of the myth itself, by means of linguistic manipulation. And, indeed, even if he is actually saving the life of pagan mythology, even if he is constantly marveling at the ancients’ inventiveness, the mediaeval grammaticus makes clear again and again his contempt for Graecia mendax, for its poetica garrulitas semper de falsitate ornata and attributes the invention of the pagan gods to a shrewdness of the Devil . . . . In one respect, one can wonder whether such an ambiguous practice of allegory is really here a way to redeem myths or if it does not appear somehow as a way of discarding them. It has often been observed that in their task to rescue myth from oblivion, to make a new word of it, and then a new sense of it, medieval mythographers may paradoxically appear as the undertakers of myths.

Martianus Capella and Mediaeval Platonism Nonetheless, about one century before Fulgentius, another kind of interpretation had appeared, somehow born with the revival, although indirect and diffused, in the Middle Ages, of Platonic and even of Pythagorean thought. This influence, though sometimes significant in Fulgentius himself, is particularly strong in the 5th-century encyclopaedist

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Martianus Capella, who himself influenced Fulgentius, even though as far as the Muses are concerned, Fulgentius never mentions him. What is different in Capella’s treatment of the myth of the Muses is that it is not included in a reading or interpretive process. Martianus’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii is not a mythography but an allegorical treatise, which expounds in fictional form the meeting and wedding of Knowledge (Philologia) and Eloquence (Mercury). In this context, the mythographic gesture does not imply a hermeneutic process but a creative one. Unlike Fulgentius, what Capella is doing here is not allegorising narratives but narrating allegories. Moreover, Capella’s Muses come from another world than Fulgentius’s. They are “Platonic” or more precisely Pythagorean Muses. Under the influence of Macrobius’s Commentary of the Dream of Scipio, this mediaeval “bible of Platonism,” a new interpretation of the Muses had emerged, significantly not acknowledged by Fulgentius, and which somehow restored them to the status of deities. Macrobius’s theories are drawn from the Timaeus, where Plato describes the heavenly spheres of the Universe and shows that each of the eight inferior ones is moved by a Siren, whose voice corresponds to the musical note produced by the movement of the planet she governs, in order to perform, in a Pythagorean way, the Music or Harmony of the spheres. In the second book of his Commentary, Macrobius, quite mysteriously, replaced these eight Platonic Sirens by eight Muses: he laconically said that “cosmogonists have chosen to consider the nine Muses as the tuneful song of the eight spheres and the one predominant harmony that comes from all of them.”8 Capella, relying on this elliptic statement, very precisely assigned the nine Muses to the nine Celestial spheres, seven of them for the seven planets, one for the Starry sphere and one for the silent Earth. In this way, the nameless Sirens of Plato were then easily conflated with the Muses, thus gaining names and personality. This first cosmological allegory of the Muses interprets them as the “Harmony of the eight spheres,” in a musical Pythagorean way, placing the ninth Muse, the silent Thalia, on Earth, as shown in fig. 2.9 The text of Capella concerning the Muses is probably the first text which shows the Muses replacing the Sirens of Plato in a fully developed series (it has been said that the lost commentary on the Republic by Porphyry operated the same substitution). But what is certain is that Capella gives sensible body to the Pythagorean theory of the Muses. From the point of view of the allegorical method Martianus is using here, there is no nominalism or Stoic kind of etymology in such a distribution, but an analogical or structural type of correspondance, closer

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to Renaissance symbolism. What is already conspicuous here is more the building of an aesthetics, capable of making Art an image of the Cosmos, or, as Philip Sidney was to put it in Renaissance England, to define human art as a mirror of “the Planet-like Musicke” of Cosmos as fashioned by Pythagoras. A few pages later in the De nuptiis, each Muse sings in praise of Philology, some of them alluding to the arts they traditionally embody, like Tragedy, or Comedy, and all encourage Philology in her ascent to Heaven, by songs full of devotion and religious feeling, as if accompanying a religious ritual of initiation. Here, the Muses appear as the tutelary goddesses of the celestial orbs, capable of driving the soul to the Heavens. Even if he was aware of such an interpretation, having read the pagan Capella, Fulgentius, the Christian mythographer, had to reject this Platonic construction for obvious reasons. In Capella’s Nuptiae, the Muses devoutly accompany a pagan procession or apotheosis to the upper celestial spheres, they are given an eschatological role unacceptable to a Christian mind. For as Franz Cumont shows when commenting the presence of the Muses on some Roman sarcophagi, the Muses functioned for pagans as religious vehicles for the soul of the dead, “imparting to it wisdom, a pledge of immortality.” As Franz Cumont explains, by their favor thought mounts toward the ether, is initiated into the secrets of nature, and comprehends the evolutions of the choir of stars . . . . And after death the divine virgins summon to themselves into the starry spheres the soul which has sanctified itself in their service, allowing it to share the life of the immortals.10

In this sense, when he shows the Muses accompanying Philology, Capella may be alluding to some form of pagan ritual concerning the afterlife, not to be revived or recalled in a Christian mythography, for obvious religious reasons. This is what L. D. Ettlinger suggests in a very interesting essay on the Muses and the Liberal Arts in mediaeval times.11 He states that this eschatological role given to the Muses is perhaps the reason why later Christian encyclopaedias, like the Anticlaudianus of Alain de Lille in the 12th century, which has to be seen as a Christian transcription of Capella’s Nuptiae and which also describes an allegorical journey to the Heavens, do exclude the Muses as tutelary goddesses, and give emphasis to the personified Liberal Arts alone, less likely to be assigned any religious connotation.

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Salutati and Humanist Poetics One has to wait until the 14th century to see this cosmological system of the Muses fully developed and expanded to encompass the seven Liberal Arts themselves, which govern on earth the curriculum of knowledge. Indeed, whereas in Capella’s narrative the Muses were associated with Planets and Harmony, and while the Liberal Arts function separately as representing Knowledge and Encyclopaedia, a humanist writer of the Italian trecento attempted to blend the two systems into one. As L. D. Ettlinger shows, the fusion between the Muses and the liberal arts had already been alluded to in the Hortus deliciarum, an encyclopaedia written by a 12th-century nun, Herrad von Landsberg.12 But it was Coluccio Salutati, a famous Florentine pre-humanist, who really systematized the fusion of the Muses and the liberal arts. In this attempt, he was probably inspired by Dante who had said: alli sette primi cieli rispondono le scienze del Trivio e del Quadrivio . . . , and who had linked, in his Convivio, the seven Liberal Arts with the seven planetary spheres, and the three philosophical disciplines with the three superior heavens, as shown in fig. 3. In his turn, Salutati imagined a complex system where the Muses were now connected to both the series, planets and liberal arts, in order to achieve a perfect macrocosm-microcosm analogy (fig. 4). The main reason of this necessity to introduce the Muses in such a panorama is that, in fact, Coluccio Salutati had very precise humanistic claims on Poetics. As his predecessors Albertino Mussato, Petrarch and Boccaccio had done before him, he undertook the great task of defending Poetry against the Scholastic philosophers who debased it as inessential and mendacious. His aim was to show not only the dignity of Poetry among other disciplines, but also its superiority as being the unique knowledge totally inspired by God.13 Scientia veneranda poesis Boccaccio had said in the Trecento. Similarly, Petrarch had insisted on the reconciliation of classical poetry with Christianity and had established, by a fine chiasmic expression that poetry is nothing but theology and theology nothing but poetry, both using a figurative language. In this humanist context, the first book of Salutati’s treatise, De laboribus Herculis, has to be understood as a “defence,” or apology of poetry, in the fashion of Boccaccio’s 14th book of De genealogia deorum gentilium. Salutati’s allegorical treatment of the Muses has to be seen as forming part of this humanist goal; much more than explaining myths away, as Fulgentius did, and more profoundly than Capella’s allusions to the cosmologic Muses, though retaining the results of both of them, Salutati

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intends to demonstrate in what sense poetry is endowed with specific qualities that put it at the highest level amongst human sciences. The Muses function here as the argument of a dissertation on poetics, in which he tries to prove, by an intricate arithmetic demonstration, that poeticam celum esse,14 that Poetry is reflection of the Sky itself, showing for instance that the Virgilian dactylic hexameter reflects in a reduced form the whole numeric scale of the Universe, as based on analogous numeric structures. Secondly, Salutati tries to upgrade poetry to the role of first and foremost discipline, containing the whole series of liberal arts; he maintains that poeticam narrationem ex trivio quadruvioque componi, that poetics encompasses the disciplines of the Trivium and the Quadrivium. Indeed, in his opinion, Poetry includes the qualities of them all: “the discipline of Logic, the coherence of Grammar, the ornamentation of Rhetoric, the measures of Geometry, the pure numbers of Arithmetic, the harmony of Music, the images of Astrology.”15 In this context, the inscription of the Muses in Salutati’s system functions somehow as the signature, the hallmark of Poetry, both in the Pythagoric harmony of the Heavens and in the human Encyclopaedia of the Liberal Arts. To legitimate his innovative view, Salutati assumed the jeopardous task of finding symbolic links between the Muses, the Planets and the Liberal Arts. In doing so, he kept some of Fulgentius’s etymologies, but also borrowed some new ones from Dante’s Convivio, for instance the relationships between three particular spheres, the Moon, Venus and Mercury, and the three arts of the Trivium: Grammar, Rhetoric and Dialectic. But he invented a lot more, for, indeed, he was at pains to complete the series and to demonstrate how the other Muses could also have their own Planet and Liberal Art. He then used a combination of etymologies and metaphors entirely of his own. And at this point, Salutati makes a very effective use of his mythographic skills. For instance, he says, Polymnia signifies Arithmetica from poly, meaning quantity, and Arithmetica being the discipline of multiplication. But Polymnia is also, according to Dante, the Muse pertaining to the sphere of Saturn, which is the planet of mathematical speculation, and whose other name Cronos, meaning Time, is also divided in an infinity of parts. Clio means “fame,” as in Fulgentius, but she appears linked to Grammar, in the sense that Grammar’s glory is drawn from the glory of the disciplines it speaks about. This way, Clio and Grammar appear linked to the Moon, because the Moon borrows its “glory” from the Sun. Thus Grammar and the Moon are similar for none of them shine on their own, but take their splendour from elsewhere. As for Mars-Erato and Geometry, all three are obviously linked to “war”: war was born from disputes around

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the limits of territory among ancient Egyptians, says Salutati, and so it is linked to the measures of Geometry; Erato, whose name comes from eris which means in Greek “discord” and chthon which means “earth,” is then made the Muse of Geometry and is governed by Mars. Similarly, in Salutati’s system, Urania is associated with Venus and Rhetoric, for both beget new fire (uros neos): Venus the fire of Love, and Rhetoric the flame and passion of logos. As we can see, Salutati combines etymology with a complex system of similia similibus, and is here halfway between the mediaeval rationalization of Fulgentius and the Pythagorean symbolism of Capella. What is significant here is that allegorism is not used for the sake of rational substitution, but for a seemingly superior purpose. The problem is not plainly to elucidate myth, or to reduce it to a secular sense, but, by a kind of inductive mythography, to call up significant elements of a myth as constructive arguments in order to enforce an idea, namely, the divine origin of Poetry and its capacity to embrace the whole curriculum of human disciplines. Pythagorism and mediaeval “moralism” work here in synergy to give a complete image of a universe fully related to human achievements. It remains true, however, that even if Salutati’s Muses can be understood as “bestowers of immortality for those who dedicated themselves to the disciplines,” even if the general mood of his discourse can be considered as genuinely Neoplatonic, the hazardous etymologies, some deriving from Papias, Isidorus or Hugutio of Pisa, as well as the credit he gives to Fulgentius, still bear the stamp of mediaeval allegorism.

Marsilio Ficino and Neoplatonic Poetics At the end of the Quattrocento, Marsilio Ficino, by contrast, realized a crucial shift from allegorism to hermeneutics. This could be achieved mainly by a consideration of myth as a legitimate form of theology. In fact, Ficino establishes a clear distancing from Stoic etymologism and substitutive allegory. Myth is no more seen as a reductorium, which resolves into a perfectly clear explanation, either according to the scheme of the Stoics (physical/moral allegories) or to the fourfold sense of Biblical hermeneutics as defined by the Church Fathers and as later reasserted by Dante in his famous letter to Cangrande della Scala. On the contrary, according to Ficino, a myth is worked out to conceal intelligible facts about the Soul, taking for granted that these facts will never be totally understood or revealed, because they pertain to religious thought, whose truths cannot possibly be explained in worldly terms. As such, myth

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functions as a religious practice of language, an artificium occultandi,16 which never totally unveils what it veils. Myth hides an intelligible meaning under a sensible form which calls for a spiritual interpretation. As a result, Ficino’s reading of pagan myth appears to be solely consonant with the highest of the four exegetical senses, namely the theological or anagogical one, that is to say, the last of the successive layers of exegetic research, the only one whose essential secret is never to be totally revealed. And in Ficino, as in Plato, this secret is always related to the Soul. In this sense, if we return here to the distinctions suggested by the German scholar Wolfgang Bernard, we may witness in Ficino’s Muses an example of what he calls diairetic allegorism, that is, an allegorism of the Platonic kind, which allows us to interpret myth as an “expression of a spiritual or supernal thought,” the “sensible” or fictional entities revealing “intellective” entities that order and govern things from beyond.17 Indeed, what is important to point out about Ficino is the fact that he re-inserts classical myths into genuine theological speculation, thus creating a new permutability between “poetry” and “theology,” his central goal being to assign a theological value to all ancient figurative forms, from numbers and symbols to hieroglyphs and myths, all worthy to be included in what he calls prisca theologia. Consequently, pagan myth not only implies a hermeneutic quest, but also—and here there is certainly a radical difference from what Petrarch and Salutati meant by theologia— does entail worshipping and cult. In short, Ficino makes a crucial shift from theologia poetica, as shown in Salutati, to what he calls theologia platonica. This last element enables us to distinguish two main allegorical ways which exclude each other. In the first one, represented mainly by Fulgentius, but also to some extent by Capella and Salutati, myth is indeed a form of “translation” or of “substitution.” But Ficino is here taking another path, which is totally opposed to substitutive allegorism. In fact, Ficino’s conception of myth owes much to the philosophers and allegorists of Late Antiquity, like Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus and especially Proclus, for whom “Plato is a theologian.” According to Proclus, as Luc Brisson explains it,18 there is an analogy between myths and mysteries, in the Greek sense of the word, as secret rituals and ceremonies. If we follow Luc Brisson, the interpretation of myths eventually culminates in what Proclus calls epopteia, that is, the final degree of the mysterial initiation, in which sacred objects are fully revealed to the mystagogs at the term of the initiation rituals, just as in the theology of Plato the “objects of philosophy” are thrown wide open to the

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exegete who enters in a sort of “dionysiac ecstasy.” Seen in this way, the hermeneutic quest is a form of religious initiation. Ficino’s daring absorption of pagan mythology within the sphere of religious thought has to be undersood in this context, and is inseparable from his important concept of prisca theologia. For him, Ancient Theology—that is: Chaldeic oracles, Egyptian wisdom, the prophecies of the Sybils, Platonic truths, Orphic theology and pagan myths—must be seen as as a stage prior to Christian revelation. Ficino says in his Theologia Platonica that these ancient theologians (Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Aglaophemus, Orpheus, and indeed Plato) were “inspired by God and, in order not to divulge the holy mysteries to the profane, hid those under poetical imagery.”19 Consequently, and bearing in mind that Ficino always reads Plato through the prismatic glasses of his Late Antiquity commentators, and especially Proclus, if Plato is a theologian, all that Plato says in the Timaeus about the Muses is for Marsilio a poetical integumentum, a mysterial truth, significant at all times as a token of religious belief, and certainly all the more so given that in Ficino’s system Poetry and Music occupy highly relevant roles. But precisely, how do Poetry and Music participate in Theology? The first point of the Ficinian poetics is his idea of mimesis. For Ficino, as for Plato in his Timaeus, as for Martianus Capella, who also calls upon the authoritative source of the Timaeus, both the universe and human souls are constructed on the same harmonic proportions and as a composite of numerical ratios. Our souls are then numerically attuned to the Music of the Spheres and to the World-Soul, which governs the particular Souls of the planets. The human soul is for Ficino a sort of microcosmic mirror of this World-Soul that moves the Heavens, the clue to their similarity being the numeric structure of both. In the Timaeus, Plato laments the essential disharmony of our soul, perverted by human sound and fury, and disordered by being trapped in a body of flesh. Plato then goes on to interpret the Muses as the figures of the harmony meant to correct this profound drawback of the human soul. He ascribes the gifts of harmony and rhythm to the Muses to provide us with an intuition of the harmony and proper measure we should create in our souls, in order to avoid multiplicity in our quest for the One: And harmony, whose movements are akin to the orbits within our souls, is a gift of the Muses, if our dealings are guided by understanding, not for irrational pleasure, for which people nowadays seem to make use of it, but to serve as an ally in the fight to bring order to any orbit in our soul that has become unharmonized, and make it concordant with itself.20

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According to this vision, the Muses are seen as auxiliaries to the inner revolution of soul, a first stage in the ascent to Unity. Ficino’s theory of Poetry thrives on these few allusions by Plato to the Muses, which are given full consistency and shape. But Ficino’s intentions here are thoroughly theological. The Muses are no longer seen as allegories or worldly names of the spheres, the names of their physical bodies. They are the souls, that is the energetic, operating powers of the spheres, in a world not allegorically but concretely, truly endowed with a cosmic psychic life, that functions exactly as our soul in animating our bodies. In this way, we understand what progression has been made from the static personifications of Capella (who said the Muses “have their lodgings” in the celestial orbs) and Salutati, who saw them as hieratic metaphors for the Liberal Arts. To put it another way, as far as the Muses function as souls, they become acting forces from above, powers to be believed, and worshipped, for they can use their grace and benevolence to permeate our souls. In fact, as Ficino says in his Phaedrus commentary, the Muses are the first step of our ascent to the Divine One. But what Ficino also implies here is somehow not far from magic,— astrologic magic, as studied by D. P. Walker21—because he sees that the Muses can, as souls, as attractive forces, that is, as planetary deities, wield a tremendous power and influence on human performances, when properly invoked. And this, especially because they govern planets, whose astrologic influences are one of the crucial issues of Ficino’s world view. At this point one may think, in Ficino’s De vita coelitus comparanda, to the ambivalent influence of Saturn, planet of melancholy, and to the crucial role of Poetry and Music in the attempt of soothing the disorders of black bile. Moreover, we have specific evidence that Ficino considered the Muses as true divinities, meant to be worshipped and celebrated. The mediation of Proclus reappears here, for it is relevant to note that Proclus provided Ficino with an astounding Hymn to the Muses, which he translated into Latin, and which may be, perhaps more than Plato’s Timaeus, the origin of Ficino’s earnest devotion to these deities. Proclus’s hymn is a real invocation, it is full of “mysterial language,” the Muses are said to be hominum sublevatrices, and asked by the mystagog to orgia et initiationem sacrorum indica(r)e sermonum, that is, to show him the language of orgies and of sacred rites, to find the way of a genuine initiation ritual.22 No wonder if Federico da Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino, maybe moved by Ficino’s almost “neo-pagan” devotion to the Muses, created in

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his palazzo a secret sacellum or chapel to the Muses, just next to one to the Holy Ghost.23 Here we come to the second and crucial point in Ficinian poetics, the theory of inspiration, crystallized around the figure of the Muses, and mainly developed in his commentaries on Plato’s Phaedrus and Ion. For Marsilio, who is intermingling the results of these two Platonic dialogues, poetic inspiration, furor, has to be seen as a part of the religious upheaval of the soul, a natural upward drive toward divinity and immortality. This is the reason why he interprets the Muses as a myth that conceals the mystery of the soul’s eschatology. In Plato’s Ion, inspiration, or poetic furor is defined as an “occupation” by the Muses. This means that the poets’ souls are raptured and therefore “converted to the divinities of the Muses” (conversio ad Musarum numina).24 Here we witness at its best how Poetry literally belongs to Theology. In fact, the rapture by the Muses is only the first step for the soul to be raised to divinity. The three subsequent stages are the three other ficinian furores, or states of frenzy, which Ficino, and this is significant, also clearly associates to divinities of pagan cult: Apollinian or prophetic furor (Apollo being the god of divination), Bacchic or mysterial furor (Bacchus being the god of mysteries and wine) and amatory or furor of Venus (so called after the goddess of Love). All these four furores, says Ficino, possess the capacity of arousing the soul “from the sleep of the body to the wakefulness of the intelligence, from the darkness of ignorance to the light, from death to life, calling back from Lethe’s oblivion to the recollection of things divine.”25 This arousal, which counteracts the descensus of the soul from Heavens in terrestrial bodies as explained in Proclus’s Commentary on the Republic26 is again well and truly defined in terms of power or force, one may say “grace” or “salvation,” to use a Christian terminology. Most significantly, Plato, and Ficino after him, use in effect a dynamic analogon to figure it: Socrates defines inspiration as a “magnetic” influx, which flows up and down along the iron chain that links Apollo to the Muses and the Muses to particular poets on earth. The Muses are thus really involved in a “theology” of the soul, and Poetry, governed by the Muses, becomes a propedeutic training to the mystical conquest of the One. To add one more element to the importance of Poetry and Music in Ficino’s system of anagogic forces, D. P. Walker points out that even if they figure as “the first and lowest kind of furor, they have the privileged position of accompanying the other three,” which find their completion through the rythm and melodies of the Poetry and Music essential in religious rites, prophecy or love.27

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We can discern by this peculiar treatment of the Muses the significant difference between the “substitutive” allegory of the Middle Ages, up to Salutati, and the hermeneutics of Renaissance platonists, also named “esoteric symbolism.” For Pico della Mirandola, for instance, myths are hieroglyphs, used as riddles, and “showing only the crust of the mysteries to the vulgar, while reserving only the marrow of the true sense for higher and more perfect spirits.”28 For Neoplatonists, then, if myth can be opened up as an enciphered message, this is only possible for a privileged élite, priests or wise men who are keen on religious mysteries. As such, pagan myths, as here the Muses, must be given a compatibility with other theological forms: Cabbala, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Orphic theology, Biblical poetics and last but not least, Christianity. The Muses are here considered as being part of a much wider eschatological system, a theologia platonica, neither pagan nor Christian, but convenient to both. As “hieroglyphs,” they conceal an ultimate mystery, eternally valid, and never totally disclosed, which is no way debased or adulterated by its integumental fiction, but really all the more enhanced. This is the reason why Ficino makes a step forward in his Theologia Platonica when he concretely shows that the Muses find equivalents in other theologies as well. This is the third point of Ficino’s theological approach to the Muses. In the fourth book of his Theologia platonica, he organizes a skilful correspondance between pagan myth (namely, the myth of the Muses) and Orphic theology, both involving a sort of ecstasy of the soul, as expression of the ascent to divinity. “The Orphics, he says, were also followers of Dionysos, with whom they shared the ecstasy (a state of ecstatic trance, referred to by the verb baccheuein) that allowed men and gods to join together.” Consequently, Ficino associates the Muses with the nine Bacchoi of Orphic theology. In his view, pagan theology and Orphic theology have given different names to these souls that govern the spheres, and what the former calls Muses are said in the latter to be the epithets of Bacchus: [T]he theology of Orpheus divides the souls of the spheres in such a way that each has a divine power, one concerned with knowing, the other in the sphere’s body with giving life and ruling. So Orpheus calls the one power . . . in the soul of the sphere of the Moon, Bacchus Licnites and the Muse Thalia. Again, in the soul of the sphère of Mercury, the one power is Bacchus Silenus, the other Euterpe; in that of Venus, (Becchus) Lysius and Erato; in that of the Sun, (Bacchus) Trietericus (and) Melpomene; in that of Mars, (Bacchus) Bassareus and Clio; in that of Jupiter (Bacchus) Sabasius an Terpsichore; in that of Saturn, (Bacchus) Amphiteus and Polymnia; in that of the eighth sphère, (Bacchus) Pericionius and Urania. But Orpheus calls the first power in the soul of the world Bacchus

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Eribromus, and the second, the Muse Calliope. Accordingly, in Orpheus schème a particular Bacchus rules over the individual Muses, and the powers of the Muses, drunken by the nectar of knowledge divine, are signified by his name. Thus the none Muses along with the nine Bacchuses together celebrate their ecstatic rites around the single figure of Apollo, that is, around the splendor of the invisible Sun.29

Finally, though in an implicit way, Ficino goes even far beyond Orphic theology, for on one of the first pages of De christiana religione, he describes the nine Angelic Hierarchies after the Coelestis hierarchia of Pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite. In Dante’s Convivio, as well as in Canto XXVII of the Paradise, which both allude to Dionysius, the Hierarchy of Angels had already been linked to the cosmologic orbs. Ficino is probably following Dante when he says in the De christiana religione: “The Empyreus is convenient for Trinity for its stability and splendour; the nine other skies belong to the nine angelic choirs . . . .”30 So, if we venture to join together—as André Chastel does31—the Muses of the Commentary of Ion and the Angels of the De christiana religione via the heavenly planetary bodies of Dante’s Convivio, we can witness a full system of correspondences, descending from Empyreus to the Moon and encompassing, in the syncretic number Nine, the theology of Heathens, as well as that of Orpheus the Theologian, and that of the mystic PseudoDionysius the Areopagite, in an outstanding syncretic vision (fig. 5). Last but not least, Ficino had to stress the importance of the human followers of the Muses, namely the Poets, by choosing archetypal authors or Musarum sacerdotes to make them correspond both to Muses and to the planets which govern their poetic “genius.” Ficino thus provides a list of the canonical poetae theologi of Antiquity: Orpheus, Musaeus, Homer, Pindar, Sapho, Thamyris, Hesiod, Virgil and Ovid, as shown in fig. 5.

The Muses in Neoplatonic Systems after Ficino Ficino’s list of poets will be completed by some of his 16th-century followers, like the Italian theorist Francesco Patrizi da Cherso, who tried, in his Discorso della diversità dei furori poetici, to sort out the different types of inspiration or ingegni leading to the main specific genres of poetry, and who included in his list the main Italian poets, Dante, Ariosto and Petrarch, as shown in fig. 6. The same procedure can be found in France in a poem by Nicolas Le Fèvre de la Boderie (fig. 7), who, following the same idea, linked each particular Muse with a French poet of the Pléiade, Ronsard, Baïf, Belleforest or Du Bellay, assigning to his

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brother Guy, author of the Galliade, the Muse of the Starry Heaven, Urania.32 In France, the most passionate of Ficino’s followers was the learned Pontus de Tyard, who wrote in 1552 the Solitaire premier, Dialogue des Muses et de la fureur poétique,33 a philosophical dialogue on Poetry, which appears like a compendium of all the possible significations of the Muses. The Solitaire premier is probably the best vulgarization in French of the Ficinian theory of inspiration. Tyard, as a member of La Pléiade, defines Poetry both as a discipline encompassing the whole encyclopaedia (for which Fulgentius’s “intellectual” etymologies are of course invaluable) and as an ecstatic force capable of redeeming the soul (here relying of course on Ficinian theory). Associating these two purposes, the work becomes then a very strange example of eclecticism, a combination of Ficinian philosophy and mythographic material that has frequently been criticized for its “rambling form and heterogeneous content,” and even called a “magpie miscellany.”34 Pontus seems to have two main concerns, as suggested by his subtitle, Discours des Muses et de la fureur poétique. The first one is, similarly to Ficino, to link the poetic madness to the complex eschatology of the soul. His dialogue begins with a very precise explanation of the descent of the soul in the body, according to Ficino’s Phaedrus commentary, even quoting Ficino’s correspondence between the Muses and the Bacchoi of Orphic theology.35 But when it comes to the mythography of the Muses, dispensers of fureur poétique, he proceeds to an almost exhaustive catalogue of their “archeology” through ancient authorities, but also through medieval writers like Fulgentius, from whom he borrows the encyclopaedic etymologies of the names of the Muses. The second concern of Tyard’s Poetics is, like in Salutati’s system, to show that the whole encyclopaedia is governed and outclassed by Poetry. These two purposes correspond, I believe, to the double function assigned to the poet by Pontus de Tyard and by the poets of the French Pléiade as well: the poeta theologus, thanks to his divine madness, and poeta eruditus or doctus, who tries to express in his productions the whole enkyklios paideia. Pontus de Tyard goes even further than Salutati when he adds new significant implications to be understood by way of the myth. For instance, as a reader of Plutarch’s Symposiacs36 he says that the number of the Muses comes from a multiplication of the number three, which is the esoteric cipher of creation. For instance, there are three philosophical branches: Theology, Moral philosophy and Natural philosophy; three branches in Rhetoric: Demonstrative, Deliberative and Judicial; three branches in Mathematics: Arithmetic, Geometry and Music. This way,

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Pontus de Tyard gives his own updated version of the Liberal Arts related to the number of the Muses. Pontus also recalls that Music is founded upon three chords, Hypate, Mese and Nete, low, middle and high. Ficino’s theory of inspiration and musical mimesis made a deep impression on writers of the following century, especially in the field of musical speculation. His Muses for instance led to a well-known musical world picture, which appears precisely in a musical treatise, Franchino Gafori’s (or Gafurius’s), Practica Musice of 1492, which includes a fine woodcut representing a new musical scale for the Muses, integrating them in the whole system of Pythagorean “Harmony of the Spheres” (fig. 8). On top of it a Latin inscription above Apollo’s head bears one the verses of the epigram of Pseudo-Ausonius which the Renaissance thought to be from Virgil: Mentis Apollineae vis has movet undique Musas. On the left is the list of the Muses, ordered upwards from Clio to Urania; as in Capella, Thalia remains earthbound with its silent orb. The cosmic spheres are ordered to the right. Between the Muses and the Spheres, this astonishing woodcut links together the notes of the Greek musical scale, rising from proslambanomene, the lowest note, attributed to Clio and the Moon, up to mese, the highest pitch, ascribed to Urania and Caelum stellatum. As shown by Joscelyn Godwin, this table was also realized by a contemporary Spanish theorist, Ramis de Pareja, in his Musica practica, published in 1482, and in Enricus Glareanus’s Dodecachordon, published in 1547.37 On the right of the great vertical serpent, or signum triceps, Gafori has ordered—and this is a quite new element in comparison with the musical cosmos of Ficino—the scale of the four authentic modes of Greek Music, Dorius, Phrygius, Lydius and Mixolydius, the three plagal or “decreased” ones, Hypodorian, Hypophrygian, Hypolydian, and finally the Hypermixolydian, added by Boethius to match the sphere of the fixed stars.38 These eight modes are supposed to correspond by pairs to the four humours or temperaments, which are now easily related to the planets and consequently to the Muses which govern them. In the fourth book of Harmonia musicorum instrumentorum opus, published in 1518, Gafori was to explain at length these humoral correspondences of the musical modes in order to show how instrumental music can have therapeutic effects on human ethos, which is an important Renaissance, and indeed Ficinian, concern. Thus, the Phrygian mode, which is suitable for warlike themes (bellicae rei aptior), and then to Mars and Erato, will be linked to the Yellow Bile, the humour of Wrath. The Lydian mode, ruled by Jupiter and Euterpes, who is the Muse of Jocunditas, “maintains, says Gafori, the

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fluidity of the Blood by its placid impulsion.” The Mixolydian mode, governed by Polymnia, is the mode of Black Bile. It is efficient sub atra bile, being the mode proper to Tragedies, and is performed in order to commiserationi tragoediae congruere. Finally, the Dorian mode, corresponds to Phlegm and, under the government of Melpomene, is the mode of Temperatio and of the Sun, moderator of all things.39 As for the three secondary or plagal Modes, the Hypodorian, the Hypophrygian and the Hypolydian, they correspond to the Moon, to Mercury and to Venus, that is to the inferior planets, governed by what we may call the “inferior Muses,” who are, according to Gafori, Clio, Calliope and Terpsichore, who represent somehow the “minor modes” of each primary musical mode or temperament. Thus, the Appeal to War aroused by the performance of the Phrygian mode will find its counterpart in the Return of Warriors, sung in the Hypophrygian mode; the Joy and Celebrations sung in the Lydian mode will be counteracted by the Tears of Devotion called forth by the Hypolydian mode; the Gravity and Virility of the Dorian mode will correspond to the Laziness and Indolence of the Hypodorian mode. Finally, the only elevated mode, the Hypermixolydian, is ascribed to the Starry Sky, and is of course deprived of flats. It represents the mode of the Mind, detached from the corruptions of sensible things and belongs to the only transcendent Muse: Urania. In his fascinating scale, Gafori’s musical Muses return to be eight in number, as Plato’s Sirens, poor Thalia remaining on the silent globe of the Earth, just as she was in Macrobius’s Dream of Scipio. Well after Gafori,40 we find these correspondences reappearing in the De occulta philosophia of Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1533), who summarizes in versified form some of the correspondences of the Muses, the Planets, the Tones and the Modes: Silent Thalia we to th’ Earth compare, For She by music never doth ensnare; After the Hypodorian Clio sings, Persephone likewise doth strike the bass strings; Calliope also doth chord second touch, Using the Phrygian; Mercury as much: Terpsichore strikes the third, and that rare, The Lydian music makes so Venus fair; Melpomene, and Titan do with a grace The Dorian music use in the fourth place. The fifth ascribed is to Mars the God Of war, and Erato after the rare mode Of th’ Phrygians, Euterpe doth also love The Lydian, and sixth string; and so doth Jove.

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Saturn the seventh doth use with Polymny, And causeth the Mixed Lydian melody. Urania also doth the eighth create, And music Hypo-Lydian elevate.41

The Muses, the Planets, the four Humors and the musical Modes form part, in Agrippa’s mind, of a worldview which affords, by mathematical similarities and relationships, the establishment of a magic system likely to enable man to circulate freely throughout the stages of Creation. This is what he states on the very first page of his book: Seeing there is a threefod world, elementary, celestial and intellectual, and every inferior is governed by its superior, and receiveth the influence of the virtues thereof, . . . wise men conceive it no way irrational that it should be possible for us to ascend by the same degrees through each world, to the same very original world itself . . . .42

Agrippa’s Neoplatonism, unlike Gafori’s, is here clearly oriented toward magic and functions as an attempt to seize occult influxes from the celestial bodies. This was, of course, already obvious in Ficino’s natural magic as expressed in the De vita coelitus comparanda. But, as Tomlinson points out, in Agrippa “we witness the alliance of two disciplines, music theory and practical magic,”43 namely, Gafori’s theory and Ficino’s magic. In such a context, Agrippa’s Muses, attuned by similarity of number to the Musical modes, become now implicitely involved in magic and bestowers of an occult influence on human souls. Their power, though, is no more due, like in Ficino’s Ion, to a magnetic fluid descending from Apollo, nor, like in his Theologia platonica, to the inebriating energy of the nine Orphic Bacchoi, but to the esoteric practice of the eight musical modes as described by Gafori. In short, the nine Muses function here as the patrons of musical magic, the practice of which, according to Agrippa, “doth change the affections, intentions, gestures, motions, actions and dispositions of all the hearers, and doth quietly allure them to its own properties, as to gladness, lamentation, to boldness, or rest, and the like…”44 But as such, it is also capable to “bring about the most direct kinds of gnosis, inducing ecstatic trances and frenzied possessions.”45 Indeed, as Jean Seznec will put it, the Muses owe very much of their brilliant survival to their “chance to be a number.”

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Notes 1

Pseudo-Ausonius, “Nomina Musarum,” in Appendix Ausoniana, English translation by H. G. Evelyn-White, Ausonius, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961). 2 Auctores Mythographi Latini: Cajus Julius Hyginus, Fab. Planciad. Fulgentius, Lactantius Placidus, Albricus Philosophus, ed. Augustinus van Staveren (Lugd. Bat.: Samuel Luchtmans; Amstelaed: J. Westenius et G. Smith, 1742), XIV, 640. 3 Augustine, De doctrina christiana II, 40.60. 4 Sigebert de Gombloux, quoted by Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 85. 5 “As for the Muses and the music and poetry in general, they seem to have derived their name from their eager desire (‘mosthai’) to investigate and do philosophy.” Plato Cratylus 406a, in Plato, Complete Works, ed. by John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 124. 6 Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), chap. XIII, “The Muses,” 235. 7 Wolfgang Bernard, Untersuchungen zur spätantiken Dichtungstheorie: Die Methode der Allegorese bei Proklos, Herakleitos, Plutarch (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1990), 3. 8 Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. William H. Stahl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), II, 3. 9 “Urania was attuned to the outmost sphere of the starry universe, which was swept along with a High pitch. Polymnia took over the sphere of Saturn; Euterpe controlled that of Jove; Erato, that of Mars, which she entered; while Melpomene held the middle region, where the Sun enhanced the world with a light of flame. Terpsichore joined the golden Venus; Calliope embraced the Cyllenian’s sphere; Clio set up as her lodging the innermost circle—that is, the moon’s, whose deep pitch reverberated with deeper tones. Only Thalia was left sitting on Earth’s flowery bosom, because the swan which was to carry her was indisposed to carry its burden or even to fly upward and had gone to find the lakes which were its home.” Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, trans. W. Harris Stahl and R. Johnson, with E. L. Burge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), I, 27–28 10 F. Cumont, Recherches sur le symbolisme funéraire des Romains, quoted by Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 234–35. 11 L. D. Ettlinger, “The Muses and Liberal Arts, Two Miniatures from Herrad of Lausberg’s Hortus Deliciarum,” in Essays in the History of Art Presented to Rudolf Wittkower, ed. Douglas Fraser, Howard Hibbard, and Milton J. Lewine (London: Phaidon, 1967). 12 Ibid. 13 On this particular issue, see C. C. Greenfield, Humanist and Scholastic Poetics, 1250–1500 (Bucknell: Bucknell University Press, 1981). 14 C. Salutati, De laboribus Herculis, ed. by B. L. Ullmann (Zurich: Thesaurus Mundi, 1951), vol. 1, 40.

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Cf. Greenfield, Humanist and Scholastic Poetics, 134. On this particular way of concealing truths in the Renaissance see Paolo Rossi, Francesco Bacone dalla Magia alla Scienza (Bari: Laterza, 1974) and Teresa Chevrolet, L’Idée de fable: Théories de la fiction poétique à la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 2007). 17 See Bernard, Untersuchungen zur spätantiken Dichtungstheorie, 25. 18 Luc Brisson, “L’Allégorie comme interprétation des mythes, de l’Antiquité à la Renaissance,” in L’Allégorie de l’Antiquité à la Renaissance, ed. Brigitte PerezJean and Patricia Eichel-Lojkine (Paris: Champion, 2004). See also idem, Introduction à la Philosophie du mythe (Paris: Vrin, 1996). 19 Ficino Theologia Platonica, in Opera omnia (Basel, 1576), I, 386. 20 Plato Timaeus 47d, in Plato, Complete Works, 1250. 21 D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (1958; University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). 22 Proclus, “In Musas,” in Ilana Klutstein, Marsilio Ficino et la Théologie ancienne: Oracles chaldaïques, Hymnes orphiques, Hymnes de Proclus (Florence: Olschki, 1987), 113. 23 André Chastel, Art et Humanisme à Florence au temps de Laurent le Magnifique (Paris: P.U.F., 1961), 257; 371. 24 Ficino Commentarius in Ionem, in Opera omnia, 1283. 25 Ibid. 26 Proclus Commentary on Plato’s Republic VI, 1–22. See for instance Proclus, Commentaire sur la République, ed. A. J. Festugière (Paris: Vrin, 1970), 6e dissertation, 200–4. 27 Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, 21. 28 G. Pico della Mirandola, Commento sopra una canzone d’amore di Girolamo Benivieni, ed. S. Toussaint (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1989), 179 (Commentary to the last stanza). My translation. 29 Ficino Platonic Theology IV, 1. English translation by M. J. B. Allen, The I Tatti Renaissance Library, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). 30 Ficino De christiana religione XIV, in Opera omnia, 19. 31 André Chastel, Marsile Ficin et l’Art (Geneva: Droz, 1975), 137. 32 “Ode de Nicolas Le Fèvre de la Boderie, frere de l’autheur, en faveur de la Galliade,” in Guy Le Fèvre de la Boderie, La Galliade ou la Révolution des Arts et Sciences, 1582, ed. F. Roudaut (Paris: Klincksieck, 1993), 135–36. 33 Pontus de Tyard, Solitaire premier: Dialogue des Muses et de la Fureur poétique, ed. S. F. Baridon (Geneva: Droz, 1950). 34 K. M. Hall, Pontus de Tyard and his “Discours philosophiques” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 33; 37. 35 The nine Bacchoï associated to the Muses and the Spheres also appear in Guy Le Fèvre de La Boderie’s Galliade of 1582 (Cercle III, lines 769–86). 36 “The ancients, reducing all arts and sciences which are executed and performed by reason or discourse to three heads, philosophy, rhetoric, and mathematics, accounted them the gifts of three gods, and named them the Muses.” Plutarch, Symposiacs, IX, 14. In Plutarch’s Morals, 5 vols., transl. from the Greek by 16

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several hands, corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1878), vol. 3, 452. 37 Joscelyn Godwin, Harmonies of Heaven and Earth (Rochester: Inner Traditions International Ltd., 1995). 38 See E. Wind, Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 267. 39 In 1518, Gafori sums up these correspondences in a “Sapphic” ode written by the poet Lancinus Curtius (De harmonia musicorum intrumentorum opus, 1518). 40 According to Tomlinson, Agrippa was probably acquainted with Gafori. Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 95. 41 Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, trans. James Freake, ed. Donald Tyson (St. Paul: Lllewellyn Publication, 1993), bk II, chap. 26, 340. 42 Ibid., 3. 43 Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic, 97. 44 Agrippa of Nettesheim, De occulta philosophia, II, 26, 333. 45 Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic, 65.

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Figures MUSES

ETYMOLOGIES

ALLEGORIES: “scientiae et doctrinae modi” (Thought processes)

CLIO

Kleos = “fama”

“Primum est velle doctrinam”

EUTERPE

Eu-terpo = “bene delectans”

“Secundum delectari quod velis”

MELPOMENE

Meleten poiomenen = “meditationem faciens permanere”

“Tertium instare ad id quo delectatus es”

THALIA

Thallein = “ponens germina”

“Quartum capere id quod instas”

POLYMNIA

Polu mnemon = “multam memoriam faciens”

“Quintum memorari quod capis”

ERATO

Euron omoion = “inveniens simile”

“Sextum invenire de tuo simile ad quod memineris”

TERPSICHORE

Koreia-terpo = “delectans instructione”

“Septimum judicare quod invenias”

URANIA

Ouranon = “coelestis”

“Octavum eligere de quo judicas”

CALLIOPE

Kalè ops = “optima vox”

“Nonum bene proferre quod eligeris”

Fig. 1. FULGENTIUS, Mythologiae, “De Novem Musis.”

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9 MUSES

9 CELESTIAL ORBS

URANIA

CAELUM STELLATUM

POLYMNIA

SATURNUS

EUTERPES

JUPITER

ERATO

MARS

MELPOMENE

SOL

TERPSICHORE

VENUS

CALLIOPE

MERCURIUS

CLIO

LUNA

THALIA

TERRA

Fig. 2. MARTIANUS CAPELLA, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, I, 27–28.

10 SCIENCES

10 CELESTIAL ORBS

THEOLOGIA

EMPYREAN

MORALIS

CRYSTALLINE HEAVEN

PHYSICA

STARRY HEAVEN

ASTRONOMIA

SATURNUS

GEOMETRIA

JUPITER

MUSICA

MARS

ARITHMETICA

SOL

RHETORICA

VENUS

DIALECTICA

MERCURIUS

GRAMMATICA

LUNA

Fig. 3. DANTE ALIGHIERI, Il Convivio, II, chap. 13.

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MUSES

ETYMOLOGIES

SPHERES

“ARTES LIBERALES”

CALLIOPE

“Kalè ops” = bona vox

CAELUM STELLIFERUM

MUSICA

POLYMNIA

“polis” = “multitude”

SATURNUS

ARITHMETICA

(“tempus bene sibi convenit numerus”) EUTERPES

ERATO

TERPSICHORE

URANIA

MELPOMENE

CLIO

THALIA

“eu” = bonus

JUPITER

“tropos” = conversio

(“salutaris atque propitius humano generi”)

“eris” = lis;

MARS

“chton” = terra

(“omnia instrumenta bellica ratione geometrica construuntur”)

ASTROLOGIA

GEOMETRIA

“discernens,”

SOL

SAPIENTIA (“artium ars”)

“judicans”

(“dux est et moderator luminum reliquorum”)

(“ad quam discretionem et judicium pertinere”)

“uros” = ignis

VENUS

RHETORICA

“neos” = novum

(“amorum novos ignes admovet”)

(“cujus est proprium animos accendere”)

“melos phonos mene” = defectum sonori melos

MERCURIUS

LOGICA

kleos = gloria

thallein = capacitas, ponens germina

(“furum atque (“quia logicus sermonis mercatorum est dulcedinem et ornatum fallaciis deceptionibus non curat”) gaudere”) LUNA

GRAMMATICA

(“alio splendet a lumine”)

(“nihil habet luminis . . . nisi id de rebus quas narrat”)

TERRA

INGENIUM

Fig. 4. COLUCCIO SALUTATI, De Laboribus Herculis, ed. Ullmann (1952).

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70

MUSES (Comm. In Ionem) CALLIOPE

URANIA

POLYMNIA

DEFINITIONS SPHERES (Comm. In (Comm. In Ionem) Ionem)

Eribromius

SERAPHIM

Orpheus

“Per dignitatem COELUS Pericionius sic dicta” STELLIFERUS

CHERUBIM

Musaeus

“Propter memoriam rerum antiquarum”; “siccam frigidamque complexionem”

“Vox”

Anfiareus

THRONES

Pindar

JUPITER

Sabasius

DOMINIONS

Hesiod

MARS

Bassareus

VIRTUES

Homer

SOL

Trietericus

POWERS

Thamyris

VENUS

Lisius

PRINCIPALITIES

Sappho

“Propter MERCURIUS honestam in gravibus rebus delectationem”

Silenus

ARCHANGELS

Ovid

“Propter viriditatem ejus humore”

Licnitus

ANGELS

Virgil

“propter gloriae cupiditatem”

MELPOMENE “Totius mundi temperatio” ERATO

EUTERPE

THALIA

“OMNIBUS RESULTANS SPHAERARUM VOCIBUS”

SATURNUS

TERPSICHORE “Salutifer choro hominum” CLIO

BACCHOI ANGELIC POETS (Theol. HIERARCHIES (Comm. In Plat.) (De Christ. Rel.) Ionem)

“Propter amorem”

LUNA

Fig. 5. MARSILIO FICINO (1433–1499): Commentariun in Ionem, in Opera omnia (Basel, 1576), 1283; De Christiana Religione XIV, Ibid., 19; Theologia Platonica IV, Ibid., 131.

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MUSES

PLANETS

POETS

Calliope

All planets

All forms of poetry (“tutte le maniere di poesia”) Orpheus, Homer, Virgil, Ariosto

Urania

Starry sky

Speculation: Hesiod (Theogonia, The Shield) Dante

Polymnia

Saturn

Terpsichore

Jupiter

Clio

Mars

History, War: Lucan, Claudian Petrarch

Melpomene

Sun

Horace

Erato

Venus

Euterpe

Mercurius

Thalia

Luna

Moral precepts: Hesiod (Works and Days)

Love poetry: Ovid, Tibullus, Catullus, Propertius Petrarch (Canzoniere)

Fig. 6. FICINIAN TRADITION, 16TH CENTURY. FRANCESCO PATRIZI Discorso della diversità dei furori poetici, 1552.

DA

CHERSO,

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72

MUSES

16th century French POETS

Calliope

Ronsard

Urania

Le Fèvre de la Boderie

Polymnia

Pibrac

Terpsichore

Du Bellay

Clio

Belleforest

Melpomene

Garnier

Erato

Baïf

Euterpe

Belleau

Thalia

Desportes

Fig. 7. NICOLAS LE FÈVRE DE LA BODERIE, “ODE EN FAVEUR DE LA GALLIADE DE GUY LE FEVRE DE LA BODERIE,” 1582.

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Fig. 8. FRANCHINO GAFORI, Practica Musice, Milan, 1496, in a reprint by Forni, Bologna, 1972. Bibliothèque Publique de Genève. Photograph by the author.

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Works Cited Sources Agrippa of Nettesheim, Henry Cornelius. Three Books of Occult Philosophy. Translated by James Freake, edited by Donald Tyson. St. Paul: Lllewellyn Publications, 1993. Auctores Mythographi Latini: Cajus Julius Hyginus, Fab. Planciad. Fulgentius, Lactantius Placidus, Albricus Philosophus. Edited by Augustinus van Staveren. Lugd. Bat: Samuel Luchtmans; Amstelaed: J. Westenius et G. Smith, 1742. Augustine. De doctrina christiana. Vol. 1–12. Translated by M. Moreau. Paris: Institut d’Etudes augustiniennes, 1997. Capella, Martianus. De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii. Translated by W. Harris Stahl and R. Johnson, with E. L. Burge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Ficino, Marsilio. Opera omnia. Basel, 1576. —. Platonic Theology. Vol. 1. Translated by M. J. B. Allen, edited by James Hankins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Gafori, Franchino. De harmonia musicorum instrumentorum opus. Mediolani: per Gotardum Pontanum, 1518. Le Fèvre de la Boderie, Guy. La Galliade ou la Révolution des Arts et Sciences, 1582. Edited by F. Roudaut. Paris: Klincksieck, 1993. Macrobius. Commentary on the Dream of Scipio. Translated by William H. Stahl. New York: Columbia University Press, 1952. Pico della Mirandola, G. Commento sopra una canzone d’amore di Girolamo Benivieni. Edited by S. Toussaint. Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1989. Plato. Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. Plutarch. Symposiacs. In Plutarch’s Morals. Vol. 3. Translated from the Greek by several hands, corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin. (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1878). Pseudo-Ausonius. “Nomina Musarum.” In Appendix Ausoniana. Translated by H. G. Evelyn-White. Ausonius. Vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961. Proclus. Commentaire sur la République. Translated by A. J. Festugière. Paris: Vrin, 1970, Salutati, C. De laboribus Herculis. Edited by B. L. Ullmann. Zurich: Thesaurus Mundi, 1951. Tyard, Pontus de. Solitaire premier: Dialogue des Muses et de la Fureur poétique. 1552. Edited by S. F. Baridon. Geneva: Droz, 1950.

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Secondary Literature Bernard, Wolfgang. Untersuchungen zur spätantiken Dichtungstheorie: Die Methode der Allegorese bei Proklos, Herakleitos, Plutarch. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1990. Brisson, Luc. Introduction à la Philosophie du mythe. Paris: Vrin, 1996. —. “L’Allégorie comme interprétation des mythes, de l’Antiquité à la Renaissance.” In L’Allégorie de l’Antiquité à la Renaissance. Edited by Brigitte Perez-Jean and Patricia Eichel-Lojkine, 23–39. Paris: Champion, 2004. Chastel, André. Art et Humanisme à Florence au temps de Laurent le Magnifique. Paris: P.U.F., 1961. —. Marsile Ficin et l’Art. Geneva: Droz, 1975. Chevrolet, Teresa. L’Idée de fable: Théories de la fiction poétique à la Renaissance. Geneva: Droz, 2007. Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Ettlinger, L. D. “The Muses and Liberal Arts: Two Miniatures from Herrad of Landsberg’s Hortus Deliciarum.” In Essays in the History of Art Presented to Rudolf Wittkower. Edited by Douglas Fraser, Howard Hibbard, and Milton J. Lewine, 29–35. London: Phaidon, 1967. Godwin, Joscelyn. Harmonies of Heaven and Earth: Mysticism in Music from Antiquity to the Avant-Garde. Rochester: Inner Traditions International Ltd., 1995. Greenfield, C. C. Humanist and Scholastic Poetics, 1250–1500. Bucknell: Bucknell University Press, 1981. Hall, K. M. Pontus de Tyard and his “Discours philosophiques.” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963. Klutstein, Ilana. Marsilio Ficino et la Théologie ancienne: Oracles chaldaïques, Hymnes orphiques, Hymnes de Proclus. Florence: Olschki, 1987. Rossi, Paolo. Francesco Bacone dalla Magia alla Scienza. Bari: Laterza, 1974. Seznec, Jean. The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Tomlinson, Gary. Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Walker, D. P. Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. First published 1958. Wind, E. Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.

CREATING MYTHOLOGICAL SPACE: SOME ASPECTS OF THE MEANING OF TAPESTRIES AT THE SWEDISH COURT DURING THE RENAISSANCE MERIT LAINE THE SWEDISH ROYAL COLLECTIONS, STOCKHOLM

Tapestry at the Vasa Courts During the Renaissance, tapestries were one of the most important vehicles for the display of princely magnificence.1 Prominent artists created the designs, and skilled spinners, dyers and weavers turned the cartoons into the most visually splendid and costly category of large scale art objects. Compared to the rich collections amassed by the Habsburg, Tudor and Valois rulers and several Italian and German courts, the tapestries of the Swedish Vasa rulers (ruled 1523–1654) were not numerous.2 Yet this dynasty on the periphery of European culture was well aware of the importance of tapestries for courtly display. Gustavus Vasa, the first Vasa king, set up tapestry workshops and invited Flemish and Dutch weavers to weave “täcken” (covers for tables or beds), cushions and wall-hangings “for Us and for Our dear children.”3 Several Swedish weavers are also mentioned in the court accounts. Gustavus’s sons received thorough humanist educations and were familiar with Renaissance architectural theory. Artists and craftsmen at their courts were often of German, Dutch or Flemish extraction, but the Vasas also knew of the splendour of the Elizabethan court, where Prince John (later John III) spent a year trying to negotiate a marriage between his elder brother Eric XIV and Queen Elizabeth.4 First-hand knowledge of the great collection of the English court must have increased John’s understanding of the prestige of tapestries—he later refused his brother a loan, explaining that he had spent all his assets “on tapestries and other necessities of life.”5

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During the reigns of Eric XIV, John III, Sigismund and Charles IX tapestry production at the Swedish court workshops was not large, but capable of high artistic, technical and material quality. One reason for maintaining the workshops was surely to facilitate and reduce the cost of weaving tapestries after new, specially commissioned designs such as King Sveno (fig. 1) but it seems clear that they also existed for reasons of prestige.

Fig. 1. King Sveno. Woven by Eskil Eriksson after a design by Domenicus ver Wilt, 1560’s. Wool, silk and metal thread. Royal Collections, HGK Vävda tapeter 6. The borders depict scenes from the story of Noah and his sons. The Royal Court of Sweden, Stockholm, photograph by Alexis Daflos.

Several acquisitions were made abroad, for example sets of “histories” bought in Brussels for the coronation of Eric XIV. As far as can be ascertained the tapestries acquired in this manner—sometimes commissioned,

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sometimes bought from stock—were woven after existing cartoons to which a coat of arms was sometimes added. Over the years, the tapestry collection came to consist of individual pieces and sets. It comprised verdures, armorial tapestries, subjects taken from ancient and biblical history, classical mythology, and later literature. Among the more substantial acquisitions were the 36 tapestries ordered by Gustavus II Adolphus from the Spiering workshop in Delft for his wedding to Maria Eleonora, Princess of Brandenburg, and the 47 tapestries woven by Delft workshops for the coronation of their daughter Queen Christina in 1650.6 Her departure for Rome four years later was a serious setback in the history of the collection, as she took several splendid sets with her, including the ones woven for her parents’ wedding. Of the tapestries remaining in the Royal Collections the largest group is the coronation tapestries of Queen Christina. A few surviving sets in other collections after the designs woven for Gustavus II Adolphus in the Spiering workshop give further insight into the character of the Vasa collection. For the rest, it must be reconstructed from inventories and other archival sources. Perhaps the most splendid of the remaining tapestries is King Sveno, (fig. 1) the only one intact of a planned but never completed set of the Kings of Sweden beginning with Noah’s grandson Magog, the alleged founder of the Vasa dynasty. The series, based on Johannes Magnus’s very influential history Historia de omnibus Gothorum Sveonumque regibus (History Concerning All the Gothic and Swedish Kings, 1554), was commissioned by Eric XIV, designed by Domenicus ver Wilt and woven by Eskil Eriksson, one of the foremost weavers in the country at the time.7 The function of the planned series is made clear by Johannes Magnus’s brother Olaus’s words: For the pictorial art is not only pleasant and gives a wondrous satisfaction—it also preserves the memory of the past and keeps the history of what has been forever before our eyes. When we regard images representing splendid acts, we are therefore spurred to seek glory and do great deeds.8

Tapestry as Space A set of tapestries—called “chamber” in several languages—should ideally cover the walls of the room in which it was hanging, from floor to ceiling or ending above the panelling. Such tapestries were regarded as the main feature of the decoration and should be understood as a threedimensional object, “created from sumptuous materials that literally

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enveloped courtly life.”9 Experiencing a courtly tapestry collection meant moving through a series of spaces, often arranged in a deliberate crescendo of splendour, glowing with brightly coloured wool and silk and glittering with silver and gold.10 Like other categories of art objects at the Renaissance courts, such as antiquities, paintings or beautiful books, tapestry as a category had particular meanings.11 For courts on the periphery such as the Vasa’s the fact that tapestries, and especially high-quality weavings of ambitious designs, were part of an international court culture was a central aspect of their meaning. Being part of this culture meant not only to display tapestries, but also to share an understanding of their significance. That they indicated magnificence is obvious from remaining examples as well as from sources of several kinds. Taste, or the adherence to prevailing artistic ideals, and erudition in the choice and rendering of subjects were clearly also important.

Tapestries all’antica During the Renaissance, tapestries were praised for fine materials, skilled workmanship and artistic qualities: The scene was executed with such skill that many of the figures seemed alive, both men and horses, they were worked so naturally. To see so many beautiful works of gold and silk was wonderful and greatly lifted the beholder’s heart.12 . . . the finest and most beautiful hangings of gold, silver, and multicoloured silk threads that depicted—true to life—animals, trees, fruit, and flowers. Only the great Parrhasias and the ingenious Pheidias, the one on canvas and the other in marble, would have been able to rival these depictions of nature.13

The quotes indicate that tapestry was perceived as close to painting, and able to equal this art in the lifelike imitation of the physical world as well as human actions and emotions. Another example of this proximity, though in negative terms, is a well-known passage by the humanist Angelo Decembrio, who berates both tapestry weavers and ignorant fresco painters for not following the principles of painting.14 In addition to lifelike and correct imitation of nature, references to the arts and artists of antiquity were an important form of praise for artistic excellence. Clearly tapestry could be experienced and evaluated in terms of classical objects and texts.

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Praise linking Renaissance art to antiquity was in dialogue with the deliberate attempts by artists and patrons to recreate the appearance of the ancient world in architecture and art objects.15 The pervading presence of classical forms and allusions in the arts of the Renaissance can also be discerned in the tapestries of the period. Greek and Roman history were popular subjects already in the late Middle Ages, while mythological themes were introduced towards the end of the 15th century. Designs in what may be termed all’antica style began to be made some decades later.16 There were no physical remains of antiquity to serve as models for tapestry designs, but artists such as Raphael, Giulio Romano, Giovanni Francesco Penni and Giovanni da Udine referenced ancient sculpture, reliefs and painted grotesques for their extremely influential tapestry cartoons.

Ekphrases Made Real? The most important written sources for the visual arts, architecture and patronage of antiquity were Pliny the elder and Vitruvius, who are both unrewarding and even discouraging as far as textiles are concerned. Pliny mentions materials, tools and techniques, but weaving does not emerge as a creative or even particularly demanding craft.17 Vitruvius is silent on the use of textiles in interiors. This is not surprising since he does not discuss furnishings (unless one includes art collections in this term), but the types of wall decoration that he does mention—stucco and frescoed walls— seem to exclude textile hangings.18 Yet there were other texts available, where indications for tapestry technique and design as well as modes of patronage and appreciation all’antica might be found.19 In the literature of antiquity figurative weavings and embroideries are used as metaphors, allusions or subjects of lengthy ekphrases. Greek and Roman mythology is often a central theme. The “weaving of the varied web” was one of the skills Athena taught Pandora. In Greek and Roman texts we find queens, princesses, sorceresses and a few ordinary women working at the loom, skilfully creating patterned or figurative textiles. Poets dressed the goddess of love in flowered robes; the peplos woven by the women of Athens for the Athena statue of the Acropolis represented a gigantomachy.20 Helen depicts the story of the Trojan wars, and Philomela reveals her rape and mutilation in scarlet threads. Aeneas awards a cloak depicting the abduction of Ganymede as a prize to his best sailor, and Pallas turns Arachne into a spider for daring to equal her weaving skills in a work denouncing the “crimes committed by the gods.”

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In these and numerous other instances textiles are represented as prestigious art objects and given important narrative and commemorative functions.21 The skill that was required of the weavers is understood and appreciated, and their works are described as beautiful, lifelike and complex images that could affect the viewer in the same manner as painting or sculpture. A Renaissance reader would find many parallels to the tapestries of his own times. Such a reader could also find similarities to contemporary textile ekphrases, for example Garcilaso de la Vega’s (1501–1536) verbal representations of lifelike tapestries with gold thread and chiaroscuro effects.22 These characteristics were already present in texts such as Ovid’s ekphrases of the tapestries of Pallas and Arachne. Renaissance praise of real tapestries and their makers sometimes seem to echo ekphrases from antiquity and later periods, and thus perhaps to be motivated by influences from a literary genre rather than by a personal response to specific tapestries.23 Yet at the same time, seemingly conventional phrases may offer a formula for expressing individual perceptions or a sincerely felt admiration. Either way ekphrastic references indicate that part of the meanings or connotations of tapestry for the Renaissance are to be found in a literary heritage going back to antiquity. The story of Arachne in Ovid’s Metamorphoses was among the most well-known ancient texts describing the act of weaving, and is especially pertinent for a discussion of Renaissance tapestries and classical ekphrases.24 The verbal representations of the tapestries of Pallas and Arachne are sufficiently detailed to be used as models for designers and weavers and there are close parallels to materials and qualities that the Renaissance valued (cf. fig. 1). Ovid writes of “shades of colour differing so slightly they could scarcely be distinguished,” merging into each other like those of the rainbow, and how “pliant gold thread too was interwoven as old stories were pictured on the looms.” The lifelike representation of nature and human actions and emotions is emphasized; Europa “timidly drawing up her feet, shrinking from the surging waters.” And especially Pallas’s design parallels that of Renaissance tapestries such as King Sveno, with a central historia surrounded by borders containing smaller scenes showing related subjects. Finally, Ovid’s phrase “all these incidents were correctly depicted, people and places had their correct features”25 is reminiscent of the almost antiquarian concern for the correct rendering of persons and events in the creation of art objects in the all’antica style. Making Renaissance tapestries was a collective, complicated, laborious, time-consuming and extremely expensive business. In Ovid, weaving is an individual, creative act, an immediate expression of the genius of the artist: “In their eagerness, they were not conscious of the

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labour involved.” Pallas and Arachne create their designs as they weave, in a manner that is reminiscent of ideas on creation and disegno in Renaissance art theory.26 Ovid’s representation of the act of weaving is far removed from the realities of the tapestry workshops, but produces an illusion that allows tapestries to be perceived as works of a creative individual—yet another way in which they equal paintings. In the Renaissance dialogue with Antiquity “needs and wishes (like ours) are what drove how they saw and selected from the random spoils of the past . . . ancient models had to be split into imitable and inimitable elements.”27 Especially categories of art objects that had no immediate models in the texts or physical remains of antiquity, illustrate this process clearly. Of the cloak showing the abduction of Ganymede described by Virgil—another ekphrasis in a famous text—a Renaissance artist might imitate the subject matter, while the lifelike depiction could be interpreted in accordance with the artist’s own conception of what “lifelike” should look like.28 The practical function on the other hand would be rejected, as a cloak with a large-scale figurative design did not fit with Renaissance customs. But the acceptable information might be utilized in creating an object that did fit—a woven tapestry.

Interwoven Histories A recurring theme of the Allusions and Reflections conference was the merging of biblical and ancient history, mythologies and classical literature into a unified conception of the world and the history of mankind.29 This conception of history did not evolve into a coherent, universally accepted version, but underwent continuing and sometimes contested changes and variations. One reason for this was the not always compatible needs of rulers to establish an ancient and illustrious lineage for their dynasty and to give their realm an equally distinguished history. Typical of this process are Johannes and Olaus Magnus’s interweaving of biblical history and the tradition of the Goths, originating in the history of late antiquity but migrated into the realm of myth. Johannes Magnus wrote his Historia de omnibus Gothorum Sueonumque regibus as a refutation of the Danish history Gesta Danorum by Saxo Grammaticus (ca. 1204). This merged worldview could connect seemingly discrete themes of tapestry sets, and it also generated several types of tapestry designs, from ensembles of exempla to genealogies and complicated allegories.30 Eric XIV’s woven version of the genealogy of the Vasas in Magnus’s Historia provoked the Danish King Frederick II, who in ca 1580 commissioned a series of Danish kings, based on the Danish version of Scandinavian

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history. Unlike Eric’s the set was completed—43 tapestries representing 113 kings of Denmark.31 There are indications that some kind of allegorical set rooted in this merged worldview may at one time have been part of the Vasa collection. In 1592, Augustin von Mörsperg, an envoy of the Order of St John, described a newly decorated interior in the Royal castle of Stockholm, where he saw tapestries representing life-size histories from Ovid and the Bible.32 The combination of classical mythology and Christian subjects indicate that the set was allegorical, perhaps representing a series of moral concepts.

Fig. 2. Unknown artist after Govert Dircksz-Camphuysen, The Royal Castle in Stockholm, 1661. Oil on canvas, Royal Collections, HGK Tavlor 105. The Royal Court of Sweden, Stockholm, photograph by Alexis Daflos.

A Represented Mythological Space The Dutch envoy Anthonis Goeteeris visited Sweden in 1616, bringing a draughtsman to illustrate his travel journal (published in 1619). One of the illustrations represents the room where Goeteeris received his audiences with Gustavus II Adolphus.33 Goeteeris’s focus is on symbolical and

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splendid objects that convey Royal dignity and magnificence and the importance of the occasion, and thus also the importance of Goeteeris and of the ruler he represented. Three rooms with splendid tapestries worked in gold are mentioned, the finest hanging in the interior where the envoys were received by the King. A comparison with what is known of this longvanished interior demonstrates that the illustration of the room is as selective as the text. The image shows only the features judged to be essential for Goeteeris’s and the artist’s purpose, and tapestries figure as prominently as they do in the verbal description.

Fig. 3. Unknown artist, Gustavus II Adolphus dubbing the Dutch Envoys, from Anthonis Goeteeris, Journael der Legatie ghedaen in de Jaren 1615 ende 1616, Graven-Hage 1619. Engraving. The Royal Court of Sweden, Stockholm, photograph by Alexis Daflos.

The representation of the King’s presence chamber is constructed of two layers of pictorial conventions, in which the tapestries are important in several ways. The first layer contains the envoys, the King in the act of dubbing one of them, the spectators on the right and the table with the Royal regalia on the left. The box-like rendering of the room, the wide spacing of the main protagonists contrasting with massed spectators, and the names of those present (visible “on the floor”) are recurring features of depictions of ceremonial occasions from the Renaissance and later. In this

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would-be documentary layer the tapestries indicate an expensive and up to date interior. The artist has made it clear that they are woven hangings, not paintings, by slightly indicating their sagging along the top, between the rings and hooks that would have attached them to the wall. Their design seems to be modeled on mannerist decorative and figurative prints. The second layer of the image consists of the tapestries and the enthroned King. The hangings on either side of the throne represent recognizable gods and goddesses from classical mythology, while those to the right are less easy to identify. The figures on the tapestries surrounding the throne are as clearly rendered and easily read as the real persons depicted. They seem almost to detach themselves to approach the sphere of the King, at and the same time they draw him into theirs, where his three-dimensionality gives him a special position among them. The source for this composition is the sacra conversazione, an image of the Christ child and the Holy Virgin surrounded by saints. It has been used for images of rulers since the Middle Ages. The intention is not to give rulers divine status in a Christian sense, but the borrowed composition creates a hierarchy among the depicted figures and exalts the central character. Usually, the participants in such a scene inhabit the same level of reality. In the Goeteeris illustration there are two such levels, each interacting with and giving meaning to the other. Though not realistic, the scene represented in Goeteeris’s journal documents a certain aspect of court culture, an aspect that in real life can only exist in the moment. It shows us real persons being ”read” or interpreted in the light of surrounding images, as they were on many occasions: In triumphal entries and court festivals, the prince and the allegorical decorations were meant to be understood together. In tableaux vivants or ballets where real people clothed themselves in mythological or allegorical costumes, “reality” and image came even closer.34 There are reasons to suspect that the tapestries in the room on the occasion of Goeteeris audience looked different from the ones represented in the illustration. An especially unlikely aspect is the blatant nudity which would hardly have been considered suitable for the King’s presence chamber. Also, though Goeteeris’s draughtsman sometimes made careful drawings from life, on this occasion he would at most have been able to do a hasty sketch. Indeed, if it were not for Mörsperg’s above mentioned testimony there would be no reason to suppose that the depicted tapestries bear any resemblance to the real ones: they look like they do because they fulfill a purpose within the image. Yet a few ambiguous parallels between Mörsperg and Goeteeris are worthy of consideration, though the information is contradictory. In both cases, mythological subject matter is

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indicated. The figures to the right of the illustration are differently clothed, though, and belong to another category. Mörsperg mentions biblical subjects, and the heavy drapery on the upper part of the figures to the right is consistent with images of, for example, patriarchs or prophets. Yet the lower part of at least one of them seems nude. Also, Mörsperg describes them as histories, which implies that they represented some action or at least had a background situating the figures in a specific context. This is missing in the image. If indeed the illustration is meant to depict the same set as that mentioned by Mörsperg, we must suppose that the draughtsman had little to work from except knowledge of the subject matter and a hasty sketch. He would also have had to reduce the compositions of large-scale tapestries to make them readable in a small-scale illustration. The most interesting thing about the illustration is not the doubtful information on the tapestries used on the occasion depicted, but how tapestry is used within the image. Magnificent tapestries (as testified by the text) confirm the status of depicted persons and events, and also serve as the means of introducing allegorical or literary meanings into a seemingly realistic image. The prominence of the King among the gods and goddesses also remind us that only in the presence of the prince do the mythological spaces of Renaissance court culture take on their full meaning.

Conclusion Texts from antiquity provided tapestry as a genre with models to be imitated, an ancient pedigree as prestigious art objects, and a model for perceiving tapestries as creative works of art rather than as imitations of paintings. Many courtly readers of the ekphrases of Virgil, Ovid and others must have imagined the textiles represented in the texts as similar to the splendid tapestries of the Renaissance. Representations of or allusions to gods and mortals of ancient Greece and Rome weaving and treasuring textiles, often with mythological subjects, could turn every tapestry space into a mythological space. Images may enclose a space and define its meaning, but they can also open it up towards a larger, conceptual space. Tapestry chambers were a means to enter a European court culture where material splendour, references to the visual world of antiquity, and humanist learning were all significant. This was a space that the Vasa rulers were anxious to inhabit.

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Notes 1

There is much valuable scholarship on Renaissance tapestries. A very good introduction is Thomas P. Campbell et al., Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence (New York, New Haven and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2002). For an understanding of the tapestries in a courtly context, I have especially relied on Thomas P. Campbell, Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty: Tapestries at the Tudor Court (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007) and Guido Guerzoni, “Liberalitas, Magnificentia, Splendor: The Classic Origins of Renaissance Lifestyles,” in Economic Engagements with Art, ed. Neil De Marchi and Crauford D. W. Goodwin (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), 332–78. Rebecca Olson’s dissertation “Behind the Arras: Tapestry Ekphrasis in Spenser and Shakespeare” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2008) has been a source of inspiration as well as knowledge. 2 John Böttiger, Svenska statens samling af väfda tapeter (Stockholm: Fröléen & comp., 1895), vol. 1, and vol. 2, 3–34. Böttiger remains the authority on the history of tapestry in Sweden, and unless otherwise stated the information on the Vasa tapestries is taken from his work. Cf. Vibeke Woldbye, “Flemish Tapestry Weavers in the Service of the Nordic Kings,” in Flemish Tapestry Weavers Abroad: Emigrations and the Founding of Manufactories in Europe, Proceedings of the International Conference held at Mechelen, 2–3 October 2000, ed. Guy Delmarcel (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2002), 104. 3 Gustavus Vasa’s proclamation on employment of Paul de Bucher, 19 february 1553, in Böttiger, Svenska statens samlingar, 1:11. 4 For the numerous acquisitions in the London luxury market during John’s stay, cf. Åke Setterwall, “Gustav II Adolfs kröninghimmel och Erik XIV:s utländska beställningar,” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift 10 (1941). 5 “tapitseri och andre mine nödtorfter.” Quoted after Lars Ericson Wolke, Johan III: En biografi (Stockholm: Historiska Media, 2004), 55, my trans. 6 For the Spiering acquisition, cf. Ebeltje Hartkamp-Jonxis, Weaving Myths: Ovids Metamorphoses and the Diana Tapestries in the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2010), 23–34. 7 Cf. Kurt Johannesson, The Renaissance of the Goths: Johannes and Olaus Magnus as Politicians and Historians, trans. James Larson (Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: University of California Press, 1991). 8 Olaus Magnus, Historia de gentibus septentrionalis (History of the Nordic People, 1555), quoted after Kurt Johannesson, “Renässansens Bildvärld,” in Signums svenska konsthistoria: Renässansens Konst, ed. Göran Alm (Lund: Signum, 1996), 20, my trans. For tapestries as exempla, cf. also Rebecca Olson, “Heroic Tapestries and the Early Tudor Court” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, session 40132, Montreal, 24–26 March 2011). 9 Emily G. Francomano, “Reversing the Tapestry: Prison of Love in Text, Image and Textile,” Renaissance Quarterly 64 (2011): 1095. 10 Cf. Campbell, Tapestry in the Renaissance, 188.

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The term “art object” is used by Luke Syson and Dora Thornton, Objects of Virtue: Art in Renaissance Italy (London: The British Museum Press, 2001). Their analysis of the meaning of categories (p. 10) in the Renaissance has been important for this article. 12 On Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga’s tapestries in the 1460’s, quoted after Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1996), 67–68. 13 On the occasion of a wedding at the Gonzaga court in 1549, quoted after Clifford M. Brown and Guy Delmarcel with Anna Maria Lorenzoni, Tapestries for the Courts of Federico II, Ercole, and Ferrante Gonzaga, 1522–63, (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1996), 31. Cf. Campbell, Tapestry in the Renaissance, 96. 14 Cf. Michael Baxandall, “A Dialogue on Art from the Court of Leonello d’Este: Angelo Decembrio’s De Politia Litteraria pars LXVII,” Journal of the Warbug and Cortauld Institutes 26 (1963): 308. The text has been debated by several authors, among them Nello Forti Grazzini and most recently Thomas P. Campbell, Tapestry in the Renaissance, 98–99. Only the link between tapestry and painting is relevant here. 15 Cf. James Ackerman, “Imitation,” in Antiquity and its Interpreters, ed. Alina Payne, Ann Kuttner, and Rebekah Smick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000); Mary Hollingsworth, Patronage in Sixteenth-Century Italy (London: John Murray, 1996), 12–17, 34–40; Syson and Thornton, Objects of Virtue, 92–102, 186, 196–200. 16 Campbell, Tapestry in the Renaissance, 100, 123–26, 143–44, 187–203, 226–27, 246–50, 341–50, 354; Campbell and Loraine Karafel in Tapestry in the Renaissance, 204–18 17 Pliny the elder, Natural History, ed. and trans. John Bostock and H. T. Riley (London: Taylor and Francis, 1855), VII:57; VIII:73, 74; XIX:3, 6. 18 Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (New York: Dover Publications, 1960), VI, chap. V, 2; VII, chap. III, 7–10, chap. IV, 4, chap. V, 1. 19 For the importance of literary and mythographical sources, see Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 4–5, 16, 65–66, 78; Luba Freedman, Classical Myths in Italian Renaissance Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 89–90, 124–25; Syson and Thornton, Objects of Virtue, 82–84. For the importance of models of behavior, cf. Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 78; Alina Payne, Ann Kuttner, Rebekah Smick, ”Introduction” to Antiquity and its Interpreters; Mary Hollingsworth, Patronage in Renaissance Italy: From 1400 to the Early Sixteenth Century (London: John Murray, 1994), 64; Syson and Thornton, Objects of Virtue, 32; Baldassare Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Garden City New York: Doubleday & Co, 1959), 77–83, uses examples from antiquity when he argues that the courtier should appreciate art and artists and be able to paint himself.

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John Scheid and Jesper Svenbro, The Craft of Zeus: Myths of Weaving and Fabric, trans. Carol Volk (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 18, 54–58. 21 James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Michael C. J. Putnam, Virgil’s Epic Designs: Ekphrasis in the Aeneid (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 55–74; Scheid and Svenbro, The Craft of Zeus; Christine Ratkowitsch, “Die Gewebe in Claudians Epos De raptu Proserpinae—ein Bindeglied zwischen Antike und Mittelalter; and Antonios Rengakis, “ ‘Du würdest Dich in Deinem Sinn täuschel lassen’: Zur Ekphrasis in der hellenistischen Poesie,” both in Die Poetische Ekphrasis von Kunstwerken: Eine literarische Tradition der Grossdichtung in Antike, Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, ed. Christine Ratkowitsch (Wien: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2006). 22 Christopher F. Laferl, “Erzählende Urnen und Webende Nymphen: Ekphrasis bei Garcilasco de la Vega,” in Ratkowitsch, Die Poetische Ekphrasis von Kunstwerken, 177–78. 23 For later ekphrases of textiles, cf. Heffernan, Museum of Words, 72–74; Olson, Behind the Arras; Max Grosse, “Die Ekphrasis im altfranzösischen Antikenroman: Magie und Darstellung statt Kunst und Beschreibung”; Elisabeth Klecker, “Tapisserien Kaiser Maximilians: Zu Ekphrasen in der neulateinischen HabsburgPanegyrik”; Laferl, “Erzählende Urnen und Webende Nymphen”; Haiko Wandhoff, “Bilder der Liebe—Bilder des Todes: Konrad Flecks Flore-Roman und die Kunstbeschreibingen in der höfischen Epik des deutschen Mittelalters,” all in Ratkowitsch, Die Poetische Ekphrasis von Kunstwerken. 24 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Mary M. Innes (London: Penguin Books, 1955), bk VI, 135–36. Cf. Campbell, Tapestry in the Renaissance, 354, 357. 25 Ibid. 26 For the importance of disegno in the decorative arts (or art objects), cf. Syson and Thornton, Objects of Virtue, 135–81. 27 Payne, Kuttner and Smick, “Introduction,” 3; Christof Thoenes, “Patterns of Transumption in Renaissance Architectural Theory,” 191, both in Antiquity and its Interpreters, ed. Payne, Kuttner, Smick, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Cf. Georgia Clarke, Roman House—Renaissance Palaces: Inventing Antiquity in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 28 Virgil, Aeneiden, trans. Ingvar Björkeson (Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 1998), V:250–67. 29 Cf. papers in this publication and Jean Seznec, La Survivance des dieux antiques (London: Warburg Institute, 1940). 30 For a few examples, cf. Adolfo S. Cavallo, Medeival Tapestries in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Harry N. Abrams, 1993) 94–124, 463–78; Guy Delmarcel, Los Honores. Flemish tapestries for the Emperor Charles V (Ghent, Antwerp: Snoeck Ducaju & Zoon and Pandora, 2000), 18–44; the Kirchenväter-Teppich in the Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin (ca. 1500, Inv. Nr 1879, 33b), where examples of wisdom from the Old Testament

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dispute with Greek and Roman philosophers, the Church fathers and writers of the Middle Ages. 31 Fourteen tapestries survive. Cf. Woldbye, “Flemish Tapestry Weavers in the Service of the Nordic Kings,” 94–101, and cited literature. There were attempts to continue the Swedish Kings after Eric, but only a second version of King Sveno seems to have been completed. This is the tapestry depicted here. 32 Tord O:son Nordberg, “Augustin von Mörspergs skildring av Stockholms slott från år 1592,” in Samfundet Sankt Eriks Årsbok (Stockholm: Wahlström och Widstrand, 1929); Martin Olsson, ”Slottets historia intill år 1600,” Stockholms slotts historia I, ed. Martin Olsson and Tord O:son Nordberg (Stockholm: Norstedts förlag, 1940), 175–80. 33 Anthonis Goeteeris, Journael der legatie ghedaen inde jaren 1615 ende 1616 (The Hague: Aert Meuris, 1619). 34 Cf. Guy Delmarcel, Los Honores, 20.

Works Cited Ackerman, James. “Imitation.” In Antiquity and Its Interpreters. Edited by Alina Payne, Ann Kuttner, and Rebekah Smick, 9–16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Barkan, Leonard. Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999. Baxandall, Michael. “A Dialogue on Art from the Court of Leonello d’Este: Angelo Decembrio’s De Politia Litteraria pars LXVII.” Journal of the Warburg and Cortauld Institutes 26 (1963): 304–26. Böttiger, John. Svenska statens samling af väfda tapeter. 2 vols. Stockholm: Fröléen & comp., 1895. Brown, Clifford M., and Guy Delmarcel, with Anna Maria Lorenzoni. Tapestries for the Courts of Federico II, Ercole, and Ferrante Gonzaga, 1522–63. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1996. Campbell, Thomas P., with contributions by Maryam W. Ainsworth, Rotraud Bauer, Pascal Bertrand, Ian Buchanan, Elizabeth Cleland, Guy Delmarcel, Nello Forti Grazzini, Maria Hennel-Bernasikowa, Lorraine Kafarel, Lucia Meoni, Cecilia Paredes, Hillie Smit, and Andrea Stockhammer. Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence. New York, New Haven and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2002. —. Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty: Tapestries at the Tudor Court. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007. Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtier. Translated by Charles S. Singleton. Garden City New York: Doubleday & Co, 1959. Cavallo, Adolfo Salvatore, Medieval Tapestries in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Harry N. Abrams Inc, 1993. Clarke, Georgia. Roman House – Renaissance Palaces: Inventing Antiquity in Fifteenth-Century Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Delmarcel, Guy. Los Honores: Flemish Tapestries for the Emperor Charles V. Ghent and Antwerp: Snoeck Ducaju & Zoon and Pandora, 2000.

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Ericson Wolke, Lars. Johan III: En biografi. Stockholm: Historiska Media, 2004. Francomano, Emily G. “Reversing the Tapestry: Prison of Love in Text, Image and Textile.” Renaissance Quarterly 64 (2011): 1059–1105. Freedman, Luba. Classical Myths in Italian Renaissance Painting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Goeteeris, Anthonis. Journael der legatie ghedaen inde jaren 1615 ende 1616. The Hague: Aert Meuris, 1619. Grosse, Max. “Die Ekphrasis im altfranzösischen Antikenroman: Magie und Darstellung statt Kunst und Beschreibung.” In Ratkowitsch, Die Poetische Ekphrasis von Kunstwerken, 97–132. Guerzoni, Guido. “Liberalitas, Magnificentia, Splendor: The Classic Origins of Renaissance Lifestyles.” In Economic Engagements with Art. Edited by Neil De Marchi and Crauford D. W. Goodwin, 332–78. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999. Hartkamp-Jonxis, Ebeltje. Weaving Myths: Ovids Metamorphoses and the Diana Tapestries in the Rijksmuseum. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2010. Heffernan, James A. W. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Hollingsworth, Mary. Patronage in Renaissance Italy: From 1400 to the Early Sixteenth Century. London: John Murray, 1994. —. Patronage in Sixteenth-Century Italy. London: John Murray, 1996. Jardine, Lisa. Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance. London: Macmillan, 1996. Johannesson, Kurt. The Renaissance of the Goths: Johannes and Olaus Magnus as Politicians and Historians. Translated by James Larson. Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: University of California Press, 1991. —. “Renässansens bildvärld.” In Signums svenska konsthistoria: Renässansens konst. Edited by Göran Alm. Lund: Signum, 1996. Klecker, Elisabeth. “Tapisserien Kaiser Maximilians. Zu Ekphrasen in der neulateinischen Habsburg-Panegyrik.” In Ratkowitsch, Die Poetische Ekphrasis von Kunstwerken, 182–202. Laferl, Christopher F. “Erzählende Urnen und Webende Nymphen: Ekphrasis bei Garcilasco de la Vega.” In Ratkowitsch, Die Poetische Ekphrasis von Kunstwerken, 158–180. Nordberg, Tord O:son. “Augustin von Mörspergs skildring av Stockholms slott från år 1592.” In Samfundet Sankt Eriks Årsbok. Edited by Sigurd Wallin, 213– 16. Stockholm: Wahlström och Widstrand, 1929. Olson, Rebecca. “Behind the Arras: Tapestry Ekphrasis in Spenser and Shakespeare.” PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2008. —. “Heroic Tapestries and the Early Tudor Court.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, session 40132, Montreal, 24– 26 March 2011. Olsson, Martin. “Slottets historia intill år 1600.” In Stockholms slotts historia. Vol. 1. Edited by Martin Olsson and Tord O:son Nordberg, 1–208. Stockholm: Norstedts förlag, 1940.

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Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso). Metamorphoses. Translated by Mary M. Innes, London: Penguin Books, 1955. Payne, Alina, Ann Kuttner, and Rebekah Smick. “Introduction” to Antiquity and its Interpreters. Edited by Payne, Kuttner and Smick, 1–9. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pliny the elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus). Natural History. Edited and translated by John Bostock and H. T. Riley. London: Taylor and Francis, 1855. (Online at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/) Putnam, Michael C. J. Virgil’s Epic Designs: Ekphrasis in the Aeneid. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. Ratkowitsch, Christine, ed. Die Poetische Ekphrasis von Kunstwerken: Eine literarische Tradition der Grossdichtung in Antike, Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit. Wien: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2006. —. “Die Gewebe in Claudians Epos De Raptu Proserpinae—ein Bindeglied zwischen Antike und Mittelalter.” In Ratkowitsch, Die Poetische Ekphrasis von Kunstwerken, 17–25. Rengakis, Antonios. “ ‘Du würdest Dich in Deinem Sinn täuschel lassen’: Zur Ekphrasis in der hellenistischen Poesie.” In Ratkowitsch, Die Poetische Ekphrasis von Kunstwerken, 7–16. Scheid, John, and Jesper Svenbro. The Craft of Zeus: Myths of Weaving and Fabric. Translated by Carol Volk. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. Setterwall, Åke. “Gustav II Adolfs kröninghimmel och Erik XIV:s utländska beställningar.” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift 10 (1941): 59–70. Seznec, Jean. La Survivance des dieux antiques. London: Warburg Institute, 1940. Syson, Luke, and Dora Thornton. Objects of Virtue: Art in Renaissance Italy. London: The British Museum Press, 2001. Thoenes, Christof. “Patterns of Transumption in Renaissance Architectural Theory.” In Antiquity and its Interpreters. Edited by Alina Payne, Ann Kuttner, and Rebekah Smick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000. Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro). Aeneiden. Translated by Ingvar Björkeson. Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 1998. Vitruvius. Ten Books on Architecture. Translated by Morris Hicky Morgan. New York: Dover Publications, 1960. Wandhoff, Haiko. “Bilder der Liebe—Bilder des Todes: Konrad Flecks FloreRoman und die Kunstbeschreibungen in der höfischen Epik des deutschen Mittelalters.” In Ratkowitsch, Die Poetische Ekphrasis von Kunstwerken, 55– 76. Woldbye, Vibeke. “Flemish Tapestry Weavers in the Service of the Nordic Kings.” In Flemish Tapestry Weavers Abroad: Emigrations and the Founding of Manufactories in Europe. Proceedings of the International Conference held at Mechelen, 2–3 October 2000. Edited by Guy Delmarcel, 91–111. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2002.

HOMER THE PHILOSOPHER ERLAND SELLBERG STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY

The huge impact on European culture and literature of the Homeric songs cannot be denied. The numerous mythological episodes and the dramatic stories of a distant past made Homer read and admired as early as in Antiquity. Well-known themes have been used and reused by later authors. The famous Nobel Prize winners James Joyce and Eyvind Johnson are the most distinguished examples from the last century. The allure of Odysseus and his constant search is obvious. Today, when we read the Homeric songs perhaps we do it to manifest our range of reading, or maybe we are spellbound by the epic narration. It cannot be disputed that most episodes belong to our common treasure of tales. In the following I will focus on a different but still very important part of the Homeric tradition. It deals with a less well-known aspect of the influence of the songs, namely the idea of Homer as a philosopher. This may seem surprising considering how Plato and his circle looked upon Homer. In his Republic Socrates argues that many passages from poetry must be banished from the republic to allow the philosopher-kings to be able to possess the virtue of moderation. However, it is worth observing that Plato in the same dialogue refers to the praise of Homer as the fountain of wisdom; it was such an opinion that Plato wanted to challenge. Thus, Homer was made a powerful symbol of everything that the true philosopher, according to Plato, had to avoid. It is worth noticing that Aristotle on the other hand without any hesitation in his Poetics often speaks of Homer as a dramatic model to follow. Already in antiquity Homer was acknowledged and admired not only for his narrative skill but also for his deep wisdom.1 We have to leave out the big issue of whether Homer was one single author who existed in pre-ancient Greece; most recent historians agree with the theory that the songs were created by different rhapsodes over a very long period. Then Homer would just have been one of several rhapsodes if he indeed was a historic person. Such problems cannot be solved once and for all. However, until the last two centuries no one really

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questioned that Homer was the one author of the songs and we will here focus on this tradition.

* As a matter of fact Homer’s songs were often studied not just as marvellous tales but also for their presumed deep wisdom concerning human behaviour and even for their hidden, divine truths. When Odysseus in one of the most famous episodes was exposed to the fatal temptation of the Sirens he had prepared himself for the challenge owing to the premonition of the goddess Circe, who was described as the loveliest of all immortals. Odysseus plugged the ears of his men with wax and let them bind him to the mast in order to be able safely to listen to the Sirens who sang “Come here,” (they sang,) “renowned Odysseus, honour to the Achaean name, and listen to our two voices. No one ever sailed past us without staying to hear the enchanting sweetness of our song—and he who listens will go on his way not only charmed, but wiser, for we know all the ills that the gods laid upon the Argives and Trojans before Troy, and can tell you everything that is going to happen over the whole world.”2

The passage is difficult to translate correctly. The question is how to render the Greek word genetai. Indisputably Cicero was right when in De Finibus he observed that the interpretation should not only include the temptation of whatever sweetness could be offered by the Sirens but that of knowledge too; this was the real temptation for a man, according to the Roman philosopher: “. . . it was no marvel if a lover of wisdom held this dearer than his home.”3 Considering the importance of patria, we may realise how high Cicero estimated knowledge. Further on in his commentary Cicero remarks that it is “the mark of a superior mind to be led on by the contemplation of high matters to a passionate love of knowledge.”4 Although his own translation of the word genetai with vestigia rerum rather implies knowledge of past time, of what had happened, his further elaboration of the Homeric lines is more in accordance with how Samuel Butler interpreted the Greek verb in the quoted passage: “. . . is going to happen over the whole world,” a still more precise translation would have been “what is happening.”5 Leaving aside the mood of the verb genetai, obviously the emphasis is on knowledge of difficult things, maybe even esoteric truth, which came to be the guiding principle in understanding the Homeric songs. During Late Antiquity, and not least in Medieval Christendom, the Neoplatonic

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influence strengthened such an interpretation. The Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry (d. 305) called Homer a man with a quite special knowledge of God—but in this case it was rather an impersonal being or a non-Christian God. Proclus (d. 485), another Neoplatonic philosopher—often even called the last ancient one—considered the poet to disclose a celestial truth.6 Therefore Proclus argued for interpreting the songs allegorically; by such a method you could reveal what might be found in them beyond their obvious contents. From such a point of view it would be fairly obvious to think of the episode of the Sirens as being about the same problem as for example the story about Er in Plato’s Republic (book X). Proclus elaborated the Siren passage quite beyond the original text when viewing the Sirens as spiritual beings who, in accordance with a Neoplatonic outlook, were arranged in different hypostases. Without elaborating further on the Neoplatonic explication of the Homeric songs we could evidently bring out a reading of them in which Homer was thought to be a visionary seer. Maybe still more important was the fact that such an approach to the text encouraged an accentuation of its theological and moral contents. In that way, Porphyry read the passage of the Cyclops Polyphemus as actually intended for discussing whether man was entitled to end his own life. According to Porphyry, Odysseus realised how it would be of no avail for him or anyone else to try to escape God’s punishment or power and to make himself the master of his life. Thus, the story of Odysseus’s wanderings was interpreted allegorically as a statement of the burdensome wandering of human spirits seeking higher celestial knowledge.7 The allegorical reading of Homer had two immediate consequences. On the one hand it made the text less controversial from a theological perspective, on the other it paradoxically made the text less important: if you are not interested in the narration, you will not learn the songs by heart, especially not in Greek. Yet, on the positive side there was no more need to censure Homer. There were even some attempts to make him a part of the Judeo-Christian sphere by arguing that he had read some of the oldest books in the Old Testament.

* It was not until the 15th century that the West once again returned to all the songs. As early as in the 1360s the Calabrian humanist Leonzio Pilato, encouraged by Petrarch and Boccaccio, had translated them into Latin, although he did not respect their original hexameter but proceeded more or less ad verbum. This translation stimulated a new interest in the Homeric

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songs among the humanists, and later there were even translations in different vernaculars..Thanks to the development of printing techniques it also became possible to make Homer known in broader circles. Already in 1488 there was a printed version of the songs in Greek. Homer became, from now on, an important part of our legacy, and in the following centuries learned humanists all around Europe studied the Songs. Of course, the question is: what significance did this have? Did the humanists persist with the medieval allegorical and Neoplatonic readings? Indeed, many scholars did, because then they did not have to bother about the presumed theological problems that might otherwise have occurred. However, eventually it was impossible for the humanists not to endorse such a magnificent though pagan epos for its obvious contents and poetic qualities, and for its many tales and interesting characters. Erasmus of Rotterdam may be a good example of the change. Mostly he stayed with the allegorical interpretation but at the same time he would express a distinct appreciation of Homer for his human yet extensive wisdom, and he observed that the ancient poet demonstrated such knowledge of almost everything that it could be called an ocean of wisdom; thus, according to Erasmus he was no less than a polyhistor.8 In the long run the interest of the humanists in ancient culture and literature, but also, in more specific terms, in philology and history, brought about a new way of looking upon Homer and his songs. Although few challenged the basic attitudes, and Homer was still considered an historic person, blind and famous for great wisdom, there were also learned professors who called such established opinions into question and wanted the songs to be studied as literature rather than as philosophy or history. After all, as late as in the middle of the 18th century it was still possible for the famous German biographer Christian Gottlieb Jöcher to compare the position of Homer among the ancient Greeks and Romans with that of the Bible in Christendom.9 However, already at the end of the 17th century a German philologist, Ludolph Küster (1670–1716), had published a critical review of Homer and the reading of his songs, Historia Critica Homeri. It would in the long run have a significant bearing on the interpretation of the songs as well as on Homer. Of course, Küster was also affected by the long tradition of interpretation but he prepared the way for a new and more philological method of studying Homer.10 Clearly, Küster avoided discussing a philosophic interpretation of the songs. Instead, he argued for a better understanding of them by means of focusing on the poet and his narrative skill. He thoroughly considered the refulgence that already in Antiquity had been associated with Homer and

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he referred to the fact that it all was a consequence of the many talents that Homer actually had displayed expertise on warship, on politics but also and not least on human nature.11 Küster’s new attitude was adopted only slowly and the learned rehearsed the old view on Homer for more than a century. A Calvinist learned clergyman, Gerhard Croesius (1642–1710), maintained without hesitation that there genuinely was a substantial correlation between what happened to the inhabitants of Sodom and what Homer narrated about the destruction of Troy. Thus, according to the priest we indeed had to interpret the songs allegorically.12

* Hence, in spite of Küster’s philological approach at the universities in early modern Europe the professors continued in their lectures to paint a more traditional picture of Homer and his songs. However, they no longer focused on Homer as a philosopher revealing a deeper truth—although for a long time he still could be at least mentioned also for such qualities—but rather as a formidable judge of human nature and as an excellent historian. However, the professors mostly objected to the former allegorical reading and a Swedish professor called such far-reaching interpretations inania deliramnta, insane rubbish.13 The students, however, were young and the major concern of their professors was what moral lessons the disciples would draw from the songs. Certainly from a religious perspective, it could be called into question if the disciples really should be encouraged to read about gluttony and all kinds of emotions and the sexual appetite of gods and men when they all were expected to act in a completely different way. Where was the ethical lesson in such a reading, many a professor asked himself. Of course, the polytheism of the Homeric songs constantly caused anxieties, but if it was at all possible to disregard the fact that the gods were several and behaved much like human beings, it would still be possible to emphasize the constant influence of divinities that was displayed in the songs; was this not an obvious sign of Homer’s strong belief in divine providence?14 From a pedagogical perspective it was more problematic that Homer uncovered human nature as deranged, irrational and distinguished by incessant outbursts of various emotions. Such knowledge was far from the ideal imposed on the students: to behave rationally and moderately. If it were to be permitted at all to let young boys read Homer, it would consequently be necessary to teach them how to interpret all the episodes

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correctly. When we read about the anger of Achilles we have to understand it as an exhortation not to give in to but rather subdue emotions and temptations. Reading about the total despair Odysseus so often displayed during his vain wanderings in search of Ithaca and his home, students could easily learn how frail man was without sincere trust in providence. And Penelope’s fate would teach us rather to endure patiently than to seek revenge. In that way the young readers should realise how important it would be for them to obey the wise lectures of their professors and to learn to stay humble and pious.15 The new philological method and the reformation in scholarly research and higher education brought a decisive end to the idea of Homer as a philosopher and a teacher of human nature. From the end of the 18th century no one talked any more about Homer as a sage or a philosopher. Today, the reasons for reading the songs are very far from those that made Porphyry and others do so.

Notes 1

Robert Lamberton, “Homer in Antiquity,” in A New Companion to Homer, ed. Ian Morris and Barry Powell (Leiden: Brill, 1997), see in particular 35–38; about Aristotle and Homer, see Ingemar Düring, Aristoteles: Darstellung und Interpretation seines Denkens (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1966), in particular 451. 2 Homer, Odyssey rendered into English prose: XII, transl. Samuel Butler (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1900). 3 Cicero, De finibus bonorum et malorum, transl. H. Rackham (Harvard: Loeb Classical Libary, 1914), bk V, 18,49. Cf. Homer, Odyssey, XII, 184–91. 4 Cicero, De finibus, V, 18,49. 5 Homer, Odyssey, XII, 190–91. 6 Robert D. Lamberton, Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 108–112 and 182–83. See also idem, Proclus the Successor on Poetics and the Homeric Poems: Essays 5 and 6 of His Commentary on the Republic of Plato (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012), xxvi–xxx. 7 On the Neoplatonic reading of Homer, see in particular Lamberton, Homer the Theologian. 8 Erasmus Roterodamus, “Oratio de virtute amplectenda,” in: Opera omnia, ed. J. Clericus (Hildeheim: G. Olms, 1961–62), vol. 5, col. 67: “. . . omnium disciplinarum tanquam oceanus.” For more information about Erasmus’s reading of Homer, see Thomas Bleicher, Homer in der deutschen Literatur (1450–1740). Zur Rezeption der Antike und zur Poetologie der Neuzeit (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1972), 55–68. 9 Christian Gottlieb Jöcher, Allgemeines Gelehrten-Lexikon (Leipzig: Gleditsch, 1750–1751), vol. 2, col. 1688–89.

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10

Friedrich August Wolff, Prolegomena ad Homerum (Halis Saxonum: Libr. Orphanotrophei, 1795), 138. 11 Ludolph Küster, Historia critica Homeri qua de scriptis ejus tam deperditis, quam exstantibus, spuriis & genuinis; . . . (Francofurti: ad Viadrum, 1696), in particular 25 where Küster discusses why Plato was sometimes called a Homer among philosophers; see also 30–31. 12 Gerhard Croesius, Homeros Hebraios. Sive Historia Hebraeorum ab Homero Hebraicis nominibus ac sententiis conscripta in Odyssea & Illiade (Dortrecht: T. Goris, 1704), 273–74. 13 Johannes Floderus and Uno von Troil, Specimen Philosophiae Homericae (PhD diss., Upsaliae, 1766), 4–5. 14 Ibid., 36 15 The professor concludes these moral lessons with “Cole Deum! Nosce te ipsum & aliorum stude commodis & felicitati, quae Homerum vidimus sedulo inculcavisse . . . .” See ibid., 53

Works Cited Bleicher, Thomas. Homer in der deutschen Literatur (1450–1740): Zur Rezeption der Antike und zur Poetologie der Neuzeit. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1972. Cicero. De finibus bonorum et malorum. Translated by H. Rackham. Harvard: Loeb Classical Library, 1914. Croesius, Gerhard. Homeros Hebraios. Sive Historia Hebraeorum ab Homero Hebraicis nominibus ac sententiis conscripta in Odyssea & Illiade. Dortrecht: T. Goris, 1704. Düring, Ingemar. Aristoteles: Darstellung und Interpretation seines Denkens. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1966. Erasmus Roterodamus. “Oratio de virtute amplectenda.” In Opera omnia. Edited by J. Clericus. Hildeheim: G. Olms, 1961–62. Floderus, Johannes, and Uno von Troil. Specimen Philosophiae Homericae. PhD diss., Upsaliae, 1766. Homer. Odyssey rendered into English prose: XII. Translate by Samuel Butler. London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1900. Jöcher, Christian Gottlieb. Allgemeines Gelehrten-Lexikon. Leipzig: Gleditsch, 1750–1751. Küster, Ludolph. Historia critica Homeri qua de scriptis ejustan deperditis, quam exstantibus, spuriis & genuinis; . . . . Francofurti: ad Viadrum, 1696. Lamberton, Robert D. Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. —. “Homer in Antiquity.” In A New Companion to Homer. Edited by Ian Morris and Barry Powell, 33–54. Leiden: Brill, 1997. —. Proclus the Successor on Poetics and the Homeric Poems: Essays 5 and 6 of His Commentary on the Republic of Plato. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012.

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Wolff, Friedrich August. Prolegomena ad Homerum. Halis Saxonum: Libr. Orphanotrophei, 1795.

PART II ENGLISH LITERATURE

RE-CONFIGURING CLASSICAL MYTH IN EARLY-MODERN ENGLAND: ORPHEUS AS A “TUTELARY DEITY” OF POETRY AND CIVILIZATION ANGELA LOCATELLI UNIVERSITY OF BERGAMO

Two Theoretical Premises: The Paradox and Strength of the Cultural Transmission of Myth The philosopher and classicist Giorgio Colli, one of the two editors of Nietzsche’s works in Italy, has argued that Orpheus is one of the deep voices of Greece from which Western religion, poetry, and philosophy all derive.1 Like most myths, that of Orpheus and his lyre has reached us in many literary versions which greatly differ in both narrative elements and modes of emplotment, as well as in the ethical and aesthetic evaluations implied towards this fascinating figure. The name and myth of Orpheus is taken up by several classical authors: the poet Ibycus, who is the first known author to mention him as already “famous” in the 6th century BCA, Pindar (who suggests that his father was the Thracian King Oeagrus and his mother the Muse Calliope), Simonides of Ceos (who celebrates the wonders of Orpheus’s lyre and his descent to the Underworld, where his music had power over Hades), Apollodorus (who suggests that he lived near Parnassus and that Apollo, while pursuing the Muse Thalia, fell in love with him and taught him how to play the lyre). Other versions of the myth consider Apollo his father, thus attributing him a divine rather than human origin. Apollonius of Rhodes in the Argonautica suggests that Orpheus took part in Jason’s expedition to conquer the Golden Fleece and that his song overpowered the alluring melody of the Sirens, thus saving sailors from sure drowning. Geographical variations of the myth are abundant: Thrace is prevalently considered his birthplace, but his presence is given in Pimpleia, near

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Olympus, in Aegina, where he is related to the cult of Hades, in Laconia where he is associated with the cult of Demeter Khthonia. Greek and Latin versions (most notably those of Pindar, Plato, Simonides of Ceos, Apollonius of Rhodes, Virgil and Ovid), have spawned a copious production of literary, visual, and musical re-creations of the myth in Western culture, up to the 20th century and into the 21st. Appropriations of Orpheus in poetry, drama, painting, music, cinema, comic strips and videogames eloquently suggest a polymorphism that displays the “generative energy” of myth in general, and of this one in particular. I will be exploring some English Renaissance re-appropriations of the figure of Orpheus, with special attention to his role as a “tutelary deity” of poetry and civilization. My discussion is grounded in the epistemological premise that myths themselves are always and already mediated texts (even Plato, the founder of Western philo-sophia, admits that there was a sophia preceding it). Moreover, since antiquity, the different local versions of the same mythological figures demonstrate that myths are acts of cultural production and interpretation, and that such interpretations are the raison d’être and the springboard of further articulations and reappropriations of the myth. I believe that what we experience with myth and ancient wisdom is the intrinsic paradox of cultural transmission itself, the inescapable effect of a metamorphosis, whereby transformation is the essential condition of survival. Re-visitations of the “original” myths are therefore meaningful in two ways: they are obviously meaningful for the culture that creates them, but, once re-configured, they are also revealing of the appropriating culture’s own values. Another theoretical premise to my discussion comes from Claude Lévi-Strauss and his seminal work Anthropologie Structurale.2 Among his many suggestions, I wish to develop here the one concerning the cultural function of myths, i.e. the idea that they provide a (logical) model to solve cultural contradictions, as well as the related notion that they evolve and persist until the intellectual impulse prompting them is exhausted. In this sense, a contextualization of the myth of Orpheus in earlymodern England cannot dispense with considerations on the broader cultural mentalité of the age, and on the complex conflicts and ambitions of the times. In her book The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early-modern England, Heather Dubrow has focused on this mythological figure in relation to the “definition, description and disputation” of the Lyric as a poetic genre.3 Her comprehensive treatment of this particular

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question allows me look somewhere else and to propose a substantially different but, I believe, complementary take on the subject. The terms “poetry” and “civilization” in my title refer to at least three significant and closely interrelated cultural domains, i.e. to the realms of poetry and poetics, of education, and of politics. It is in these three contexts that the myth of Orpheus takes its strong and deepest significance in early-modern England.

Versions of the Myth and Historical Contextualizations As I have said, according to myth and legend, Orpheus pre-exists Homer and Hesiod and is credited with having founded Greek religion from ancient Egyptian mysteries. Pindar calls Orpheus the “father of songs.”4 The power of his art, which according to some versions of the myth had been taught him by Apollo, produced wondrous effects: it moved rocks and stones, stopped the flow of rivers, charmed trees and birds, and tamed the wildest animals. This is, of course, the most widely known and celebrated praise of this hero, as well as the story of his descent into the Underworld to plead, and by means of his irresistible lyre obtain, the rescue of his wife Eurydices. The story of the fatal loss of his beloved due to an uncouth gesture of looking back before she could cross the threshold of the earthly world is equally well known, and has been variously interpreted through the centuries in a number of allegorical ways, as well as having been widely disseminated in literature, music, the plastic and visual arts. Before we come to terms with its Renaissance configurations, I wish to recall that a widespread use of analogy had already promoted a special syncretism in Hellenistic culture and in Early Christianity, so that in late antiquity,5 particularly in Alexandria, where Egyptian, Greek and Jewish cultural elements and beliefs co-existed, the figure of Orpheus was often juxtaposed or even conflated with that of the Biblical figures of Moses, David, and Christ, in sculpture, painting and literature. The Roman world depicted Orpheus as the archetypal singer and civilizer of mankind, a tòpos which from the Latin works of Ovid (Metamorphoses, Book X), Virgil (Georgics, Book IV), and Horace (Ars Poetica), was to enter the cultural imaginary of mediaeval and early-modern Western culture. I am mentioning both Hellenistic and Roman references because, as I will show, they are both relevant to culturally mainstream English Renaissance appropriations. The myth of Orpheus was energetically “revived” in connection with the Latin translations of Plato and Neoplatonic texts in the Florentine

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Academy. When some of the original Greek texts became available, the so called “rhapsodic theogonies,” composed in Hellenistic times and disseminated by Neoplatonist authors, as well as the “Orphic Hymns” (shorter poems composed in the late Hellenistic or early Roman Imperial age), shaped new configurations of the hero at the Medici’s court; derivative interpretations of his songs continued throughout the Renaissance, and up to our present, if one considers the vicissitudes of the Derveni Papyrus,6 found in 1962. A re-casting of the myth was particularly significant in early-modern culture, given the fundamental intertextual relationship of Humanism with “the classics,” within a wide humanist cosmopolitan dynamics. In the early-modern context Orpheus is re-configured mostly in a tripartite function: as a musician-poet, as the prophet of a mystical religion, and as the founder of civil society. These three roles work both separately and jointly in different authors and in numberless versions of the story. I obviously cannot go into detailed textual parallels here between English versions and the texts of Ovid and Virgil, Marsilio Ficino and Angelo Poliziano; what I wish to accomplish instead is to show how English schoolmasters, philosophers, rhetoricians, and poets tap into an already rich intertextual cultural dynamics and construe the character of Orpheus by enlisting his myth in their aesthetic, ideological and educational programs, and into their own cultural self-fashioning. I believe that the centrality of the Orpheus figure in early modern English Literature is mostly bound to the significance of his myth in pedagogical and political terms.

Re-Signifying Orpheus amidst Cultural Crisis: English Early Modern Ideological Imperatives I have suggested in my theoretical premises that the relevance of myth can be grasped in relation to its continuous re-signification, and to its capacity to respond to conflicting cultural impulses, I will therefore now point out that Orpheus enters early-modern cultural discourses at a moment fraught with contention and contradiction, a moment in which a crisis of authority, of belief, and of knowledge is shaping the emerging scenarios of what was eventually to become “modernity.” Fear of social subversion is a recurring element in political, religious, and even poetical and aesthetic discourses of the age; the repeated enlisting of the myth of Orpheus, and of concomitant narratives on the meaning of art, in the political and ideological debate, and not just in musical or poetic discourse, clearly responds to current cultural imperatives. In the English context this figure

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takes on strong political connotations, which seem less relevant in continental versions of the myth, in which medieval allegorical interpretations of the Orpheus-Eurydice’s motive seem to persist and prevail. In England he is a figure which Neoplatonists, Rosicrucians and mystics of various persuasions claim as their own in magic and mystical terms, but, more importantly, the universally acknowledged roles of musician and poet become functional to different purposes, which range from the establishment of a self-conscious national literature and poetics, to the implementation of specific pedagogical imperatives, and, last but not least, to frankly political purposes. Discussing specific paradigmatic instances will be my task in the following pages. Several early-modern English texts, belonging to different genres, show that the intrinsic strength of the myth of Orpheus was its ability to express the contradictory aspirations of the age, while providing the means to sustain, or challenge, aspects of contemporary competing ideologies. This is why the myth is repeatedly told in poetry, anecdotes, drama, religious doctrines, political pamphlets, philosophical, and pedagogical treaties. Shakespeare, Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Wilson, Sir Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes and John Milton will be quoted and discussed in the pages that follow as crucial and authoritative examples. I will take Shakespeare as a starting point, not only because of the Bard’s obvious prestige, but also to prove that the debate was not restricted to academic or religious circles, but that it reached heterogeneous audiences in 16th- and 17th-century England. Two Shakespearean characters stand out in the canon as foils to the mythical figure of Orpheus: Shylock and Cassius. A clear aversion or lack of sensitivity to music links the alien usurer and the political rebel, both of them construed as representing the aspirations of the rising enemies of traditional hierarchies. The Merchant of Venice foregrounds the broad cultural clash between two ideological positions: Humanism, and its Orphic faith in music, logocentrism, and poetical inspiration or “furor,” versus the material, matter-of-fact, impersonal, and quantitative logic of incipient financial capitalism. Unresponsiveness to music, or its outright rejection, works as a premise to Shylock’s “extreme cruelty” in Shakespeare’s subtle strategy of character construction. Shylock “hates festive music” and his aversion to it is repeatedly displayed. The Christians’ festivities are stigmatized in his self-defined “sober” conduct. In act IV Shylock seems to echo Plato’s opposition to musical merriment, especially when he remarks that music can have degrading rather than ennobling effects. In Timaeus Plato had, in

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fact, suggested that music should not be used to give merry, wild and irrational pleasure, but as a heaven-sent means of achieving cosmic harmony within the human. This doctrine was central to the appropriation of the myth of Orpheus in the Renaissance, when Orpheus was associated with Pythagorean beliefs on the sacredness of music and numbers, and with the practice of healing through music. But Shylock’s derogatory perception of music is cast in a mode that is never expressed in the classics or among Neoplatonists. He translates the emotions aroused by music into a vulgar corporeal effect: Some, that are mad if they behold a cat; And others, when the bagpipe sings I’ the nose, Cannot contain their urine: for affection, Mistress of passion, sways it to the mood Of what it likes, or loathes. (IV.1.48–52)

This ekphrasis of a base ‘carnevalesque’ gesture (in Mikael Bakhtin’s parlance) projects onto the Christians’ festivities a severe condemnation. But Shylock has read only half of Plato: he forgets the ennobling effects of Orpheus’s art. They do not enter his field of vision: music is for him just a degrading baseness, or “shallow foppery.” In Act Two the usurer’s rejection of music is expressed through an interesting auricular metaphor, comparing “casements” to ears: Lock up my doors: and when you hear the drum And the vile squealing of the wry-neck’d fife, Clamber not you up to the casements then, Nor thrust your head into the public street, To gaze on Christian fools with varnished faces, But stop my house’s ears, I mean my casements. Let not the sound of shallow foppery enter My sober house. (II.5.29)

I propose that Shylock’s hate and/or unresponsiveness to music is intrinsically linked to his general lack of linguistic sophistication,7 to his obsession with quantity and the merely material aspects of life. He fully displays this frame of mind, which we may call his “Lebensform,” in Act 1 scene 3 where his language is reduced to a few practical, financial terms (“due,” “forfeit,” “bond”), where his favorite figure is meticulous, mechanical repetition (“three thousand ducats”). Jonathan Goldberg has warned us against sentimentalizing Shylock, a “ravenously greedy” character.8 Shylock’s mentality is at odds with the highly allusive, symbolic and even ineffable language of music. I will add that distance

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from the Platonic and Pythagorean divine abstraction of music shows in the fact that he needs to literalize abstraction (a consequence of this attitude is that he infamously equates “good” with “sufficient”), and he needs to translate concepts into concrete elements: for example, in Act I scene 1 he is at dinner and builds an oddly compulsive association between his breath cooling his broth and the ocean winds threatening his trade (“My wind, cooling my broth, / would blow me to an ague, when I thought / What harm a wind too great might do at sea”).9 Shylock finds music distasteful, or an unnecessary weakness, at best. This is important in my perspective on Orpheus in early-modern England, since the aesthetic and the ethical were intimately joined in the Florentine Neoplatonic rearticulation of the myth. Rejection of music bespeaks a disregard for the Platonic theories of the unity of the “beautiful and good” in favor of a conception of “reality” as purely material gain.10 Lofty ideals (indeed more voiced than practiced in Venice) are contrasted with a faith in “facts,” which ultimately proves myopic. Shylock’s inability to deal with the symbolic at a sufficiently elaborate level is, ironically, finally responsible for his undoing. I do not wish to ignore Portia’s disgustingly biased procedures in the trial scene, but I wish to show that the extreme literalization of the terms of the contract (“the pound of flesh” but not a drop of blood) takes precisely Shylock’s own logic to the limit. In this sense, Orpheus is fully revenged in the usurer’s defeat. Lorenzo, whose Christian name does not conceal a tribute to the Medici, is the transparent spokesman of the doctrines of the Florentine Academy. His cultivated position is reminiscent of Plato’s Timaeus, and incorporates Ficino’s Orphic views, while embodying the pedagogical ideal of a sublimated passion that can master the lower instincts through music. The triumph of love in the Fifth Act is a celebration of music and love, as deriving from cosmic harmony and conducive to civilized society. Orpheus is explicitly invoked in the musings of this accomplished lover for whom music is the heavenly consort of the spheres: Lorenzo:

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! Here we will sit, and let the sound of music Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night Become the touches of sweet harmony. Sit Jessica: look, how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold: There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins; Such harmony is in immortal souls;

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Re-Configuring Classical Myth in Early-Modern England But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. ENTER MUSICIANS Come, oh and wake Diana with a hymn: With sweetest touches pierce your mistress’ ear, And draw her home with music.

Jessica’s response is an apparently puzzling line: I’m never merry when I hear sweet music.

It seems to suggest that, just like her father, Jessica does not appreciate music, but it should, on the contrary, be taken to mean that she does not see music as mere “merry entertainment,” but appreciates it in the lofty dimension in which her lover Lorenzo sees it. He explains: Lorenzo:

The reason is, your spirits are attentive: For do but note a wild and wanton herd, Or race of youthful and unhandled colts, Fetching mad bounds, bellowing and neighing loud, Which is the hot condition of their blood; If they but hear perchance a trumpet sound, Or any air of music touch their ears, You shall perceive them make a mutual stand, Their savage eyes turn’d to a modest gaze By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods Since nought so stockish, hard, and full of rage, But music for the time doth change his nature. The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; The motions of his spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus: Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music. (V.1.54–88)

Orpheus is cast in the role of “ruler” of unbridled passion through the uplifting effect of music on youthful temperaments. Moreover, music is the cipher of a cosmic order that benignly looks to the lovers’ noble passion. The tòpos returns countless times in nearly all of the English Humanists I have mentioned. It can be found in Edmund Spenser’s 1579 defence of “pierlesse Poesye,” in the aegloga decima of the The

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Shepeardes Calender (“October”),11 where the homage to Orpheus is typically associated to the teachings of Plato and Pythagoras. In Spenser’s “Glosse” to the aegloga music is seen as a means of producing harmony, given the intrinsic affinity of the human mind with numbers and notes: “some of the auncient Philosophers, and those the moste wise, as Plato and Pythagoras held for opinion, that the mynd was made of a certaine harmonie and musicall numbers . . . . Such might is in musick.” Spencer clearly subscribes to Lorenzo’s view that the social function of melodious poetry rests in its power of “training” lawless youths by “enticing” their “will”: O what an honour is it, to restraine The lust of lawlesse youth with good aduice: Or pricke them forth with pleasaunce of thy vaine, Whereto thou list their trayned willes entice. Soone as thou gynst to sette thy notes in frame, O how the rurall routes to thee doe cleaue: Seemeth thou dost their soule of sence bereaue All as the shepeard that did fetch his dame From Plutoes balefull bowre withouten leaue: His musicks might the hellish hound did tame. (19–30)

In early modern pedagogical discourse, education is often metaphorically represented as a “taming of wild beasts.” According to Spenser, Sidney, Thomas Wilson, Sir Francis Bacon, and Milton, even if “Wit” and “Will” are the strongest conflicting impulses in human nature, there is hope for civil society: these impulses can, and should be reconciled through art and education. In Thomas Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), art and education “tame” the wild beasts of unbridled “will” by fostering the persuasion that “the lawe is honest [and] very gainfull.”12 The “wilde” becomes civil through appropriate cultivation, and the arts of Orpheus have a major role to play in the process. Rhetoric and the numerous early modern English “apologies” of poetry and music become the vehicles for the dissemination of a conceptual and political orthodoxy, which substantiates the creation of the “modern” English “subject” (in both of the Foucaultian senses of the term). Rebellious impulses must be checked through music which, together with poetry, is consoling, soothing, and uplifting in Neoplatonic terms, but also, and not less importantly, a powerful means of social and cultural reconciliation. This is the most important early-modern ideological appropriation of the myth of Orpheus: the victory of culture and civil society over “brutish” nature.

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In Sidney’s works the beneficial effect of poetry goes hand in hand with the praise of music and is connected to a mainstream academic veneration of the Classics, frequently voiced among English Humanists, from Roger Ascham to Ben Jonson, from Thomas Campion to Milton. The idea that poetry was the mainspring of all arts is central to Sidney’s argument, and Orpheus is explicitly given among the earliest and greatest “Fathers in learning.”13 Sidney discusses the effects of his art in relation to both the dissemination of knowledge and a salutary strategy of civil governance. Echoes of Ficino and Poliziano can be recognized in his Apologie. Once the analogy is established between “wild beasts” and “rebels,” lyrical poets are easily qualified as socially valuable, because they can drawe with their charming sweetnes, the wild untamed wits to an admiration of knowledge. So as Amphion, was sayde to move stones with his Poetry, to build Thebes. And Orpheus to be listened to by beastes, indeed, stony and beastly people.14

Moreover, as a Protestant humanist, Sidney celebrates the holiness of religious verse and he draws a parallel (traceable, as I have said, to Hellenistic Christianity) between David’s Biblical Psalms and the Songs of Orpheus and Amphion, all of them uplifting, despite what Sidney considers the doctrinal errors of the latter. The parallel is reinforced through the juxtapositions of the figures of Orpheus with David, Solomon, Moses, and Job: Such were, David in his Psalmes, Salomon in his song of Songs, in his Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs: Moses and Debora, in their Hymnes, and the writer of Job. . . . Against these none will speake that hath the holie Ghost in due holie reverence. In this kinde, though in a full wrong divinitie, were Orpheus, Amphion, Homer in his hymnes, and many other, both Greekes and Romaines.15

This Ficinian perspective on the holiness of some authors of antiquity is further reinforced in the praise of inspired Christian Songs and of the penitential healing provided by the singing of Psalms: And this Poesie must be used by whosoever will follow S. James his counsel, in singing Psalmes when they are merry: and I knowe is used with the fruite of comfort by some, when in sorrowfull pangs of their deathbringing sinnes, they find the consolation of the never-leaving goodnesse.16

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Sidney’s “Protestant Poetics” are reiterated, and possibly even extended in Milton’s pedagogical program, as well as in some of his best known poems.17 In his Letter to Master Samuel Hartlib, published in 1644 as a treatise Of Education, Milton recommends his own sort of “Pilgrim’s Progress” for pupils “between twelve, and one and twenty,” whose education should eschew the abstractions of Scholasticism and turn instead to the practical ethics of the active life: I shall detain you no longer in the demonstration of what we should not do, but strait conduct ye to a hill side, where I will point ye out the right path of a vertuous and noble Education; laborious indeed at the first ascent, but else so smooth, so green, so full of goodly prospect, and melodious sounds on every side, that the Harp of Orpheus was not more charming. . . . I call therefore a compleat and generous Education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and publick of Peace and War.18

Not only is Orpheus’s harp the metaphor of “melodious” and “charming” learning, and as such a symbol of the delectare preceding the docere of a right conduct, but Orpheus himself inaugurates the list of Milton’s prescribed poets (Orpheus, Hesiod, Theocritus, Aratus, Nicander, Oppian, Dionysius, Lucretius, Manilius, and Virgil). The great consideration that Milton has for the myth of Orpheus is manifest in his recurrent return to it, almost obsessively: i.e. in Lycidas, as well as in L’Allegro, Il Pensieroso, and Paradise Lost. The death of Lycidas in the eponymous poem is lamented in close parallel to that of Orpheus, and the helplessness of Calliope in saving his son from the fury of the Bacchae is compared to that of the Nymphs who could not save Lycidas: Where were ye Nymphs when the remorseless deep Clos’d o’re the head of your loved Lycidas? ... What could the Muse herself that Orpheus bore, The Muse herself, for her inchanting son Whom universal nature did lament, When by the rout that made the hideous roar, His gory visage down the stream was sent, Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore? (50–63)

The theme of Orpheus’s dismemberment returns in Paradise Lost with an invocation to Urania, the new Muse, more powerful than Calliope, and a renewed plea to discard the vulgar revels of Bacchus (Paradise Lost):

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Visit my slumbers nightly, or when morn Purples the east: still govern thou my song, Urania, and fit audience find, though few But drive far off the barbarous dissonance Of Bacchus and his revellers, the race Of that wilde Rout that tore the Thracian Bard In Rhodope, where woods and rocks had eares To rapture, till the savage clamor drowned Both harp and voices; nor could the Muse defend Her Son. So fail not thou, who thee implores: For thou art Heav’nlie, she an empty dream. (VII.29–39)

Orpheus’s amazing power in the Underworld is celebrated in both L’Allegro (lines 135–50)19 and Il Pensieroso (lines 103–8).20 Having illustrated the persistence of the figure of Orpheus and of his myth as a valuable educational strategy among English Humanists, let me now come to terms with the obviously concomitant political implications of the Orpheus figure in early modern England. To do so, I will return to Shakespeare and deal with the character of Cassius, which I have mentioned earlier. Cassius is a secondary character in Julius Caesar, but relevant to my reading of Jacobean re-configurations of the myth. This tragedy is, of course, a timely play which registers the collective anxiety of Stuart England of having to choose between tyrannical bondage or a freedom “bathed in blood.” Such freedom the conjurors flaunt “in the market place,” under the horrified gaze of peaceful bystanders, supposedly representing the “righteous” Jacobean subjects. Shakespeare thus carefully articulates a grim analogy between Caesar’s Rome and revolutionary London.21 Fears of a general upheaval are vividly evoked through ekphrasis, and the figure of the rebel is outlined in its threatening fullness. Cassio is skillfully defined in Caesar’s terms, and vainly does Antony attempt to soften this image of him. In just a few lines (I.2.193–209) we have the epitome of the ‘Malcontent’: one who avoids the most natural pleasure of food, and the more sophisticated enjoyment of plays, a great reader of both books and people, self-ironical, envious, gloomy, and above all insensitive to music, and therefore ultimately dangerous. Caesar:

Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.

Antony:

Fear him not, Caesar, he’s not dangerous; He is a noble Roman, and well given.

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Would he were fat! But I fear him not: Yet if my name were liable to fear, I do not know the man I should avoid So soon as that spare Cassius. He reads much; He is a great observer, and he looks Quite through the deeds of men; he loves no plays, As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music Seldom he smiles, and smiles, in such a sort As if he mock’d himself, and scorn’d his spirit that could be mov’d to smile at any thing. Such men as he be never at heart’s ease Whiles they behold a greater than themselves, And therefore are they very dangerous (I.2.193–209, accentuation A. L.)

Let me point out that rejection of music is associated here to a rejection of pleasure in general, a rejection that is almost unnatural (albeit typical of many martial figures in Shakespeare’s canon, the archetype of which is Coriolanus). The music which Cassius ignores and disregards is not the uplifting Neoplatonic harmony of Lorenzo’s musings, but a “terrestrial” source of pleasure. When depicting Cassius as a man impelled by speculative excess and aesthetic insensitivity, the supposedly Catholic Shakespeare seems to be instilling in his audiences a fearful Royalist mistrust of the stern and stony-hearted Puritan; on the other hand, assumptions about the danger of “lean philosophers” seem to have been mainstream in non Catholic circles as well, if Protestant Sidney in the Apologie (just like Shakespeare in Julius Caesar) was to warn his contemporaries that philosophy teaches “[leaders] occidendos esse.” And with these considerations I have clearly shifted focus from the aesthetic to the strictly political English re-casting of the myth of Orpheus. The character of Cassius is timely in the social context of the general “domestic fury and fierce civil strife,” which Thomas Hobbes depicted in 1651 in terms that have become memorable in the history of ideas. In The Leviathan Hobbes “bodies forth” the darkest imaginings of human aggressiveness, i.e. perpetual war, and an inevitable clash of unbridled appetites: Hereby is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war is of every man against every man. For war consisteth not in battle only, . . . not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is peace. . . . In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth; no

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Violence is Hobbes’ pharmakon: its ambivalence lies in the fact that it is seen both as “the disease,” in the hands of rebels, but also as a “homeopathic cure,” when ministered by the Monarch; on the other hand, the philosopher reconfirms the connection of “arts and letters” to the creation of “society,” and therefore to the pre-emptying of the forces that would make the “life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Taking the “nasty and brutish” element out of life was the role of poetry and music even for this disillusioned philosopher. In The Advancement of Learning Sir Francis Bacon similarly and eloquently pictures “Orpheus Theatre” as a school of civil virtue, curbing “sedition and tumult”: Orpheus’ theatre, where all beasts and birds assembled; and, forgetting their several appetites, some of prey, some of game, some of quarrel, stood all sociably together listening to the airs and accords of the harp; the sound whereof no sooner ceased, or was drowned by some louder noise, but every beast returned to its own nature: wherein is aptly described the nature and condition of men, who are full of savage and unreclaimed desires of profit, of lust, of revenge; which as long as they give ear to precepts, to laws, to religion, sweetly touched with eloquence and persuasion of books, of sermons, of harangues, so long is society and peace maintained; but if these instruments be silent, or that sedition and tumult make them not audible, all things dissolve into anarchy and confusion.23

The popularity of Orpheus in early-modern English culture is demonstrated by the fact that he is present in both high and low genres, in the academy and at the dinner table. In one of his Apophthegmes24 Sir Francis Bacon makes a playful allusion to Orpheus’s powers and thereby reconfigures his myth in ironical and amusing terms: A gentleman brought music to his lady’s window. She hated him, and had warned him often away; and when he would not desist, she threw stones at him. Whereupon a gentleman said unto him that was in his company, ‘What greater honour can you have to your music, than that stones come 25 about you, as they did to Orpheus?’

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After this light text, I can conclude by saying that the myth of Orpheus was indeed pervasive in early-modern English Literature. I hope that my critical perspective in the discussion of early modern appropriations of it has demonstrated that this figure provided either a solution to a specific crisis of authority, or provided relevant material for a complex debate. The Orpheus myth articulated a variety of responses to the cultural contradictions and to the intellectual and political needs of the times. Orpheus was enlisted as a benign tutelary deity of peaceful and civil society, responding to what was felt to be a primary need in times of general turmoil. His prevalently political and ideological connotations (i.e. instigating the preservation of the status quo) were downplayed by being wrapped in philosophical and aesthetic pronouncements that only apparently did not belong with political issues. The vicissitudes of this figure in early modern English culture confirm my premise that myth always, from its inception, entails the possibility of plurality and diachronic variation. Perhaps, and more importantly, this figure shed light on the fact that myths enable those who create, disseminate, and transform them to come to terms with the specific controversial issues of their own cultures.

Notes 1

Giorgio Colli, La nascita della filosofia (Milano: Adelphi, 1975). Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie Structurale (Paris: Plon, 1955). 3 Heather Dubrow, The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 15. 4 Pindar Pythian Odes 4.4.315: “And from Apollo came the master lyrist, father of songs renowned Orpheus.” Pindar, Olympian Odes. Pythian Odes, ed. and trans. William H. Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 5 Miguel Herrero de Jauregui, Orphism and Christianity in Late Antiquity (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012). 6 A new impulse to the knowledge of Orphic theogonies came in 1962, when the Derveni Papyrus was found containing an allegorical commentary on the “Protogonos Theogony” composed in the second half of the 5th century B.C. in the circle of the philosopher Anaxagoras. The “Eudemian Theogony” an earlier, but lost work, was composed in the context of Bacchic-Kouretic cults in the 5th century B.C. 7 Angela Locatelli, “Dialettica e Ideologia in The Merchant of Venice,” in L’eloquenza e gli incantesimi. Interpretazioni Shakespeariane (Milano: Guerini e Associati, 1988). 8 Jonathan Goldberg, “Shakespearean Inscriptions: The Voicing of Power,” in Shakespeare and The Question of Theory, ed. Geoffrey Hartman and Patricia Parker (London: Methuen, 1985). 9 However, Shylock is in good company in an age that abandoned the vague arabesques of Baconian “idols” in order to focus on experimental verification as 2

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the sole criterion of truth, an age which also invoked a literal interpretation of the Bible against tropological allegorizing. 10 In fact, Shylock mentions Laban’s episode not out of religious piety, but out of a proto-capitalist defense of ruthless industrious profit. When Shylock tells Laban’s parable in praise of his own industriousness and Antonio asks “. . . is your gold and silver ewes and rams?” the significant reply is “I cannot tell; I make it breed as fast” (I.3.96–97). 11 Edmund Spenser, “The Shepeardes Calender, ‘October,’ ” in The Norton Anthology (New York: Norton & Company Inc., 1979). 12 Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, ed. Thomas J. Derrick (New York: Garland Publishing, 1982), 89. 13 Sir Philip Sidney, “An Apologie for Poetrie,” in The Prelude to Poetry, ed. Ernest Rhys (London: Dent & Sons Ltd., 1970), 10. 14 Ibid., 10–11. 15 Ibid., 16. 16 Ibid. 17 Barbara Lewalski, “Milton and the Hartlib Circle: Educational Projects and Epic Paideia,” in Literary Milton: Text, Pretext, Context, ed. Diana Benet and Michael Lieb (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1990). 18 John Milton, “Of Education,” in Milton on Education: The Tractate of Education with Supplementary Extracts from Other Writings of Milton, ed. Morley Oliver Ainsworth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1928). 19 L’Allegro: “And ever against eating cares, Lap me in soft Lydian airs, Married to immortal verse, Such as the meeting soul may pierce In notes, with many a winding bout Of linkéd sweetnes long drawn out, With wanton heed, and giddy cunning, The melting voice through mazes running; Untwisting all the chains that tie The hidden soul of harmony. That Orpheus’ self may heave his head From golden slumber on a bed Of heaped Elysian flowers, and hear Such strains as would have won the ear Of Pluto, to have quite set free His half regained Eurydice.” (135–50) 20 Il Pensieroso: “But, O sad Virgin, that thy power Might raise Musaeus from his bower, Or bid the soul of Orpheus sing Such notes as, warbled to the string, Drew iron tears down Pluto's cheek, And made Hell grant what Love did seek.” (103–8)

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21

Antony’s speech in Act III (scene 1, lines 263–75) embodies a dystopian perspective on the imminent Puritan revolution. 22 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985). 23 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. G. W. Kitchin (London: Dent & Sons Ltd., 1934), 43. 24 Angela Locatelli, “The Apophthegms: Renaissance Education between Laughter and Scapegoating,” in Hammered Gold and Gold Enamelling, ed. Simona Beccone, Carmen Dell’Aversano, and Chiara Serani (Roma: Aracne, 2011), 373– 86. 25 Francis Bacon, Apophthegme no. 166 (in the 1626 edition of the Apophthegmes, 185–86). I refer to the original text at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. (see bibliography).

Works Cited Bacon, Francis. “Apothegmes New and Old.”/ Collected by the Right Honourable Francis Lo.Verulam, Viscount St.Alban./ London/ Printed for Hanna Barret, and Richard Whittaker, and are to be Sold at the Kings Head in Pauls Church.yard.1626. (Folger 1116, Copy 1,BACON,F.). —. The Advancement of Learning. Edited by G. W. Kitchin. London: Dent & Sons Ltd., 1934. Colli, Giorgio. La nascita della filosofia. Milano: Adelphi, 1975. Dubrow, Heather. The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Goldberg, Jonathan. “Shakespearean Inscriptions: The Voicing of Power.” In Shakespeare and The Question of Theory. Edited by Geoffrey Hartman and Patricia Parker, 116–37. London: Methuen. Herrero de Jauregui, Miguel. Orphism and Christianity in Late Antiquity. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by C. B. Macpherson. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Anthropologie Structurale. Paris: Plon, 1955. Lewalski, Barbara. “Milton and the Hartlib Circle: Educational Projects and Epic Paideia.” In Literary Milton: Text, Pretext, Context. Edited by Diana Benet and Michael Lieb, 202–19. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1994. Locatelli, Angela. “Dialettica e Ideologia in The Merchant of Venice.” In L’eloquenza e gli incantesimi. Interpretazioni Shakespeariane. 73–88. Milano: Guerini e Associati, 1988. Locatelli, Angela. “The Apophthegms: Renaissance Education between Laughter and Scapegoating.” In Hammered Gold and Gold Enamelling. Edited by Simona Beccone, Carmen Dell’Aversano, and Chiara Serani, 373–86. Roma: Aracne, 2011. Milton, John. “Of Education.” In Milton on Education: The Tractate of Education with Supplementary Extracts from Other Writings of Milton. Edited by Morley Oliver Ainsworth, 51–64. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1928.

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Pindar. Olympian Odes. Pythian Odes. English and Greek edition, edited and translated by William H. Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1997. Sidney, Sir Philip. “An Apologie for Poetrie.” In The Prelude to Poetry. Edited by Ernest Rhys, 6–90. London: Dent & Sons Ltd., 1970. Spenser, Edmund. “The Shepeardes Calender, ‘October.’ ” In The Norton Anthology. Edited by M. H. Abrams, 511–15. New York: Norton & Company Inc., 1979. Wilson, Thomas. The Arte of Rhetorique. Edited by Thomas J. Derrick. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1982.

FROM ICARUS TO PHAETHON: SHAKESPEARE AND THE DISOBEDIENT SONS SOPHIE CHIARI BLAISE PASCAL UNIVERSITY, CERHAC

For Elizabethan playwrights, transgression was often symbolized by the figures of Icarus and Phaethon, the two impetuous young men denied metamorphoses and falling to their deaths. Shakespeare and his rivals derived most of their knowledge about the tragic fates of these two rash figures from Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1567).1 Indeed, in the story told by Ovid (1.747–2.398), Phaethon wants to be sure that Clymene, his mother, told him the truth when she said that his real father was not Merops, but Apollo. In order to get direct confirmation from the sun god, Phaethon makes him promise to let him drive his chariot. Eager to guide the fire-breathing steeds of the Sun through the sky, he unfortunately fails to control them and comes too close to the earth which then is put on fire. The end of this episode is aptly summarized by Thomas Cooper in his 1565 Thesaurus,2 probably one of Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s main mythological sources besides Ovid: “Wherof Jupiter being afearde, lest he also shoulde bee burned, strykynge Phaethon with lyghtnynge, threwe him into the river called Padus, and Eridanus” (Or). So, the young man was killed by Jove’s thunderbolt to prevent further disaster. In Book VIII (183–235), another disobedient son appears when we are told that the “ingenious architect” Daedalus, desirous of flying away from the labyrinth of Crete where he and his son had been imprisoned, made two pairs of wings by sticking feathers on to a wooden frame with wax.3 Giving one pair to his son, he cautions him that flying too close to the sun might cause the wax to melt. Young Icarus, thrilled at the idea of flying high, does not listen to his father’s warning. In Cooper’s words, “waxe, wherewith the feathers of hys wynges were glewed, melted with the heate of the sunne. And the feathers falling of, Icarus was constraigned to fall into the sea” (K2v).

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Icarus and Phaethon are thus similarly doomed as rash overreachers. In each story, the reckless flight of the son leads him to his death. As a consequence, Renaissance poets tended to juxtapose these characters as two similar figures of excessive pride and immaturity. Dante, for instance, places them side by side in the seventh circle of Hell (Canto 17) and reminds his readers that the two young men both disregarded “paternal advice to take the ‘middle way,’ neither too high nor too low, neither too far to one side or the other, . . . in reflecting the classical idea of virtue . . . as the temperate course between extremes.”4 As late as 1626, the Dutch Florentius Schoonhovius associates the two figures in an emblem entitled “Altum sapere periculosum” (“It is dangerous to aim too high in knowledge”).5 On the left hand side of the engraving, one of the horses leading Phaethon’s chariot is seen falling through the sky, while on the right hand side of the engraving, Icarus is about to drown in the sea. The fall of Phaethon, like that of Icarus, was thus taken as a symbol of thoughtless disobedience resulting from pride. But how did Shakespeare use these figures? Did he fail to establish any kind of difference between the two myths?

The Cultural Background of Phaethon’s and Icarus’s Flights It has often been observed that in the Renaissance, the two ill-fated adolescents served mannerist purposes and were generally seen by the poets as the perfect embodiments of heroic frenzy. Still, beyond generalities, the compelling myths of Phaethon and Icarus generated markedly different responses. Catholic countries praised their daring deeds, whereas those converted to the Reformation remained seemingly impervious to their magnificence. It thus comes as no surprise that, in French and Spanish poetry, the vainglorious son of Helios tends to be glorified for his courageous attempt.6 By contrast, English poets seldom mention Phaethon, and when they do so, their judgement is harsh, since the boy did not keep to the golden mean. The Icarus episode is endowed with a similar double-edged meaning whose interpretation depended upon where it was used and by whom. In a sonnet included in Giordano Bruno’s Neoplatonic dialogue Degli Eroici Furori (1585),7 the heroic lover figure is compared to Icarus.8 Here, the disobedient son stands for fame and loftiness. In England, he appears in a less positive light9 even though he still arouses some sort of compassion. To put it differently, the frustrated Icarus is deemed guilty, but his guilt makes him human despite the fact that his supposed

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sufferings are never described at length. Shakespeare’s contemporaries drew extensively on the theme of the Icarian flight, especially on the moment when the boy feels elated in front of the open sky and forgets his father’s advice that he fly at a moderate height. Even before the publication of Arthur Golding’s Metamorphoses, Thomas Wilson, in the third book of his Art of Rhetorique (1553), regarded Icarus as a political myth signifying that “euery man should not meddle with things aboue his compasse.”10 In Golding’s text, political undertones are cautiously erased, but we nonetheless “. . . learn by Icarus how good it is to be / In mean estate and not too climb too high, but too agree/ To wholesome counsel…”11 In the epistle to Leicester, Golding further explains that Phaethon must be regarded as “ambition blind and youthful wilfullness.”12 The lack of moderation and the excessive ambition: here are two seemingly interchangeable features of these mythological episodes where the two heroes stand as counter-examples in Elizabethan literature. This comes from a long-standing tradition. Indeed, in the Middle Ages, Phaethon and Icarus embodied the same vices. In the medieval translations of the Icarus story, the young boy’s disorderly energy was univocally understood as a form of transgression and pure arrogance. In the Ovide moralisé, the flight of Icarus was equated with pride (“c’est cil qui par orgueil s’afole”)13 and his downfall was regarded as the fall of pride in eternal damnation (“Ains versera danpnablement / Ou puis d’enfer parfondement / En enfer est sa seputure”).14 As to Phaethon, he was similarly used as a symbol of pride and the anonymous author of the Ovide moralisé juxtaposed his fall with Lucifer’s. In the early modern period, and more particularly in England, such moralistic readings did not fall into complete oblivion—Golding is often said to have “preserved the medieval tradition”15—but writers gradually focused on humanistic values. They revivified the myths and tended to allude to the two episodes in order to warn viewers and readers against the dangers of extremes and to insist on the virtue of moderation. As already pointed out, the two parallel stories of the disobedient sons were also characterized by a disturbing polysemy as, for some Renaissance commentators, they were also a way of symbolizing a form of heroic quest for knowledge. But whatever interpretation was chosen, Icarus’s fate, contrary to the plight of Phaethon who attracted little sympathy, was regarded as so moving that poets somehow identified themselves with the unfortunate boy. This literary trend is already found in The House of Fame, when Geoffrey Chaucer imagines himself swept through the air by an eagle and compares this flight to that of “nyce Ycarus.”16

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Marlowe’s Handling of the Myths Renaissance playwrights thus fashioned Icarus as an ambivalent figure, both attractive and repulsive. Marlowe’s Faustus, compared to Icarus in the opening chorus, is a case in point. Indeed, when he allows himself to be “ravished” by magic, Dr Faustus decides to shun the beaten paths of academic knowledge so that his “overweening” ambition causes his destruction at the end. Here, Icarus clearly “embodies the dialectic between aspiration and limitation.”17 No wonder then that such an ambiguous figure should stand as the central myth in Marlowe’s tragedy of knowledge, even if the playwright only refers to it in the Prologue when he depicts Faustus as a man “swoll’n with cunning of self-conceit”18 and whose “waxen wings did mount above his reach.”19 His interpretation of the Icarus episode actually reinforced the reading which had become so popular with the emblematists. Indeed, an Icarus plate could be found in Alciati’s Emblemata (1531)20 as well as in Geoffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblems (1586),21 an Elizabethan collection of emblems actually modelled on Alciati’s book. The lines beneath Alciati’s emblem are a warning to astrologers and by extension to those who dabbled in forbidden knowledge. Incidentally, in the euhemeristic lines provided by the Ovide moralisé, Phaethon was seen not exactly as an astrologer, but as an astronomer “whose writings were destroyed and who threw himself off a high mountain.”22 In his book of emblems, Alciati also depicted Phaethon as the embodiment of recklessness.23 Significantly, the fall was not shown and there was no pathos in the scene. As a result, the triumphant man depicted on the engraving became even more deceptive. Under the emblem, the author explained that eventually “the wretched boy fell from the car he had so rashly mounted.” The story was therefore duly moralized: “Even so,” Alciati writes, “the majority of kings are borne up to heaven on the wheels of Fortune, driven by youth’s ambition. After they have brought great disaster on the human race and on themselves in particular, they finally pay the penalty for all their crimes.”24 Such commentary betrays the learned jurist who exclusively applies the Phaethon emblem to the hubris of princes. Marlowe’s Ovidianism was of course not restrained to the myth of Icarus. The bastard son of Helios, damaging the whole world simply for failing to recognize his proper sphere, provided him with an efficient model for his best known plays. As Jonathan Bate puts it in Shakespeare and Ovid, Golding’s language “is marked by precipitation” when the translator narrates the story of Phaethon, and the “verse itself lightly leaps

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. . . with not a little pride, tumbles from line to line as Phaethon eventually does from his chariot.”25 Marlowe precisely imitated and reproduced such stylistic features in his plays. Clearly, for him, “the bold but foolish Phaethon, who drives the horses of the sun to disaster, was a powerfully emblematic figure.”26 No wonder then if, in the second part of Tamburlaine, the sight of the main character in his chariot on stage with his “pampered jades of Asia,”27 “could have summoned up the image of Phaethon, as a visual mythological allusion to parallel the verbal ones with which the text is littered.”28 Marlowe’s influence over Shakespeare cannot be underestimated, and his subtle treatment of the Icarus myth was probably a source of inspiration for the partly self-taught Shakespeare. Even though the latter ultimately ceased to imitate his rival and overcame the “anxiety of influence,” he kept referring to Marlowe’s favourite myths. What he did, however, was to gradually abandon the myth of Icarus in favour of the Phaethon figure, which he emphasized in a number of different early plays such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Richard II and Romeo and Juliet, all written in the mid 1590s. Partly because, if Icarus stood for lack of moderation, Phaethon more clearly embodied excess: the former is associated with water, and the latter with fire.

Phaeton and Icarus in Shakespeare’s Plays Like Icarus, Phaethon was regarded as lacking judgement, and most of the illustrated Ovid perpetuated the moralized view of Phaethon, as exemplified by a 1602 edition by Crispijn van de Passe, where the inscription underneath the vignette with Phaethon’s fall contains a clear admonishment against excessive striving for greatness.29

Yet, this tragic figure also gave way to different interpretations. In chapter 5 of Seneca’s Discourse on Providence, edited by Lipsius and translated into English in 1614, one could read that a strong man “must trauell high and low, he must haue stormes . . .; he must shape his course against Fortune; He shall haue many hard and dangerous accidents to confront him, but such as he himself may smooth and make plaine.”30 In other words, virtuous men should neither seek comfort nor security but like Phaethon, explicitly mentioned by Seneca, should follow perilous paths and travel in difficult conditions.31 In some specific cases, Phaethon can thus be seen as a glorious instance of disobedience, and his courage becomes what matters most. At the beginning of her famous prothalamion, a monologue which could be

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defined as “an exhortation to make the sun run faster and an invocation to bring in long-awaited night,”32 Juliet exclaims: Gallop apace, you fierie footed steedes, Toward Phoebus lodging, such a wagoner As Phaethon did whip you to the west, And bring in clowdie night immediately. (3.2.1–4)

A naive Juliet regards Phaethon as a benevolent character since he is able to bring the desired darkness, the hoped for refuge of clandestine lovers. However, at this moment, the girl is still unaware that in a play permeated by images of light and fire, the appearance of Phaethon foreshadows disastrous events. Even when Phaethon is not directly quoted, his underlying presence is an ominous one. In 1.4 for instance, as he mentions his beloved, Romeo exclaims: O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear, Beauty too rich for use, for each too dear (1.4.157–60)

The radiance of the jewel cannot be separated from the darkness of the Ethiop girl bearing this jewel.33 Here, the word “Ethiop” actually refers to the summer heat caused by the behavior of Phaethon who burnt the earth and devastated Ethiopia, thus creating the black race.34 The etiological myth of Phaethon is thus implicitly associated by Romeo with both fury and self-destruction. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, probably composed two years before Romeo and Juliet, Phaethon, who is said to have burnt the world, is linked to Valentine by the Duke, and he is openly associated with folly: DUKE Why, Phaethon, for thou art Merops’ son Wilt thou aspire to guide the heavenly car? And with thy daring folly burn the world? Wilt thou reach stars, because they shine on thee? Go, base intruder, overweening slave, ... (3.1.153–57)

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Actually, Shakespeare simply knew his Ovid well enough to retain the boy’s most prominent features, since in Book II of Golding’s version of the Metamorphoses, he could read: But that the foolish Phaëton straight for a day did crave The guiding of his wingèd steeds and chariot for to have. (II.62–63)

Phaethon is thus irremediably foolish right from the beginning. He stands for excess to the point of nonsense. While Daedalus’s son, his mythical counterpart, only rushed to his own doom, Phaethon came close to bringing the world to an end. No wonder then if the Phaethon episode literally haunted the young Shakespeare, who found the myth compelling enough to instill disturbing and tragic undertones in his drama. A. B. Taylor has for instance convincingly shown that, in a tragedy like Titus Andronicus, Phaethon is alluded to even though he is never openly mentioned. Indeed, his disastrous end seems to lend “an undertone of fitting irony to a debt”35 as the play comes to its conclusion. When Tamora “visits him disguised as Revenge,” Taylor explains, “the crazed Titus offers to drive her chariot on a journey like the sun’s; from ‘Hyperion’s rising in the east’ to ‘his very downfall in the sea.’ ” This probably reminded Shakespeare’s learned spectators of Golding’s depiction of the boy as “the waggoner” (II.394) “on his ride across the skies, and of the motion of the heavens which ‘whirleth so about’ (97).”36 Now, is the Icarus figure likely to be endowed with such violence? Not in Shakespeare, who expresses sympathy for him. His fate is lamented upon and his hubris seems somewhat diminished by his human weaknesses. In 1 Henry VI, through Shakespeare’s repeated references to Icarus, the humanistic reward of earthly fame is “combined, at least implicitly, with the Christian consolation of resurrection after death.”37 Old Talbot uses the myth in bono, as when he addresses John, his heroic son (“My Icarus, my blossom, in his pride,” 4.7.16), about to plunge to his death in a sea of blood. As far as John is concerned, and as already pointed out by Coppélia Kahn, “any attempt to detach himself from his identification with his father and seek a separate identity is doomed.”38 In 3 Henry VI, things are more complex and mythology is debunked, as often in Shakespeare. Icarus remains seen as “poor” Icarus, but he nonetheless becomes the embodiment of failure. No wonder then if he is mentioned in a derogatory context. For Natale Conti the story amounts to that of a simple disobedient son39 while in Gloucester’s sarcastic version it is the father’s teaching which is made responsible for the boy’s fate: “Why, what a peevish fool was that of Crete, / That taught his son the

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office of a fowl!” he tells King Henry VI (5.6.18–19). The latter cannot but complain: KING HENRY VI: I, Daedalus; my poor boy, Icarus; Thy father, Minos, that denied our course; The sun that sear’d the wings of my sweet boy Thy brother Edward, and thyself the sea Whose envious gulf did swallow up his life. (5.6.21–25)

So, throughout the play’s repeated use of the Icarus story—with its images of failed flight, thwarted crossing, as well as of wax, wings, sun, binding and melting, and finally of liming and thwarted vertical movement— Shakespeare redeploys all the elements of the myth in order to re-track the ethics of ambition and arrogance. Incidentally, Phaethon appears in two passages of the play (1.4.33–34 and 2.6.11–13) and he is twice mentioned by Clifford. Phaethon’s connection to the sun, a Yorkist badge in the tetralogy, turns him into a doomed political figure. Clifford, for instance, refuses Northumberland’s mercy because his father, like Phaethon, “hath tumbled from his car: / And made an evening at the noontide prick” (1.4.33–34). Interestingly enough, the illegitimate Phaethon figure is here directly opposed to the phoenix by York (1.4.35), Clifford’s ambitious opponent. While Phaethon is a tragic political figure, the phoenix stands for one of the king’s two bodies: the latter is a permanent strength, able to overcome human frailty and mortality. Phaethon is also perceived as a weak political figure in Richard II, when in 3.3, before the deposition scene, King Richard meets Bolingbroke at Flint castle and is asked to come down at the base court. A carnivalesque mock-king, Richard leaves the upper stage and replies jestingly and desperately at once: “Down, down I come; like glistering Phaethon, / Wanting the manage of unruly jades / In the base court?” (3.3.178–80). This passage is analysed by Kantorowicz as a reflection of “the splendour of the catastrophe in a manner remindful of Brueghel’s Icarus and Lucifer’s fall from the empyrean.”40 This may well be true, but Shakespeare specifically avoided comparing the declining king to Icarus. So, the two figures of Icarus and Phaethon are far from similar here as the playwright, who was in quest of a powerful political emblem, made a deliberate and well-informed choice. To be sure, in his history plays, Shakespeare used mythology as a form of translation or as a sensational substitute for history.

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Conclusion: Two Myths, Two Sets of Meanings My conclusion will stress the specificities and differences between the two mythic protagonists I have examined in the particular context of early modern English drama. If Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, a specialist of French Renaissance poetry, regards Phaethon and Icarus as figures of “baroque eros”41 that both symbolized forms of unquenched desire (Pierre de Ronsard used them as such in his poetry), I find such a definition far too vague concerning Shakespeare’s treatment of them in his plays. Indeed, where Icarus seems to have deeply moved contemporary audiences, Phaethon infuriated them. Icarus not only stood as the perfect overreacher but he also represented the outcast or the fallen angel announcing the loss of innocence. He symbolized the aspirations of both poet and lover trying to transcend humanity through an act of supreme daring,42 but soon realizing that such aspirations are excessive and hubristic. Thus, Icarus is more than the negative figure of vain desire. He is the epitome of human ambition and frailty. So, Daedalus’s son was gradually turned into the representative of desiring mankind, always wishing to know more and always failing to do so. The foolish Phaethon figure, on the other hand, is not just an emblem of the limits of human daring in the search of knowledge. It is a much more violent or oxymoronic one. Endowed with a proleptic function, the myth suggests brightness and darkness at the same time, as in Romeo and Juliet. In his obvious associations with the sun, Phaethon can also stand for a doomed king and therefore refer to the decline of some political power since the Phaethon story “provided a pattern for the falls of both Gaveston and Edward II in Marlowe’s history play.”43 This is also the case in Shakespeare’s Richard II where, according to Bate, one particular effect of the hint at Phaethon may “have been to contribute to the process whereby the play became more politically dangerous than Shakespeare intended it to be.”44 Losing control of one’s passions or, as George Sandys put it in his Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, being “rash and unexperienced” as well as “refractory to counsel (with out which, Power is her owne destruction)”45 was, and still is, more than a simple error made by a disobedient son. It stands as the emblem of political fault or failure as in the case of such shooting stars as Richard.

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Notes 1

In the present article, all references to Ovid’s Metamorphoses translated by Arthur Golding will be drawn from Madeleine Forey’s edition for Penguin Classics, and quotes from Shakespeare will be excerpted from The Complete Works edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor for The Oxford Shakespeare. See bibliography for further details. 2 Thomas Cooper, Thesaurus linguae Romanae & Britannicae tam accurate congestus (1565; Menston, The Scolar Press Limited, 1969). 3 See Golding, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, VIII.259–61: “Even so the country organpipes of oaten reed in row / Each higher than another rise. Then fastened he with flax / The middle quills, and joynèd in the lowest sort with wax.” 4 Durling, Robert M., ed. and trans, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 561. Cf. Dante, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, vol. 1, Inferno, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 5 See Florentius Schoonhovius, Emblemata (Leiden: Officina Elzeviriana, 1626), Emblem no. 3. This emblem is reproduced in Joanna A. Tomicka, “Ovidian Metamorphoses of the Queen of Sins,” in Emblems and Art History: Nine Essays, ed. Alison Adams, Laurence Grove, and Amy Wygant (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1996), 122, fig. 5. 6 See Frederick Alfred De Armas, Writing for the Eyes in the Spanish Golden Age (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 2004), 115: “Fernando De Herrera writes of Phaethon: ‘Grande fue, aunque infelice, tu osadia, / jo valeroso hijo de Climene!’ [Your daring was great, though unhappy, oh, courageous son of Clymene!].” 7 Giordano Bruno, The Heroic Frenzies, trans. Paul Eugene Memmo (Jr. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1964). 8 The sonnet was actually written in 1536 by Luigi Tansillo (1510–1568), for whom the Icarus figure probably embodied Tansillo’s love for either Maria d’Aragona or Laura Monforte. Bruno inserted the poem in his own work some fifty years later. 9 This affirmation is no longer true by the mid-17th century. In his 1632 edition of the Metamorphoses, George Sandys already praises Icarus who “falls in aspiring. Yet more commendable than those who creepe on the earth like contemptible worms.” Quoted by Niall Rudd, “Daedalus and Icarus from the Renaissance to the Present Day,” in Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 38. 10 Thomas Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique, transcribed by Judy Boss (Omaha, NE, September, 1998) from Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique 1560, ed. G. H. Mair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle /1794/774/arte.pdf?sequence=1 (accessed June 25, 2014). 11 Golding, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 177–79. 12 Ibid., 72.

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“Ovide moralisé”: Poème du commencement du quatorzième siècle, vol. 3 (Books VII–IX), ed. Cornelis de Boer, Martina G. de Boer and Jeanette Th. M. Van’T Sant. Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen te Amsterdam, Afdeeling Letterkunde. Nieuwe Reeks, Deel XXX, no. 3 (Amsterdam: De N.V. Noord-Hollandsche Uitgeversmaatschappij, 1931), line 1842. 14 Ibid., line 1865–67. 15 Richard F. Hardin, “Ovid in Seventeenth-Century England,” Comparative Literature 24, no. 1 (1972): 46. 16 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (1966; repr., London: Oxford University Press, 1968), II.919–24. 17 Johan Callens, Dis/figuring Sam Shepard (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2007), 204. 18 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. David Wootton (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2005), line 21. 19 Ibid., line 22. 20 See Andrea Alciati, Emblematum liber (Augsburg: Heinrich Steyner,1531), http://www.mun.ca/alciato/fr-l104.htm (accessed July 7, 2014), emblem no. 104: “Icare, per superos qui raptus et aera, donec / In mare praecipitem cera liquata daret, / Nunc te cera eadem, fervensque resuscitat ignis, / Exemplo ut doceas dogmata certa tuo. / Astrologus caveat quicquam praedicere: praeceps / Nam cadet impostor dum super astra volat.” 21 See Geoffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblems, ed. John Manning (Leyden, 1586; Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1989), emblem no. 28: “Heare, ICARUS with mountinge up alofte, / Came headlonge downe, and fell into the Sea: / His waxed winges, the sonne did make so softe, / They melted straighte, and feathers fell awaie: / So, whilste he flewe, and of no dowbte did care, / He moov’de his armes, but loe, the same were bare. / Let suche beware, which paste theire reache doe mounte, / Whoe seeke the thinges, to mortall men deny'de, / And searche the Heavens, and all the starres accoumpte, / And tell therebie, what after shall betyde: /With blusshinge nowe, theire weakenesse rightlie weye, / Least as they clime, they fall to theire decaye.” 22 William W. Kibler, Medieval France: an Encyclopedia (New York: Garland, 1995), 688. Similarly, in De Astrologia, a treatise probably falsely ascribed to Lucian, the reader is told that “Phaethon was really an astronomer who tried to plot out the sun’s course through the sky, but died before he had completed his task.” A. G. Lee, ed., Ovid. Metamorphoses, Book I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953; Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1988), 144. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, an excursus acquaints the reader with the path to be followed by the sun-god’s chariot through the sky (63–83). See Peter E. Knox, “Phaethon in Ovid and Nonnus,” The Classical Quarterly, New Series 38, no. 2 (1988): 546. 23 See Alciati, Emblematum liber, emblem no. 56: “Aspicis aurigam currus Phaethonta paterni / Ignivomos ausum flectere Solis equos; / Maxima qui postquam terris incendia sparsit, / Est temere insesso lapsus ab axe miser. / Sic plerique rotis fortunae ad sidera Reges / Evecti, ambitio quos iuvenilis agit; / Post magnam humani generis clademque suamque, / Cunctorum poenas denique dant scelerum.” The Phaethon emblem is not reproduced by Whitney.

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The English translation is available at: http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/ alciato/emblem.php?id=A31a065 (accessed July 18, 2014). 25 Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993), 40. 26 Ibid. 27 Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, ed. J. S. Cunningham and Eithne Henson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), 4.3.1–2. 28 Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, 41. 29 Aneta Georgievska-Shine, “Horror and Pity: Some Thoughts on the Sense of the Tragic in Rubens’ ‘Hero and Leander’ and ‘The Fall of Phaethon,’ ” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 30 (2003), 225. 30 Lucius Annaeus Seneca, “His Discourse on Providence: or Why good men are afflicted, since there is a divine PR0VIDENCE,” in The Workes of Lvcius Annaevs Seneca, Both Morall and Naturall . . . , ed. Justus Lipsius, trans. Thomas Lodge (London: William Stansby, 1614). 507. 31 Georgievska-Shine, “Horror and Pity,” 223. 32 Gary M. McCown, “‘Runnawayes Eyes’ and Juliet’s Epithalamium,” Shakespeare Quarterly 27, no. 2 (1976): 154. 33 François Laroque, “Roméo et Juliette, entre violence et jouissance,” Revue Silène (2007), http://www.revue-silene.com/f/index.php?sp=liv&livre_id=88 (accessed June 26, 2014). 34 Incidentally, in the Genesis (9:20–27), Ham sees his father Noah naked, and many interpreters think that he actually sleeps with the queen mother. Noah then curses Ham’s illicit son, Canaan. Even though this is an apocryphal story, it was usually believed that the black skin color resulted from the curse on Ham and his descendants. Interestingly enough, in the Bible as well as in classical mythology, illegitimate sons have something to do with the supposed origins of the black race. 35 Anthony Brian Taylor, “Shakespeare, Studley, and Golding,” The Review of English Studies, New Series 39, No. 156 (1988): 526. 36 Ibid., 526–27. See Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, 5.2.48–49: TITUS: “And then I’ll come and be thy waggoner, / And whirl along with thee about the globe.” 37 David Riggs, Shakespeare’s Heroical Histories: Henry VI and Its Literary Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 110. 38 Coppélia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 54. 39 See Natale Conti, Mythologiae, 2 vols., ed. John Mulryan and Steven Brown (Tempe, Arizona: ACMRS, 2006), Book VII, chap. 16, 665: “But Icarus was as inattentive to his father’s words of advice as young men usually are, and ignored those very perceptive and practical warnings that Daedalus had given him. He got all excited about flying, and kept going higher until the intense heat of the sun melted his wings and he fell headlong into the sea.” 40 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (1957; Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1997), 32–33. 41 Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, Mythes de l'Éros baroque (Paris: PUF, 1981). 42 What Rimbaud will later style as “les voleurs de feu.” See Arthur Rimbaud, “Lettre à Paul Demeny,” in Œuvres complètes, ed. Jean-Luc Steinmetz (Paris, Flammarion, 2010), 99.

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43

Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, 170. Ibid., 175. 45 Sandys, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 67. 44

Works Cited Alciatus, Andrea. Emblematum liber. Augsburg: Heinrich Steyner, 1531. Accessed July 18, 2014. http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/alciato/books.php?id=A31a &o=. Bate, Jonathan. Shakespeare and Ovid, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993. Bruno, Giordano. The Heroic Frenzies. A translation with an introduction and notes by Paul Eugene Memmo. Jr. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1964. Callens, Johan. Dis/figuring Sam Shepard. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2007. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Edited by F. N. Robinson. London: Oxford University Press, 1968. First published 1966. Conti, Natale. Mythologiae. 2 vols. Edited by John Mulryan and Steven Brown. Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2006. Cooper, Thomas. Thesaurus linguae Romanae & Britannicae tam accurate congestus. Menston: The Scolar Press Limited, 1969. First published 1565. Dante. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Vol. 1. Inferno. Edited and translated by Robert M. Durling, introduction and notes by Ronald L. Martinez, illustrations by Robert Turner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. De Armas, Frederick Alfred. Writing for the Eyes in the Spanish Golden Age. Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 2004. Durling, Robert M., ed. and trans. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Inferno. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Georgievska-Shine Aneta. “Horror and Pity: Some Thoughts on the Sense of the Tragic in Rubens’ ‘Hero and Leander’ and ‘The Fall of Phaethon,’ ” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 30 (2003), 217–28. Golding, Arthur, trans. Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Edited by Madeleine Forey. London: Penguin Book, 2002. Hardin, Richard F. “Ovid in Seventeenth-Century England.” Comparative Literature 24, no. 1 (1972): 44–62. Hill, R. F. “Shakespeare’s Early Tragic Mode.” Shakespeare Quarterly 9, no. 4 (1958): 455–69. Kahn, Coppélia. Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Kantorowicz, Ernst H. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1997. First published 1957. Kibler, William W. Medieval France: an Encyclopedia. New York: Garland, 1995. Knox, Peter E. “Phaethon in Ovid and Nonnus.” The Classical Quarterly, New Series 38, no. 2 (1988): 536–51.

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Laroque, François. “Roméo et Juliette, entre violence et jouissance.” Revue Silène (2007). Accessed June 26, 2014. http://www.revue-silene.com/f/index.php?sp= liv&livre_id=88. Lee, A. G., ed. Ovid. Metamorphoses, Book I. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1988. First published 1953 by Cambridge University Press. Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus. Edited by David Wootton. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2005. —. Tamburlaine the Great. Edited by J. S. Cunningham and Eithne Henson. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981. Mathieu-Castellani, Gisèle. Mythes de l'Éros baroque. Paris: PUF, 1981. McCown, Gary M. “ ‘Runnawayes Eyes’ and Juliet’s Epithalamium,” Shakespeare Quarterly 27, no. 2 (1976): 150–70. “Ovide moralisé”: Poème du commencement du quatorzième siècle. Vol. 3 (Books VII–IX). Edited by Cornelis de Boer, Martina G. de Boer and Jeanette Th. M. Van’T Sant. Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen te Amsterdam, Afdeeling Letterkunde. Nieuwe Reeks, Deel XXX, no.°3. Amsterdam: De N.V. Noord-Hollandsche Uitgeversmaatschappij, 1931. Rimbaud, Arthur. “Lettre à Paul Demeny.” In Œuvres complètes. Edited by JeanLuc Steinmetz. Paris, Flammarion, 2010. Riggs, David. Shakespeare’s Heroical Histories: Henry VI and Its Literary Tradition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971. Rudd, Niall. “Daedalus and Icarus from the Renaissance to the Present Day.” In Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century. Edited by Charles Martindale, 37–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Sandys, George. Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures. 1626. Edited by Karl K. Hulley and Stanley T. Vandersall, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970. Schoonhovius, Florentius. Emblemata. Leiden: Officina Elzeviriana, 1626. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, “His Discourse on Providence: or Why good men are afflicted, since there is a divine PROVIDENCE.” In The Workes of Lvcius Annaevs Seneca, Both Morall and Naturall. . . . Edited by Justus Lipsius, translated by Thomas Lodge. London: William Stansby, 1614. Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works. Edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. First published 1988. Taylor, Anthony Brian. “Shakespeare, Studley, and Golding.” The Review of English Studies, New Series 39, No. 156 (1988): 522–52. Tomicka, Joanna A. “Ovidian Metamorphoses of the Queen of Sins.” In Emblems and Art History: Nine Essays. Edited by Alison Adams, Laurence Grove, and Amy Wygant, 115–34. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1996. Whitney, Geoffrey. A Choice of Emblems. Leyden, 1586. Edited by John Manning. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1989. Wilson, Thomas. Arte of Rhetorique. Transcribed by Judy Boss (Omaha, NE, September, 1998) from Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique 1560, Edited by G. H. Mair. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909. https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui /bitstream/handle/1794/774/arte.pdf?sequence=1 (accessed June 25, 2014).

MARLOWE’S ACTÆON: SYNCRETISM ON THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE ROY ERIKSEN UNIVERSITY OF ADGER

But what strange boldnesse is this, o Baro, that thou shouldst thus Platonize, or rather play and juggle in things appertaining to God? —John Ludham (1562)1 The word ‘damnation’ terrifies not me, For I confound hell in Elizium. My ghost be with the old philosophers! 2 —Doctor Faustus (1616)

Alastair Fowler once remarked that Marlowe probably was among the first, if not the first English poet to use allusion consistently in his writings. Indeed, he had vast literature to draw on, being trained in theology, “a sound classicist,” and an avid reader of romances.3 Allusion is a literary device that to a great extent depends on and challenges the knowledge and ability of readers or spectators to recognize and connect various explicit or implicit references to characters or persons, places or events, images in another literary work or passage.4 As such it is related to what George Puttenham terms “full allegorie,” where the sense should not be revealed or overtly stated, “but left at large to the readers iudgement and coniecture.”5 In contrast to this, in “mixt Allegorie” is when the readers are meant to discover the meaning fairly easily by means of sure identification and naming. Allusion should probably therefore be listed with the minor tropes such as enigma, parimia, ironia and sarcasmus that Puttenham listed as “souldiers to the figure allegoria and fight vnder the name of dissimulation.”6 Here I wish to argue that Marlowe in Doctor Faustus (B), and especially in the so-termed imperial scenes (IV.i–iii) studiously draws on both syncretist interpretations of myth in classical and medieval literature as well on exegesis to underscore the magician’s

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transgressive practices. As Pierre-Yves Badel has argued such practices “represent an attempt to defuse the poentially embarrassing or subversive elements of the text by recouping it to a conventional and safe expression of christian orthodoxy.”7 In this kind of moralisation romances like Le Roman de la Rose received the same type of treatment as that given to “a nascent canon of texts like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, whose potentially subversive literal sense was explained as the poetic veil for an articulation of the christian mysteries.”8 In the process of signification in Doctor Faustus (B) Marlowe deploys allusion in combination with a technique of rhetorical anticipation—a choice probably made in view of the controversial topics treated in the play. The fate of the haughty courtier Benvolio in the scenes set at the imperial court in Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (B), provides examples of both the kinds of allegory defined by Puttenham, in the several references to the frequently allegorised Actæon myth, famously used as an induction in Marlowe’s own Edward the Second,9 and has by many been considered slapstick additions to the play made after Marlowe's death in May 1593.10 The conflict between the Wittenberg professor and the courtier is explained as an example of cheap farce of the miles-clericus type,11 inserted to appeal to the groundlings in the public theatre and therefore deemed unworthy of Marlowe's play of high seriousness. The dramatist draws attention to the myth openly twice,12 first in scene two of the imperial sequence immediately before the Alexander dumb show: Benvolio: Faustus:

Ay, ay, and I am content too. And thou bring Alexander and his paramour before the Emperor, I’ll be Actæon and turn myself to a stag. And I’ll play Diana, and send you the horns presently. (IV.ii, 97–102)

And immediately following the dumb show: Faustus.

If Faustus do it, you are straight resolved In bold Actæon’s shape to turn a stag.—/. . . I’ll raise a kennel of hounds shal hunt him so As all his footmanship shall scarce prevail To keep his carcass from their bloody fangs. (IV.ii, 142–43; 146–48)

Yet, in Marlowe’s various plays outrageous and suggestive spectacle goes hand in hand with serious themes and flights of thought couched in stunning and suggestive verse. In fact, the grotesque and tragi-comic end of Benvolio-Actæon in the imperial sequence does not serve merely as

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gratuitous and spectacular violence to dumbfound the groundlings. The episode also serves the function of a play-within-the-play and a preparation for the sparagmos of Faustus himself at the end of the B-text.13 Acccordingly, François Laroque, who like Leonard Barkan, John Steadman,14 and the present writer has devoted time and space to study the impact and multiple uses of and meanings invested in the Actæon-figure, and, especially as used by Shakespeare and Marlowe. Laroque argues that, “in Marlowe and Shakespeare, the myth of Actæon generally served a proleptic function, being used as an antimasque or as an anamorphosis of the main plot.”15 Inevitably this is a view that implicitly recognizes the central sequences as integral parts of the play since its likely composition in the late 1580s, probably 1588,16 a position that at least until recently has been opposed by the current orthodoxy that favours the shorter A-text. However, the careful study of oral transmission in the two versions, undertaken by Thomas Pettitt, who in 2006 demonstrated that “the A-version of Doctor Faustus reflects the impact of oral transmission on a play whose original text, where they have material in common is better represented by the B-version.”17 Pettitt’s findings are telling because they suggest that there is little justification for doubting the integrity of the latter, which allows us to consider its use of the Actæon myth anew. For the fact that it was popular in emblem books, in art,18 in love poetry, and not least in stage jokes about cuckolding, is not per se a reason that should prevent us from exploring the rich symbolism of the figure in the play. On the contary, the popularity avouches for the aptness of using it, for Marlowe subtly underscores the theme of forbidden knowledge, which is not limited to sexual transgression and dreams of power, but also connects directly to the deepest mysteries of Christian religion. In fact, Marlowe’s treatment of the figure fully displays its complex and ancient lineage in scriptural and philological exegesis. Critics may perhaps associate the image more readily with a plain reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses than the “exposicion double” offered in the late medieval Ovide moralisé, but both are equally relevant. The French moralist stresses the central role of forbidden knowledge in the tale, but also explains that the story holds the mystery of divine relevation and of the crucifixion, interpretations that would baffle most modern readers: Quant le premier homme par temtacion diabolique et de Eve sa femme eut mengé du fruit qui luy avoit esté deffendu et que luy et toute sa lignée fut pour icelle griefve effense condempné à moutir et à descendre en enfer, icelleui doulz Dieu glorieux, meü en pitié por ráchapter humain lignage,

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A comparable example of the application of the four-fold method of reading Scripture, is provided by Clément Marot in his interpretation of the rose in his version of Le Roman de la Rose (1526) as “l’estat de sapience,” “l’estat de grace,” the Virgin, or “le souvrain bien infiny et la gloire d’étérnelle béatitude.”20 In fact, two traditions have been combined to produce the interpretations witnessed in the syncretistic reading of the Actæon myth found in the Ovide moralisé: The stag image in Ovid’s Metamorphoses III and in Scripture, more precisely Psalm 42.1 (“As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.”) and in Canticles 2.1 (“My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag.”) The thirsting stag became an image of the individual devout Christian, whereas the Canticles variant is more spectacular and public. The love between the bridegroom and the bride in Canticles was commonly considered symbolic of the wedding, or the unio mystica, of Christ with the Christian’s soul. For instance, Puritan theologian and martyrologist, John Foxe even composed a play—a comoedia in the dantesque sense of the term—celebrating the mystical wedding, Christus Triumphans (1556), so the topos was continued by some Protestant theologians. The second tradition consists of readings of Ovid’s text as a cautionary tale about the danger of seeking forbidden knowledge, where Actæon unawares discovers the naked Diana bathing with her nymphs and becomes transformed into a stag and killed by his own dogs, as described above. Hence the tragedy of Prince Actæon was also given a political interpretation, as e.g. in Edward the Second. The poetry of Ovid is interesting for many reasons, but here primarily because the Latin phrasing lends itself to be combined with the story of the Passion. Actæon is described as “the lord under the image of a hart” (dominum sub cervi imagine), who is “similar to a man kneeling in prayer” (genibus pronis supplex similisque oranti).21 The parallel was recognised already in antiquity when the martyrdom of St. Eustace was closely patterned on the myth and no doubt contributed fuelling readings like the ones in Ovide moralisé.

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How, then, does the play-within-the-play on the fate of BenvolioActæon connect to Faustus’s quest for infinite knowledge and God-like power? The answer is, I propose, through the conflation of the Actæon and Paris myths and their common interpretations. Ethel Seaton has taught us that French romances were part of Marlowe’s light reading, which is so evident in his recycling of passages from them in Tamburlaine. Interestingly, in Le Roman de Troie we also find an account of a dream, in which Paris clearly identifies himself with Actæon; Seignors dist Paris, . . . . Il avint chose que je chacoie l’autre un cerf, si avoie perdu tous me compaignons et mes chiens, et m’en vins sur une fontaine, . . . .22

Marlowe may have remembered this passage, or recalled that Natale Conti lists Actæon and Paris under thee same heading (IV., 363), as examples that show that it is impossible delve into secrets of God.23 However, the conflation of the two mythical figures was also made in contemporary London, where Giordano Bruno does so in a work published in 1585, e.g. in a sonnet entitled “Ben far voglio ma non mi vien permesso,” that may have provided the name of Benvolio, Marlowe’s Actæon-figure.24 This deliberate and allusive conflation of these figures in Marlowe’s confirms that “a strong interest in types marks Renaissance sacred art as well as its theology, and types were found outside the Old Testament, too, for example in classical myth.”25 Marlowe primarly employs a technique of juxtaposition and prolepsis, tying together the crucial episodes in the initial and the final Wittenberg scenes with spectacular episodes of silent and speaking visuality in the imperial sequence, so as to create a syncretist typological pattern embracing nearly all of the play, or at least the twenty-four years of the compact. Thus Faustus, identifying himself with Paris in the apostrophe to Helen is connected to Alexander the Great that appears in the dumb show presented to Charles V. Alexander is said to be the Emperor’s progenitor, but he also carries the same name as Paris, who was also named Alexander/-os. It is appropriate therefore that Marlowe reminds us of Paris’s second name when he ironically describes how Mephostophilis made “blind Homer sing to me/ Of Alexander’s love and Oenone’s death” (II.iii, 24–25). Particularly purpose and telling are the changes the dramatist makes in the show of Alexander and his paramour found in his source, the English Faust Book. From a minimalist display in the narrative source he creates a mini-drama and court entertainment in the play in which Alexander fights and kills Darius before he crowns his paramour with Darius’s crown and embraces her. This is no doubt done to prepare

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for how Faustus identifies himself with Paris in the apostrophe to Helen, his desired paramour: I will be Paris, and for love of thee Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sack’d, And I will combat with weak Menelaus, . . . . (V.i, 98–100)

The courtier Benvolio, too, is integrated into this typological pattern, by repeating Alexander’s killing of Darius: he cuts off Faustus’s head and lifts it as a trophy more or less in the manner that Alexander picks up and displays Darius’s crown. His friend, Frederick’s apostrophe to the hewnoff head (“Was this that stern aspect, that awful froun,” 46) grimly looks forward to Faustus’s address to Helen—“Was this the face that launched the thousand ships” (V.ii, 94), which is parallelled by Martino immediately afterwards: “Was this that damnèd head whose heart conspired / Benvolio’s shame before the Emperor?” (IV.ii, 49–50). But let me return briefly to the crown Alexander gives to Roxana. That coronation had a special significance in syncretist exegesis, because it was likened to the crown given the bride in Canticles 3.11, which was seen to seal the unio mystica. Cornelius à Lapide explains: “Talis fuit corona qua Alexander Magnus sponsam suam Roxanam coronavit” (VII., 677). This rather suprising turn, sheds lights on the ambiguous nature of Helen as perceived by Faustus. As several critics have proposed, first Philip Brockbank, to Faustus Helen is an image of divine wisdom, or in the language of the Ovide moralisé, “la divine essence,” but it is the false wisdom worshipped by the followers of Simon Magus, as stated by Pope Clemens I: “Helena vero ad figuram Minervae proni venarentur.”26 Giordano Bruno was much more positively inclined towards the Helen figure and praised her “sub titulo divinae sapientiae” in his farewellspeech to Faustus’s and Luther’s university, the Oratio valedictoria to Wittenberg from 1588.27 However, the Helen that burns the topless towers of Ilium is also anticipated by the very opposite of Alexander’s Roxana, that is, the “hot whore” Faustus receives from mephostophilis when he asks for a wife. The choice between the courtesans offered to Faustus every morning, ironically reflects the epithets chaste, wise, and beautiful of the three goddesses (Diana, Minerva and Venus) amongst whom Paris chose Venus to receive the world’s most beautiful woman, Helen, for his prize: She whom thin eye shall like, thy heart shall have, Were she as chaste as was Penelope,

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As wise as Saba, or as beautiful As was bright Lucifer before his fall. (II.ii, 155–58)

Thus, Helen is alluded to and is anticipated both by the female devil in scene and by Alexander’s paramour, who after all is a shadow “not substantial.” Only a trained theologian with deep knowledge of syncretist imagery would probably know to combine these seemingly unrelated images to present the serious and transgressive religious backdrop of Faustus various “shows” that prepare for his downfall. Yet, to the very end of the play Marlowe subtly alludes to contemporary syncretist interpretation of myths. Faustus’s wish to be metamorphosed into a “brutish beast,” recalls the “brutish shape” given Benvolio by Faustus who in the imperial scenes is said to play a vengeful Diana. He does not like Diana in the myth transform Benvolio by throwing water (ultricibus undis, III., 190) into his face, but instead throws the courtier and his two friends into a lake of mud and dirt. And Diana is also alluded to when Faustus himself—almost in Lucretian fashion—wishes to dissolve into elemental particles. The scriptural passage involved is Philippians 1.23, which the 17th-century exegete Cornelius a Lapide surprisingly glosses with the image of Diana kissing Endymion, which was interpreted as a pagan analogue to and imitation of the mystical mors osculi. Cornelius à Lapide explains: Cupio ait [Paulus], dissolvi, et esse cum Christo. Hoc imitati Gentiles finxere Dianam osculando Endymionem, suscitisse eum a somno lethifero.28

The exegete glosses his interpretation with a reference to Piero Valeriano’s Hieroglyphica,29 so the topos may not have been too uncommon among the well educated. It may be no coincidence therefore that Marlowe in the final soliloquy makes his protagonist cite Amores I.xiii (“O, lente, lente currite noctis equi,” V.ii, 147) four verses before he calls on Christ, because in that very elegy Ovid states (in Marlowe’s rendering) that Diana “sleeps with Endymion” (43). The quest to be dissolved and be redeemed by Christ later in the soliloquy both harks back to the paradramatic inset at the centre of the play and the brutal treatment received by Benvolio at the hands of a Faustus who is performing the role of Diana, and it also recalls his kiss and embrace of Helen, a false wisdom figure. In this article I have argued that the ambiguous image of Actæon in the much maligned B-text of Doctor Faustus does not set the imperial scenes apart from the Wittenberg scenes, but unifies the play by adding a shared syncretist dimension to Faustus’s quest for forbidden knowledge. That

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scriptural dimension seems to no little extent rooted in syncretist works like the Ovide moralisé and the mode of scriptural exegesis as taught by Peter Baro, Lady Margareth Professor of Divinity during Marlowe’s years at Cambridge30 and for which he was severely attacked by the majority of Calvinist theologians: The second effect of the work of the Holy Spirit, Baro sometimes calleth Assent, sometimes a certaine kind of putting forward, or moouing of the will, or a certain kind of loue, and good liking of this chiefest good or happinesse, which is offered. But what strange boldnesse is this, o Baro, that thou shouldst thus Platonize, or rather play and juggle in things appertaining to God? For the Scripture speaketh far otherwise, and calleth this second work of the Holy Spirit . . . by the name of Repentance.31

Like Baro, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, who combined Scripture with classical philosophy and myth, Marlowe was accused of being a juggler bred of Merlin’s race. His protagonisttheologian does indeed seek the wisdom of prisci theologi like Plato, Aristoteles, and Pythagoras, by John Ludham dubbed “diuine Plato and the Stagyrian Sophist, or such like builders of darkness,” when he declares that his “ghost be with the old philosophers” (I.iii, 59) or appeals to the doctrines of Pythagoras (V.iii, 175–77). The theological controversy at Cambridge between theologians with a syncretist bias like Baro and Barrett, and Calvinists like William Perkins and John Ludham therefore seems to have prompted Marlowe’s allusions to syncretist readings of the Actæon myth. This reveals that the dramatist addresses two audiences: ordinary spectators looking for spectacle and entertainment, and a few spirits who would have understood and appreciated the string of allusions drawn from myth and allegorized epic and romance.

Notes 1 John Ludham, De fide ejusque ortu, & natura, contra P. Baronis . . . explicatio. (Cambridge, 1592), quoted from the translation Of Faith and the Originall thereof (London, 1653), 71. 2 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus: A- and B-texts (1604, 1616), ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), B-text, I.iii, 57–59. 3 Ethel Seaton, “Marlowe’s Light Reading,” in Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies Presented to Frank Percy Wilson in Honour of his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Herbert Davis and Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959).

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Abrams defines allusion as “a brief reference, explicit or indirect, to a person, place or event, or to another literary work or passage.” M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 2008), 9. 5 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. G. D. Willcock and A. Walker (1587; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 188. 6 Ibid., 191. 7 Pierre-Yves Badel, Le Roman de la Rose au XIVe siècle: Étude de la réception de l’oeuvre (Geneva: Droz, 1980), 491. 8 Ibid., 494–95. 9 In the frequently cited speech by Edward’s lover, Gaveston, alludes to both the political and amorous interpretations of the myth. Christopher Marlowe, Edward the Second, ed. Richard Rowland, vol. 3 of The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Roma Gill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), I, 50–73. 10 Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, 42–48. 11 Nan C. Carpenter, “ ‘Miles’ versus ‘Clericus’ in Marlowe’s Faustus,” Notes and Queries 197 (1952). 12 For a detailed account of Marlowe’s close adherence to Ovid’s text in these scenes, see Roy Eriksen, The Forme of Faustus Fortunes: A Study of the Tragedie of Doctor Faustus (1616) (Oslo: Solum Forlag; Atlantic Highlands N. J.: Humanities Press), 145–49. 13 Ibid., 86–94; 159–62. 14 See John M. Steadman, “Falstaff as Actæon: A Dramatic Emblem,” Shakespeare Quarterly XIV (1963), and Leonard Barkan, “Diana and Actaeon: The Myth as Synthesis,” English Literary Renaissance 10, no. 3 (1980). 15 François Laroque, “The Fashioning of Self and Desire: the Metamorphosis of Actæon in Marlowe and Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare’s Ovid, ed. Antony. B. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 171. 16 McMillinlean and MacInnis argue that “the references to Marlowe make it apparent that Doctor Faustus was on the stage well before The troublesome Reign of King John (1591).” Scott McMillinlean and Sally-Beth MacInnis, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 156–57. See also J. H. Jones, ed., The English Faust Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). For a brief account of the relationship between the prose source and the play, see Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus with the English Faust Book, ed. David Wootton. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2005), xi–xiii. 17 Thomas Pettitt, “Marlowe’s Texts and Oral Transmission: Towards the Zielform,” Comparative Drama 39 (2006), 231. 18 Eric J. Sluitjer, “Some Observations on the Choice of Narrative Mythological Subjects in Late Mannerist Painting in the Northern Netherlands,” in Netherlandish Mannerism: Papers Given at a Symposium in Nationalmuseum Stockholm, September 21–22, 1984, ed. Görel Cavalli-Björkman (Stockholm: Museet, 1985). 19 “Ovide moralisé”: Poème du commencement du quatorzième siècle, vol. 1 (Books I–III), ed. Cornelis de Boer (Amsterdam: Johannes Müller, 1915), III.iii, 115–16.

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20

David Cowling, Building the Text: Architecture as Metaphor in Late Medieval and Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 68. 21 Ovid, The Metamorphoses, ed. and transl. F. J. Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1971), III., 232–52. Cf. Eriksen, The Forme of Faustus Fortunes, 79–80. 22 Cited by Seaton, “Marlowe’s Light Reading,” 35. 23 This conflation of types within a syncretist mindset is reasonable in view of the connection between syncretism and typology.” Maren-Sofie Røstvig, Configurations: A Topomorphical Approach to Renaissance Poetry (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1994), 4. 24 Giordano Bruno, “De gli eroici furori,” in Opere italiane, vol. 2, ed. Giovanni Gentile (1585; Bari: La Terza, 1925), I.iii, 120. 25 Røstvig, Configurations, 4. 26 “S. Clementi I, Pontifici Romani Opera omnia,” in Patrologia graeca-latina, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris, 1857), I., 13A. 27 Eriksen, The Forme of Faustus Fortunes, 84–85. 28 Cornelius a Lapide, Commentaria in Canticum canticorum (Antverpiae, 1859 [1637]), vol. 7: 490. 29 The marginal note refers to “Pierius Hierogli. 50. c.29,” i.e. Piero Valeriano, Pierii Valeriani Hieroglyphica (Basilea, 1556). 30 On Baro and his syncretism and alignment with the ideas of the early St. Augustine, see H. C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 376–90. 31 John Ludham, De fide ejusque ortu, & natura, contra P. Baronis . . . explicatio. (Cambridge, 1592), 45.

Works Cited Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 2008. Badel, Pierre-Yves. Le Roman de la Rose au XIVe siècle: Étude de la réception de l’oeuvre. Geneva: Droz, 1980. Barkan, Leonard. “Diana and Actaeon: The Myth as Synthesis.” English Literary Renaissance 10, no. 3 (1980), 317–59 Bruno, Giordano. “De gli eroici furore.” In Opere italiane. 1585. Vol. 2. Edited by Giovanni Gentile. Bari: La Terza, 1925. Carpenter, Nan C. “ ‘Miles’ versus ‘Clericus’ in Marlowe’s Faustus.” Notes and Queries 197 (1952), 91–93. Cowling, David. Building the Text: Architecture as Metaphor in Late Medieval and Early Modern France. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Eriksen, Roy. The Forme of Faustus Fortunes: A Study of the Tragedie of Doctor Faustus (1616). Oslo: Solum Forlag; Atlantic Highlands N. J.: Humanities Press. Jones, J. H., ed. The English Faust Book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

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Lapide, Cornelius a. Commentaria in Canticum canticorum. Antverpia, 1859. First published in 1637. —. “The Fashioning of Self and Desire: the Metamorphosis of Actæon in Marlowe and Shakespeare.” In Shakespeare’s Ovid. Edited by Antony. B. Taylor, 165– 77. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Ludham, John. De fide ejusque ortu, & natura, contra P. Baronis . . . explicatio. Cambridge, 1592. —. Of Faith and the Originall thereof. London, 1653. Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus: A- and B-texts (1604, 1616). Edited by David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993. —. Edward the Second. Edited by Richard Rowland. Vol 3 of The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, edited by Roma Gill. Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1994. —. Doctor Faustus with the English Faust Book. Edited by David Wootton. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2005. McMillinlean, Scott and MacInnis, Sally-Beth. The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. “Ovide moralisé”: Poème du commencement du quatorzième siècle. Vol. 1 (Books I–III). Edited by Cornelis de Boer. Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen te Amsterdam, Afdeeling Letterkunde. Nieuwe Reeks, Deel XV. Amsterdam: Johannes Müller, 1915. Ovid. The Metamorphoses. Edited and translated by F. J. Miller. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Heineman, 1971. Pettitt, Thomas. “Marlowe’s Texts and Oral Transmission: Towards the Zielform.” Comparative Drama 39 (2006), 213–42. Porter, H. C. Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958. Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie. 1587. Edited by G. D. Willcock and A. Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936. Røstvig, Maren-Sofie. Configurations: A Topomorphical Approach to Renaissance Poetry. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1994. Pope Clemens I. “S. Clementi I, Pontifici Romani Opera omnia.” In Patrologia graeca-latina. Edited by J. P. Migne. Paris, 1857. Seaton, Ethel. “Marlowe’s Light Reading.” In Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies Presented to Frank Percy Wilson in Honour of his Seventieth Birthday. Edited by Herbert Davis and Helen Gardner, 17–35. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959. Sluitjer, Eric J. “Some Observations on the Choice of Narrative Mythological Subjects in Late Mannerist Painting in the Northern Netherlands.” In Netherlandish Mannerism: Papers Given at a Symposium in Nationalmuseum Stockholm, September 21–22, 1984. Edited by Görel Cavalli-Björkman, 61–72. Stockholm: Museet, 1985. Steadman, John M. “Falstaff as Actæon: A Dramatic Emble.” Shakespeare Quarterly 14 (1963), 231–44. Valeriano, Piero. Pierii Valeriani Hieroglyphica. Basilea, 1556.

“WHAT VENUS DID WITH MARS”: ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA AND EROTIC MYTHOLOGY FRANÇOIS LAROQUE UNIVERSITY SORBONNE NOUVELLE – PARIS 3

Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, along with Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, forms a kind of loose triptych inspired by his reading of Plutarch’s Lives in Thomas North’s translation (1579) from Amyot’s French text. It is both a Roman play and a romance where classical and Egyptian mythologies drawn from a great number of sources simultaneously structure and saturate the playtext. As often noted by critics, Shakespeare departs from the great Augustan poem extolling the founding myths of the Roman empire, namely Virgil’s Aeneid. Choosing to rewrite the version of the Dido and Aeneas story, which Virgil had presented as a debate between love and strife, Shakespeare clearly favours the Ovidian deconstruction of these myths of empire in order to stress myths of desire. In Antony and Cleopatra, he indeed underpins his historical plot with frequent allusions to the myths of Venus and Mars, Hercules and Deianira, Jove and Juno as well as to Isis and Osiris. History is here revised in the light of an erotic mythology which serves to blur the contours of the harsh Roman world of reason, action and discipline, and to glamorize the magic opulence of an Egyptian dream world with its playful debauchery—drinking, feasting, sexual fantasies and voluptuousness of all kinds.1 But the latter is also presented in a comic, satirical or burlesque way as in Troilus and Cressida, where love is also played out against an epic context of war and empire and oscillates between erotic hyperbole and prosaic bawdy. On the one hand, Roman mythology may be responsible for the complex, “ennobling”2 vision of love (generally lacking in Plutarch) as well as a fairly unashamed one as it celebrates an adulterous relationship. True to its Ovidian spirit, the play refuses to moralize erotic misconduct (for instance when, immediately after his marriage with Octavia, Antony plans to return to Egypt and exclaims

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“I’th’East my pleasure lies,” 2.3.403) contrary to, say Arthur Golding’s or George Sandys’s readings of “the snares of Mars and Venus.”4 This article aims at investigating the role played by the erotic myth of Mars and Venus in a play which Janet Adelman presents as “a tragic experience embedded in a comic structure.”5 As we will see, erotic mythology is simultaneously the source of comedy and anticlimax, and of a transformation of the worldly, immanent pleasures of love into an ecstatic, transcendent apotheosis with hopes of a reunion of the lovers after death.

Antony and Cleopatra or Mars and Venus Translated Since, as Michael Neill puts it, there is no limit to “the complete reconstruction of the cultural matrix to which the play belongs,”6 it would be impossible for me here to dwell in any detail on the sources and various classical interpretations or re-interpretations of the myths of Venus and Mars, I will then essentially call attention to some of the functions of erotic mythology in the play. In 1.5, Cleopatra engages in a witty, bawdy dialogue with Mardian, which affords a paradoxical glimpse at the Mars and Venus story, as this cliché of adulterous and intensely sexual relationship is here presented from the point of view of the impotent eunuch who, as he says, can imagine but can “do nothing”: Cleopatra Thou, ennuch, Mardian! Mardian What’s your highness’ pleasure? Cleopatra Not now to hear thee sing. I take no pleasure In aught an ennuch has. ‘Tis well for thee That being unseminared, thy freer thoughts May not fly forth of Egypt. Hast thou affections? Mardian Yes, gracious madam. Cleopatra Indeed? Mardian Not in deed, madam, for I can do nothing But what indeed is honest to be done. Yet have I fierce affections, and think What Venus did with Mars. (1.5.9–19)

So, Cleopatra’s vitality and erotic power is here suggested through its exact contrary, the impotent, though far from incompetent, eunuch, while the expression “What Venus did with Mars” may also indirectly refer to the iconographic tradition of erotica representing “the loves of the gods” as in Pietro Aretino’s famous Sonetti Lussoriosi. This scandalous piece of

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work, published in Venice in 1527, was also known as Posizioni, or I Modi and it had been illustrated with a series of sixteen drawings by Giulio Romano, a painter whom Shakespeare mentions and mistakes for a sculptor in The Winter’s Tale. The drawings, representing various erotic positions (in England the book was later referred to as “Aretino’s postures”), were reproduced by Marcantonio Raimondi who was imprisoned in Rome for this by the pope’s counselor.7 This type of bawdy double entendre, like Cleopatra’s punning exchanges with the clown at the end (5.2.242–78), was also probably meant as a tit bit for the groundlings and literati alike. On the other hand, the great number of ekphrastic topoi in the play may reflect a deliberate effort on the part of Shakespeare to refer to numerous pictorial representations, such as those by Sandro Botticelli, Cranach, Titian, Tintoretto, or Bartholemeus Spranger,8 the latter being one the most spectacular painters at the court of Rudolph II in Prague. These artists had often illustrated similar mythological episodes which provided them with excuses to paint female nudity and which naturally included scenes of the goddess Venus and the god of war lying side by side and sometimes surprised by the cuckolded husband, Vulcan (as in Tintoretto’s piece for instance). In such Mannerist compositions, learning, eroticism and a sense of surprise (due to the elongated shapes and contorted positions of the figures in contrapposto postures) are all deftly combined while a touch of humour is often added to the scene. It is also true that Mardian’s allusion may well foreshadow the two lovers’ downfall since their mythological counterparts had been trapped by Vulcan’s fine iron net in order to turn them into laughing stocks in front of all the gods assembled on Mount Olympus. If the two title parts also symbolize cosmic harmony, like Venus and Mars according to Renaissance mythographers,9 some of their undignified attitudes are represented as coming close to ridicule. The swapping of clothes is indeed also attached to this episode, as in the Hercules and Omphale story, thus contributing to suggest Antony’s emasculation and the triumph of the woman on top: . . . next morn, Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed; Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst I wore his sword Philippan. (2.5.20–23)

The ”sword Philipan” refers to Antony’s weapon which triumphed over Brutus and Cassius at the battle of Philippi in 42 B.C. Here Cleopatra seizes his emblem of virility and glory as a warrior in order to unman him

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and, as in the case of Mars and Venus, they seem to swap clothes and gender roles. Later, when Cleopatra congratulates Antony for his victory in battle, she fondly asks him “Lord of lords/ Of infinite virtue, com’st thou smiling from/ The world’s great snare uncaught?” (4.8.16–18). According to Barbara Bono, this phrase is an explicit rewriting of “the story of Vulcan’s netting of Venus and Mars.”10 In 4.14, it is Mardian again who will beautifully word his report of Cleopatra’s death to Antony, thus allowing him to convert his Stoic suicide into a transcendent erotic posture (“I will be/ A bridegroom in my death, and run into’t/ As to a lover’s bed” (4.14.99–101). In act 5, Cleopatra suspects Caesar to intend to play the part of Vulcan by turning her love affair with Antony into a licentious skit when she says to Iras: “Antony/ Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see/ some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness/ I’th’posture of a whore” (5.2.217–20). The word “posture” here probably refers to the infamous Aretino Pozitioni mentioned above. If Cleopatra likes to play her own games, she certainly hates to be manipulated into others which she does not control, let alone be taken in by Octavius’s secret designs to humiliate her in public. Her final aspirations are indeed to restore a sense of “nobleness” (the adjective “noble” is repeatedly used in the last two acts) to her life and love: “What’s brave, what’s noble,/ Let’s do’t after the high Roman fashion/ And make death proud to take us” (4.15.91–3). And at the end, when Caesar discovers the dead Cleopatra, he seems fascinated by her quiet beauty and dignity as he exclaims: “she looks like sleep,/ As she would catch another Antony/ In her strong toil of grace” (5.2.340–42). This time the snare (“toil”) belongs to Venus, not to Vulcan and, far from turning the lovers into laughing-stocks it elevates them both to a pedestal. In that respect, the use of the word grace, both for beauty and, I would imagine, some kind of pagan sanctification, provides a form of recreation of the myth as it gives it an eschatological dimension. These different variations on the mythical episode are representative of the play’s fluctuating moods and modes, switching from farce to historical romance to love tragedy, and so erotic mythology, as illustrated in the Venus and Mars story, works as a world poles apart from history when desire is made to prevail over empire.

Erotic Mythology vs. Heroic History Just as Shakespeare allows his spectator to move back and forth from Rome to Alexandria, his dramatic imagery proposes a constant shuttling between textual and visual elements. Indeed, Enobarbus’s famous depiction of Cleopatra on her barge as extraordinary creation and

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transcendent power, which closely follows Plutarch’s prose, may also have taken its cue from Lucretius’s invocation of Venus in his De rerum natura. Indeed, Cleopatra, like the Venus Genitrix or Aphrodite Pandemos of the Lucretian tradition are deities of fruitful nature, an aspect which is later confirmed by Enobarbus’s admirative comment “Royal wench! . . . He [Caesar] ploughed her and she cropped” (5.2.236, 238). As in the case of Lucretius’s Venus, everything becomes Cleopatra, her seemings, her wrinkles and her breathlessness, while her sexuality, indirectly linked to the “o’erflowings” of the Nile, is regarded as sacred (“the holy priests/ Bless her when she is riggish,” 2.2.246–47). However, Enobarbus’s speech is not a precise picture but a web of verbal suggestion. When some critics happen to refer to Botticelli’s famous painting of the “Birth of Venus” as a possible visual analogue for the scene, they overlook the fact that Cleopatra is never actually described in other terms than “She did lie in her pavilion” (line 209) or through such details as “her delicate cheeks glow[ed]” (lines 213–14). It presents the Egyptian queen as “O’erpicturing that Venus where we see/ The fancy outwork nature” (lines 210–11). Quite different is the way Plutarch renders the encounter In The Life of Mark Antony: . . . she was laid under a pavilion of cloth-of-gold of tissue, appareled and attired like the goddess Venus commonly drawn in picture.

“Commonly drawn in picture” is indeed a rather plain and general turn of phrase, while “O’erpicturing,” which echoes the previous phrase “It beggared description,” together with the allusion to the competition between fancy and nature, stimulates our imagination and adds a transcendental horizon to the scene. Plutarch’s rather static painting is thus amplified into an erotic masterpiece where the senses as well as the surrounding elements are drawn towards some inexpressible place of desire. So, punning, saucy jests and playing are also a foreshadowing of Cleopatra’s marble constancy and “immortal longings” (5.2.240, 280) when she asks Charmian to “fetch/ [her] best attires” and says “I am again for Cydnus” (lines 227–28). The end repeats the beginning as the phallic “aspic” on her breast is turned into the circled ouroboros, the Egyptian symbol of eternity. Another difference at the end in Plutarch’s and Enobarbus’s descriptions is the rather benign tone of the first (“And then went a rumour in the people’s mouths that the goddess Venus was come to play with the god Bacchus for the general good of all Asia”) as opposed to the wry comments of the Roman on the queen’s cunning wit (When she first met Mark Antony, she pursed up his heart upon the river of Cydnus, 2.2.196–97) and on her irresistible seduction (“Our courteous Antony . . ./

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goes to the feast/ And for his ordinary pays his heart/ For what his eyes eat only,” lines 229–33) which slyly suggests how the Roman general was fooled and cheated by the cony-catching gypsy queen. All these images reinforce the mythic and almost magic potency of the main characters in the play while Shakespeare’s sarcastic touches of humour and irony also serve to tone down the learned and possibly numinous quality of these allusions, so as to mark his preference for Ovid’s rather than Virgil’s style in the play. When the playwright keeps the Bacchus association for other scenes (for instance the “Egyptian bacchanals” (2.7.104) on board Pompey’s galley), Plutarch pursues the identification of Antony with Bacchus as ingrained in his character: Now the government of these Triumviri grew odious and hateful to the Romans, for divers respects. But they most blamed Antonius, because he, being elder than Caesar and of more power and force than Lepidus, gave himself again to his former riot and excess when he left to deal in the affaires of the commonwealth . . . . [His] house was full of tumblers, antic dancers, jugglers, players, jesters, and drunkards, quaffing and guzzling . . . .11

If Plutarch’s characterization may have lent some of its barbs to Philo’s derogatory portrait of his general at the beginning of the play when he degrades Antony from “plated Mars” (1.1.4) to “the bellows and the fan/ To cool a gipsy’s lust” (lines 9–10), such burlesque flouting of authority definitely turns its back on the high and mighty solemnity of Virgil’s epic poem. So, Leslie Fiedler is right when he calls Antony and Cleopatra an “anti-Aeneid in which the hero chooses the ‘tawny’ Queen over patriarchal Rome . . . .”12 In the play, Alexandria is indeed the realm of sexual misrule where night is turned into day and where Cleopatra simultaneously appears as the new “Venus” (2.2.210) and as the Amazon Omphale reducing the Roman Hercules to slavery and bondage, thereby turning the sexual hierarchy upside down in a sort of permanent Saturnalia. In Antony and Cleopatra, it is not only the danger represented by the sexual excesses of the Queen of Egypt which is disapproved of and fought by the Romans, it is also an attempt to exorcize the ghost of Queen Dido of Carthage and the Virgilian story of her passionate and most unfortunate love affair with the Trojan Aeneas on his way to Italy in order to found the city of Rome. This most famous episode is indirectly alluded to by Mark Antony before he kills himself: Eros!—I come, my queen.—Eros!—Stay for me. Where souls do couch on flowers, we’ll hand in hand, And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze.

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Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops, And all the haunt be ours.—Come, Eros, Eros! (4.14.50–54)

But one sees how the myth is re-appropriated and rewritten by Shakespeare. In Virgil’s poem, Dido refuses to speak to Aeneas when she sees him in the underworld and, contrary to Aeneas who, as David Bevington puts it, was “pulled from erotic entanglement in Africa by the call of Roman destiny,”13 Antony dies in Alexandria to remain with his dark Egyptian beauty. For the Romans, Cleopatra’s seduction of Antony was necessarily reminiscent of the Dido story which had indirectly led to the two Punic wars between Carthage and Rome, the second one being waged by Hannibal against Rome between 219 and 202 B.C. These wars were then interpreted as Dido’s belated revenge against the Romans for Aeneas’s betrayal. Jonathan Bate rightly interprets this in terms of an opposition between Virgil and Ovid: Ovid . . . destabilized another of the founding myths of the Roman empire, that of the ‘pious Aeneas’. In Virgil’s Aeneid, the exemplary Augustan poem, Aeneas has to leave Dido in order to fulfil his destiny and establish Rome . . . . The pursuit of empire, rather than the pursuit of love, is made to seem wayward and unpredictable. Ovid appropriates Virgil’s ‘pius’ and gives it to Dido . . . . Dido and Aeneas are mythico-historical precedents for the North African queen who distracts the Roman general from his imperial duty in Shakespeare’s play. But Shakespeare, like Chaucer, follows Ovid in revising the official version of the story by giving the dominant voice to the woman and to love.14

Other analyses could have been made of the multiple mythical, erotic associations for the Alexandrian lovers—the Hercules and Omphale, Hercules and Deianira, Jove and Juno, Isis and Osiris stories, all of them archetypal fables of desire—but similar conclusions would probably have been reached for all these narratives, different as they may be. In the case of Dido and Aeneas, the story is being revised in Antony and Cleopatra in order “to endorse the un-Roman love of Antony and Cleopatra to such an extent that they are allowed to believe that they will be reunited after death” (4.15.53–4).15 The pressure of Roman reality causes the lovers to understand their former romantic hyperbole as playful rehearsal for a serious transforming endeavour (“Husband, I come!/ . . . I am fire and air—my other elements/ I give to baser life,” 5.2.286–89). The duality of love makes desire both a fall into worldly sensuality and an aspiration to divine unity with the triumph of the female voice in the play changing the warrior and conqueror hero into a “martyr of love.”16 In this vision, erotic

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mythology works against or rather away from history which it is trying to evade in a never-never world of love, plenty and fertile imagination. It is more or less the equivalent of Falstaff’s Eastcheap tavern in Henry IV or of the holiday world of Rosalind in the forest of Arden. But it is characterized by ambivalence since it destroys just as much as it recreates. As Northrop Frye says of Cleopatra: Her Egypt is able to bring a superhuman vitality out of Antony . . . not in spite of the fact that it destroys him but because it destroys him. Cleopatra’s mythic ancestry helps illuminate her dangerous fascination and her greatness as a ‘counter-historical’ figure.17

Conclusion So, the multiple correspondences between the two lovers and their mythical doubles serve various functions in Antony and Cleopatra. At one level, they introduce a number of alternately bawdy and witty allusions that undercut the seriousness of the political and historical plot, as the Egyptian world of play and licentious indulgence is pitted against worldlyminded interest and the strong sense of family and political duty of the Roman world. This capitalizes on the rhetorical trope of ekphrasis which introduces a number of parallels between the textual images or suggestive figures, the highly imaginative world of Renaissance and Mannerist painters who specialized in the representation of mythological erotic episodes. Such vision is further used as a sign of potency and fertility in the Egyptian sense of concordia concors that calls for an eschatological synthesis of teeming sexual activity and a transcendental vision of afterlife. The various jokes, puns or teasing games are later revisited in a more serious light which does allow room for anagogic readings compatible with some of the more arcane Neoplatonic interpretations of those same myths.18 Finally, through the language of the suicide speeches, Shakespeare joins hands with Ovid against Virgil. For the playwright, myth is not just a list of anecdotes or prescriptions but it is endowed with strong creative resonances. And this is precisely what makes it possible to believe that history, which is shaped and encoded by these archetypal forms, can be rewritten or at least understood in different ways and along different lines. Such, I think, is the meaning of Octavius’s fairly ambiguous funeral eulogy of Antony and Cleopatra at the end: [H]er physician tells me She hath pursued conclusions infinite Of easy ways to die. Take up her bed,

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And bear her women from the monument. She shall be buried by her Antony. No grave upon the earth shall clip in it A pair so famous. High events as these Strike those that make them; and their story is No less in pity than his glory which Brought them to be lamented (5.2.349–57)

Rather than “his glory” or “his story,” it is “their story” which Caesar emphasizes here, which may be his way of celebrating their dawning legend and of making the land of myth and love prevail over the facts and figures of historical reality. After Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s last “Roman” play thus turns Roman values upside down and thus slyly introduces us into the magic world of romance which he was to explore and exploit in his last plays.

Notes 1

Judith H. Anderson, Reading the Allegorical Intertext: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 240–41. According to Anderson, the mythical material in Shakespeare’s play and the description of Alexandria as a new “Bower of Bliss” and Cleopatra as Venus is directly inherited from Spenser. I am grateful to Joshua Held for this reference. 2 David Bevington, ed., Antony and Cleopatra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 7. 3 William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. David Bevington (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990). 4 Arthur Golding, The XV. Books of P. Ovidius Naso, titled Metamorphosis (London: Willyam Seres, 1567); George Sandys, P. Ovidi Nasonis Metamorophoseon Libri XV (Oxford: John Lichfield, 1632). 5 Janet Adelman, The Common Liar: An Essay on Antony and Cleopatra (Yale: University Press, 1973), 52. 6 Michael Neill, ed., Anthony and Cleopatra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 6. 7 Ian Frederick Moulton, Before Pornography: Erotic Writings in Early Modern England (Oxford: OUP, 2000), 122–23. 8 Daniel Arasse, On n’y voit rien: Descriptions (Paris: Denoël, 2000), 19–22. 9 Vincenze Cartari, Les images des dieux, contenans les idoles, coustumes, cérémonies & autres choses appartenans à la Religion des payens (Lyon: Etienne Marcel, 1581), 465–66. 10 Barbara Bono, Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearian Tragicomedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 185. 11 Neill, Anthony and Cleopatra, 330. 12 Leslie Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (Frogmore: Paladin, 1973), 168.

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13

Bevington, Antony and Cleopatra, 7. Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 211–12. 15 Ibid., 212. 16 François Laroque, “The Cult of Saints Revisited: Shakespeare’s Martyrs of Love,” Cahiers Élisabéthains 73 (2008). 17 Northrop Frye, Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearian Tragedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), 71–72. 18 Bono, Literary Transvalutation, passim. 14

Works Cited Adelman, Janet. The Common Liar: An Essay on Antony and Cleopatra. Yale: University Press, 1973. Anderson, Judith H. Reading the Allegorical Intertext: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Arasse, Daniel. On n’y voit rien: Descriptions. Paris: Denoël, 2000. Bate, Jonathan. Shakespeare and Ovid. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993 Bevington, David ed. Antony and Cleopatra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Bono, Barbara. Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearian Tragicomedy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Cartari, Vincenze. Les images des dieux, contenans les idoles, coustumes, cérémonies & autres choses appartenans à la Religion des payens. Lyon: Etienne Marcel, 1581. Fiedler, Leslie. The Stranger in Shakespeare. Frogmore: Paladin, 1973. Frye, Northrop. Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearian Tragedy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967. Golding, Arthur. The XV. Books of P. Ovidius Naso, titled Metamorphosis. London: Willyam Seres, 1567. Laroque, François. “The Cult of Saints Revisited: Shakespeare’s Martyrs of Love.” Cahiers Élisabéthains 73 (2008): 23–29. Moulton, Ian Frederick. Before Pornography: Erotic Writings in Early Modern England. Oxford: OUP, 2000. Neill, Michael ed. Anthony and Cleopatra. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Sandys, George. P. Ovidi Nasonis Metamorophoseon Libri XV. Oxford: John Lichfield, 1632.

“A SERPENT TO BE GAZED UPON”: A TAXONOMY OF PRIDE AND HUMILITY IN OVID AND MILTON MATTHEW T. LYNCH INDIANA UNIVERSITY BLOOMINGTON

The influence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses on early modern English poetry and drama is ubiquitous. The stories in this collection of poetry were as ingrained in the imaginations of school children as the stories in the Bible. A young John Milton1 would have read and translated Ovid’s verse from Latin into English,2 making him intimately familiar with the work. Although the subject of Ovid’s poetry is classical mythology, its themes of pride and humility are just as applicable to Milton’s Christian poetics. In composing his grand epic Paradise Lost, Milton draws upon the story of Cadmus in Books III and IV of Metamorphoses to devise a dichotomy for Satan’s serpentine transformations, both voluntary and involuntary: one type of serpent represents pride and magnificent terror; the other is beastly, gentle, and humble. Cadmus and Satan, proud of their initial conquests, are ultimately trampled underfoot by higher divine authorities. These defeats are literalized in the lowly serpentine forms the characters are forced to assume. Book III of Ovid’s Metamorphoses relates the story of Cadmus, the founder of Thebes. Having been exiled by his father Agenor for failing to find his sister Europa after she is seized by a taurine Jove, Cadmus consults the oracle at Delphi to ask where he might find a new home. The oracle instructs him to follow an unyoked heifer until she lies down. At that site, he should name the region Boeotia and begin the construction of a new city. Cadmus sees this heifer right after he leaves the oracle and follows her as he has been instructed. Once he reaches the site, he orders his servants to fetch water to be used in a sacrifice to Jove. His servants enter a thick, dark wood and discover a grove marked by a pool and a cave. Unbeknownst to them, a giant serpent who is “Sacred to Mars” (III.31–32)3 dwells within the cave and becomes angry when their urns upset the pool’s still water. The serpent makes short work of these men,

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and Cadmus begins to wonder what has happened to them. Armed only with a “lion’s skin” “shield,” a “steel” “lance,” a “javelin,” and his “courageous spirit,” Cadmus sets off to find his companions (III.52–54). Cadmus reaches the grove, battles the serpent, and eventually slays it. A mysterious voice asks him, “Why, O Cadmus,/ Stare at the serpent slain? You also, some day,/ Will be a serpent for mortal men to stare at” (III.97– 98). Cadmus, confused and cold, is eventually approached by Minerva, who instructs him “To plow the earth, to sow the teeth of the serpent/ Which would become the seed of future people” (III.102–3). An army rises from the sown dragon’s teeth, and the soldiers battle and kill each other until only five remain. Minerva orders these five to drop their weapons. These fang-hatched men become Cadmus’s new companions and help him build his city Thebes.4 Perhaps the most memorable scene in this tale is Ovid’s description of the Martian serpent, which must have excited the imaginations of early modern school children. The poet appeals to visual as well as non-visual senses in order to make the serpent frighteningly real for his readers. First, he appeals to memory. By indicating that the serpent is “Sacred to Mars,” the reader knows that it is not a benevolent beast, but valued for its skill in war and destruction. Next, we get a visual description: “His crest was gold,/ His eyes flashed fire, his body swelled with poison;/ Three darting tongues he had, three rows of teeth” (III.32–34). The head of “gold” and eyes of “fire” illuminate his dark antral home, while also illuminating the reader’s imagination, which heretofore cannot “see” the serpent. This visual description also reinforces the reader’s initial misgivings about the creature; although his crest is praesignis (III.32), or “distinguished,”5 his ample “poison” and exploding, shark-like mouth are to be feared rather than admired. But while the reader has knowledge of the serpent, Cadmus’s servants remain ignorant of its presence. Ovid exploits this dramatic irony with a crescendo of tension and suspense enabled by descriptions of sound: “[The servants’] lowered vessels broke the water’s silence,/ Answered by hissing, for the long head, thrusting,/ Reached out from the long darkness of the cavern” (III.35–37). Now the reader’s point of view has migrated from relative omniscience to the perspective of one of the serving men, who sees only the water before him but not the serpent behind him. At the unexpected sound of hissing, we turn our heads around along with the servants. By then it is too late. While the gold and fire of the serpent’s head only offers us glimpses in the cave, just as in The Faerie Queene6 the feeble reflections from Redcrosse’s armor only offer him glimpses in the Cave of Error, we now see the magnificent beast in its entirety, as it bursts forth

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from darkness. Indeed, the serpent is so surprisingly large that its seemingly infinite coils leap off the page: Twisting his scaly coils in writhing loops, Curving in undulant arcs and semicircles, The serpent lifts himself erect; he towers, Half of him anyway, as high, as huge, As the great serpent of the constellations. The whole wood lies beneath him, and he strikes, Coils, or constricts, and all the men are victims. It makes no difference what they try, to fight, To run, to stand, too numb for either.

(III.41–48) The foe presented here is no wily snake in the grass. The grotto’s physical space is flooded with the “scaly coils,” “writhing loops,” “undulant arcs,” and “semicircles” of a single serpent, rather than the multiple appendages found on a tentacled monster or polycephalous hydra. As if that isn’t enough to overwhelm the luckless servants, the serpent is upright and thus cannot be trampled underfoot or evaded with the acquisition of higher ground. Indeed, while half the serpent is earth-bound, entwined throughout the grotto and constricting several men, we are to imagine that it is the other half that, upright, blends in with the constellation in the sky. But Ovid, ever Protean in his poetic perspectives, emphasizes that the creature’s size is no exaggeration or trompe-l’oeil realized by the fearstruck men. If an outside observer were to look down on this ancient wood from a mountaintop, he would see the upper half of the snake with “[t]he whole wood . . . beneath him.” By appealing to many senses and looking through many perspectives in his depiction of the Martian serpent, Ovid is breathing new life7 into an ancient tale with which his audience would have been intimately familiar. The challenge for the poet is to represent archetypal evil in its appropriately epic scale while maintaining a relative realism so that evil is still everyday and human. By letting his reader “sense” the serpent’s presence in many ways and focusing on such minute details as the urn dipping into the pool, we experience the terror of evil along with its victims who, in other tellings of the tale, may possibly be depicted as human sacrifices to appease an audience’s vicarious bloodlust. Instead, the audience experiences futility along with Cadmus’s servants, who are unable to flee or fight when confronted with such an awesome adversary. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, overwhelming evil also takes the shape of a serpent. Milton, however, must deal with theological as well as poetic

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concerns, a tension that in this case involves the inherent nature of the serpent. Due to some ambiguous language in Genesis, theologians often debated whether the snake in Eden is inherently evil or only becomes so after Satan possesses it. Rather than taking an extreme position in the argument, as Milton often does,8 he leaves some wiggle room for both viewpoints. In Book 9 of Paradise Lost the snake is innocent, yet wily. This is the reason Satan considers the beast a “Fit Vessel, fittest Imp of fraud, in whom/ To enter, and his dark suggestions hide/ From sharpest sight” (9.89–91).9 As the “suttlest Beast of all the Field” (9.86), this serpent is nothing like the gigantic monster found in Book III of Metamorphoses. The serpent slain by Cadmus is mailed with several scaly warnings: its association with Mars, its vibrant colors indicating toxicity, its belly full of poison, and its menacing mouth set with triple tongues and triple rows of teeth. The serpent in Eden, however, is so inconspicuous and camouflaged that none would even notice its passing, much less suspect it of demonic possession: . . . for in the wilie Snake, Whatever sleights none would suspicious mark, As from his wit and native suttletie Proceeding, which in other Beasts observ’d Doubt might beget of Diabolic pow’r Active within beyond the sense of brute. (9.91–96)

While the serpent’s stealth makes it the perfect “Vessel” for Satan’s ultimate deception, Milton is careful to differentiate between natural sneakiness and inherent evil. Unlike the Martian serpent, who lurks menacingly in his cave, the serpent in Eden is innocently “sleeping” (9.181), “Not yet in horrid Shade or dismal Den” (9.185). “Nor” is it “nocent,” or guilty, and it is “Fearless unfeared,” a signature Miltonic compound phrase that emphasizes the prelapsarian condition of the serpent, before the mutual enmity that will soon exist between snake and man (9.186–87). Even though the serpent sleeps in a state of innocence, its “head” is “well stor’d with suttle wiles,” and his coiled body, “In Labyrinth of many a round self-rowld” suggests the wandering errancy10 of sin and dissembling rhetoric (9.183–84). The capitalization of “Labyrinth” also brings to mind the myth of Theseus and the minotaur, wherein the lack of a clear path leads to certain death. But once Satan possesses the indiscreet and wily snake in the form of a “black mist” (9.180), recalling the veneni adflatu or “poisoned breath” of

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the Martian serpent (III.49),11 it begins to resemble the magnificent creature of evil in the story of Cadmus. Like that monster, the newlypossessed snake stands upright: “toward Eve/ Address’d his way, not with indented12 wave,/ Prone on the ground, as since, but on his reare,/ . . . erect” (9.495–501). The effect here, however, is the illusion of reason rather than a threatening display of power. This snake does not tower over the trees, blending in with the sky, but moves upright like a human. This imitatio humanitatis is evident in the word “erect,” which comes from the Latin erectus, a past participle of eregere, to “set up.” But the verb rego also means to “make straight,” as seen in the English word “correct.” And so, within this word, Satan is cloaked in the disguise of “man’s right reason.” The Demonic serpent’s head also resembles the head of the Martian serpent: “his Head/ Crested aloft, and Carbuncle his Eyes;/ With burnisht Neck of verdant Gold, erect” (9.499–501). These “Carbuncles,” beautiful ruby stones, are like the fiery eyes of the Martian serpent. But carbuncles may be deadly as well as beautiful. Another meaning of the word is: “Originally: any of various inflammatory or infective lesions of the skin or (rarely) the eye; spec. the malignant pustule of anthrax (obs.). In later use: a group of interconnected or coalescing boils.” (OED 3a).13 The danger here is covert, unlike the direct threat of the Martian serpent’s igne . . . oculi (III.33). Its crest and neck are also golden and distinguished, although the Demonic snake is more overtly praesignis. Significantly, Milton enjambs the description of the snake’s crest within his description of the snake’s upright posture. To “erect one’s crest” is to display “a symbol of pride, self-confidence, or high spirits” (OED “crest” 1b). In suggesting sin rather than violent intimidation, the threat of the snake is psychological in nature. Furthermore, this threat is disguised beneath a face of jewels and glittery gold, “burnisht” and “verdant,” suggesting spotless polish and green innocence. This beast is deceptively beautiful: “pleasing was his shape,/ And lovely, never since of Serpent kind” (9.503– 4). And so, although the Martian serpent and the Demonic serpent are described with similar language, the Demonic serpent is a creature of beauty and wonder rather than terror. Its weapons are wiles and subtleties rather than fangs and coils. In Book IV of the Metamorphoses, the prophecy that Cadmus will be looked on as a snake comes to pass. Many years after he founds the city of Thebes, he is plagued by misfortune. His daughter Ino offends the goddess Juno with the excessive pride she has for her family, especially her alumno numine (“divine foster-son”) Dionysius (IV.421). To punish her, Juno travels to Hades to unleash the Furies on the House of Cadmus. The

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serpent-haired Furies drive Ino and her husband Athamas mad by breathing “pestilential breath”—inspirantque graves animos (IV.498)—on them. Possessed by this madness, Athamas seizes his son Learchus by the hands and throws him into a rock. Ino takes their other young son Melicertes to a cliff and jumps into the ocean. Pitying the mother and child, Venus asks Neptune to transform them into the sea-nymphs Leucothoe and Palaemon respectively. Cadmus, overwhelmed with grief, flees the city with his queen.14 Lamenting the ills that have beset his family, he asks the gods: . . . Was that a serpent Slain by my spear so long ago . . . . . . Did I sow A serpent’s teeth in the ground, to generate New men? If this is what the gods are angry over, May I become a serpent, with a body Stretched full-length forward! (IV.570–75)

In other words, if the gods love serpents more than him and his family he would desire to become a serpent himself. Such a cynical plea is disrespectful to the gods, and they do not receive it kindly. They grant his desire but the result is tragic, as he transforms pitifully before his wife’s weeping eyes: Even as he spoke He stretched out full-length forward, felt his skin Harden, and scales increase, and mottled markings Sprinkle his blackening body. He fell forward, Crawled on his belly, with his legs behind him Drawn in, and tapering. He still had arms And tried to reach them forward; his cheeks were human, And tears ran down them, as he cried: “Come nearer, My poor dear wife, while there is something left For you to come to; come and touch my hand Before I have no hand, am wholly serpent.” He wanted to say more, but found his tongue Suddenly forked; instead of words, a hissing Spoke his lament: Nature had left him nothing Save this one power. (IV.576–89)

The queen asks the gods to be transformed as well,

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. . . and suddenly there were only Two serpents there, entwined about each other, And gliding, after a while, to hiding-places In the dark woods. Now as before, they never Hurt men, nor fear them, for they both remember What once they were; they are most gentle serpents. (IV.600–3)

Cadmus’s fundamental flaw, like so many Greek tragic heroes, is pride and a blatant disregard for the will of the gods. He is proud because in his youth he had defeated the Martian serpent, a gigantic incarnation of evil and terror, founded a people with its teeth (the appropriately war-like Spartans), and founded a great city. Yet, egotistically, he cannot separate his fortunes from his misfortunes. Cadmus attributes all of his problems to the day he defeated the serpent, forgetting that at that same moment his fate is already clear: he will one day become a serpent himself. When he flees Thebes, it is “as if the fortune of the place and not his own evil fate were overwhelming him” (IV.566–67). Not only does he forget the prophecy he received in his youth, but he is also unaware that his “daughter and grandson/ Had become sea-gods” (IV.563–64). As a result, his misfortunes are once again due to ignorance of the gods’ will. Overcome by his own self-importance, Cadmus desires to be transformed into a wondrous beast sacred to the gods like the one he has slain. Instead, he becomes a gentle worm, the prelapsarian snake “Fearless unfeared,” a fitting metamorphosis for a proud king. As Flannagan and many others observe, Satan’s transformation in Book 10 is a deliberate allusion to Cadmus’s transformation.15 Satan returns to Hell in triumph once he has instigated the fall of mankind. Yet he is surprised by his reception, a “dismal universal hiss” (10.509). The fallen angels in Hell have been turned into serpents. Satan, like Cadmus, experiences a gradual metamorphosis: His visage drawn he felt to sharp and spare, His Armes clung to his Ribs, his Leggs entwining Each other, till supplanted down he fell A monstrous Serpent on his Belly prone, Reluctant, but in vaine, a greater power Now rul’d him, punisht in the shape he sin’d. (10.511–16)

But Satan’s new shape, although serpentine, is not the shape in which he sinned. This snake is not adorned in beautiful colors, undulating upright, but is lowly and brute. When Satan falls to the ground, he is “supplanted,”

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or defeated. But “supplanted” literally means sub planta, “beneath the sole of the foot” (OED). So, not only is he shorter in the physical sense, but this literal meaning also foreshadows the coming of Christ, who shall bruise the serpent’s head with his heel.16 “Prone” is another word that indicates an inherently different nature of serpent than the one Satan becomes in Eden. While “prone” can mean “a tendency or disposition” (OED I.1–3), as in the pre-possessed serpent being “Prone on the ground” (9.497), it can also be a literally low position: “Of (the posture or attitude of) a person or animal: such that the belly is next to the ground, or lies beneath the body; lying face downwards or on one’s belly; bending forward and downward; facing downwards” (OED II.5b). This prostrate condition is the opposite of the erect serpent in the Garden. And just as Milton associates “erect” with “man’s right reason,” he also associates “prone” with bestial lowness.17 In Book 7 Milton demonstrates this opposition with chiasmus when describing Adam’s posture: “A Creature who not prone And Brute as other Creatures, but endu’d With Sanctitie of Reason, might erect His Stature” (7.506).18 And so, Satan’s new shape is a harmless shadow of the beautiful and triumphant snake that conquered man in the Garden. God transforms him into this type of serpent to mock Satan’s supposed power, “To dash [his] pride, and joy for Man seduc’t” (10.577).19 Cadmus and Satan are both proud, mighty figures who either ignore, defy, or forget the divine omnipotence of which both have direct experience. The source of Cadmus’s pride is the founding of a city and a nation, a genesis birthed in the conquering of archetypal evil, which takes the shape of a magnificent serpent. Although Satan founds a city as well as a race, they are damned and despicable.20 His pride derives not from conquering the evil of a magnificent serpent, but embodying the evil of a magnificent serpent in order to conquer goodness: mankind, the imago Dei. Self-obsessed and self-loathing, both figures aspire to become the sublime creature that is the foundation of their fragile senses of selfimportance. Instead, both figures are reduced to a mere shadow of such a beast: a harmless, lowly worm, base in reason as well as strength. Truly, for the ambitious and proud, ever chasing shadows, this is a just metamorphosis.

Notes 1

A sexagenarian Milton, as Martindale reminds us, also considered Metamorphoses his favorite Latin text. Charles Martindale, “Paradise Metamorphosed: Ovid in Milton,” Comparative Literature 37, no. 4 (1985): 301.

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Milton may have also read Arthur Golding’s 1567 English translation. George F. Butler, “Arthur Golding’s Ovid and the Mining of Hell in Paradise Lost,” Notes and Queries 51, no. 1 (2004). 3 Since line numbers in Rolfe Humphries’s English translation are approximate, all cited line numbers here come from the original Latin. Ovid, Metamorphoses, vol. 1, trans. Frank Justus Miller, ed. T. E. Page (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1946). When I have used Humphries’s English translations instead of my own, the edition I use is Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1958. 4 Milton also uses the image of the sown dragon’s teeth in Areopagitica: “Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of the living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.” John Milton, Areopagitica, in The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 999. 5 Curiously, Humphries’s translation does not include this adjective. 6 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, Hiroshi Yamashita, and Toshiyuki Suzuki (Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2007). 7 in-spir-ing. 8 Some of Milton’s radical religious ideas included skepticism over the Trinity and a belief that Adam and Eve had sexual intercourse before the Fall. 9 All quotations come from Paradise Lost, in The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). 10 From the Latin errare, “to wander,” as seen in The Cave of Error and the “knight errant” (Red Crosse Knight) in Book I of The Faerie Queene. 11 Here again, Humphries’s translation omits this detail, which, in this case, is instrumentally fatal. 12 Literally, “in-tooth.” 13 The OED = Oxford English Dictionary. OED Online. Oxford University Press (accessed September 1, 2014, http://www.oed.com.proxyiub.uits.iu.edu/view/Entry /27783?redirectedFrom=carbuncle#eid) cites an example of Shakespeare using this meaning in King Lear: Lear says to Goneril “Thou art A Byle, A plague sore, or imbossed Carbuncle In my corrupted blood” (II.iv.227). 14 Cadmus’s wife is Harmonia or Hermione, but she is not given a name in the Metamorphoses. 15 The commentary of Roy Flannagan in The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. 639. 16 DuRocher claims that “supplant” “in its implied moral sense . . . suggests that, having acted to supplant . . . humanity, Satan has effected his own downfall.” Richard J. DuRocher, Milton and Ovid (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985), 129. 17 In Canto XXV of Inferno, Dante also opposes “erect” (dritto) and “prone” (giacea) when describing a serpentine transformation in Hell, as a man becomes a serpent and a serpent becomes a man: “He that was erect drew his towards the temples, and out of the excess of matter that came there the ears issued from the bare cheeks; that which did not run back and was retained made of that excess a

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nose for the face and thickened the lips to the due size. He that was lying down drives the snout forward and draws back the ears into the head as the snail does its horns, and the tongue, which was whole and fit for speech before, divides, and the forked one of the other joins up, and the smoke stops” (XXV:124–35). Dante prefaces his description with a boast that his verse bests Ovid’s rendition of Cadmus: “Let Ovid be silent about Cadmus and Arethusa, for if in his lines he turns him into a serpent and her into a fountain, I do not grudge it to him, for two natives face to face he never so transmuted that both kinds were ready to exchange their substance” (XXV:97–102). Dante, The Divine Comedy 1: Inferno, trans. John D. Sinclair (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961). 18 According to The Oxford English Dictionary, Milton also uses this meaning of “prone” on page 9 of Colasterion: “Nothing . . . but a prone and savage necessity, not worth the name of mariage, unaccompanied with love” (OED II.6). 19 Martindale argues that the “snake passage is rather designed primarily for scornful comic effect: for example, the various learned puns (often a sign of stylistic lowering)—‘supplanted,’ ‘reluctant,’ ‘sublime,’ ‘exploding’—and the joke whereby the expected applause is metamorphosed into ‘a universal hiss.’ ” Martindale, “Paradise Metamorphosed,” 330. 20 Kilgour uses these two aitia to show how metamorphosis plays a part in Miltion’s Christian poetics: “Cadmus is the founder of a nation associated with incest, patricide, and fratricide . . . . In Milton’s poem, Ovid’s aition of the founding of Thebes has been metamorphosed and expanded to become the story of the origins of evil in the entire world . . . . The fall is a change which brings about a radical and permanent metamorphosis.” Maggie Kilgour, “Changing Ovid,” in Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Alison Keith and Stephen Rupp (Toronto: CRRS Publications, 2007), 278–79.

Works Cited Sources Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy 1: Inferno. Translated by John D. Sinclair. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. Milton, John. Areopagitica. In The Riverside Milton. Edited by Roy Flannagan, 987–1024. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. —. Colasterion. 1645. N. pag. Early English Books Online: Text Creation Partnership. Accessed September 2, 2014. http://eebo.chadwyck.com.proxyiub .uits.iu.edu/search/fulltext?SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&ACTION=ByID&ID=D0 0000998708490000&WARN=N&SIZE=75&FILE=../session/1411436711_12 469&SEARCHSCREEN=CITATIONS&DISPLAY=AUTHOR&ECCO=N. —. Paradise Lost. In The Riverside Milton. Edited by Roy Flannagan, 296–710. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Vol. 1. Translated by Frank Justus Miller. Edited by T. E. Page. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946.

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—. Metamorphoses. Translated by Rolfe Humphries. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1958. Shakespeare, William. King Lear. New York: Signet Classics, 1998. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. 2nd ed. Edited by A. C. Hamilton, Hiroshi Yamashita, and Toshiyuki Suzuki. Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2007.

Secondary Literature Butler, George F. “Arthur Golding’s Ovid and the Mining of Hell in Paradise Lost.” Notes and Queries 51, no. 1 (2004): 27–29. DuRocher, Richard J. Milton and Ovid. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Flannagan, Roy, ed. The Riverside Milton. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Kilgour, Maggie. “Changing Ovid.” In Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Edited by Alison Keith and Stephen Rupp, 267–83. Toronto: CRRS Publications, 2007. Martindale, Charles. “Paradise Metamorphosed: Ovid in Milton.” Comparative Literature 37, no. 4 (1985): 301–33. Oxford English Dictionary. OED Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed September 1, 2014. http://www.oed.com.proxyiub.uits.iu.edu/.

SATIRE, SATYRS, AND EARLY MODERN MASCULINITIES IN JOHN MARSTON’S THE SCOURGE OF VILLANIE PER SIVEFORS LINNAEUS UNIVERSITY

It is a well-known fact that early modern writers were frequently confused about the meaning of the term “satire.” It was not until 1605 that Isaac Casaubon established that satire (frequently spelled “satyre” in Elizabethan English) was not connected to the Greek “satyros”—and even then the misconception lingered on for a long time.1 Unsurprisingly, this misunderstanding had implications for how early modern writers conceived of satirical writing. The association with the grotesque mythical creature even suggested, as scholars have pointed out, that to Elizabethans satire had to be rough, harsh and sexually explicit.2 For example, Thomas Lodge claimed that in classical times they presented the liues of Satyers, so that they might wiselye, vnder the abuse of that name, discouer the follies of many theyr folish fellow citesens: and those monsters were then, as our parasites are now adayes: suche as with pleasure reprehended abuse.3

Similarly, George Puttenham made the connection between satires and the satyr clear. The ancients, he suggested, made wise as if the gods of the woods, whom they called Satyres or Siluanes, should appeare and recite those verses of rebuke, whereas in deede they were but disguised persons vnder the shape of Satyres, these terrene and base gods being conuersant with mans affaires, and spiers out of all their secret faults: had some great care ouer man, & desired by good admonitions to reforme the euill of their life.4

Two things can immediately be observed on Puttenham’s and Lodge’s satyr: it is a “base” and even “monstrous” creature, but as a role model for the satirist the satyr is just that: an assumed mask, a role. It is clear not just

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from Puttenham and Lodge but from satirists in general at the time that authors—in Alvin B. Kernan’s words—“are consciously constructing the satyr persona to deliver attacks on fools and folly.”5 This image of the satyr is arguably central to John Marston’s The scourge of villanie (1598), one of the most acerbic satirical pieces from the period and a text that clearly construes the satirist’s persona as “grim” and “stern”: I craue no Syrens of our Halcion times, To grace the accents of my rough-hew’d rimes; But grim Reproofe, stearne Hate of villanie, Inspire and guide a Satyres poesie.6

The satyr is seen as a force whose sheer brutality may—or may not have— the power to cleanse basically everything from viciousness: “O that a Satyres hand had force to pluck / Some fludgate vp, to purge the world from muck.”7 Marston’s satires were part of a general trend for satire in the 1590s, a trend that clearly built on the “rough” satirist’s persona in Juvenal’s satires but that was also characterized by extensive use of the satyr device, although the emphasis was more on specific character traits—aggressiveness, crudity, and insatiable lust—rather than on the physical looks of the creature itself.8 The targets of the angry satyr in Marston’s verse satires, which were published in The metamorphosis of Pigmalions image and certaine satires as well as in The scourge of villanie, are the degenerate members of the court and the Inns of Court, where Marston was a student. It is notable that in these volumes, the harshness of the satyr’s persona is only matched by the effeminacy of the vice it attacks. “A man, a man, a kingdom for a man,” the satirist exclaims in pseudo-Shakespearean fashion, only to find utter disappointment: “Is this a Man? Nay, an incarnate deuill, / That struts in vice, and glorieth in euill.”9 It might seem therefore as if the boundary line between the aggressively masculine satyr and the emphatically not-masculine, degenerate courtiers under attack is firmly upheld, creating a clear normative sense of what constitutes masculinity and masculine behavior. There are, however, several reasons why this assumption would not be correct. Firstly, as many scholars have observed, the boundary between the satirist and his target is not always kept up. As Gabriel Rieger claims, the satirist frequently “both condemns and resembles, or participates in, what he scorns.”10 This paradox in the case of Marston is further complicated by the fact that the narrative voice is evasive because it establishes a persona—the satyr—only to underscore its artificiality. This is arguably a difference, at least in degree, to the classical role models, notably Juvenal,

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that Marston imitated.11 In contrast to Juvenal, Marston’s satire therefore seems less than clear as to what is “manly” and what is not. It would be mistaken, however, to see this ambiguity as a failure of the poetry itself (or indeed, to see the poetry as the production of a warped mind, as some 20th-century criticism used to do12). Rather, as the present essay suggests, The scourge of villanie utilizes satire as a means of forcing the reader to interrogate what masculinity and manly behavior are. The very artificiality of Marston’s persona, which uses the made-up “Kinsayder” instead of his own name, underscores the extent to which the satire has a bearing on any reader. The mythological image of the satyr reinforces the implication that masculinity, for the satirist and the satirized, is open to negotiation and questioning. Moreover, the assumption clearly begs the question of what constituted “manliness” as such in the period, and as much recent scholarship has shown the idea of moderation or a golden mean was crucial to the understanding of manhood in early modern England. Using such models as a framework, the present essay focuses on the paradoxical image of the satyr, who was of course everything else than “moderate” in behavior, and claims that the extremity of his demeanor—the markedly excessive nature of the satyr’s persona—also puts the reader in the position of having to define proper manly behavior instead of being provided with a positive role model. Thus, the present essay does not so much concern itself with the genre definitions themselves as with the implications of masculinity inherent in Marston’s projection of the angry satyr. However, even if Marston’s satires seem to obsess over “faulty” masculinities and fail to construct a clear counter-image, this is not necessarily to say that they could be read as a “deconstruction” of established gender boundaries. After all, it should be remembered that early modern masculinity was itself not a monolithic or clearly defined property, and that the very terms used to describe “manliness” were different from the ones employed today.13 At the same time, there obviously was a great deal of concern and discussion in early modern Europe over what it meant to be male. Central to my discussion is Todd W. Reeser’s understanding of early modern masculinity in terms of a golden mean between extremes: “moderation is either coded as—or assumed to be—masculine.”14 However, if moderation is a defining characteristic of male behavior at the time, there is also the widespread apprehension that masculinity is always at risk of lapsing into loss of selfcontrol.15 As Alexandra Shepard observes, writers at the time saw men as tending by nature to undermine the very standards of masculinity set up by patriarchal norms, being prone to anger, lust and all sorts of excessive

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behavior. Importantly, Shepard emphasizes that writers at the time saw youth as an age particularly threatened by excess, especially so young men, whose natural temperamental heat made them prone to all kinds of unruly behavior.16 At the same time, such excess was also recognized as a ritualistic assertion of maleness through fraternal bonding (unsurprisingly, the toleration for violation of codes by young women seems to have been lower, as Shepard points out).17 Like other institutions of education, Marston’s Inns of Court were no exception in this respect, as is testified by the numerous reports of violation of established codes and the attempts at containing it.18 Historically, then, the satyr persona in Marston’s satirical writings can be contextualized from the point of view of debates over masculinity. If the satyr can be said to take attributes of manliness to an extreme and therefore in practice open them to questioning and discussion, not only the degenerate young men Marston criticizes but also his own “satyrical” persona asserts manliness precisely in opposition to “normal” codes of conduct. The abusive, violent, even disgusting register of his style—which will be discussed in detail later in this essay—establishes a voice that is curiously at odds with the conception of manhood as moderation and restraint. Even if the satirist acts as a scourge of effeminacy and lack of manliness, it is hard to escape the notion that Marston’s own satirical voice embodies precisely the lack of self-control that was anathema to early modern codes of manly conduct. This lack of balance and moderation is obviously not something Marston is unaware of. Indeed, Marston is notably concerned with his persona, his self-projection, to an extent that many other Elizabethan writers are not. If, as Alan Haynes suggests, “Marlowe and Shakespeare rarely intrude” in their writing, then Marston does so almost obsessively.19 Also, his persona seems to revolve very much around issues of manliness—and the problems inherent in it. His very pen name, Kinsayder, has been interpreted as a pun on Mar-stone, that is, on castration: “kinsing seems to have been an operation which castrated unruly dogs and docked their tails.”20 In other words, the author’s persona is not just built around aggression and excess, but around masculine aggression and excess—and the forcible cure for them. In fact, Marston patterned his own satirical writing in terms of youthful excess; in the preface to his play The Fawne (1605), he attempts to distance himself from the vices of his youth: speaking of the poetry-writing in which he has previously indulged, he says, since the ouer-vehement pursute of these delights hath bin the sicknesse of my youth, and now is growne to be the vice of my firmer age, since to

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satisfie others, I neglect my selfe, let it be the curtesie of my peruser, rather to pitie my selfe-hindring labours, than to malice me.21

However, even if Marston has moved on to the playwright’s art, his concern with excessive “delight” spills over into his mature age as well— all creating “neglect of the self” and “self-hindering.” The very first line of the preface exposes the author’s concern with his Montaigne-like quest for self-knowledge: “I haue euer more endeuoured to know my selfe, than to be knowne of others.”22 The fact that he sees the delight of poetry as a hindrance to that knowledge makes the issue of his status as a man of “firmer age” all the more uncertain: his manhood, by implication, lacks the balance and moderation required in a man precisely because of the occupation he has chosen. Like the satyr, he is “over-vehement” in his pursuit. It should be added that the play itself reflects this concern with selfknowledge and does so on the level of the satyr’s persona. The Fawne features the duke Hercules, who dresses up as “Faunus” to go and observe and support his son at the court where he is courting—or not courting—the daughter of the duke Gonzago. In doing this, Hercules also has ample opportunity to expose the vices of the effete courtiers (appropriately equipped with names like “Nymphadoro” and “Sir Amoroso DebileDosso”). Thus, Hercules is also developed around disguises, masks and the satyr’s game—something which makes it hard to accept Joel Kaplan’s suggestion that Hercules provides Marston with a positive pattern of manliness.23 Hercules is changing appearances until the very end of the play; his last words as Hercules are “But now we change our face,” after which he goes on to expound the author’s own views in the guise of Epilogus.24 In The scourge of villanie, this conception of satire in fact extends to both satirist and satirized, because Marston repeatedly accuses his targets of exactly the kind of metamorphic qualities that characterize his own persona: Ile snarle at those, which doe the world beguile With masked showes. Ye changing Proteans list, And tremble at a barking Satyrist.25

While “masked shows” and “changing Proteans” are the object of attack, the canine metaphor also suggests changing shape, for Marston has made it clear that image of the dog is crucially one of role-playing: he plays the rough part of the satirist. If the persons barked at are protean and metamorphic, then so is the satirist himself. Role-playing serves in other

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words both as a target of scorn and as the fundament of the satirist’s voice. What is more, this role-playing is also exposed as a journey from effeminacy to manliness. In Marston’s previous Certaine Satyres, the narrator proudly boasts, “I that euen now lisp’t like an Amorist, / Am turn’d into a snaphaunce Satyrist.”26 Of course, there is no doubt here as to what constitutes the “manlier” form of writing of the two, but given the previously outlined notion of masculinity as moderation the “snaphaunce Satyrist” comes off as aggressively challenging the standards of male behavior and restraint. Indeed, sexual lust constitutes a problem in defining masculinity; built into the notion of the angry, snarling satirist is of course also the idea of sexual excess, or more precisely the inability to control one’s desire. Utilizing the image of the ragged satyr, Marston’s narrator conveys this sense of excess even while condemning it, in a telling pun on “rod”: Who would not shake a Satyres knottie rod? When to defile the sacred seate of God Is but accounted gentlemens disport? To snort in filth, each hower to resort To brothell pits: alas a veniall crime, Nay royall, to be last in thirtith slime.27

License is thus embodied in the very condemnation of it—a neat illustration indeed to the point about the satirist’s implication in the vices he rejects. However, this is not to say that Marston does not try to keep things apart. The counterpart of excess is a “pure” intellect, clean from the clash of sex, and it is a commonplace in The scourge of villanie that intellect and sensuality should be kept apart even though the focus is clearly much more on the vice. In Satire 7, which is clearly more concerned with images of masculinity than any other piece in the collection, the narrator deplores the fact that reason is contaminated by lust: [T]hat same radiant shine, That lustre wherwith natures Nature decked Our intellectuall part, that glosse is soyled With stayning spots of vile impietie, And muddy durt of sensualitie[.]28

There is no doubt as to the nature of such “muddy durt,” as the narrator goes into some detail in saying for example that heterosexual promiscuity is preferable to homosexuality, as in the case of one “Luscus,” who “has his Ganymede” but who should better “have his courtesan, / Or we shall

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have a monster of a man.”29 Recurringly, the rhetoric is based on the emotive value of words such as “slimie,” “muddy,” and “dungie.” Much has been made of the “disgust” that pervades Marston’s poems and plays—there is seemingly no limit to all the slime and snot and scum in them.30 This feature can be and has been labeled “sensationalist,” but it is also paradoxically suggestive of order. As Brown argues, disgust is “a mechanism that enables us to order the world,” that is, between high and low, repulsive and attractive, and so on.31 While this is an appealing claim, Brown does not mention the gender dimension of Marston’s focus on disgust, nor the humoral aspects that were inherent in terms such as “slime” and that were routinely connected to ideas of masculinity and femininity. As Shepard points out, it was a commonplace in early modern humoral theory that the dry and hot was what characterized men, as opposed to the relative moistness and coldness of women.32 Marston clearly despises the “sliminess” and “heat” of drink: “My spirit is not huft vp with fatte fume / Of slimie Ale, nor Bacchus heating grape.” At the same time heat is commendable if combined with dryness: “O what dry braine melts not sharp mustard rime / To purge the snottery of our slimie time?”33 Thus, if Marston can reject the disgustingly hot and slimy temperament, he also embraces the dry heat that was considered a hallmark of manliness. There is an aesthetic, distancing dimension to this obsession with disgust as well, for Marston acknowledges that he ultimately has even to go beyond the satyr convention to achieve his goal: Auaunt yee curres, houle in some cloudie mist, Quake to behold a sharp-fang’d Satyrist. O how on tiptoes proudly mounts my Muse, Stalking a loftier gate than Satyres vse. Me thinkes some sacred rage warmes all my vaines, Making my spright mount vp to higher straines Then wel beseemes a rough-tongu’d Satyres part, But Art curbs Nature, Nature guildeth Art.34

As Kernan points out, attaining “a loftier gate” entails the use of a higher, epic style than the harsh and loose register implied in Elizabethan critical conceptions of satire.35 It is only after art has “curbed” nature that Marston can return safely—or so he believes—to the rough style of the satyr. If so, this strategy did not go down well with Marston’s readers, at least judging from the attack in the student play The Return from Parnassus (1598– 1601), in which Marston, along with a host of other poets, is characterized as a “ruffian in stile” whose poetical ambition is merely that of “lifting vp

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your legge and pissing against the world.”36 It would seem then that what many Elizabethan readers picked up on in Marston’s writing was precisely the excessive, unrestrained “satyrist” whose nature was not curbed by art. However, rather than dismissing Marston’s complex relation to the satyr persona as an aesthetic failure, it seems more fruitful to interpret—as does R. C. Horne—the very extremity of this persona as a device that forces the reader to take positions. Indulging in lust, indulging in anger to such an extent that the reader’s judgment is engaged—this is what Marston’s satires do, and the rough satyr and the angry satirist are the devices the poet uses to accomplish this goal. Horne sees this extremity as a way of attacking current systems of ethical thought that requires the poet to undermine his own position as an authoritative voice.37 Although Horne does not discuss issues of gender or masculinity, it is, I think, appropriate to consider his model in this light as well, for it can be argued that a consequence of Marston’s position is that the reader is forced to define what proper male behavior is rather than have a positive pattern served up. Given the prevalent view of masculinity as moderation, the very excessiveness of Marston’s personification as a satyr exposes manhood as something that is open to debate rather than firmly and definitively established. It is illuminating to extend this discussion by looking at Marston’s actual targets of scorn in his satires, for the degenerate men he criticizes are effectively reduced to role attributes, to pieces of clothing. This is how one gallant is described: “Marke nothing but his clothes, / His new stampt complement, his Cannon oathes.”38 At another point, a “senselesse, sensuall Epicure” is characterized as “nought but clothes, & senting sweet perfume.”39 Such men are not even real in a physical sense: These are no men, but Apparitions, Ignes fatui, Glowormes, Fictions, Meteors, Ratts of Nilus, Fantasies, Colosses, Pictures, Shades, Resemblances.40

In its heavy emphasis on male behavior as role-playing, as “fictions,” The scourge of villanie thus operates on the principle of establishing what men should not be. In that sense the poems also draw upon a fundamental principle of satiric writing. As Brown says of Marston’s plays, they “exploit a structure of comparison and juxtaposition which is one of the basic techniques of satire.”41 However, as Marston’s readers would have known, this technique runs—again—the risk of implicating the writer in the things he condemns. Indeed, Marston’s satires acknowledge throughout that the tortuously established boundaries are also violated. It is the targets

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of attack that constitute the basic reason for the poem’s existence, and hence they cannot but come uncomfortably close to the narrator himself: Welcome all eyes, all eares, all tongues to me, Gnaw pesants on my scraps of poesie. Castilios, Cyprians, court-boyes, spanish blocks, Ribanded eares, granado-netherstocks, Fidles, Scriueners, pedlers, tynkering knaues, Base blew-coates, tapsters, brod-cloth minded slaues, Welcome I-sayth, but may you nere depart, Till I haue made your gauled hides to smart.42

In reducing its targets of scorn to body parts, Marston makes clear the physical and “disgusting” side of the attack, but the attempt at cleansing the world of this “dung” is not defined as any cleaner itself—quite the contrary: “Nay then come all, I prostitute my Muse / For all the swarme of Idiots to abuse.”43 Moreover, the satirist is at the same ontological level as the satirized: the persona of Kinsayder is of course emphatically a “fiction,” just like the shady characters he rails at, “a Mimick Ape / That onely striues to seeme an others shape.”44 If boundaries are established, they are transgressed by the very form and nature of the poetry itself: condemning men for being mere dirty fictions is of course a strategy bound to backfire on you if you do it in the form of an emphatically fictionalized persona who also appears deeply involved in the filth described. However, Marston is perfectly aware of this paradox; it can be argued that the problematic status of his “satyre’s mask” is fully in line with the moral message he constructs. In that sense, the subject position isn’t necessarily an “unstable” one, as for example Douglas Lanier argues: “If for others the satiric persona serves to protect the author from accusation or to urge a set of moral reforms, for Marston it serves to confound the notion of a stable textual ‘voice’ altogether.”45 The evasiveness of the voice is part of a deliberate agenda, for the poet denies any involvement with particular people and desires to remain in anonymity precisely because this is what will make his message relevant to any reader: importantly, in his afterword to The scourge of villanie he wishes “each man to leaue enquiring who I am, and learne to know himselfe.”46 Here, the quest for self-knowledge that we also find in the preface to The Fawne is deflected to the reader’s exploration of selfhood. It can of course be questioned whether Marston’s strategy is very successful considering that he actually has to tell his readers to stop wondering who he is and look for other things instead. But the emphasis on reform in the reader is consistent

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with the message conveyed and would at least have been a conceivable one for a 16th-century reader; it does not suggest that the textual voice as such is on the verge of being dissolved. At the same time, there is a sense of a questioned subject position, for the consequence of Marston’s insistence is that masculinity is interrogated—a claim that has a profound bearing on the reader’s response to the text. The obsession over manhood in Satire 7 opens with the already-mentioned exclamation “A man, a man, a kingdome for a man” and then repeating it with increasingly sarcastic effect throughout the poem: the words “A man, a man” variously draw the responses “What? meanst thou him that walks al open brested / Drawne through the eare with Ribands, plumy crested?” and “What, meanst thou him, that in his swaggering slops / Wallowes vnbraced all along the streete?”47 But if the basic framework for the poem is self-knowledge, then the poem’s quest for masculinity is by implication extended to the reader himself. If each man who reads the text is to know himself qua man, then the gender position becomes far less clear than the condemnation of “scum” and “slime” would suggest. There is a problematic aspect here, though, for Marston clearly differs between readers and readers. He prefers “diuiner souls, celestiall spirits” to decadent pedants: “am I forc’d to beare, / The blasting breath of each lewd Censurer?”48 From such a perspective, the purpose of male reformation seems hollow, for why desire reform in readers who do not need it? This is a point made by R. B. Gill, who argues that the scornful attitude adopted by Marston is partly the satirist’s attempt to establish his contempt for fools, but the convention is complicated by his distaste for their even reading his works. In effect, [the poem] declares that the Scourge was written less for moral reform than for the approval of ‘true iudging eyes, quick sighted censurers.’49

However, I am not fully convinced by this argument as Marston does not just express contempt for foolish readers and leave it at that. On the contrary, he emphasizes that such readers are exactly what makes his poetry successful in the first place: O, how I bristle vp my plumes of pride, O, how I thinke my Satyres dignified, When I once heare some quaint Castilio, Some supple mouth’d slaue some lewd Tubrio, Some spruce pedant, or some span-new come fry Of Innes a-court, striuing to vilefie

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My darke reproofes. Then doe but raile at me, No greater honor craues my poesie.50

Thus, even though Marston spends loads of ink and venom on keeping readers apart, the bad readers are also what infuses his satire with its energy and verve. If the satirist can say that “to my pamphlet, few saue fooles resort,” he also admits that “fooles” are the true constituting force behind his satire.51 Such a division of readers into “good” and “bad” can be understood as flattering the actual reader of his text: you are one of the select (and hence not a spruce pedant). At the same time the tendency to define masculinity in mostly negative terms begs the question of how to articulate one’s own stance, and since the very extremity of Marston’s position forces his audience to engage with it, the issue for the reader is not to follow an established pattern of masculine behavior but rather to establish one in the first place. Satire, in other words, becomes a means of finding out what male behavior is, instead of merely criticizing specific male identities. Marston’s connection to the role-playing aspects of the “satyre” is not just an aestheticized pose, it also, and crucially, forces the (male) reader to consider what role to play. If the narrative voice is exposed as an assumed satyr’s mask, then, as this essay has argued, the reader’s response is equally exposed as a quest, a so far unfulfilled desire to become a man.

Notes 1

See for example Dustin Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), 12–13; Raymond B. Waddington, Aretino’s Satyr: Sexuality, Satire, and Self-Projection in Sixteenth-Century Literature and Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 94–96. 2 See for example K. W. Gransden, “Introduction” to Tudor Verse Satire, ed. K. W. Gransden (London: Athlone Press, 1970), 20. 3 Thomas Lodge, A Reply to Stephen Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse in Defence of Poetry, Musick, and Stage Plays (London, 1579), C2v. 4 George Puttenham, The arte of English poesie (London, 1589), E4v–F1r. 5 Alvin B. Kernan, The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 58. It should be added that Kernan’s—and my—focus on the satirist’s persona does not necessarily do justice to the full range of achievement of satirical writing in early modern England, which is far from always adaptable to this perspective; see Ejner J. Jensen, “Verse Satire in the English Renaissance,” in A Companion to Satire, ed. Ruben Quintero (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 103. 6 John Marston, The scourge of villanie (London, 1598), F8r. 7 Ibid., F8v.

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Kernan, The Cankered Muse, 90–91. It should be pointed out already here that Marston frequently equips the satirist’s persona with the attributes of an angry, snarling dog, so it would be exaggerated to say that Marston’s satyr is without physical characteristics. 9 Marston, The scourge of villanie, F2r. 10 Gabriel A. Rieger, Sex and Satiric Tragedy in Early Modern England: Penetrating Wit (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 2. 11 Although the present essay is not concerned with classical influences or the historical implications of the satire genre, it is instructive to compare Marston to his role model Juvenal, who is arguably clearer in establishing a positive counterpart to the vices condemned and who also puts less emphasis on disguise as such. For example, Juvenal’s satire 6 begins with a firm articulation of the “once” in which chastity was prevalent—hence providing a moral compass for the rest of the poem: “Credo Pudicitiam Saturno rege moratam / in terris” (I believe that Chastity lingered on earth during Saturn’s reign); see Juvenal, “Satire 6,” in Juvenal and Persius, ed. Susanna Morton Braund (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), line 1. Juvenal’s resonant “I believe” articulates a subject position that Marston’s satire, with all its obvious role-playing and masking, does not ultimately espouse. If both Juvenal and Marston construct a persona around the angry satirist, then Marston differs from Juvenal in the sense that the constructedness of the persona is more underscored. 12 See for example John Peter, Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), 176–86. 13 See Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 9. Among the many other recent studies on early modern masculinity, which frequently bring up the issues of threats to or instabilities of male roles, see for example Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (London: Longman, 1999); and the essays in The Image of Manhood in Early Modern Literature: Viewing the Male, ed. Andrew P. Williams (Westport: Greenwood, 1999). 14 Todd W. Reeser, Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Language and Literatures, 2006), 15. 15 Of the many possible examples of this apprehensiveness, one early 17th-century manual uses a telling metaphor to describe proper, moderate manhood: “Wee doe vse to commend that raine, which (falling moderately) wasteth not nor washeth quite away, by too much violence, where it should onely mollifie and make fruitfull, by soft and gentle dropping.” See William Martyn, Youths Instruction (London, 1612), P2r. 16 Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 23–38. 17 Ibid., 96. 18 For the issue of order and disciplinary regulations at the Inns of Court, see particularly Wilfrid R. Prest, The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts, 1590–1640 (London: Longman, 1972), 91–114.

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Alan Haynes, Sex in Elizabethan England (Stroud: The History Press, 2010), 100. 20 Theodore Spenser, “John Marston,” Criterion 13 (1934): 581, cited in Kernan, The Cankered Muse, 96. 21 John Marston, Parasitaster, or The favvne as it hath bene diuers times presented at the blacke Friars, by the Children of the Queenes Maiesties Reuels (London, 1605), A2r. Henceforth abbreviated as The Fawne. 22 Marston, The Fawne, A2r. The play’s parallels to Montaigne are well known and have been explored in for example David A. Blostein, “Introduction” to Parasitaster or The Fawn, by John Marston (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), 8–9. 23 Kaplan observes, in commenting on Marston’s reference in The scourge of villanie to Hercules’s sexual proclivities, that “the hero’s apocryphal thirteenth labor, the impregnation of King Thespius’s fifty daughters in a single night, provided Marston with a comic pattern of virility and creative exuberance”; see Joel Kaplan, “John Marston’s Fawn: A Saturnalian Satire,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 9, no. 2 (1969): 337. However, Blostein points out that Marston’s employment of the myth does not necessarily imply a positive understanding of it: “in none of the frequent applications of the story in Marston’s writings is a happy construction put upon it.” See Blostein, “Introduction,” 31. It could be added that Marston’s very obsession with disguises, masks and embedded personas seems to undermine the credibility of Hercules as a normative pattern. 24 Marston, The Fawne, I4v. 25 Marston, The scourge of villanie, C2v. 26 John Marston, The metamorphosis of Pigmalions image and certaine satyres (London, 1598), C8v. 27 Marston, The scourge of villanie, C1v. It should be added that the OED’s first recorded instance of “rod” in the sense of “penis” is from 1641 (OED, Def. III.10), even though Marston’s use of the word—or his style more generally—seems perfectly compatible with such punning. 28 Marston, The scourge of villanie, F1v. 29 Ibid., C6r. 30 See for example Georgia Brown, “Disgusting John Marston: Sensationalism and the Limits of a Post-Modern Marston,” Nordic Journal of English Studies 4, no. 2 (2005): 121–42. 31 Ibid., 133. 32 Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, 51. 33 Marston, The scourge of villanie, A8r, C2v. 34 Ibid., G7r. 35 Kernan, The Cankered Muse, 103–4. 36 J. B. Leishman, ed, The Three Parnassus Plays (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1949), 241. 37 See R. C. Horne, “Voices of Alienation: The Moral Significance of Marston’s Satiric Strategy,” The Modern Language Review 81, no. 1 (1986): 23. As Horne suggests, Marston’s scorn targets “every current school of ethical thought, including neo-Stoicism, Empiricism, Calvinism, and Cynicism itself” (ibid.).

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38

Marston, The scourge of villanie, F2r. Ibid., F2v. 40 Ibid., F1v. Italics in the original. 41 Brown, “Disgusting John Marston,” 127. 42 Marston, The scourge of villanie, B1v. 43 Ibid., B2v. 44 Ibid., F5v. 45 Douglas Lanier, “Satire, Self Concealment, and State Craft: The Game of Identity in John Marston’s The Malcontent,” Pacific Coast Philology 22, no. 1–2 (1987): 37. 46 Marston, The scourge of villanie, I3v. 47 Ibid., F2r, F4r. 48 Ibid., B2v. 49 R. B. Gill, “A Purchase of Glory: The Persona of Late Elizabethan Satire,” Studies in Philology 72,no. 4 (1975): 416. 50 Marston, The scourge of villanie, B3r. 51 Ibid., D8r. 39

Works Cited Blostein, David A. “Introduction” to Parasitaster or The Fawn, by John Marston, 1–62. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978. Breitenberg, Mark. Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Brown, Georgia. “Disgusting John Marston: Sensationalism and the Limits of a Post-Modern Marston.” Nordic Journal of English Studies 4, no. 2 (2005): 121–42. Foyster, Elizabeth A. Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage. London: Longman, 1999. Gill, R. B. “A Purchase of Glory: The Persona of Late Elizabethan Satire.” Studies in Philology 72, no. 4 (1975): 408–18. Gransden, K. W. “Introduction” to Tudor Verse Satire. Edited by K. W. Gransden, 1–29. London: Athlone Press, 1970. Griffin, Dustin. Satire: A Critical Reintroduction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994. Haynes, Alan. Sex in Elizabethan England. London: The History Press, 2010. Horne, R. C. “Voices of Alienation: The Moral Significance of Marston’s Satiric Strategy.” The Modern Language Review 81, no. 1 (1986): 18–33. Jensen, Ejner J. “Verse Satire in the English Renaissance.” In A Companion to Satire. Edited by Ruben Quintero, 101–17. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Juvenal. Juvenal and Persius. Edited and translated by Susanna Morton Braund. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Kaplan, Joel. “John Marston’s Fawn: A Saturnalian Satire.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 9, no. 2 (1969): 335–50. Kernan, Alvin B. The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959.

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Lanier, Douglas. “Satire, Self Concealment, and State Craft: The Game of Identity in John Marston’s The Malcontent.” Pacific Coast Philology 22, no. 1–2 (1987): 35–45. Leishman, J. B., ed. The Three Parnassus Plays (1598–1601). London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1949. Lodge, Thomas. A Reply to Stephen Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse in Defence of Poetry, Musick, and Stage Plays. London, 1579. Marston, John. The metamorphosis of Pigmalions image and certaine satyres. London, 1598. —. Parasitaster, or The favvne as it hath bene diuers times presented at the blacke Friars, by the Children of the Queenes Maiesties Reuels. London, 1606. —. The scourge of villanie. London, 1598. Martyn, William. Youths Instruction. London, 1612. Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. Accessed September 20, 2012. http://www.oed.com. Peter, John. Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956. Prest, Wilfrid R. The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts, 1590– 1640. London: Longman, 1972. Puttenham, George. The arte of English poesie. London, 1589. Reeser, Todd W. Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture. Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Language and Literatures, 2006. Rieger, Gabriel A. Sex and Satiric Tragedy in Early Modern England: Penetrating Wit. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Shepard, Alexandra. Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Smith, Bruce R. Shakespeare and Masculinity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Waddington, Raymond B. Aretino’s Satyr: Sexuality, Satire, and Self-Projection in Sixteenth-Century Literature and Art. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

PART III FRENCH LITERATURE

FUNCTIONS OF MYTHOLOGICAL REFERENCES IN RABELAIS’ PANTAGRUEL AND GARGANTUA OLIVIER MILLET PARIS-SORBONNE UNIVERSITY

In the only recorded mention we find of Rabelais’ novels by the author speaking directly as François Rabelais rather than as narrator (Alcofrybas Nasier), the novelist refers to his work as “mythologies Pantagruelicques.”1 Indeed, through the adventures of his good giants, Rabelais invented a new (French) mythology2 which symbolically expresses the quest for a new world called “the humanist Renaissance.” Though his works adopt the form of the popular novel and mock the claims of mediaeval historical chronicle as a historical genre (pointing to its customary lying), they use classical mythology to achieve parody and symbolism.3 Rabelais successively published Pantagruel (1532), Gargantua (1535), Le Tiers livre (1546), Le Quart livre (1552); mythology increasingly played a role in supporting and underlining the key literary and spiritual aspects of the narrative. The first two of these novels, Pantagruel and Gargantua, are at the focus of this study. These two works are closest to the traditions of both the popular novel and the chivalric romance, and thus appear to be far removed from the writing styles (both poetry and scholarly prose) which drew most extensively upon classical mythology in the French literature of the end of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance. I will only focus on the explicit mythological references. I intend to examine the functions of these references, which are as unexpected as the other scholarly references (medical, philosophical, etc.) in the narratives of the French Lucian.4 In the two first parts of his work, Rabelais borrows relatively few figures and themes from Greco-Roman mythology, which he uses for three intellectual purposes, and which signal to the readers his intentions and his specificity. I will successively distinguish three functions: a hermeneutic function which raises the question of the literal and allegorical meanings of Rabelais’ novels; a poetic function which brings out his literary originality; and finally, a generic and stylistic function which serves to

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underline the comic inspiration of the learned culture, which in turn gives even more meaning to the adventures of the giants and their friends.

The Hermeneutic Function The first function of the mythological references cannot be separated from the general context, namely the revival of hermeneutic culture, or put another way, the hermeneutic crisis5 that the humanist Renaissance underwent in the first half of the sixteenth century in Europe, notably in France and German-speaking countries. Two related questions arose in the first decades of the sixteenth century. One concerned the allegorical deciphering, in a Christian context, of the poetical fictions of mythology. The other arises from a critique leveled by certain Christian humanists at the exegetic systematism of biblical allegorism which was conceived as a systematic analysis of four distinct meanings: the literal sense and three other senses called allegorical or spiritual. The critique took on a new significance in the context of the Protestant Reformation. The two questions are closely linked, as can be seen in the 1526 Parisian edition of Le Roman de la rose and then in Rabelais’ works. The anonymous Prologue to Le Roman de la rose of this Parisian printer contrasts with the essence of contemporary Christian, Erasmian humanism. A continuation of the old dispute to which Le roman de la rose gave rise in the fifteenth century, the text originated in a clerical and scholastic culture, and legitimized both secular literature and amorous inspiration because the poetic fable was allegorically interpreted, just as the author of Ovide moralisé had done for The Metamorphoses. That is why the text of this Prologue is based on the model of the articulation of the various allegorical or spiritual senses, but its author is very cautious about the interpretation: [B]ien peult estre que ledict autheur [du Roman de la rose] ne jettoit pas seullement son penser et fantasie sus le sens litteral ains plustost attiroit son esprit au sens allegoric et moral comme l’un disant et entendant l’aultre. Je ne veux pas ce que je dis affermer, mais il me semble qu’il peult ainsi avoir faict. Et si celluy aucteur n’a ainsi son sens reiglé et n’est entré soubz la morale couverture penetrant jusques à la mouelle du nouveau sens mystique, toutesfois l’on le peult morallement exposer et en diverses sorte.6

Then the anonymous author mentions the four allegorical senses of the rose’s amorous quest, and considers the “estat de sapience [the state of wisdom],” the “estat de grâce [the state of grace],” the “vierge Marie [the

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Virgin Mary]” or the “gloire d’éternelle beatitude [the glory of eternal bliss].” The question of the author’s real intention, and that of the other meanings to be deciphered in the text, had already been addressed by Petrarch in his comments in a letter on The Aeneid. Indeed, Petrarch argued that “the differences between intellects were infinite” and that “some interpretations could not be dismissed, even though, perhaps, they had never even crossed the minds of those who had created these fables.”7 In fact, in the first half of the sixteenth century the problem of the allegorical sense was abundantly discussed in a different way, in the context of the hermeneutic, exegetic, and religious crisis of which the Protestant Reformation was only one manifestation. Indeed, the question arose of the distinction between the possible intention of the author of a biblical text and the meanings theologians could allegorically find in it using the traditional method of the three allegorical Christian meanings of the Bible (typological, moral and anagogical). The same subject was also alluded to a few years later in the Prologue to Gargantua, in an aporetic and comic passage8 which has been abundantly commented upon by literary critics since the 1970s. Some critics find it hard, if not impossible, to know whether Rabelais endorses an allegorical reading in his Prologue. However, if you carefully study the Prologue and the commentaries to which it gave rise, there are a few things you can be sure of. In the Prologue, the narrator, who is comic and casual, mocks the medieval tradition of the Christian allegorical interpretations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Ovid Moralized)—a satire of the “moralizations” which already appeared in Pantagruel, in the pseudocatalogue of the library of Saint-Victor Abbey.9 According to medieval tradition, every single detail in Ovid’s mythological encyclopedia had a univocal moral (Christian) meaning, either because it was the author’s intention, or because of the allegorical consistency of the mythological narratives. On the contrary, humanists such as Erasmus10 and Rabelais believed that every myth could have more than one meaning, but that ancient poets did not necessarily know about it. Indeed, they thought that modern authors—being cultured and eloquent and hence fecund—have to use those myths without supposing that they have a predetermined (Christian) meaning, as they may also pick in a free spirit, examples from history, from the Old Testament or even from comedies, just because they wanted an abstract idea to be lively and concrete, and reinterpret the concerned themes and figures for this purpose. In fact, in the Prologue to Gargantua (which, from the 1542 edition of that novel onwards, was also used as a Prologue to Rabelais’ other novels), mythology is used twice in this way; Rabelais refers to Sileni and to Homer’s works. In order to

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discuss the problem of the allegorical behind the literal meaning of his own work, he uses one of Erasmus’s Adages, namely the platonic theme that Socrates was as wise as Silenus.11 Erasmus argues that, in antiquity, pictures of Sileni—cheerful and frivolous satyrs—were painted on boxes: the outside was grotesque, but inside there was a god figure that people were surprised to discover when they opened the boxes. In the same way, Socrates, though outwardly ugly, humble, and ridiculous, was virtuous and heroic. According to the Prologue of Gargantua, Rabelais’ novels are analogous to those boxes: the readers should not just consider the titles, and more generally the comic aspects on the surface, but “discover the higher meaning” and explore the right themes: “religion,” “the state of politics” and “economic life.” The author of the Prologue then poses the question of the allegorical meaning of Homer and mythology. Finally Rabelais disclaims any responsibility for the allegorical meanings which his “livre seigneurial” may engender, and asserts that he is as guiltless as Homer in this respect. Thus, in the Prologue, he kills three birds with one stone. Firstly, he ridicules the traditional moralizations of classical mythology, and through them the whole of traditional allegorical culture, including the system of the figurative meanings of Holy Scripture to which he alludes when he contrasts “the literal meaning” with “the higher meaning”;12 secondly, he uses again the platonic and Erasmian symbol of Silenus, a drunkard, “the master of good Bacchus”13 and a grotesque mythological figure who serves as an introduction to an essential dimension of Rabelais’ works, namely wine, the source of free inspiration which comically leads one to wisdom; thirdly, he claims that his works are analogous to Homer’s epics because Homer was “the paragon of philologists.” The preestablished catalogue of the pagan symbols that were Christianized by tradition is thus discarded and replaced, on the one hand by the creativity of the modern humanist writer who, like Erasmus, is sensitive to the open meaning of classical texts and above all myths, and on the other hand by the active role and increased responsibility of the readers in the process of deciphering and understanding mythological and other symbols. Renaissance mythographers14 wrongly maintained that the Sileni were allegorical symbols of the dangers of excessive drinking. But in the works of Plato, Athenaeus, Xenophon and Erasmus, the Sileni are described in many different ways; in Rabelais’ works, the name and the connotations acquire a very personal meaning. “Moralization” is completely rejected, so that mythology is no longer a catalogue of symbolic figures, but a set of interrelated literary references which form a truly Rabelaisian mythology; what is more, both the author and the reader now have a different status.

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The Poetic Function (Figures of Author and Reader) The poetic approach, which runs parallel to the hermeneutic one, should focus on other mythological references, namely the muses in Pantagruel. In chapter twenty-six, Pantagruel and his companions have a banquet in order to celebrate their victory over 660 knights. They have salted meat, to which is then added game killed on the spot. For Rabelais this is an occasion to describe the improvised culinary preparations and to bring in a character called Epistemon, a vastly cultured humanist who “fit au nom des neuf Muses neuf belles broches de bois à l’antique [did . . . make, in the name of the nine Muses, nine antique wooden spits].”15 They drink vinegar because it makes a good accompaniment to game, and because it mitigates the effects of excessive drinking (caused by the salted meat). In the footnotes to modern editions,16 it is explained that the wooden spits and the Muses are in equal number (nine)—nine having a precise meaning, as can be seen in Plutarch’s Apophthegmata Laconica, where it is said that in antiquity warriors offered sacrifices to the Muses before fighting.17 But the reference and the interpretation are certainly inappropriate in the context, for here the characters are not preparing for the next battle, but celebrating the previous one. On the other hand, the traditional interpretation does not account for the fact that there is a close link between cooking, gastronomic delights and the collective joy of the banquet: “C’était triomphe de les voir bâfrer [it was a triumphant and incomparable spectacle to see how they ravened and devoured].” This is in fact another tradition, according to which muses are goddesses who preside over banquets in order to moderate the effects of wine, as can be seen, for example, in Homer’s works. The Muses’ function is also discussed at length in De Musica, another treatise attributed to Plutarch: It was for a most important service and remedial effect that Homer included music on such occasion, that is, at the meals and social gatherings of the ancients. For it is a fact that music was there introduced for its efficacy in counteracting and soothing the heat latent in wine, . . . music was introduced forasmuch as wine makes the bodies and minds of those who overindulge in it disorderly, while music by its order and balance brings us to the opposite condition and soothes us.18

Plutarch’s remarks apply perfectly to the passage under discussion where Pantagruel and his companions share a meal, but enjoy the cooling effect of game and vinegar, which are easy to digest in comparison to wine and salted meat. As a companion of Pantagruel, called Carpalin, says: “Cette chaire salée me altère tout [This salt meat makes me horribly dry].” If you

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read the passage carefully, you become aware of the fact that Rabelais discusses dietetics (a fit subject for a doctor of medicine) and emphasizes the role of the Muses of music and poetry, which is to moderate the demands of both the body and the soul. Though he was a scholar, Rabelais did not intend to give the readers an erudite lecture on mythology. In the next passage, music and food are again associated in a typically Rabelaisian fashion, as the author reinterprets a motif that can be found in Homer and Plutarch alike. Indeed, Pantagruel then says: Plût à Dieu que chacun de vous eût deux paires de sonnettes de sacre [= oiseau de volerie] au menton, et que j’eusse au mien les grosses horloges de Rennes, de Poitiers, de Tours et de Cambrai, pour voir l’aubade que nous donnerions au remuement de nos badigoinces. [Would to God every one of you had two pairs of little anthem (sic!19) or sacring bells hanging at your chin, and that I had at mine the great clocks of Rennes, of Poictiers, of Tours, and of Cambray, to see what a peal they would ring with the wagging of our chaps].20

The classical, almost ascetic motif of the self-control one can learn from the Muses is here replaced by an imaginary association of the banquet with modern music, in an aristocratic (the motif of hunting, with the “oiseau de volerie” for the falconry), modern and gigantesque (the ringing of clocks with the “grosses horologes”) treatment of the subject which is comic on the surface, but in fact very serious. Pantagruel dreams that bells are attached to his companions’s chins because their jaws spontaneously make euphoric music when moving. But the function of the Muses goes beyond the amusing sound of chewing. In the following chapter, Pantagruel and his companions establish two trophies in memory of their victory. On this occasion they sing “petites chansonnettes villatiques [small popular songs],” and Pantagruel writes a poem in which he celebrates the victory of intelligence over force, together with the faith in divine providence, namely the winners’ moderation. In every respect, therefore, the readers are immersed in the cult of the Muses (songs, poetry, moderation), but again, in a typically Rabelaisian fashion, because Panurge immediately parodies Pantagruel’s poem and recites an obscene poem where the name of Bacchus rhymes with “bas culs [low arses].” Finally, Pantagruel puts an end to the episode of the banquet and the trophies when he makes a pun in which the feast and the Muses are associated: “C’est trop musé à la viande [We have spent too much time dealing with food and the Muses].” In Rabelais’ cheerfully utopian world, there is a close link between, on the one hand, the carnivalesque excess represented for example in the myth of the land of plenty and, on the other, the ideal of moderation;21 between the

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Muses and hearty eating; between music and the noises of the body; between the erudite culture of scholarly literature and the feasting episodes—at least for the protagonist and his companions.22 Such is the function of the mythological theme of the Muses—a theme which helps us define the poetics of the novel. In fact, as is almost always the case with Rabelais, mythology is not just a literary or cultural ornament, but an essential theme, as can be seen in the following passage where Rabelais refers again to the Muses, but in a different form and with a different function. The narrator describes the preparation for and the beginning of the decisive battle in the protagonist’s army and in the opposite camp. When the intensification reaches a climax just before the decisive war episode, the narrator invokes the Muses in order to be fit for the job. Ô qui pourra maintenant raconter comment se porta Pantagruel contre les trois cents géants ? Ô ma muse, ma Calliope, ma Thalie, inspire-moi à cette heure, restaure-moi les esprits, car voici le pont aux ânes de logique, voici le trébuchet, voici la difficulté de pouvoir exprimer l’horrible bataille qui fut faite. A la mienne volonté que j’eusse maintenant un boucal du meilleur vin que burent onques ceux qui liront cette histoire tant véridique [O who were able now condignly to relate how Pantagruel did demean himself against the three hundred giants! O my Muse, my Calliope, my Thalia, inspire me at this time, restore unto me my spirits; for this is the logical bridge of asses! Here is the pitfall, here is the difficulty, to have ability enough to express the horrible battle that was fought. Ah, would to God that I had now a bottle of the best wine that ever those drank who shall read this so veridical history!].23

Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry, is mentioned because the passage is a parody of epic style. But what matters here is to determine what Thalia symbolizes. We know that in ancient sources Thalia represents many different values and is usually associated with the “low,” i.e. simple style used in idylls and comedies, as is explained in modern editions about the passage in under discussion.24 But Thalia is above all the muse who presides over banquets—an important feature because it enables us to better understand the passage and the nature of Rabelais’ inspiration. This particular function was stressed by some Renaissance mythographers.25 In fact their view echoes Plutarch’s Symposiaka26 where the different functions of the Muses are discussed. The civil and royal functions, namely the functions related to matters of government and state are attributed to Calliope—an analogy with Pantagruel, a good giant, a prince and a military leader whose domain is both political and military. As for Thalia, she

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Functions of Mythological References in Pantagruel and Gargantua . . . converts our concerns for food and drink from something savage and animal into a social and convivial affair. That is why we apply the word thaliazein [merry-making] to those who enjoy one another’s company over wine in a gay and friendly manner, not to those who indulge in drunken insults and violence.27

Rabelais’ scholarly allusion to Plutarch adds a new dimension to the passage, a dimension I have already emphasized when discussing the previous chapters: the association of the politico-military theme of war with that of a cheerful yet moderately “boozy” banquet. The author and his readers are therefore involved in a literary activity which, though serious, thrives in the collective and symposiac atmosphere of a banquet where wine is drunk joyfully but moderately. The novel is serious (see above) precisely because it is an allegory: we have seen that in the Prologue Rabelais told us about the existence of a “higher meaning,” that is, among other things, a political meaning. But Thalia, who, as said, presides over banquets, is associated with this politico-military Calliope in order to help both the narrator (“restore unto me my spirits”) and the reader (“the best wine that ever those drank who shall read this so veridical history”) to discover the deep meaning of the text. And the reader can only discover the meaning if he participates in the banquet with Pantagruel, his companions and the nine Muses; if he eats the nine game broiled meats; if he drinks the vinegar. Thus the poetic aspects are closely linked to the hermeneutic aspects as defined in the Prologue to Gargantua. Thanks to the mythological references, the poetics of the grotesque alliance of “low” and “high” is simultaneously a vehicle for hermeneutics because it associates the author, who is joyfully unaware of the allegorical sense of his own works, with the reader, who is free to enjoy himself as he tries to decipher the deep meaning. It is important to note that ignorant and semi-ignorant readers do not feel excluded by Rabelais’ mythological references. Indeed, in this passage, the readers who are not familiar with mythology can at least perceive the comic effect produced by those references which, though scholarly, are expressed in a half serious, half clownish (or drunken) style. In the narrator’s invocation of the two Muses, semi-ignorant readers can recognize the literary and stylistic contrasts of the two inspiring goddesses, the meeting point of epic and comedy, and the grotesque mixture of “high” and “low” which is so typical of Rabelais. Finally, humanist readers, those who have read Plutarch, are asked to interpret the “higher meaning” of the mythological references, but in order to do so they should follow the hermeneutic directions given in the Prologue of Gargantua.

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Generic and Stylistic Functions (Parody and Symbolism) The fact that nobody is excluded is also visible when examining the literary and stylistic functions of the other mythological references in the two novels. In the Prologue to Gargantua, before mentioning the Socratic and Erasmian figure of Silenus, that is, a scholarly allegorical figure, the narrator mentions some figures already known to his readers, “telles que voyons de présent es boutiques des apothecaires [like those we now may see in the shops of apothecaries]”:28 harpies and satyrs, that is to say mythological creatures that were apparently popular in the sixteenth century. Moreover, Rabelais enumerates other non-mythological creatures: “oisons bridés, lièvres cornus, canes bâtées, boucs volants [bridled geese, horned hares, saddled ducks, flying goats, thiller harts, and other such-like counterfeited pictures].” It appears, therefore, that Silenus is associated with his modern equivalents, so that it is very easy for the reader to understand the author’s meaning. The mythological elements cannot be reduced to a scholarly classical culture; they pertain to the world of everyday life, of carnival and modern fantasy. It is plain that Johann Fischart, the German adapter of Rabelais’ work, fully understood this point, as he added many other elements to the list of these fantastic creatures, for example when he mentions the grotesque29 that was so typical of humanistic decoration style in the Renaissance but could be understood or enjoyed without any knowledge of classical antiquity. Further in the novel, the description of Gargantua’s codpiece has the same aesthetic function in the sense that it is compared to a mythological cornucopia “telle que donna Rhea es deux nymphes Adrastea et Idea, nourrices de Jupiter [as Rhea gave to the two nymphs, Amalthea and Ida, the nurses of Jupiter].”30 Thus the detailed description of a luxurious garment that was fashionable for men in 1530 is rich in meaning. It appears that this codpiece (the garment which is larger than the body; the flowers and the fruit which are larger than the cornucopia; the mythological reference which is poetic and more meaningful than the phallus) is the very symbol of Rabelais’ novels;31 with their bawdy kind of naturalism; their glorification of fertility (even through the feminine categorization of a phallic symbol); their ornament which “overflows” and, therefore, finally hides what it celebrates. In Rabelais’ two novels, many other elements have exactly the same aesthetic function and produce certain effects on attentive readers, even if they are not very educated. For example, in a sentence like “Bacchus ne fut-il pas engendré par la cuisse de Jupiter? [Was not Bacchus begotten by Jove’s thigh?],”32 this recurrent bacchic theme, whose symbolic value is fundamental in Rabelais’ works,

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is introduced by a riddle which can easily be solved, but which considerably widens the horizons of open-minded readers. Therefore, Rabelais presupposes that mythology is a well-known subject (which it is not), and he acquaints his readers with it. In the same way, he constantly uses place names and proper names which he borrows from his natal Chinon in Touraine, as if sixteenth-century readers (and those of today), were familiar with them. Mythology is a concrete discourse—whatever the subject, be it people, things or places. “Global” mythological phenomena are always “local.” Rabelais perfectly understood this dimension of mythology, not because he sought to deprive it of its prestige and its symbolic functions, but because he wanted it to be integrated into his own novels. His works can be read by all sorts of readers, and they also incorporate the richness of popular culture, together with the liturgical and biblical elements in Christian culture (which are sometimes combined with classical mythology33). In Rabelais’ novels, many elements are extraordinary, fantastic, hidden or legendary. Thanks to mythology, the prestige of antiquity becomes tangible, and what is remote and fictional becomes palpable. However, most of the references are not (only) real symbols, but are also connected with the literary genre of the epic and the noble deeds of classical heroes. Homer and Virgil are, among others, sources of inspiration.34 Similarly, the comic references35 to prestigious works of classical culture do have a deeper meaning, but in that case the narrator exclusively refers to literary texts and wholeheartedly accepts the epic effects. In this respect, the readers do not have to be very knowledgeable: they can easily understand that the meaning is somewhere between burlesque eulogy and literary satire. Gargantua’s mother gives birth to her son after an eleven-month pregnancy, Comme dit Homère36 que l’enfant (duquel Neptune engrossa la nymphe) naquit l’an après révolu [As Homer says, that the child, which Neptune begot upon the nymph, was born a whole year after the conception, that is, in the twelfth month].37

It is unimportant that Homer refers to a nymph (Tyro) and her two sons (Pelias and Neleus): what really matters is the fact that a long pregnancy enables the child to reach perfection and accomplish heroic deeds. In this passage, Rabelais’ intention is the same when he explicitly mentions an ancient source (Aulus Gellius), and then Hercules, who was conceived during an exceptionally long night. Here the narrator seeks to glorify his hero and to astonish his readers. The accumulation of references and scholarly sources is supposed to legitimize the medical and legal discourse

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on extended pregnancies. Rabelais then lists “mile autres fols [a thousand other madmen]” in a pseudo-attempt at further strengthening his discourse. Is the narrator a quack who makes jokes in order to tell the truth? Either way, he is both a liar and a scholar, and he uses mythology in the second degree, both as poetic discourse and as humorous fiction. Mythology is neither a mere hyperbole nor a credible allegory which reveals mysteries whose veracity must not be questioned. This Lucianic use of mythology is characteristic of Rabelais’ works as a whole in the sense that it has a purely literary function. Therefore, the readers do not have to know or understand mythology, although the educated ones will find it profitable to grasp its implications. The status of mythological discourse strikingly appears in Gargantua when we study the references which can be found in the two chapters that are entirely written in verse (chapters 2 and 58). Indeed, the readers do not have to understand those references, for the simple reason that the two chapters are deliberately enigmatic, even incomprehensible! Rabelais was extremely well versed in classical culture, but he was no pedant, nor did he have a didactic intention in this matter. In Pantagruel, the discourse is a parody of epic style and the heroes are supposedly superior to those of classical tradition. The ancient and the modern worlds are superimposed so that the emphasis is placed on the grotesque contrasts. Of course, Pantagruel is “superior” to Hercules (Pantagruel, chapter 4), the Croustelles fountain in Poitou is “caballine” (chapter 5), etc. From a generic and stylistic point of view, the mythological elements are also, of course, partly accurate, partly deformed and grotesque. For example, Pantagruel’s enemies are giants who carry their King Anarche away “à leur col [on their necks],” “as Aeneas did for his father Anchises when Troy was destroyed”:38 there is an unexpected contrast because in that case the malevolent giants are comically compared to the Trojan hero who founded Rome. In other words, there is nothing pious about their attitude: it is in fact comically low. The narrator’s voice is not the only epic element, as there is obviously something epic about the characters themselves. For example, there are characters that refer to themselves as classical heroes, and they do so by using direct speech and mythological references. In chapter 24, before going to battle, Epistemon declares that Sinon (a cunning character in the Aeneid) is one of his ancestors. Then his companions Eusthenes and Carpalim respectively declare that they are descended from Hercules and Camilla the Amazon. They are obviously boasters; but nonetheless they rightly identify with heroes with whom they have much in common. Indeed, they are cunning (Epistemon), athletic (Eusthenes), and fast

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(Carpalim). In this episode, Rabelais seems, in a good-natured way, to have mocked the fact that Renaissance princes symbolically appropriated the virtues of classical heroes through the mythological characters and scenes on their suits of armor. There is always an element of satire or doubt: Panurge maintains that his adventures are “more marvellous than those of Ulysses,”39 but in fact this is to be doubted as Panurge is just as crafty and untrustworthy as Ulysses himself. Should Panurge be trusted? In Pantagruel, Panurge is often associated with classical mythology when he is depicted as a deceitful hero. For example, in chapter 16, it is said that he is as good with his hands as Minerva and Arachne, and he is depicted as a conjurer, a crook and a thief, which is an introduction to a “dispute par signes” and his victory over Thaumaste, an English philosopher he defeats at the Sorbonne by using skilful, manual tricks (chapter 18). When he is associated with the mythical figures of Minerva and Arachne, he is assimilated to a woman and it is suggested that he is cruel; above all his role is defined as ambiguous in the sense that Arachne is in the myth victorious over Minerva in the art of tapestry-making, but then falls victim to the power of the latter. Panurge is human, all too human, and as such he is a disturbing figure of the manipulation of supernatural (hence diabolical) forces. In another passage (chapter 21), he pretends to woo a Parisian lady: he refers to the fashionable theme of the judgment of Paris and proclaims that she is more beautiful than Venus. Then, in her presence, he prays to the Olympians gods and goddesses (the narrator also prays to them). In both cases, it is the typical discourse of a sophist who believes that mythology is pure fiction and can be interpreted for some evil purpose. The ending of this episode is grotesque and even obscene, and it serves as a conclusion to this comic, but perverted inversion of mythology. Therefore, the mythological elements belong to the domain of illusion and cultural appearance, and sometimes even constitute “false evidence.” In any case, parody and perversion are not the most important keys to the Rabelaisian use of mythology. Most of these references are part of a literary tradition that is rich in figures and innuendoes that invite the reader to make a symbolic interpretation. For example, when reluctant to confront a formidable enemy, Pantagruel justifies himself by saying: “Hercules ne osa jamais entreprendre contre deux [Hercules first never undertook against two].”40 As is very often the case in Rabelais’ novels, this expression is one of Erasmus’s Adages.41 The latter gives a few examples and says that this adage can be used in three cases: firstly when a coward (a man like Thersite, not like Hercules) confronts some terrible danger; secondly when a brave man confronts two dangers at the same time; thirdly if a man who is not Hercules confronts two Hercules! This is

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exactly what Rabelais is saying in this passage: Pantagruel is indeed a Herculean figure and has to confront an army of giants. The parodic elements do not only aim at belittling the characters: through such literary allusions, they emphasize both the epic dimension and the redeeming mission of Rabelais’ heroes; the mythological symbols, figures, and themes of classical tradition and of modern humanistic culture are therefore used to this effect. In another passage, Pantagruel’s enemies are deluged by a flood of urine “plus énorme que celui de Deucalion” [more enormous than that of Deucalion].”42 This is not only a carnivalesque parody of the myth of the deluge, nor is it only an inversion through which the lower part of the body (in that case urine) is celebrated in a grotesque and cheerful manner. The theme of the deluge, which, in the first chapter, is associated with the birth of the hero, is further developed, and the narrator then mentions two different interpretations given by the victims of the urinary deluge: firstly “la fin du monde et jugement final [the end of the world and the final judgment],” namely the biblical symbolism of the Flood and the character of Noah (who is the biblical equivalent of Deucalion); secondly the revenge of Neptune and the sea gods who release salty sea water (“eau marine et salée”). Of course, neither explanation is correct; and it is the reference to Deucalion which gives us a clue. In fact, Deucalion was a just and pious man, and he was a founder of cities; hence he was a most unusual figure at a time when criminality was rife, as is shown in many ancient works, like, for example, Ovid’s Metamorphoses (I, 318). What matters in this reference, therefore, is the figure of Deucalion, and not the false interpretations given by his enemies. At a time when apocalyptic or gloomy prophecies were very successful, Rabelais aims at reassuring his contemporaries; to do so, he does not mock the biblical or pagan myths of the deluge, but only the sixteenth-century exploitation of ancestral eschatological fears. In this respect, Pantagruel, whose urine carries everything away, is indeed a redeeming hero (it is an established fact that he has Christ-like features) who inaugurates a new mythological (evangelical) era that is cheerful and carefree with respect to religion.

Conclusion To sum up, I would suggest that the most important feature of classical mythology in Rabelais’ first two novels is the link and interrelation between three functions, hermeneutic, poetic and generic-stylistic. In the Rabelaisian world, only Biblical references play such a part with the same functions. In the case of the Bible43 the hermeneutic function means the

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question of an allegorical meaning of the text; the poetic function raises the question of the believable, and linked with the generic-stylistic we find, in the same way as for classical mythology, the whole span of parody. Both classical mythology and Bible work together, in a parallel or opposite way, and often in the same passage. In short, mythology can neither be reduced to a literary, learned ornament, nor to a simple, univocal symbol for a Christian-Evangelical sense. It plays its own part, and at the same time leads the readers to decipher one level of signification (i.e. the classical meaning) through the other (i.e. the evangelical one), and vice versa.

Notes 1

François Rabelais, Le Quart livre in Œuvres complètes (further abbreviated: OC), ed. Mireille Huchon (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 517. On Rabelais’ novels as “Mythologies Pantagruelicques” or “fabuleuses narrations” (in the sense of Macrobius’s use of the expression “narrationes fabulosae” in his Saturnalia), see Mireille Huchon, “Le roman, histoire fabuleuse,” in Le Roman français au XVIe siècle ou le renouveau d’un genre dans le contexte européen, ed. M. Clément and P. Mounier (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2005). 2 There are many critical studies on this theme, such as Henri Weber, “Eléments structurels de quelques mythes rabelaisiens,” in Etudes rabelaisiennes, vol. 21, Rabelais en son demi-millénaire: Actes du Colloque international de Tours (24–29 septembre 1984), ed. Jean Céard and Jean-Claude Margolin (Geneva: Droz, 1988); Max Gauna, The Rabelaisian Mythologies (London: Associated University Press, 1996); on the use of French and popular (folkloric) mythology by Rabelais see Claude Gaignebet, A plus hault sens: L’ésotérisme spirituel et charnel de Rabelais (Paris, Maisonneuve et Larose, 1986). 3 On the tension between popular literature and humanist erudition by Rabelais see Guy Demerson, “ ‘Extraicts de haulte mythologie’: la mythologie classique dans les ‘Mythologies Pantagrueliques’ de Rabelais,” Cahiers de l’Association internationale d’études françaises 25 (1973). 4 On the lucianic model and intertextuality by Rabelais, see Romain Menini, Rabelais altérateur: “Graeciser en françois” (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014). 5 For Rabelais in this context, see Michel Jeanneret, Le défi des signes: Rabelais et la crise de l’interprétation à la Renaissance (Orléans-Caen: Paradigme, 1994). 6 Anonymous, Prologue to Le Roman de la rose by Guillaume de Loris and Jean de Meung (Paris: Galliot du Pré, 1526), text cited after Clément Marot, Œuvres poétiques, ed. Gérard Defaux (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1993), II: 771–75; about the attribution of this Prologue see notes p. 1356–61. 7 Petrarch, Lettres de la vieillesse IV–VII/Rerum senilium IV–VII, ed. Elvira Nota (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2003), letter IV, 5, “A Federico d’Arezzo, sur quelques fictions de Virgile,” p. 74 for the quotation.

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Prologue to Gargantua, OC, 5–8. For a recent summary of the interpretations of this passage, see François Cornilliat, “Interpretation in Rabelais, interpretation of Rabelais,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rabelais, ed. John O’Brien (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 43–44, and the bibliography in the footnotes, 55. 9 Pantagruel, chap. 7, OC, 235–41. 10 On Erasmus and the allegorical sense of the Ovid moralized, see Jacques Chomarat, Grammaire et rhétorique chez Erasme (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1981), vol. 1, 436, note 185. 11 The rabelaisian theme of Alcibiad’s Sileni refers together to Plato (Convivium), to Lucian (Bacchus), to Pico de la Mirandola (letter to Ermolao Barbaro, 3 June 1485), and to the well known Erasmian adage “Alcibiades’ Sileni” (Adagia, III, III, 1); on this complex intertextuality see Menini, Rabelais altérateur, Part II, chap. IV. 12 In his Adagia, Erasmus applies the simile of Silenus (who was both Bacchus’s pedagogue and the muses’s clown) to the interpretation, among other things, of biblical texts: some of the stories of the Old Testament are apparently as ridiculous, or obscene, as Homer’s fables. 13 On mythology and bacchic symbolism in Rabelais’ works, see Mireille Huchon, “Libertés bachiques chez Rabelais,” in Rabelais-Dionysos: Vin, carnaval, ivresse. Actes du colloque de Montpellier, 26–28 mai 1994, ed. Michel Bideaux (Montpellier: Jeanne Laffitte, 1997), 121–32. 14 See for example the conclusion of Natale Conti’s chapter on Sileni in his Mythologiae, sive Explicationes Fabularum libri decem (Venise: Comin da Trino, 1567), bk. V, chap. “De Silenis.” 15 Pantagruel, OC, 306. Translation by Thomas Urquhart and Peter Antony Motteux (in the version online in the Gutenberg Project), Gargantua and His Son Pantagruel (Derby: Moray Press, 1894). 16 See for example Pantagruel, OC, 1318 note 3. 17 Plutarch, Sayings of Spartans, in Moralia, vol. 3, trans. F. Cole Babbitt (London: W. Heinemann, 1961), § 221 (cf. § 238 for the same idea). 18 Plutarch, On Music, in Moralia, vol. 14, trans. Benedict Einarson and Philippe H. de Lacy (London: W. Heinemann, 1967), § 43 (1146). 19 Erroneous translation; we correct further below. 20 Pantagruel, OC, 306. Translation by Urquhart and Motteux, Gargantua and His Son Pantagruel. 21 On the good use of wine in Rabelais’ work, see Isabelle Hersant, “L’imaginaire du vin chez Rabelais: Etude du prologue du Tiers Livre,” Esculape et Dionysos. Mélanges en l’honneur de Jean Céard, ed. J. Dupèbe, F. Giacone, E. Naya, and A.-P. Pouey-Mounou (Geneva: Droz, 2008), 707–16. 22 On the contrary, their enemies, the monstrous leader Anarche and his men, get drunk before fighting (“s’endormirent comme porcs”), so that they are defeated by the followers of the Muses (OC, 313). On the links between words and food in the Renaissance culture, see Michel Jeanneret, Des Mets et des mots: Banquets et propos de table à la Renaissance (Paris: Corti, 1987). 23 Pantagruel, chap. 28, OC, 315.

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For example Pantagruel, OC, 1324 note 9. For example by Geoffroy Linocier, Mythologia Musarum (edited in the Renaissance with Conti’s Mythologiae), chap. “Thalia.” 26 See Michel Jeanneret, Des mets et des mots, 93 and 105 (though Jeanneret does not mention Rabelais by name). 27 Plutarch, Table-Talk, in Moralia, vol. 8–9, trans. Edwin L. Minar, F. H. Sandbach, and W. C. Helmbold (London: W. Heinemann, 1961), IX, 14 [746]. 28 Prologue to Gargantua, OC, 5. Translation by Urquhart and Motteux, Gargantua and His Son Pantagruel. 29 Johann Fischart, Affenteurliche und Ungeheurliche Geschichtsschrift vom Leben, Rhaten und Thaten der [Helden] Gorgantoa ([Strasburg], 1575), fol.°A2r [“grubengrotteschische, fantastische krüg”]. 30 Gargantua, OC, 25. Translation by Urquhart and Motteux, Gargantua and His Son Pantagruel. 31 See Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), Part II, chap. 2, “Rabelais.” 32 Gargantua, OC, 22. 33 For the folkloric (and esoteric) aspects, see Gaignebet, A plus hault sens. For the combination of Christian and classical culture, see, for example, Pantagruel, chap. 1 (on the genealogy of the giants). 34 See for example in the case (of Panurge as) Odysseus redivivus Terence Cave, “Panurge and Odysseus,” in Myth and Legend in French Literature: Essays in Honour of A.J. Steel, ed. D. Bellos and P. Sharratt (London: The Modern Humanities Research Association, 1982), 47–59; Gérard Defaux, Le Curieux, le Glorieux et la sagesse du monde: L’exemple de Panurge (Ulysse, Démosthène, Empédocle) (Lexington, Kentucky: French Forum, 1982); Philip Ford, De Troie à Ithaque: Réception des épopées homériques à la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 2007). 35 For Le Tiers livre, see Michèle Clément, “Les Dieux Olympicques malmenés par Rabelais dans le Tiers Livre,” in Rire des Dieux, ed. D. Bertrand and V. GélyGhedira (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2000). 36 Odyssey, XI, lines. 235–60. 37 Gargantua, chap. 3, OC, 15. 38 Cf. Virgil Aeneid II, line 721s. 39 Pantagruel, chap. 9, OC, 249. 40 Pantagruel, chap. 29, OC, 316. 41 “Ne Hercules quidem adversus duos.” Erasmus, Adagia, I, V, 39. 42 Pantagruel, chap. 28, OC, 315. 43 On the Christian, Erasmian-Evangelical interpretation of Rabelais’ work, see Michael Andrew Screech, Rabelais (London, Duckworth, 1979). 25

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Works Cited Sources Conti, Natale. Mythologiae, sive Explicationes Fabularum libri decem. Venise: Comin da Trino, 1567. Fischart, Johann. Affenteurliche und Ungeheurliche Geschichtsschrift vom Leben, Rhaten und Thaten der [Helden] Gorgantoa. [Strasburg], 1575. Marot, Clément. Œuvres poétiques. Edited by Gérard Defaux. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1993. Petrarch. Lettres de la vieillesse IV–VII/Rerum senilium IV–VII. Edited by Elvira Nota. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2003. Plutarch. On Music. In Moralia. Vol. 14. Translated by Benedict Einarson and Philippe H. de Lacy. London: W. Heinemann, 1967. —. Sayings of Spartans. In Moralia. Vol. 3. Translated by F. Cole Babbitt. London: W. Heinemann, 1961. —. Table-Talk. In Moralia. Vol. 8–9. Translated by Edwin L. Minar, F. H. Sandbach, and W. C. Helmbold. London: W. Heinemann, 1961. Rabelais, François. Œuvres complètes. Edited by Mireille Huchon. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. —. Gargantua and His Son Pantagruel. Translated by Thomas Urquhart and Peter Antony Motteux. Derby: Moray Press, 1894. Virgil. Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid 1–6. Edited by G. P. Goold. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Secondary Literature Cave, Terence. The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. —. “Panurge and Odysseus.” In Myth and Legend in French Literature: Essays in Honour of A. J. Steel. Edited by D. Bellos and P. Sharratt, 47–59. London: The Modern Humanities Research Association, 1982. Chomarat, Jacques. Grammaire et rhétorique chez Érasme. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1981. Clément, Michèle. “Les Dieux Olympicques malmenés par Rabelais dans le Tiers Livre.” In Rire des Dieux. Edited by Dominique Bertrand and Véronique GélyGhedira, 113–21. Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2000. Cornilliat, François. “Interpretation in Rabelais, interpretation of Rabelais.” In The Cambridge Companion to Rabelais. Edited by John O’Brien, 43–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Defaux, Gérard. Le Curieux, le Glorieux et la sagesse du monde: L’exemple de Panurge (Ulysse, Démosthène, Empédocle). Lexington, Kentucky: French Forum, 1982.

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Demerson, Guy. “ ‘Extraicts de haulte mythologie’: la mythologie classique dans les ‘Mythologies Pantagrueliques’ de Rabelais.” Cahiers de l’Association internationale d’études françaises 25 (1973): 227–45. Ford, Philip. De Troie à Ithaque: Réception des épopées homériques à la Renaissance. Geneva: Droz, 2007. Gaignebet, Claude. A plus hault sens: L’ésotérisme spirituel et charnel de Rabelais. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1986. Gauna, Max. The Rabelaisian Mythologies. London: Associated University Press, 1996. Hersant, Isabelle. “L’imaginaire du vin chez Rabelais: Etude du prologue du Tiers Livre.” In Esculape et Dionysos: Mélanges en l’honneur de Jean Céard. Edited by J. Dupèbe, F. Giacone, E. Naya, and A.-P. Pouey-Mounou, 707–16. Geneva: Droz, 2008. Huchon, Mireille. “Libertés bachiques chez Rabelais.” In Rabelais-Dionysos: Vin, carnaval, ivresse: Actes du colloque de Montpellier, 26–28 mai 1994. Edited by Michel Bideaux, 121–32. Marseille: Jeanne Laffitte, 1997. —. “Le roman, histoire fabuleuse.” In Le Roman français au XVIe siècle ou le renouveau d’un genre dans le contexte européen. Edited by Michèle Clément and Pascal Mounier, 51–67. Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2005. Jeanneret, Michel. Des Mets et des mots: Banquets et propos de table à la Renaissance. Paris: Corti, 1987. —. Le défi des signes: Rabelais et la crise de l’interprétation à la Renaissance. Orléans-Caen: Paradigme, 1994. Menini, Romain. Rabelais altérateur: “Graeciser en françois.” Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014. Screech, Michael Andrew. Rabelais. London: Duckworth, 1979. Weber, Henri. “Eléments structurels de quelques mythes rabelaisiens.” In Etudes rabelaisiennes. Vol. 21. Rabelais en son demi-millénaire: Actes du Colloque international de Tours (24–29 septembre 1984). Edited by Jean Céard and Jean-Claude Margolin, 157–65. Geneva, Droz, 1988.

MYTHOLOGIES OF WAR AND PEACE IN MALHERBE’S AND AUBIGNÉ’S POETRY KJERSTIN AUKRUST AND GRO BJØRNERUD MO UNIVERSITY OF OSLO

In 1562 the French Wars of Religion broke out and peace was not concluded until thirty-six years later, after what contemporary commentators described as a “fiercely violent” age.1 It is in this historical context that the two French poets Agrippa d’Aubigné (1552–1630) and François de Malherbe (1555–1628) emerged as important authors, each in his own way, Aubigné as a writer and soldier and Malherbe as an official court poet.2 Although they were contemporaries, they in all likelihood never met, and they belonged to different milieus, represented different poetics, and have claimed highly dissimilar positions in French literary history. Whereas Malherbe was recognized in his own time for his technical perfection and has since been praised for helping develop the poetic rules of the classical period, it was not until the middle of the twentieth century that Aubigné gained his prestige, when he was “rediscovered” by baroque critics such as Jean Rousset.3 When literary scholars mention Malherbe in the same context as Aubigné, it is mostly in order to stress the elements that divide them, and they emphasize their differing political affiliations, religions, styles, careers, and reputations. In the context of the civil war, Aubigné and Malherbe observed and described some of the most important events of their own time, but from radically different perspectives, both religious and political: Aubigné was an ardent Protestant and militant poet, Malherbe a moderate Catholic and court poet. Even though Malherbe also wrote about conflicts, battles, and war scenes, he is more well-known for his official poetry on triumphal royal entries and his odes on lighter and more joyous occasions, such as weddings and victories. Given their numerous dissimilarities, it seems that a comparative reading of the two poets should focus on the contrasts between them rather than their similarities. However, Malherbe and Aubigné are united not

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only by their close relationships to Henry IV (1553–1610), but also by their at times similar use of mythological imagery. In this essay, we will first give examples of how their use of myths confirms some of the differences between the two poets, before focusing on cases where mythology brings them closer together than is commonly known. We therefore propose a comparative approach that is open to finding unknown common ground, thus providing new insight not only into our understanding of these two poets, but also into the religious and political situation in France during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Huguenot poet Agrippa d’Aubigné is mainly known for two key works, Le Printemps and Les Tragiques. Le Printemps is a collection of love poems written by the young Aubigné, who after falling in love with his Catholic neighbour Diane de Salviati dedicated several poems to her, including the entire first part of the work, entitled “L’Hécatombe à Diane.”4 The poems written after the young couple’s break-up explicitly play with the mythological dimension of the name “Diane,” as Aubigné gradually dissociates himself from the Petrarchan and precious tradition of love poetry.5 The name of his beloved and (as time goes by) hated mistress allows Aubigné to refer to the mythical figure of Diana in more than one way. In his use of the myth of Diane, Aubigné combines an external model and a personal experience, radicalizes the violence of the story, and creates an even more ambivalent figure.6 The lyrical persona of “Diane” is in fact a combination of the authentic Diane de Salviati, the goddess of hunting and Catherine de’ Medici, the female protagonist and somewhat mythical figure of the civil war.7 Diane and Catherine are both accused of tyranny8 and are characterized by their cold-hearted malevolence, symbolized by the images of the vampire9 and the monster.10 The multi-layered portrait of the figure of Diane insists on her many destructive qualities, combining the violent aspects of her mythological persona with the equally violent features of Catherine, the “goddess” of the civil war.11 The imagery and mythology that dominate Le Printemps are thus deeply coloured by the war.12 This is even more so the case in Les Tragiques, Aubigné’s principal work. Aubigné wrote this massive text, comprising seven books and more than 9,000 verses, during the Wars of Religion. This epic poem is inspired by the persecutions suffered by the Protestants throughout the course of the civil conflict, described by a man who was not just a mere bystander but who took part as a soldier, witnessing at close range the miseries and carnage of the war.13 It was at the age of sixteen that Aubigné had joined the army of the Prince of

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Condé, later becoming the companion of Henry of Navarre, the future Henry IV. In his Histoire Universelle, Aubigné sums up his military career, stating that he was a soldier for fifty-four years, and captain for fifty.14 Aubigné began writing Les Tragiques when he was badly hurt at Casteljaloux in 1577. It was first published in 1616 and then reedited in 1630. However, it was not until the nineteenth century that Aubigné was “rediscovered” by the public and the critics. One of the principal reasons for Aubigné’s obscurity was, as Catherine Monfort puts it, that “the new standards of poetry recently imposed by Malherbe were incompatible with those of Aubigné: in particular the principle of the inspired poet and the use of a rich and concrete language.”15 One of the most renowned features of Aubigné’s writing is indeed the concreteness of his vocabulary, which sometimes even borders on the trivial. He tends to relate his playful, metaphorical imagery to an entirely tangible reality, often by means of suggestive adjectives.16 This is also the case when it comes to biblical references, which he often amplifies by adding specific details.17 A good example of Aubigné’s use of the rhetorical figure of amplificatio is found in Book IV, lines 487–502, where he paraphrases a passage from the Acts of the Apostles, adding vivid details and embellishing over several lines the presence of a vermin, which is mentioned only in passing in the Bible. Aubigné finds pleasure in amplifying the passage in macabre detail, as he meticulously describes how the worms, maggots, and lice attack and devour the flesh of the King, leaving nothing but rotten carrion behind.18 Malherbe’s situation differed from that of Aubigné in many ways, not just with regard to his style and aesthetics. Malherbe was a Catholic, but possibly had a Protestant background, and he received a humanist education. He moved in learned circles, but struggled to find patronage for his poetry, and he was almost forty years old when he presented his first text, a long penitential poem, to Henry III in 1587. Only a short while after Malherbe’s arrival in Paris, however, Henry III—who probably would have been susceptible to texts of this nature—suddenly died. The poet once again faced an uncertain future, but persisted relentlessly with his attempts to gain access to the French court. He was hired by the Duke of Bellegarde and received his first “pension.” Bellegarde was the King’s Master of the Horse (Grand écuyer), one of the most prominent court positions.19 It was he who in October 1600 escorted Marie de’ Medici from Italy to Marseilles and further on to Aix-en-Provence, where the King himself met her.20 It was also Bellegarde who acted as the King’s proxy when the wedding ceremony between Henry and Marie was held in Florence before the party’s departure to France.21 In this context, where

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the marriage was confirmed without the groom being physically present, Malherbe composed an ode where he extols the King’s second wife Marie de’ Medici at the moment she first arrived in France as the new queen of the country. He presents her in all her glory, in a heroic and joyful situation where she brings hopes for prosperity and peace for the future.22 The poet focuses on her beauty, comparing her to both Venus and the Graces; Cephalus and Neptune admire her.23 Thenceforth the poet would write about everything from Henry IV’s martial prowess to his peace treaties, but he also composed poems about more sinister events. After Henry IV had been the target of an attempted assassination on the Pont Neuf in December 1605, the poet composed an ode, “Ode on an assassination attempt,”24 that described the fear that gripped the King’s closest associates and that deplored the dreadful era in which they were all living, où les hommes par les hommes sont devorez (where man is devoured by man).25 Malherbe became an influential person at court during the reign of Henry IV. His success as a poet is often illustrated by a minor episode recounted by his biographer Racan. According to Racan, it was the cardinal Du Perron who introduced Malherbe to the King, telling the monarch that he himself had completely stopped writing after reading Malherbe’s poetry because “nobody could compete with the perfection it represented.”26 Malherbe is known by posterity to have created a new literary school and a new style built on order, reason, and clarity; he is equally famous for being a ferocious literary critic and an unsympathetic person. Malherbe also has a certain reputation for insensitivity, for composing dry and dull poems, and for writing very slowly. Whereas Aubigné’s writing is most often characterized by its concrete language, ornamental style, and violent imagery, Malherbe is famous for his sober and abstract style and for his taste for simplicity and purity in vocabulary and versification. Malherbe emphasizes clarity, and seeks to create poems characterized by limpid images, words and rhymes. Both as a literary critic and as a poet, Malherbe strongly criticizes and excludes metaphors he deems irrational, removes elements he considers superfluous, banishes neologisms, and is deeply concerned with formal problems and metrical invention. In his poems, Malherbe explicitly admires reason and judgement;27 critics such as André Chenier even think he preferred reason to emotion and imagination, in both the creation and reading of poetry.28 Despite such stringent rationalism, mythology and mythological images play an integral role in Malherbe’s poetry. Danger is associated with the Hydra, and its destructive forces are explicitly linked to civil

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war.29 All kinds of threats are repeatedly depicted as storms or stormy water,30 and allusions to mythological voyages at sea prevail.31 In order to find peace and create harmony, it is important to be able to navigate, to stay clear of dangerous Syrtes and to locate safe harbours.32 Conflicts are associated with the rebellion of the Giants, and Protestants become rebellious Titans.33 The King’s heroic actions are praised by allusion or direct reference to the deeds of Hercules and Jason. “Who would not admit that Hercules was less Hercules than you?” the poet hyperbolically asks the monarch, in a poem addressed to Henry IV.34 These were violent times, and the court poet Malherbe was often called upon to write poems on loss and sorrow. Such texts depict grieving and tearful figures in detail, confronting the reader with images of, for example, an abandoned Ariadne and a weeping, petrified Niobe. After Henry IV was murdered in 1610, Malherbe wrote a poem to comfort the grieving queen; though Niobe is not explicitly named, this poem does refer to the place of her death, the hills of Sipylus.35 The poet gently cautions the widow, fearing that she might remain inconsolable, and urges her to avoid Niobe’s destiny and escape an overwhelming, paralysing grief. Some of the same metaphors and mythological references, all in various ways connected to water and stone, recur at the very heart of Malherbe’s poetic imagery, where mythology is adroitly used to offer a concentrated and fairly codified material for these metaphors. For example, Jason and the Argonauts are so famous that their names can remain unsaid (“The pilots of Aeson’s son / whose name will never disappear”);36 through periphrasis, naming Jason’s father Aeson, the poet depends on shared knowledge with his readers. In his poems, Malherbe hints, suggests, and leaves only a few clues for the reader to identify the mythological material he exploits. A preliminary reading of our two poets will permit any reader to clearly identify the contrasts between the images of Malherbe’s victorious Hercules on one hand, and Aubigné’s suffering Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy, on the other. At the very beginning of “Misères,” the first book of Les Tragiques, Aubigné apostrophizes his dark muse, defining the very nature of his inspiration: “I call upon Melpomene in her vivid fury / In the stead of Hippocrene, awaking this sister / Of the fresh tombs out of which she must emerge, / Dishevelled, horrible, and howling / Like a deer missing its fawn.37 In these verses, Aubigné lets Melpomene emerge from the fresh tombs of the war. He also alters her appearance, from goddess to a person of flesh and blood, who is dishevelled, weeping, and howling like an animal, thus removing all her mythical grace and making her similar to the victims of the civil conflict—“she is now the muse of a real war.”38 It is also .

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noteworthy that although Les Tragiques is a poem and not a play, Melpomene is his choice of muse over Calliope: tragedy outshines epic poetry. Aubigné transforms his mythological material, bending it to fit the depicted realities and dramatizing the painful scenes he describes. Malherbe, conversely, tends rather to carefully urge his listeners to remain calm; he tries to avoid tragedy, focusing instead on continuity and survival, and myths are used to reinforce these ideals. Malherbe’s poetry is rife with dreams of peace and eulogies of unification and prosperity, whereas the darkness of war and elegies over the torments on the battlefield characterize the poems written by Aubigné. A schematic presentation of these differences reveals oppositions known from literary history, where Aubigné and Malherbe have been contrasted as a baroque, Protestant soldier/writer and a protected Catholic, classicizing court poet respectively. Literary critics tend to emphasize these differences and continue to describe the same antithetic realities. Jean-Raymond Fanlo has written extensively on the function of mythology in Aubigné, and sees the use of mythology in Aubigné’s texts as linked to invisible and violent forces of chaos.39 Mythology is put under pressure, modified and reenacted in a way that makes sense of current events. As yet another Aubigné critic, Catherine Montfort, points out, the myths that we find in Les Tragiques are largely myths of violence.40 Aubigné uses approximately thirty myths in the first book, ten in the second, sixteen in the third, and increasingly fewer in the last four books. In the first three books, Aubigné harangues those he holds accountable for the suffering of his country: judges, inquisitors, the Valois Kings, and of course the “evil queen” herself, Catherine de’ Medici. The various myths referred to by Aubigné in these books are all part of a rhetoric of violence used to jolt “his readers out of complacency and into action for the Protestant cause”:41 thus, mythology is not simply used to appeal to the taste of the public, but to serve a specific political purpose. The various myths that we find in Les Tragiques can be divided into three categories: myths of female figures who personify death, civil war, tragedy, and so forth; myths of violence, often related to familial relationships; and finally, the myths related to Catherine de’ Medici, the embodiment of evil.42 In the first category, key figures include Bellona and the above-mentioned Melpomene. In Aubigné’s epic poem, the blind Bellona becomes the very symbol of the civil war, furiously tearing her own body apart with her bare hands.43 The second category includes many well-known myths: the legend of Cadmus, the meal of Thyestes, the sacrifice of Lycaon, the enemy sons of Oedipus, and the myth of the

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Giants. All of these fables merit the label “myths of violence” and serve as metaphors for the political situation in France. The story of Thyestes and his twin brother Atreus is an apt example of how Aubigné compares blood-soaked myths with the horrors of the French civil war. Thyestes seduces his brother’s wife, leaving Atreus to plot a terrible revenge: he murders Thyestes’ sons, cooks them, and then serves them to Thyestes himself in a macabre feast. In the first book of Les Tragiques, Aubigné uses this myth for contrast and emphasis, stating that the banquet of horror that is the civil war is worse than Thyestes’ feast.44 Aubigné depicts France at war with herself by using the image of the cannibal mother: like Thyestes, she eats her own sons, the Protestant and the Catholic twin brothers, instead of nourishing and safeguarding them. In his eyes, Mother France’s crime is worse than that of Thyestes, because unlike Thyestes, Mother France is fully aware of her misdeed; the comparison with the myth is therefore used to evince that “the reality of the time was worse than fiction.”45 Finally, in the third category of myths utilized by Aubigné, the dreaded Queen Catherine de’ Medici is compared to numerous monsters from antiquity, for example when the author in the first book alludes to Medusa by describing “a Catherine who by shaking her head spreads poison throughout the country.”46 Aubigné thus develops a poetics of violence through techniques that imply a kind of hybridity, where myths connected to death and tragedy are mixed with figures representing lust and desire. These complex images are projected upon living persons, such as the despised queen, leading Fanlo to contend that Aubigné’s depiction of history prevents his readers from acquiring a coherent representation of it.47 Aubigné’s rhetoric and mythologies of violence continue to fascinate scholars even today, and the perspectives provided by Fanlo and others seem to coincide with the concerns of literary studies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Malherbe is in an altogether different situation: even though he was considered to be one of the most prominent poets of his time, he has long since been shunted aside to the margins of literary debate. Jean Rousset depicts Malherbe as “baroque in spite of himself,” thus seeking to reduce some of the distance between Aubigné and Malherbe.48 However, the image of a strictly ordered universe remains the dominant one in the reception of Malherbe. David Lee Rubin shows how mythology participates in the creation of a higher, hidden order in Malherbe’s odes, noting that “[s]pecific mythological patterns underlie and give meaning to the poem’s plots.”49 J. D. Hubert, in a wonderfully ironic text, conversely describes Malherbe as “the great technician, the eloquent rationalist,” who in his use of pagan

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myths ends up creating a “purely literary universe.”50 The poet transcends the present historical moment, the actors from historical events disappear, and the reader is left with gods and devils spinning around in a timeless space. “The myths of the ancient world as they appear in Malherbe’s poetry do not reveal any truth on man,”51 Hubert asserts. It may thus be argued that Aubigné combines the personal, the historical, and the mythological in complex ways, whereas Malherbe loses actual events out of sight and finds no truth in mythology. His mythological figures are “overworked,” and his poems present us with “deflated” portraits of the King and of history.52 For Aubigné, myths help him strengthen his attacks “and give an exemplary value to his accusations.”53 Malherbe, on the other hand, carefully presents poems to the King, emphasizing the importance of tightening the bonds between the monarch and his people; through his use of mythology, he expresses hopes and aspirations for prosperity and peace. All in all, the two contemporary poets seem to have little in common. However, one might well ask whether any potential similarities have been obscured by such rather polarized readings. One of the major debates in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries concerned the relation between biblical and classical myths. Could they be mixed, or should they rather be kept apart, and did ancient mythology inform the Bible in any way?54 Both Aubigné and Malherbe wrote religious and secular works, and they dealt with these questions, trying out different positions. In some texts, Aubigné and Malherbe clearly keep the two traditions apart, while in other texts they combine biblical and classical myths without any hesitation. But there is also a third case, as epitomized by the praeteritio that opens some of their religious texts. Malherbe’s penitential poem “Les larmes de saint Pierre” from 1587 is a prime example: in the opening verses, treason and tears are linked together and associated with Ariadne, Henry III, and Jesus.55 Pagan myth, present history, and biblical events are thus intertwined, but their association is introduced by a negation: “It is not in my verses . . . .”56 Another example from Aubigné illustrates some of the same techniques and characteristics. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Henry IV was still striving to reconcile Protestants and Catholics after the Wars of Religion. At his side was Cardinal Du Perron, a great admirer of Malherbe’s poems and an ardent defender of the policy of reconciliation. Malherbe was at court at the time, closely observing the political situation and composing several tributes to the King’s diplomatic efforts. In 1606, the court was preparing for the christening of the dauphin, the future Louis XIII. On this occasion, Henry IV called upon his old friend and Huguenot

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soldier, Aubigné, asking him to write a meditation on peace and attend the christening. Although Aubigné disapproved of the reconciliation efforts and feared for the future rights of his fellow Protestants, he sent the King a paraphrase on Psalm 133, but refused to attend the celebrations.57 During the Wars of Religion, Huguenot psalms had enjoyed great success among Protestants. Catholic writers took up the challenge and started composing psalms as well as paraphrases of biblical psalms. Both Aubigné and Malherbe helped develop this genre, with both poets not only meditating on religious problems, spiritual crises, and the culpability of man, but also using their texts to comment on political issues.58 In the meditation sent to the court of Henry IV, Aubigné opens with hasty and oblique allusions to pagan mythology, explicitly refusing to deploy classical myths. Like Malherbe in his penitential poem, a genre that is closely related to the meditation, Aubigné begins with a negation, “It is not here a question of . . . ,”59 though he still manages to slip in a few mythical references, all of which concern the possibility and impossibility of unity. It starts with an allusion to concordia discors, which is then rapidly dismissed, as is the union of Poros and Penia and Plato’s myth of the androgynous. These myths serve as mere illustrations in this case, and are not to be considered examples of truth by any means—in fact, only the Bible serves as a reliable source of truth.60 In the final lines of his meditation, the poet dwells on similar images and scenes, now taken from the Bible. He cites Cain and Abel and reminds his readers of the dangers of fraternal hatred and fratricide.61 Biblical materials are thus used to describe the conflict between Protestants and Catholics and to define the antagonists in this conflict: Abel is the Protestant, the assassin Cain is the Catholic. Joseph, famed in the Bible for helping his brothers, is associated with the Protestants who helped Henry of Navarre prior to his ascension to the French throne as Henry IV.62 Aubigné’s warning in his meditation to the King would soon prove to be prophetic, foreshadowing Henry’s assassination in 1610. In 1629 the seventy-seven-year-old Aubigné, in exile in Geneva, decided to publish a modified version of the paraphrases of his psalms, twenty-three years after composing the first text. We know that the elderly Aubigné was worried and deeply concerned by Louis XIII and his campaigns against Protestants in the 1620s.63 His passages on the resistance put up by the city of La Rochelle are replete with strategy and tactics, written by a hardy veteran once again getting prepared for action. In 1627 and 1628, Malherbe, too, took great interest in the situation at La Rochelle, although from a different vantage point. He wrote a final ode on the siege of the Protestant city a year before he died. His former

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eulogies for peace were replaced by an intense and violent call for vengeance, where he exhorts Louis XIII to crush the Protestant rebellion, urging him to “go, tear down, decapitate.”64 Malherbe’s use of mythology insists on monsters, suffering, warfare, and destruction, with Colossus, Megara, Enceladus, Amphion, and Apollo all depicted as enmeshed in strife and conflict. But there is a personal touch to this text, and the need for revenge is particularly violent: Malherbe wrote this final ode to convince the King to punish the man who killed his son in a duel; thus he reveals a more personal and aggressive vein. These examples, culled from the second half of their careers, show that it is in fact possible to uncover parallels between Malherbe and Aubigné. Some of the resemblances are related to mythology and violence: Malherbe ended up writing an extremely violent text at the end of his life, targeted at the Protestants of La Rochelle; Aubigné on the other hand, wrote more classical texts, moderating the highly belligerent rhetoric of his earlier works. Though the two writers used dissimilar figures and promoted opposite political views, they seem to be of one mind on the function of mythology, in that both Aubigné’s and Malherbe’s use of classical myths has a political purpose and is not simply ornamental. Neither Aubigné nor Malherbe believed in the veracity of pagan myths, but they both clearly rely on the imaginary power they evoke. Mythological images were used to create allegorical patterns, linking the past to the present and adding value, depth, and colour to historic events. But mythology also played an active part in politics, and was used to vividly portray the conflict between Protestants and Catholics. The two poets referred to the treacherous Giants of Greek mythology: in Malherbe, they symbolize the Protestants; in Aubigné, the Catholics. At the heart of religious and political polemics, mythology thus served to accentuate and perpetuate differences and conflicts. Let us conclude with an interrogation and a more speculative argument. One might ask if the violent images of mythology have a power that still influences literary critics and scholars. Do we remain under the spell of mythological metaphors? Is it the images of fratricide brothers, of the realities of civil wars and their ramifications that are perpetuated in the readings of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French poetry? If this is the case, the continuing emphasis on the differences between Malherbe and Aubigné—the former Catholic, classical, and reconciliatory, the latter Protestant, baroque, and militant—represent a victory for mythological imagination and allegorical play.65

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Notes 1

Stuart Carroll, Blood and Violence in Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 264. 2 We have chosen to write Aubigné rather than d’Aubigné, “pour respecter la désignation correcte, celle du reste que le poète a lui-même retenue, que choisissait A. M. Schmidt, et que recommandait V. L. Saulnier.” Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, “Violences d’Aubigné,” in Poétique d’Aubigné. Actes du colloque de Genève, mai 1996, ed. Olivier Pot (Geneva: Droz, 1999), 17. 3 Jean Rousset, La Littérature de l’âge baroque en France (Paris: Corti, 1954). 4 See Agrippa d’Aubigné, Sa vie à ses enfants, ed. Gilbert Schrenck (Paris: Librairie Nizet, 1986), 77: “Ayant son peu de biens entre les mains, il devint amoureux de Diane Salviaty, fille aisnée de Talcy. Cet amour luy mit en teste la poësie françoise, et lors il composa ce que nous appelons son Printems.” 5 Ibid., 76: “il y a plusieurs choses moins polies, mais quelque fureur qui sera au gré de plusieurs.” 6 Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, “La figure mythique de Diane dans ‘L’Hécatombe’ d’Aubigné,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 78, no. 1 (1978): 7: “La Diane humaine cache, sous ses traits, . . . le visage énigmatique de la déesse.” See also Kathleen A. Perry, “A Re-Evaluation of Agrippa d’Aubigné’s Printemps: Youthful Love or Mature Theology?,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 51, no. 1 (1989): 110: “Diane is not merely the object of love; she is at once the bloodthirsty goddess Diane, responsible for the horrible death of Actaeon, and a symbol of the hated Catholic Church, steeped in bloody sacrifices of innocent Protestants.” 7 Diane’s father, Bernard Salviati, who was of Italian origin, was in fact related to the Medici family and actually came to France as a member of Catherine’s entourage. See Madeleine Lazard, Agrippa d’Aubigné (Paris: Fayard, 1998), 62. 8 See for instance Agrippa d’Aubigné, “Stances IV,” Le Printemps, lines 7–8 (“Les ordinaires fruitz d’un regne tirannique / Sont le meurtre, le sac et le bannissement”). For all references to Le Printemps, see Agrippa d’Aubigné, Le Printemps. L’Hécatombe à Diane, ed. Bernard Gagnebin, vol. 1 (Geneva: Droz, 1948); Aubigné, Le Printemps. Stances et Odes, ed. Fernand Desonay, vol. 2 (Geneva: Droz, 1952); Aubigné, Le Printemps. L’Hécatombe à Diane et les Stances (Paris: PUF, 1960). 9 See Aubigné, “Sonnet XCVII,” line 3: “celuy où le sang appaisoit ton envie”; “Stances XVI,” line 4: “As-tu saoullé de sang ta soif aspre et sanglante.” See also Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, Agrippa d’Aubigné. Le corps de Jézabel (Paris: PUF, 1991), 44: “Non seulement sévère, mais cruelle, non seulement cruelle, mais perverse, Diane exhibe la sauvagerie d’une vierge indomptée, et elle se lient à la beauté la violence, à la chasteté la froideur, à la blancheur le goût du sang.” 10 See Aubigné, “Ode LII,” line 8: “Le bras qui foudroioit le tiran et le monster.” 11 See Aubigné, “Sonnet LXXXIX,” line 1–2: “Diane, ta coustume est de tout deschirer / Enflammer, desbriser, ruiner, mettre en pieces.” 12 Véronique Ferrer, “Le Printemps d’Agrippa d’Aubigné ou les épreuves du pétrarquisme,” in Les poètes français de la Renaissance et Pétrarque, ed. Jean Balsamo (Geneva: Droz, 2004), 452: “Si Le Printemps charrie autant de sang et de

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cadavres, s’il hante les lieux funèbres et dévastés, c’est aussi parce qu’il voit le jour dans un contexte désolant, celui des guerres et des massacres qui ravagent la France. . . . L’imaginaire poétique se nourrit des carnages qui affectent le royaume, des conflits qui divisent le pays.” 13 Agrippa d’Aubigné, Les Tragiques, ed. Jean-Raymond Fanlo (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1995), bk 1, line 70: “Nous avortons ces chants au milieu des armees.” 14 Agrippa d’Aubigné, Histoire Universelle, ed. André Thierry (Geneva: Droz, 1981), “soldat 54 ans, capitaine 50, Mestre de camp 44 et Mareschal de camp 32 annees.” 15 Catherine R. Montfort, “From Myths to Metaphors in Les Tragiques,” Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature 16, no. 31 (1989): 407. 16 See Michel Jeanneret, “Les styles d’Agrippa d’Aubigné,” Studi francesi 32 (1967): 256: “il exploite le concret pour en tirer de suggestives comparaisons ou pour donner du tourment du poète une image frappante.” 17 Marguerite Soulié, “Les citations textuelles des Psaumes et des Prophètes dans les Tragiques d’Agrippa d’Aubigné,” in Poétique d’Aubigné. Actes du colloque de Genève, mai 1996, ed. Olivier Pot (Geneva: Droz, 1999), 244. 18 Aubigné, Les Tragiques, bk. 6, lines 490–502: “Un gros de vers et poux l’attacque et le consomme: / La terre qui eut honte esventa tous les creux . . . / Tout regrouille de vers, le peuple esmeu s’elogne, / On adoroit un Roy, on fuit une charogne.” For more details on Aubigné’s use of the macabre, see Kjerstin Aukrust, Violences du corps. Une étude du macabre chez Ronsard, Aubigné et Chassignet (Oslo: Unipub, 2008). 19 Janine Garrisson, A History of Sixteenth-Century France, 1483–1598, trans. Richard Rex (London: Macmillan Press, 1995), 210. 20 François de Malherbe, Œuvres poétiques, ed. René Fromilhague and Raymond Lebègue (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1968), vol. 2, 26. 21 See Julia de Pardoue, The Life of Marie de Medicis (Teddington: The Echo Library, 2006), 60. 22 Malherbe, Œuvres poétiques, vol. 1, XIII, 80: “Peuples, que cette belle feste / A jamais tarisse nos fleurs.” 23 Ibid., XIII, 81: “Telle n’est point la Cytheree, / Quand d’un nouveau feu s’allumant, / Elle sort pompeuse et paree.” 24 “Ode sur l’attentat,” ibid., IX, 71–78. 25 Ibid., IX, 72. See notes, vol. 2, 20ff. 26 Honorat de Bueil de Racan, Vie de Monsieur de Malherbe (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 10. 27 See Malherbe, Œuvres poétiques, vol. 1, XXX, 117: “Qu’en dis tu ma raison? crois-tu que ce soit possible / D’avoir du jugement, et ne l’adorer pas?” 28 For more information about André Chénier and his critique, see Malherbe, Œuvres poétiques, vol. 2, 60. 29 Malherbe, Œuvres poétiques, vol. 1, XCIV, 209: “L’hydre civile.” 30 Ibid., VII, 63: “Enfin apres les tempestes / Nous voicy rendus au port.” 31 Ibid., XCV, 213: “Les pilotes du fils d’Eson, / Dont le nom jamais ne s’efface, / Ont gaigné la premiere place / En la Fable de la Toison.”

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Ibid., LXIII, 168: “Qu’en employant ce Tiphys, Syrtes et Cyanées / Seront havres pour toy.” 33 Ibid., LXV, 172. 34 Ibid., VII, 66: “Qui ne confesse qu’Hercule / Fut moins Hercule que toy?” 35 Ibid., CVIII, 233: “Et sans doute la France aura, comme Sypile, / Quelque fameux rocher.” 36 Ibid., XCV, 213: “Les pilotes du fils d’Eson, / Dont le nom jamais ne s’efface, / Ont gaigné la premiere place / En la Fable de la Toison.” 37 “J’appelle Melpomene, en sa vive fureur, / Au lieu de l’Hypocrene, esveillant cette sœur / Des tombeaux rafraischis, dont il faut qu’elle sorte, / Eschevellée, affreuse, et bramant en la sorte / Que faict la biche après le fan qu’elle a perdu.” (Aubigné, Les Tragiques, bk. 1, lines 79–88; our translation). 38 Montfort, “From Myths to Metaphors,” 411. 39 Jean-Raymond Fanlo, “Fiction poétique et prière dans le livre III des Tragiques,” Bulletin de l’Association d’étude sur l’humanisme, la reforme et la renaissance 32 (1991). 40 Catherine Montfort Howard, “Classical Mythology and Baroque in Les Tragiques,” Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature 15, no. 29 (1988). 41 Ibid., 500. 42 Montfort, “From Myths to Metaphors.” 43 Aubigné, Les Tragiques, bk. 5, lines 327–34: “Le premier vous présente une aveugle Bellone / Qui s'irrite de soy, contre soy s'enfellonne, / Ne souffre rien d'entier, veut tout voir à morceaux. / On la void deschirer de ses ongles les peaux; / Ses cheveux gris, sans loy, sont sanglantes vipères / Qui lui crèvent le sein, dos et ventre d'ulcères. / Tant de coups qu'ils ne font qu'une playe en son corps. / La louve boit son sang, et faict son pain de morts.” 44 Ibid., bk. 1, lines 543–46: “On dit que le manger de Thyeste pareil / Fit noircir, et fuir, et cacher le Soleil. / Suivrons-nous plus avant? voulons-nous voir le reste? / De ce banquet d’horreur, pire que de Thyeste?” 45 Montfort, “From Myths to Metaphors,” 412. 46 Ibid., 413. Aubigné, Les Tragiques, bk. 1, lines 827–30: “Mais toy, qui, au matin, de tes cheveux espars / Fais voir à ton faux chef branslant de toutes parts, / Et desploiant en l'air ta perruque grisonne. / Les pais tous esmeus de pestes empoisonne.” 47 Jean-Raymond Fanlo, “Les tragiques d’Agrippa d’Aubigné: un titre et sa portée,” Erudit 44, no. 2 (2008): 48 Rousset, La Littérature, 20. 49 David Lee Rubin, “Toward a New View of Malherbe: Higher, Hidden Order in the First Completed Ode,” The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association 2, no. 1 (1969): 96. David Lee Rubin, Higher, hidden order. Design and meaning in the odes of Malherbe (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1972). Philip A. Wadsworth “Form and content in the odes of Malherbe,” Publications of the modern Language Association, June (1963): 190– 95. 50 J. D. Hubert, “Myth and Status: Malherbe’s Swan Song,” Yale French Studies 49 (1973): 138.

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51

Hubert, “Myth and Status,” 135. The words in brackets stem from Hubert. 53 Howard, “Classical Mythology and Baroque,” 507. 54 See Michel Jeanneret, Poésie et tradition biblique au XVIe siècle (Paris: José Corti, 1969). Claude Chantalat, À la recherche du goût classique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1992), 134–35. 55 On hyperbolic images in Malherbe, see Rousset, La Littérature, 202–3. See also Gro Bjørnerud Mo, “Corps sanglants, souffrants et pétrifiés.” in Corps sanglants, souffrants et macabres. La représentation de la violence faite au corps en Europe, XVIe–XVIIe siècles, ed. Kjerstin Aukrust, Charlotte Bouteille-Meister (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2010). 56 Malherbe, Œuvres poétiques, vol. 1, LXVII, 173: “Ce n’est pas en mes vers . . .” 57 See Agrippa d’Aubigné, Œuvres, ed. Henri Weber (Paris: Gallimard/La Pléiade, 1969), Tableau chronologique, LXI. 58 There are differences in these political comments, however. Malherbe tends to write about conflicts in the past, whereas Aubigné speaks of present problems. For more information on the development of psalms in the sixteenth century, see Jeanneret, Poésie et tradition biblique, and Véronique Ferrer and Anne Mantero, Les Paraphrases bibliques aux XVIe et XVIIe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 2006). See also Klára Erdei, “Méditation et culpabilisation: une spiritualité du péché,” in La Méditation en prose à la Renaissance (Paris: Editions Rue d’Ulm, 1990), 19–27. 59 Agrippa d’Aubigné, “Meditation sur le Pseaume 133,” in Œuvres complètes, ed. Jean-Raymond Fanlo, Marie-Madeleine Fragonard, and Gilbert Schrenck, vol. 1, Petit œuvres meslees suives du Recueil des vers de Moniseur d’Ayre, ed. Véronique Ferrer (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004), 136. “Il n’est point ici question de . . . .” 60 Ibid., 137. 61 Ibid., 163: “que la force des Caïns ne vous eschauffe point sur Abel.” 62 Ibid., 163. 63 Agrippa d’Aubigné, Histoire Universelle, vol. 5, Tome X (1620–1622) (Geneva: Droz, 1999), see “Introduction,” 8. 64 Malherbe, Œuvres poétiques, vol. 1, 166–71: “Marche, va les destruire: esteinsen la semence.” 65 Aubigné, Œuvres, “Introduction,” LI. 52

Works Cited Aubigné, Agrippa D’. Œuvres. Edited by Henri Weber. Notes by Henri Weber, Jacques Bailbé, and Marguerite Soulié. Paris: Gallimard/La Pléiade, 1969. —. Œuvres complètes. Edited by Jean-Raymond Fanlo, Marie-Madeleine Fragonard, and Gilbert Schrenck. Vol. 1. Petit œuvres meslees suives du Recueil des vers de Moniseur d’Ayre. Edited by Véronique Ferrer. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004. —. Histoire Universelle. Edited by André Thierry. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1981. —. Le Printemps. L’Hécatombe à Diane. Edited by Bernard Gagnebin. Vol. 1. Geneva: Droz, 1948.

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—. Le Printemps. Stances et Odes. Edited by Fernand Desonay Vol. 2. Geneva: Droz, 1952. —. Le Printemps. L’Hécatombe à Diane et les Stances. Edited by Henri Weber. Paris: PUF, 1960. —. Les Tragiques. Edited by Jean-Raymond Fanlo. Paris: Honoré Champion, 1995. —. Sa vie à ses enfants. Edited by Gilbert Schrenck. Paris: Librairie Nizet, 1986. Aukrust, Kjerstin. Violences du corps. Une étude du macabre chez Ronsard, Aubigné et Chassignet. Oslo: Unipub, 2008. Carroll, Stuart. Blood and Violence in Early Modern France. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Chantalat, Claude. À la recherche du goût classique. Paris: Klincksieck, 1992. Erdei, Klára. “Méditation et culpabilisation: une spiritualité du péché.” In La Méditation en prose à la Renaissance, 19–27. Paris: Editions Rue d’Ulm, 1990. Fanlo, Jean-Raymond. “Fiction poétique et prière dans le livre III des Tragiques.” In Bulletin de l’Association d’étude sur l’humanisme, la reforme et la renaissance 32 (1991): 5–15. —. “Les tragiques d’Agrippa d’Aubigné: un titre et sa portée.” In Erudit 44, no. 2 (2008): 107–18. Ferrer, Véronique. “Le Printemps d’Agrippa d’Aubigné ou les épreuves du pétrarquisme.” In Les poètes français de la Renaissance et Pétrarque. Edited by Jean Balsamo, 445–57. Geneva: Droz, 2004. Ferrer, Véronique, and Anne Mantero, eds. Les Paraphrases bibliques aux XVIe et XVIIe siècle. Geneva: Droz, 2006. Garrison, Janine. A History of Sixteenth-Century France, 1483–1598. Translated by Richard Rex. London: Macmillan Press, 1995. Hubert, J. D. “Myth and Status: Malherbe’s Swan Song.” Yale French Studies 49 (1973): 132–42. Jeanneret, Michel. “Les styles d’Agrippa d’Aubigné.” Studi francesi 32 (1967): 246–57. —. Poésie et tradition biblique au XVIe siècle. Paris: José Corti, 1969. Lazard, Madeleine. Agrippa d’Aubigné. Paris: Fayard, 1998. Lee Rubin, David. “Toward a New View of Malherbe: Higher, Hidden Order in the First Completed Ode.” The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association 2, no. 1 (1969): 94–102. —. Higher, hidden order. Design and meaning in the odes of Malherbe. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1972. Malherbe, François de. Œuvres poétiques. Edited by René Fromilhague and Raymond Lebègue. Paris: Belles Lettres, 1968. Mathieu-Castellani, Gisèle. Agrippa d’Aubigné. Le corps de Jézabel. Paris: PUF, 1991. —. “La figure mythique de Diane dans ‘L’Hécatombe’ d’Aubigné.” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 78, no. 1 (1978): 3–18. —. “Violences d’Aubigné.” In Poétique d’Aubigné. Actes du colloque de Genève, mai 1996. Edited by Olivier Pot, 17–31. Geneva: Droz, 1999.

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—. “Corps sanglants, souffrants et pétrifiés.” in Corps sanglants, souffrants et macabres. La représentation de la violence faite au corps en Europe, XVIe– XVIIe siècles. Edited by Kjerstin Aukrust and Charlotte Bouteille-Meister, 129–43. Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2010. Montfort, Catherine R. “From Myths to Metaphors in Les Tragiques.” Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature 16, no. 31 (1989): 407–18. Montfort Howard, Catherine. “Classical Mythology and Baroque in Les Tragiques.” Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature 15, no. 29 (1988): 497–515. Pardoue, Julia de. The Life of Marie de Medicis. Teddington: The Echo Library, 2006. Perry, Kathleen A. “A Re-Evaluation of Agrippa d’Aubigné’s Printemps: Youthful Love or Mature Theology?” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 51, no. 1 (1989): 107–22. Racan, Honorat de Bueil de. Vie de François de Malherbe. Paris: Gallimard, 1991. Rousset, Jean. La Littérature de l’âge baroque en France. Paris: Corti, 1954. Soulié, Marguerite. “Les citations textuelles des Psaumes et des Prophètes dans les Tragiques d’Agrippa d’Aubigné.” In Poétique d’Aubigné. Actes du colloque de Genève, mai 1996. Edited by Olivier Pot, 241–50. Geneva: Droz, 1999. Wadsworth, Philip A. “Form and content in the odes of Malherbe.” Publications of the modern Language Association, June (1963): 190–95.

UNDER THE SPELL OF SATURN: MYTH AND INSPIRATION IN FRENCH RENAISSANCE POETRY ANNA CARLSTEDT STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY

[O]nly those gifted with divine inspiration and the spirit of prophecy can foresee particular things.1 —Henricus Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim

During the Renaissance a highly esteemed and frequently quoted book about all kinds of philosophical problems was often entitled Aristotle’s Problemata (Problems), although it was wrongly attributed to the important Greek philosopher. It contained almost 900 different quodlibets with solutions, and one of the most quoted of them was the one following this question (part XXX, number I):” “Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy, or politics, or poetry, or the arts—are clearly melancholic?” During the French Renaissance, in the 1560s, poets like Pierre de Ronsard (1524–1585) began to refer to the “melancholic prophet” Nostradamus— Michel de Nostredame (1503–1566)—as a role model. Why would Ronsard declare that he wanted to follow in the footsteps of Nostradamus when at the same time he set out to investigate the above mentioned “problem” formulated by Pseudo-Aristotle, in his search for genius and creativity? Both Ronsard and Nostradamus (although in different ways) fitted into the humanist poetic movement inspired by the Neoplatonism of Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), who was the head of a long line of interpreters of the PseudoAristotelian passage. Ficino took the link between melancholy and genius and reconciled it with Plato’s association of prophetic inspiration and creativity. If poets like Ronsard turned to Nostradamus, they were all part of a coherent tradition, and in this context they turned to the ancients for inspiration, investigating the poet’s way toward divination through communication with divine sources and oracles as Plato had described it: In his writings, it is

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declared that when the poet succeeds in freeing him- or herself from the body and comes closer to the divine, the poet becomes an instrument of God. This is a painful process since the poet-prophet has to spend a lot of time alone, at night, in complete privacy and suffering, in order to be able to properly combine “philosophy, magic and obsession.” Only then can he/she become the melancholic vates—the seer, and be inspired under the spell of Saturn. According to Agrippa of Nettesheim in his De Occulta Philosophia, and as portrayed by Dürer in the famous engraving, the inspired melancholic was clearly a Saturnian, immersed in those sciences of number which could lead their devotees into great depths of insight.

Fig. 1. Albrecht Dürer. Melencolia I. 1514. Vevey, Jenisch Museum.

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Melancholy (the result of too much black bile (mélaina cholé) and one of the four humours of the body according to Hippocrates’ physiological theory), was highly recognized during the Renaissance as the temperament of the creative genius. This is why all artists, including poets, were to be seen as potentially prone to melancholia. And since the planet associated with the melancholic temperament was Saturn, the inspired but suffering saturnine poet was thought to be “born under Saturn.” There was a price to pay, but at the same time this condition predisposed the chosen one toward divine inspiration. The close connection between the concepts of poetry, prophecy, melancholia and Neoplatonism during the French Renaissance is well documented. The matter is thoroughly discussed in the classical work from 1964 by Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art. Other important works in this field are the edition by Faulkner, Kiessling and Blair of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1989), Jennifer Radden’s The Nature of Melancholy (2000), Linda Woodbridge’s The Scythe of Saturn: Shakespeare and Magical Thinking (1994) and Frances Yates’s The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979). In their turn, they all owe a lot to Hiram Haydn and his The Counter-Renaissance (1950). Ronsard shared his interest in melancholy and creative genius with Joachim du Bellay (1522–1560). They were both members of The Pleaide group in mid-16th-century France. Ronsard, “the Prince of Poets and the Poet of Princes,” successful and productive, was hugely celebrated during his lifetime. He managed to get powerful patrons and had connections early on to the French court. Being part of the Pleiade he wanted, albeit with Italian culture as a model, to create a French and not less brilliant Renaissance literature. His lyrical love poetry includes the Amours de Cassandre (1552) and the Amours de Marie (1555). Du Bellay was perhaps not quite as successful but still important with works such as Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Francaise (1949), Olive (1550), Les Regrets and Les Antiquités de Rome (1558). In the 1560s, something was changing in the poets’ output. They began to explore the oracular genre, and they extended their poetic world in striving to understand the role of the poet as a prophet. Leaving the themes of court life, beautiful ladies and the glorification of war heroes behind, they were looking for something else. This was not unique for Ronsard or Du Bellay; as the Reformation in France set off horrible civil wars between Protestants and Catholics in France in the 1560s, the writings of several major French poets changed as they took sides in the religious conflicts. Poetry was no longer an innocent pastime but became politics,

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and a way of expressing things that could not be discussed in public. Throughout the last part of the 16th century, poetry in France was increasingly marked by a dourness and pessimism caused by the horrors experienced. And not only in France: in England, Sir Philip Sidney (1554– 86) described how his entire creative approach changed after having travelled to France and experienced the killing of thousands of Protestants during the so-called St. Bartolomew’s Massacre in Paris 1572. Robert E. Stillman comments on the development in Sidneys work: Reading is intellectual travel. Knowledge is wide familiarity with this many serving sciences (“knowledges”) necessary for the government of self and society, and poetry, in turn, the superior human science as the full scope of Sidney’s argument maintains, because of its zodiacal range, the Cosmopolitanism of its studies inclusiveness.2

Sidney’s perception of visionary renaissance mysticism, knowledge and Cosmopolitanism can thus be associated with the thinking of Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), who describes a humanist as someone who has spent much time studying in her/his chamber and at the same time has travelled the world; the more you experience different people and cultures, the more tolerant you can become as a human being. A remarkable number of works enjoying an international reputation in the Renaissance and Baroque period were produced by voluntary or reluctant exiles, by cross-cultural collaboration and by communities in exile. Small communities as well as small nations had a vital place on the cultural map of the Renaissance world, and this is something that can be restored to its due prominence by focusing on visionary writing and Cosmopolitanism. Like Ronsard and Du Bellay, Sidney and other English poets (Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne) traced the basic conceptualizations and aesthetic assumptions of a type of Neoplatonism that was tolerant and open-minded. In their cases, it might be fruitful to link the concept of Renaissance Neoplatonism and more precisely Neoplatonic poetry to the idea of an early modern cosmopolitanism. The philosophical doctrine, derived from Platonism, was revived in the form of a specific Renaissance Neoplatonism and finally merge with the Hermetic and occult tendencies. Quoting Stillman again, the visionary writings of the poets mentioned fit into a framework of what he calls the “Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism.”3 He shows how texts of visionary poetry at this turbulent point in history were used to convey thoughts, knowledge and values through the oracular genre. These authors operated close to each other despite the fact that they wrote in different languages and had diverse cultural and national affiliations. This was a period of transition

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and transformation: state formation and religious upheaval lead to conflicts and the wars that followed were often the setting used by the writers too. Cosmopolitanism by its nature does not consider national borders or language.4 As Erich Auerbach puts it, . . . it is patently impossible to establish a synthesis by assembling all the particulars. Perhaps, however, we shall be able to do so by selecting characteristic particulars and following up their implications. This method consists in finding unusually fertile areas or key problems on which it is rewarding to concentrate, because they open up a knowledge of a broader context and cast light on entire historical landscapes.5

Texts travelled and they influenced writers from different cultural and national origins and also affected later generations of visionary poets, like Milton and Blake. War did not halt the transmission of texts and ideas but brought forward intellectual and cultural change: The work of these poets was connected, easily finding its way through early modern Europe—with the same texts constituting the immediate sources. Since the purpose of Orphic poetry was to reveal what had been hidden, it is relevant to investigate how many of these poets wrote with a political and religious agenda. Hence, the idea of the “poet as a “prophet” as described by Plato was resumed in a new, violent context. According to Plato, the poetic and prophetic inspiration could be a result of what he calls a “divine madness.” The poetic creation takes place in a state of frenzy. Plato writes about the “inspiring frenzy” in one of his most known dialogues, where Socrates meets with Phaedrus under a plane-tree by the banks of the Ilussus: [H]e who, having no touch of the Muses’ madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks that he will get into the temple by the help of art—he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man disappears and is nowhere when he enters into rivalry with the madman.

I might tell of many other noble deeds which have sprung from inspired madness. And therefore, let no one frighten or flutter us by saying that the temperate friend is to be chosen rather than the inspired.6 This can be compared to Shakespeare’s words in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends.

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Myth and Inspiration in French Renaissance Poetry The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact:—7

Out of this “inspired madness,” Plato made the subdivision into four types: The prophetic madness (associated with Apollo and the Sibyls), the ritual or mystic (Dionysus), the poetic (the Muses) and the erotic (Venus), each one of them having its appropriate inspiring deity, conferring a “blessing.” The early modern poets embraced this idea in different ways. For instance, Pontus de Tyard, another member of the Pleaide, published his Solitaire Premier in 1552 (revised in 1575), giving it in the revised version (1575) the additional title Dialogue de la fureur poétique. There, Tyard describes l’Amoureuse affection, l’intelligence des misters, le ravissement de prophetie and la fureur Poetique. Like Ronsard, de Tyard insisted on the prophetic dimension of poetry.8 They thought of the poets as heirs of the divine, as descendants of the ancient oracles and sibyls. In 1560, with bad times coming up, Ronsard writes in his Premier Livre des Odes (X) about “disciples de leurs escoles / vindrent les Poëtes divins.” In his Elegies from 1584, quite late in his production, Ronsard’s role as the vates has evolved and he clearly speaks of himself as a prophet and a poet: Je resemble, mon Prince, au Prestre d’Apollon, Qui n’est jamais attaint du poignant aiguillon Ou soit de Prophetie, ou soit de Poësie, S’il ne sent de son Dieu son ame estre saisie.9

This statement is associated with the one made by Nostradamus in his preface to King Henry II in 1558, where he declares that he is not a poet, only the vates with a natural instinct: [M]es nocturnes & prophetiques supputations, composees plus tost d’un naturel instinct, accompagné d’une fureur poëtique, que par reigle de poësie . . . .10

Ficino (1433–1499) emphasized early, in line with Plato, the poet’s important role as a vates, a seer. Texts by both Plato and Plotinus often reached Italy and then the rest of Europe thanks to Ficino’s commented translations. In 1462, Cosimo I de’ Medici, patron of arts, who had an interest in humanism and Platonism, provided Ficino with all 36 of Plato’s dialogues in Greek for him to translate. Between 1462 and 1469, Ficino translated these works into Latin, making them widely accessible, as only a minority of the learned could read Greek. And between 1484 and 1492,

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he translated the works of Plotinus, making them available for the first time in the West. He also translated Jamblicus’s De Mysteriis Aegyptorium. Ficino and Jamblicus had shared the idea that the poet under the right conditions could gain insight into the divine and they both left clear imprints in the poetry of Ronsard, Du Bellay, Sidney and Spenser. If they underlined the contact that the enlightened poet, at best, could establish with divinity, they also stressed the responsibility of the poet to depict the woes of the world. And so Ronsard comments on the disorders of his time in his Discours des Miseres de ce Temps, A la Royne mere du Roy. Referring to the prophets of his time, he links the disastrous events to the warnings expressed, by these prophets and by nature itself with its concrete signs such as comets. When Ronsard writes his Discours, he takes on the oracular genre, writing poetry at war: O toi, historien, qui d’encre non menteuse Écrit de notre temps l’histoire monstrueuse, Raconte à nos enfants tout ce malheur fatal, Afin qu’en te lisant ils pleurent notre mal, Et qu’ils prennent exemple aux péchés de leurs pères De peur de ne tomber en pareilles misères.11

The Discours were addressed to Catherine de Medici after the massacre of Vassy. Both sides geared up and the young, weak King Charles was not to be trusted. France had to put its faith in the King’s Mother Catherine. Natural disasters, portents and the words of prophets had heralded what was coming. Now poets and historians had to record what was happening, and warn the generations to come. Ronsard did write for the crown, but also for his other readers. He was the educated, intellectual observer, but also the melancholic prophet who saw what many others did not see. And this is where Nostradamus enters the stage as a role model, as a link to the prophets of the Middle Ages, the Bible and the ancient Rome and Greece. It has been suggested, by scholars like Yvonne Bellenger, Jean Céard and Galande Perrière-Hallyn, that the poetry of Nostradamus inspired several of the Pléiade poets, including Ronsard. In my opinion, Nostradamus is to be considered much less as a prophet than as an author of oracular poetry. As an inspirer, Ronsard hence chose the astrologer who achieved fame with the publication of his Prophecies in 1555. The enigmatic, dark oeuvre of Nostradamus, with its textual themes of war and disaster, inspired Ronsard to a political, prophetically inspired poetry. For example, he refers to “the dark and

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melancholy spirit” of Nostradamus, in his Elegie sur les troubles d’Amboise (1560) à Guillaume des Autels gentilhomme Charrolois: Ou soit que du grand Dieu l’immense eternité Ait de Nostradamus l’enthousiasme excite ... Ou soit que son esprit sombre et melancolique D’humeurs grasses repeu, le rende fantastique, Bref, il est ce qu’il est: si est ce toutefois Que par les mots douteux de sa profette voix, Comme un oracle antique, il a des mainte année Predit la plus grand part de nostre destinée.12

Nostradamus’s book The Prophecies has been continuously in print since mid-16th century.13 A lot of works on Nostradamus suffer from mistranslation, wishful thinking or corrupt texts. Nostradamus was a scholar and a Renaissance man (doctor of medicine, translator, poet, astrologer) who can be seen as having been in line with the Neoplatonic tradition and the framework of the occult philosophy of the 16th century. The Prophecies consists of almost a thousand short poems—10 centuries of quatrains—of only four rhymed lines each. The number of textual themes and motives of the Centuries is quite limited: war, catastrophe, (bad) government, with the prodigy being identified as the general poetic topic. I suggest that the role which would fit Nostradamus would be the one described by Frances Yates: the “inspired melancholic,” a title she applied to John Dee, the English astrologer and scientist contemporary to Nostradamus.14 Surely Nostradamus’s occupations were such as to qualify him as a Saturnian, a representative of the Renaissance revaluation of melancholy as the temperament of inspiration. And after the first stage of inspiration— the inspiration coming from immersion in the sciences of numbers— Agrippa of Nettesheim envisaged a second stage, a prophetic stage, in which the adept was intent on politico-religious events and prophecies. And finally in the third stage, stage of inspired melancholy, the higher insight into religion and religious changes was revealed. According to Ficino, the idea of melancholy touched on advanced and complex theories not only of madness, but also on spleen and depression. At the same time, this temper, associated with the deep influence of Saturn, was also connected with ambition and fantasy as well as with intellectual and physical achievement. As Neoplatonics inspired by Ficino, both Ronsard and Du Bellay saw that Saturn and Melancholy were linked

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together and in their poetry the concept of melancholy became an explanatory trope of humanism. Already in his Odes, published in 1555, Ronsard took interest in Plato’s and Pseudo-Aristotle’s ideas of the poet as a prophet, and in particular the four Platonic rages or furies (fureurs). In his famous Ode to Michel de l’Hospital, Ronsard puts the prophetic fury at the highest rank: En Prophetie, en Poësies, en mysteres et en amours, Quatre fureurs qui tour à tour Chatouilleront vos fantaisies.15

In the poetry of Ronsard, there is an ambiguity in his use of the word “fureur,” such as in the Elegy for Guillaume des Autels that I will quote below. In Ronsard’s earlier work, words such as “fureur, fantaisie, frénésie” are often associated with love. But when he uses the term “fureur” round 1560, it is to be understood in the full seriousness of its setting in Neoplatonic mythology, and especially associated with Saturn. Like Ronsard, Nostradamus was preoccupied by the idea that Saturn could transmit power of God in a purely literal, physical sense to humans given the prophetic skills. Saturn’s “children” could use the melancholy temperament, at the right moment. Nostradamus refers to this in his preface to the Centuries: And—given that we are now governed by the moon—before it has completed its full circuit, thanks to the omnipotence of God eternal, the (age of the) sun shall come (again), and then (that of) Saturn.

In his Discours, Ronsard refers not only to Saturn but also to Jupiter: On dit que Jupiter, fâché contre la race Des hommes qui voulaient par curieuse audace Envoyer leurs raisons jusqu’au Ciel, pour savoir Les hauts secrets divins, que l’homme ne doit voir, Un jour étant gaillard choisit pour son amie Dame Présomption, la voyant endormie Au pied du mont Olympe, et la baisant soudain Conçut l’Opinion, peste du genre humain. ... Ce monstre arme le fils contre son propre père, Et le frère (ô malheur) arme contre son frère, La sœur contre la sœur, et les cousins germains Au sang de leurs cousins veulent tremper leurs mains. L’oncle fuit son neveu, le serviteur son maître,

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Myth and Inspiration in French Renaissance Poetry La femme ne veut pas son mari reconnaître. Les enfants sans raison disputent de la foi, Et tout à l’abandon va sans ordre et sans loi . . . (lines 127–66)

Fig. 2. Jacob II de Gheyn. Melancholicus. 1596. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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Ronsard also refers to Saturn in his Amours diverses, dedicated to the “tres-vertueux Seigneur N. de Neufville, Seigneur de Villeroy, Secretaire d’Estat de sa Majesté.” In this poem, Ronsard worries about the famous apocalyptic prophecy for the year 1588, likened to the civil wars in France: En ce temps la Comete en l’air est ordinaire, En ce temps on a veu le double luminaire Du ciel en un mesme an s’eclipser par deux fois: Nous avons veu mourir en jeunesse nos Rois, Et la peste infectee en nos murs enfermee Le peuple moissonner d’une main affamee. Qui pis est, ces Devins qui contemplent les tours Des Astres, & du Ciel l’influance & le cours, Predisent qu’en quatre ans (Saturne estant le guide) Nous voirrons tout ce monde une campaigne vuide: Le peuple carnassier la Noblesse tuer, Et des Princes l’estat s’alterer & muer.16

This can be compared with the theme of the quatrain 5.24 in Nostradamus Prophecies: Le regne & loy soubs Venus eslevé, Saturne aura sur Jupiter empire: La loy & regne par le Soleil levé, Par Saturnins endurera le pire.17

Du Bellay’s writings also developed towards a prophetically inspired discourse. The years in Rome were very productive, and back in Paris in 1558 he published Les Antiquités de Rome, Les jeux divers Rustiques and Les Regrets. He dedicated these works to Henry II, hoping in vain for a lucrative and prestigious career. Unfortunately, Henry II was soon to be mortally wounded in the famous 1559 tournaments in Paris. In his Jeux Rustiques, Du Bellay writes in his preface to the reader (“avertissement au lecteur”) that he put together the elements of his poems, bringing them together like the “feuillets de la Sibylle,” Sibyl’s leaves, scattered by the winds, alluding to the ancient Greek sibyls whose elusive message was spread by the wind. Ce qui m’a contrainct de recueillir par cy par là, comme les feuillets de la Sibylle, toutes ces petites pièces . . . .18

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Like Nostradamus and Ronsard, Du Bellay comments on the ongoing conflicts, hoping for an end: Sonnet 123 Nous ne sommes fâchés que la trêve se fasse: Car bien que nous soyons de la France bien loin: Si est chacun de nous à soi-même témoin Combien la France doit de la guerre être lasse.19

“We are not upset over this ceasefire, because even if we are far from France, each one of us could tell, how tired of the war France must be.” The content of this sonnet is quite remarkable. Du Bellay was a French poet, but he was sent to Italy as a diplomat. Under these circumstances it was a sensitive matter that he turned to the French court talking openly about everybody being tired of the war. This was not comme il faut. On the contrary, the genre of literature glorifying the wars occupied an important place in the French Renaissance. Du Bellay, Ronsard, and several of the other Pleiade poets had all delivered poetry that—with the help of ancient mythology—made the contemporary warlords epic heroes. They did it to please the court, and perhaps to let readers escape from the grim reality for a while. Key ingredients were knightly romance and princes with divine properties and no fear. These epics were characterized by a strong intertextuality with the Greek and Roman historiography. But Du Bellay got to a point where he refused to join in as a cheerleader of war. When he began to write Les Regrets, the Prophecies of Nostradamus had just been released and quickly spread. In Nostradamus, Du Bellay found a poet who laconically described the true face of war. Although it may seem strange to describe Nostradamus’s poetry in terms of social criticism, the fact remains that he was amazingly straightforward, such as in the following poems of the Prophecies. In verses 2:37 and 3.84, Nostradamus summarizes the horrors of war, but also its futility. He points out that it is diseases and hunger that kill most people, and not the weapons. There are not many left to save at the besieged fortress: 2.37 De ce grand nombre que l’on envoyer Pour secourir dans le fort assiegés, Peste & famine tous les devorera, Hors mis septante qui seront profligés. 3.84 La grand cité sera bien desolée: Des habitans un seul ny demourra:

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Mur, sexe, temple & vierge violée Par fer, feu, peste, canon, peuple mourra.20

In the 1560s, during the religious wars, Nostradamus was caught up in the turmoil of religious and ideological quarrels, his texts were being used by both Catholics and Protestants. He needed to be careful. As a vates mathematicus, he made sure to dedicate some of his works to Catholic dignitaries, and carefully outlined Christian principles in the preface to his first Centuries or Prophecies (1555). Nostradamus was one of Ficino’s dedicated readers. He came to inspire Ronsard in his exploration of the poet/seer because Nostradamus’s writings functioned as a kind of bridge between the Italian Renaissance philosophers, and the great poets of 16th-century France. They appreciated the concrete depictions they found in the texts of Nostradamus. Perhaps there is no better introduction to Nostradamus’s works than the one he himself provides in the first two quatrains of the Centuries. Unlike the others, which stand for themselves and do not really follow each other in terms of content, the first two should be read together as a unit. Through them, and by his preface in the form of a letter to his newborn son Cesar, Nostradamus provides us with a kind of “manual” for reading (English translation, AC): ESTANT assis de nuit secret estude, Seul repousé sus la selle d’aerain, Flambe exigue sortant de solitude Fait proferer qui n’est à croire vain. (Sitting alone at night in secret study; placed on the brass tripod, A slight flame comes out of emptiness and makes successful that which should not be believed in vain.) La verge en main mise au milieu de BRANCHES De l’onde il moulle & le limbe & le pied: Vn peur & voix fremissent par les manches Splendeur diuine. Le diuine près s’assied. (The wand in the hand is placed in the middle of the tripod’s legs. With water he sprinkles both the hem of his garment and his foot. A voice, fear: he trembles in his robes. Divine splendor; the God sits nearby.)21

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The melancholic poet finds different metaphors to describe what is threatening mankind. Nostradamus writes about the sword of death—“le glaive de la mort”: . . . le mortal glaive s’aproche de nous pour asture par peste, guerre plus horrible que à vie de trois hommes n’a esté, & famine, lequel tombera en terre, & y retournera souvent.22

Du Bellay meanwhile writes about the Storm, “la Tempeste” that will come and destroy the world, as in his Songes: Quand un Demon apparut à mes yeux Dessus le bord du grand fleuve de Rome, Qui m’appellant du nom dont je me nomme, Me commanda regarder vers le cieux: . . . O vanité du monde! un soudain tremblement Faisant crouler du mont la plus basse racine, Renversa ce beau lieu depuis le fondement. . . . Las rien ne dure au monde que torment! Je vy du ciel la Tempeste descendre, Et fouldroyer ce brave monument.23

Ronsard expresses les misères de ce temps—that will bring on a monster who arms sons against their fathers:—Ce monstre arme le fils contre son propre père. To each reader, the Sword or Storm or Monster meant different things. But these poets had in common the expression of a profound, global melancholy. They embraced the idea of a poetic melancholy associated not only with madness, spleen and depression, but also with creativity, wisdom and intellectual achievement; a special kind of melancholy connected to the deep influence of Saturn and regarded as a precondition of prophetically inspired poetry. According to the myths, Saturn transformed darkness into light, cold into heat, sadness into joy. Its color was black and it was associated with lead. But while Saturn was linked to death, it was also linked to the notion of the Golden Age. In this regard it was of importance that Saturn was often identified with the Greek Cronus, the mythological son of Uranus. In that sense, there was also hope for the world that these poets portrayed. There was a glimmer of light in this melancholic prophetic poetry that the Swedish translator of Plato Jan Stolpe has described as “dark, frozen and glowing at the same time.” If we go back to one of art

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history’s most famous images of the inspiring but painful melancholy, necessary for creation, yet also extremely demanding and fateful— Albrecht Dürers Melencolia I—we find the picture filled with symbols of the melancholic temperament: the darkness, the bat, the leaning dog, loneliness, the melancholy of the slumped, contemplating figure. We also find all kinds of tools and scientific instruments; all sorts of chances of creativity are given, but melancholy threatens to take over. At the same time, there is a glimpse of light up in the left corner of a rainbow, and this is important. The design of the rainbow reminds of the emblem of Catherine de’ Medici—a rainbow with the Greek motto “it brings light and serenity.” I believe Nostradamus would have agreed with one of the melancholic and prophetic poets of our own time, Leonard Cohen, when he sings: There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.24

Notes 1

Henricus Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, De Occulta Philosophia libri tres = Three Books of Occult Philosophy, trans. James Freake, ed. Donald Tyson (St. Paul, MN: Lllewellyn Publication, 1995), xlv, 545. 2 Robert E. Stillman, Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism (London: Ashgate, 2008), vii. 3 Ibid. 4 In this context, it is fruitful to mention Anthony H. T. Levi, “The Role of Neoplatonism in Ronsard’s Poetic Imagination,” in Ronsard the Poet, ed. Terence Cave (London: Methuen, 1973). 5 Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), 18. 6 Plato Phaedrus 245a–b. Translation by Benjamin Jowett (Boston: Forgotten Books & Indy Publish, 2008). 7 William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. H. F. Brooks for the New Arden (London: Methuen, 1979), 5.1. 8 Pontus de Tyard, Solitaire premier ou Dialogue de la fureur poétique (Paris: Galiot du Pre, 1575), 11, 16–17. 9 Pierre de Ronsard, Les Elegies (1584), in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jean Céard, David Ménager, and Michelle Simonin (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), vol. 2, 299. 10 Michel Nostradamus, Les Prophéties de M. Michel Nostradamus (1568), Préface à Henry II. 11 Pierre de Ronsard, Discours des Miseres de ce Temps, A la Royne mere du Roy, in Œuvres complètes. 12 Pierre de Ronsard, Elegie à Guillaume des Autels gentilhomme Charrolois (1560), in Œuvres complètes, 358–59.

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13

My doctoral thesis on this subject was entitled: Anna Carlstedt, La poésie oraculaire de Nostradamus: Langue, style et genre des Centuries (Stockholm: ACTA, Stockholm University, 2005). 14 Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1979), 101. 15 Pierre de Ronsard, Ode à Michel de l’Hospital (1552), in Œuvres complètes, vol. 1. 16 Pierre de Ronsard, in Les oeuvres, reveues, corrigees & augmentees par l’Autheur (published in Paris by Gabriel Buon, 1584), in Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, 233–34. 17 Michel Nostradamus, Les Prophéties 1568, ed. Michel Chomarat (Lyon: Editions Michel Chomarat, 2000, 5.24. 18 Joachim du Bellay, Divers Jeux Rustiques, ed. G. Chaufour (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). See idem, Œuvres complètes, ed. Francis Goyet and Olivier Millet (Paris: Champion, 2003), and idem, Œuvres poétiques, ed. Daniel Aris and Françoise Joukovsky (Paris: Bordas, 1993). 19 Joachim Du Bellay, Œuvres complètes. 20 Nostradamus, Les Prophéties 1568, centurie 2, quatrain 37; centurie 3, quatrain 84. 21 Ibid. The first two quatrains of the Prophéties. 22 Ibid. From the preface of the Prophéties. 23 Joachim du Bellay, Songe I, in Les regrets et autres œuvres poëtiques suivis des Antiquitez de Rome, plus un Songe ou Vision sur le mesme subject, ed. J. W. Jolliffe (Geneva: Droz, 1966). 24 Leonard Cohen. Anthem, in Selected Poems 1956–1968 (New York: Bantam Books, 1971).

Works Cited Sources Agrippa of Nettesheim, Henricus Cornelius. De Occulta Philosophia libri tres. Translated by James Freake, edited by Donald Tyson. Three Books of Occult philosophy. St. Paul, MN: Lllewellyn Publication, 1995. Aristotle. Problems. Books XXII–XXXVIII. Translated by W. S. Hett. Rhetorica ad Alexandrum. Translated by H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library 317. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983. First published 1937. Du Bellay, Joachim. Songe I, in Les regrets et autres œuvres poëtiques suivis des Antiquitez de Rome, plus un Songe ou Vision sur le mesme subject. Edited by J. W. Jolliffe. Geneva: Droz, 1966. —. Œuvres poétiques. Edited by Daniel Aris and Françoise Joukovsky. Paris: Bordas, 1993. —. Divers Jeux Rustiques. Edited by G. Chaufour. Paris: Gallimard, 1996. —. Œuvres complètes. Edited by Francis Goyet and Olivier Millet. Paris: Champion, 2003.

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Nostradamus, Michel. Les Prophéties 1568. Edited by Michel Chomarat. Lyon: Editions Michel Chomarat, 2000. —. Propheties 1555. Translated by Anna Carlstedt and Jan Stolpe. Stockholm: Gidlunds, 2008. Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Boston: Forgotten Books & Indy Publish, 2008. Pierre de Ronsard. Œuvres complètes. 2 vols. Edited by Jean Céard, David Ménager, and Michelle Simonin. Paris: Gallimard, 1993–4. Pontus de Tyard. Solitaire premier ou Dialogue de la fureur poétique. Paris: Galiot du Pre,1575. First published 1552.

Secondary Literature Auerbach, Erich. Literary Language and its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Pantheon Books, 1965. First published 1958. Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. 1621. Vol. 1. Edited by Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicholas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Carlstedt, Anna. La poésie oraculaire de Nostradamus: Langue, style et genre des Centuries. Stockholm: ACTA, Stockholm University, 2005. Klibansky, Raymond, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl. Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art. London: Nelson, 1964. Levi, Anthony H. T. “The Role of Neoplatonism in Ronsard’s Poetic Imagination.” In Ronsard the Poet. Edited by Terence Cave, London: Methuen, 1973. Radden, Jennifer. The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Stillman, Robert E. Philip Sidney and the poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism. London: Ashgate, 2008. Woodbridge, Linda. The Scythe of Saturn: Shakespeare and Magical Thinking. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Yates, Frances A. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1964. —. The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1979.

FROM MYTHOLOGICAL EVENTS TO HISTORICAL EVIDENCE: A STUDY OF LES ILLUSTRATIONS DE GAULE ET SINGULARITEZ DE TROYE BY LEMAIRE DE BELGES ADELINE DESBOIS-IENTILE PARIS-SORBONNE UNIVERSITY

The 7th-century author Fredegar was the first one to argue that the Franks descended from a Trojan ancestor.1 This belief spread during the Middle Ages and did not fade away. At the end of the 15th century, French and Burgundian historians were still telling of the diaspora of the Trojan refugees from their homeland, and of their journey toward Germany and France.2 As the members of the French royal family were assumed to be part of the Frankish lineage, this meant that Trojan ancestors lay at the root of the French monarchy too, and historians and clergymen celebrating the French grandeur could not but recall the glorious Trojan past. By the 16th century, the most popular version of the legend stated that the Trojan ancestor of the French was Francus (whose name was sometimes gallicized as Francion), an alleged son of Hector who escaped slaughter when the Greek warriors destroyed Troy.3 While Aeneas sailed to Italian shores to found the city of Rome, Francus or one of his heirs supposedly made his way to France after remaining some time in Hungary and Germany. Other Western European peoples were also said to belong to the Trojan lineage: some historians contended that an offspring of Aeneas named Brutus ruled over Brittany, and Bavo, who was Priam’s rescued cousin, was supposed to have gone to the Belgian region. The incorporation of those legends into chronicles and universal histories reveals that, during the Middle Ages, the Trojan War and the Trojan diaspora were not read as mythological events invented by poets, but as historical events. This belief was buttressed by two alleged ancient narratives of the Trojan War, which were in reality forgeries dating from

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perhaps the 2nd century A.D.: the Ephemeridos belli Troiani by Dictys Cretensis, and the De excidio Troiae historia by Dares Phrygius.4 As both authors had claimed to have participated in the war, medieval writers tended to rely on their accounts, while simultaneously casting doubt on Homer’s version, since it was not an eyewitness account and had been written more than one hundred years after the Trojan War. Medieval writers may also have been prompted to follow Dictys’s and Dares’s narratives because they are written in plain historical style: mythological events involving gods and heroes are indeed absent from both texts.

Lemaire de Belges’s Account of the Trojan War At the beginning of the 16th century the Trojan War was still read as a historical event belonging to the History of France, even if the historian Robert Gaguin had expressed misgivings about Francus actually being a Trojan.5 But such a cautious opinion did not prevent the historiographer Jean Lemaire de Belges from publishing a book entitled Les Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye6 (1511–1513) intended to establish the truth about the ancestors of the French royal and Burgundian ducal families,7 and especially about the Trojan War. The work undertakes a long genealogy, beginning with Noah, the first man after the Flood, and ending with Louis the Pious, the son of Charles the Great. The genealogical chain includes the eldest branch of the Trojan royal family itself, including Francus, Hector’s son and Priam’s grandson and the last member of the lineage. Such chronologies, extending from biblical Antiquity to the Middle Ages, recall the universal histories written during the Middle Ages, but Lemaire overtly sought to distance his work from medieval texts, and especially from some narratives of the Trojan War which he considered untruthful.8 In order to restore the historical truth that he felt had been corrupted, Lemaire relied on different sources. Like many medieval writers, he considered the most ancient author to be the most reliable. But instead of following only Dares—as most medieval authors did—he would gather all the available ancient sources, taking into account texts written by the historian Diodorus Siculus and the pseudo-historians Dictys and Dares, as well as the antique fragments published in 1498 by the Italian scholar Annius of Viterb who claimed to have discovered lost antique texts (texts he had actually forged9). While scholars at that time disagreed about the authenticity of Annius’s texts, many readers, including Lemaire, believed them to be genuine. What is perhaps more surprising to us is Lemaire’s use of epic and poetry as historical sources. Homer (Iliad),

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Virgil (Aeneid) and Ovid (Heroides and Metamorphoses) rank among the most frequently quoted authorities in the Illustrations. Relying on epic and poetical works to build a non-fictional framework was not, however, as incongruous as it may seem. Lemaire was in line with the medieval tradition which interpreted mythological tales as sources of biblical, historical or scientific knowledge. Indeed, he makes frequent reference to interpreters of mythological stories, most especially to Boccaccio, whose Genealogy of the Pagan Gods is one of the major sources for the Illustrations.10 Nevertheless, Lemaire’s attitude differed from that of many medieval interpreters: his main objective was not to decode mythological events, but to square them with a worldwide historical synchrony. Even if Boccaccio often suggested that mythological tales should be read as if they referred to historical events, he did not seek to prove that mythological events had actually taken place. Instead, he relied on ancient sciences (history, physics and morality) for an interpretation of these accounts, and, unlike many of his contemporaries, shied away from Christian exegesis.11 He also broke new ground by establishing that a single name need not refer to a single creature, but could instead apply to multiple characters. Thus, according to Boccaccio, Jupiter is not an omnipotent and ubiquitous god, but the name “Jupiter” actually refers to three different characters who lived at different times and places, and accomplished various exploits. This principle known as homonymy thus enabled readers of the Genealogy of the Pagan Gods to combine gods and heroes with historical chronology. Since these gods and heroes are no longer ubiquitous creatures, but instead characters living at a specific time and in a specific place, their lives could now be dated.12 This strategy, in fact, had been used by Annius of Viterb. He wrote different texts which he attributed to various antique authors such as the Chaldean priest Berossus who, he claimed, had left additional fragments of their work to posterity. Taken together, his texts reconstruct a long and continuous chronology of the world which incorporated pagan mythology. When Lemaire reconstructed the genealogy of the French royal and Burgundian ducal families from Noachian time onward, he gave credit to the Trojan episode by introducing it into the chronology, while breaking with the traditional medieval narratives of the Trojan Wars. Since pagan gods are necessarily false gods within a Christian setting, medieval narratives, which claimed to tell the true story of Troy, often eliminated pagan gods either by ignoring them or by interpreting their presence allegorically.13 Lemaire, too, understood that pagan gods did not exist; rather than removing them completely from the Trojan story, he instead sought to explain their presence and their actions within the context of a

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historical narrative. In order to render mythological events historically valid, Lemaire needed a coherent and rationally satisfying way to account for mythological events in a historical work that sought to reconstruct events as they had actually unfolded. Doing so would sometimes prove difficult: certain events could be read literally, but many others contained elements which precluded them from being read as plain historical truth. For instance, the abduction of Ganymede by Jupiter in the form of an eagle had to be interpreted before being included in an historical work. In order to introduce fully the Trojan episode in his work—without having to exclude or transform parts of the Trojan account—Lemaire made use of certain tools and devices drawn from the works of Boccaccio and Annius, rather than using allegories systematically. These tools, which enabled him to join myth and reality, will be discussed in the three sections below.

Historical Reading Lemaire, as a Catholic, believed in only one God: characters called “gods” in mythology could not, by definition, be real gods. Medieval allegorical readings typically made “gods” stand-ins either for moral or psychological abstractions, or for material elements and planets. In his Illustrations, Lemaire’s favourite interpretation of mythology made them mere human beings.14 One way to explain the presence of pagan gods in epics or poetry is simply to consider them human beings who have been called “gods” by the poets. This is what Lemaire calls “historical” reading.15 He found support for aspects of this reading in Boccaccio’s Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, and would also make use of the comparison between Homer’s mythological tales and the supposedly historical narratives of Dictys and Dares. After having narrated a fabulous event where gods and goddesses interfered with humans, Lemaire announces that he will undertake a historical reading of the episode. Lemaire thus recalls the Homeric episode in which the goddess Venus saved Paris from the fight against Menelaus, and explains that Venus could be allegorically understood as standing for cowardice, and suggests as an alternative that Venus’s intervention in the Homeric battle may also have a “historical cause”: it was not Venus herself who acted, but Aeneas, supposedly Venus’s son.16 What Lemaire calls “historical reading” is not a literal reading, but it implies that a god or a mythological character stands in for a human being who actually existed: the fabulous event is thus a transposition of an actual historical event.17 In comparison with other allegorical readings, the historical reading is the only one that really transforms myth into reality:

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the mythological episode is transposed as an event (and not as a moral or psychological abstraction) into reality. Using this approach, Lemaire would prove that mythological texts referred to historical events that had truly occurred. Such interpretations of mythological tales are usually established by mythographers from the tale itself. Boccaccio, for instance, composed almost every genealogical fragment of his Genealogy of the Pagan Gods using this approach: he first narrates the tale according to the poets’ version, subsequently expounding on the interpretations suggested by former readers. For instance, in Boccaccio’s exposition of Ganymede, he recalls the Virgilian and Ovidian versions of the boy’s abduction by an eagle, and then recounts Fulgentius’s, Eusebius’s and Leontius’s interpretations of the event.18 Lemaire proceeds differently: he does not seek to explain mythological tales, asserting instead that they refer to true historical events. This is why he reverses Boccaccio’s approach: he starts by presenting the historical event, and then he tells or hints at the mythological tale poets would have forged by adding fabulous material to the event. In this formulation, the myth follows, rather than precedes the historical event. Thus, in Lemaire’s hands, the young man Ganymede is abducted when he went to the war with his father. His kidnapper, the king of Crete, whose nickname was Jupiter, we are told, wore an eagle for his standard. Then Lemaire adds: And for this reason, poets had the opportunity to pretend that the boy Ganymede had been abducted while hunting by an eagle and taken up into the sky.19

Lemaire holds the poets accountable for such fables: “poets feign that . . .” is a phrase he uses to introduce the fabulous version of the event, along with “according to the poets” and “poets say that.” Concerning Venus’s intervention to save Paris from being killed by Menelaus, Lemaire states that “Homer was within his rights to feign” that the goddess Venus had intervened, because Aeneas (Venus’s son) actually had.20 Homer was simply transposing historical fact onto a mythological narrative. Interestingly, Lemaire does not mention the role played by the poets when a prince or an illustrious person is deified after his death. The only exception involves Castor and Pollux, whom the poets claim were converted into stars after their death, and who were also worshipped as pagan saints. Here the fiction made up by the poets and the popular belief converge, and they converge precisely because the fiction underlies the worship of the twins:

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From Mythological Events to Historical Evidence Poets feign that [Castor and Pollux] have been transported up into the sky, and have become one of the twelve signs of the zodiac, Gemini. And at the time of pagan idolatry, they were called upon at sea, as Saint Nicholas is today. Because the fable says that they had been granted by the god of the sea, Neptune, the power to save people from dangers and shipwrecks.21

In the other cases, Lemaire clearly distinguishes the poet’s imagination that confers a mythological aura on the event, from the fervour of ordinary people that makes them worship a dead prince as if he were a god.

Euhemerism The distinction between the poetic imagination and popular fervour is a particularly meaningful one, and it requires us to distinguish historical reading from “euhemerism.” In a historical reading, the poet transposes events onto another level of reality rather than narrating them literally: the character is thus not actually deified, but instead depicted as a god or a hero by the poet. Deification is thus a rhetorical process within the discipline of elocution. Euhemerism, in contrast, implies that a human being is perceived as a god by those who have known him. Such distinction between historical reading and euhemerism is not always made clear: Jean Seznec labels “euhemerism” all interpretations of gods as deified men.22 John D. Cooke explains “euhemerism” as the belief “that the so-called gods had come to possess or exert actual power,” but also as the idea “that mankind had been deceived by poets and mythmakers who had fabricated the stories of their deification and potency.”23 Popular belief and poetical forgeries become two of the reasons that lead to the same act of falsely worshipping mortal men. But Raymond de Block warns the modern reader against confusing euhemerism with what he called “historical interpretation”: he indeed argued that the Stoics developed “historical interpretation” in order to explain minor deities.24 For example, the Stoics asserted that mortal men such as Theseus had been deified thanks to legends glorifying their exploits, and not by popular fervour at the time of their death. Jean Pepin’s short history of euhemerism also shows how mythological tales may be associated with euhemerism insofar as they give the past a glorious aura.25 While this essay will not dwell on the definition and stakes of euhemerism,26 we note that poetical fictionalization and popular divinisation suffer different fates in the hands of the author of the Illustrations: whereas Lemaire describes poetical fictionalization as a worthy tool used by poets to give some glory to the actions that are depicted, he morally condemned people for deifying and worshipping mortal human beings. Poets are liars, but worshippers are

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idolatrous people who do not know the true god. In the case of euhemerism, mythological tales relate facts and events which were truly believed by the people, and not feigned by the poets. Then, when the historian talks about gods, he relates what the population thought of as true. Lemaire never explicitly uses the word “euhemerism,” but he mentions various cases of deifications he dates back to the age of idolatry.27 Perseus and Jason, Castor and Pollux, Osiris (Noah’s grandson) and the Hercules of Libya were all worshipped as gods after their deaths. Helen was worshipped as well: After [Helen’s] death, during a blinded and misguided age, a lavish and idolatrous time when many new gods and new goddesses were created, Helen was placed among the number and catalogue of immortal goddesses.28

Although Lemaire found information concerning men being deified in the Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, his main sources were a series of texts published by Annius of Viterb. In his book, Annius sought to account for the antiquity of the city of Viterb through a retelling of the whole story of humanity. Instead of inventing the past, however, he used existing documents, especially mythological texts, to speak about the most remote times of humanity. To make mythological events fit into world history, he tried to bring the mythological characters closer to human beings, and in particular to obscure their timelessness.29 Vincenzo De Caprio observed that Annius made great use of aequivocatio to that purpose.30 In the rhetorical tradition aequivocatio designates words or inflections that have the same spelling but different meanings—a process known nowadays as “homonymy.” Annius developed this process in a text entitled De aequivocis which he attributed to Xenophon. In it, Xenophon says: The most ancient kings belonging to a noble household and having founded cities were called Saturn; their elder children, Jupiter and Juno; and their bravest grandsons, Hercules. The Saturns’ fathers were the skies; their wives, Rhea; and the skies’ wives, Vesta.31

The process of aequivocatio had already been used by Boccaccio in the Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, where he distinguished various homonymous characters. What is new about Annius’s strategy is the fact that the mythological names refer to the position or status of an individual, and not directly to individuals who happened to share the same name: a Saturn is a king and a founder of a city, and Jupiter, Juno and Hercules are

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individuals related to him through family ties. Aequivocatio enables Annius to make a euhemeristic interpretation of mythological characters: gods and heroes are great people who have laid the foundations of civilization.

Lemaire’s Vocabulary Twist In Annius’s text, aequivocatio supported the idea that various historical characters were called by the same name. The reading of the names of pagan gods as reflecting their status, and not their identity, was for Annius a convenient and rational way to transform mythological characters into mere human beings. In the Illustrations, Lemaire links the process of aequivocatio to a more general conception of vocabulary. At various times, Lemaire justified his use of pagan gods’ names, and insisted on the fact that those names did not imply the existence of pagan gods. He used the process of aequivocatio to separate the name from the mythological character to which it was linked, and to transform proper names into common names: In order to avoid the suspicions of those who might listen to this text, and who would protest that it is not necessary to so frequently remind Christian ears of the names of the idols once worshipped by the pagans (i.e. Saturn, Jupiter, and Hercules, etc.), [I say that] any man of sound mind can know that the name of Coritus or crowned Jupiter was at that time a title of royal or papal dignity (like Pharaohs in Egypt and Caesars in Rome). And if they called Jupiter their god, we do the same when we call our pope our Holy Father, because Jupiter means juvans pater and pope, pater patrum. Moreover, as Xenophon says in the Equivoques, formerly, in the first golden age, the most ancient father of each noble royal family, founder of a kingdom or a city, was called Saturn; their elder children, Jupiter and Juno; and their most brave and courageous grandsons, Hercules.32

At the end of this excerpt, Lemaire rephrases the text Annius had attributed to Xenophon. But whereas Annius was interested in homonymy as a way to make mythological characters fit into a chronology, Lemaire dismisses the god’s names as belonging to an out-of-date vocabulary. Some mythological names were titles used to call some specific characters (Jupiter meant “king,” and Saturn “founder”), others are the remnants of an ancient state of the language: Lemaire states that nymph should be understood as referring to a “young girl from a noble family,”33 and he rephrased the expression “gods, semi-gods and heroes” as “brave, courageous and virtuous princes.”34

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In such cases Lemaire gives a linguistic interpretation of mythology: the mythological event is no longer a transposition of a real event made by poets or a deification made by people ready to believe their chiefs to be gods. Analyzing mythological names as ancient words implies that a reader who thinks of a god when the text evokes Saturn is in fact engaged in a misreading. Only those who have forgotten the original meaning of those words think that Saturn is a god, when he is in fact merely a mortal man who founded a city. In order to prevent further mistakes, Lemaire helpfully provides us with a brief lexicon of such words. Vocabulary matters, and Lemaire adds etymological remarks (“Jupiter means juvans pater”) in order to show that etymology can help us recover the true original meaning of the words. Such an analysis of the mythological lexicon necessarily affects the reading of the mythological texts themselves, and indeed Lemaire relies on his own dictionary of mythology to read excerpts from the Aeneid or from other epics or poems entirely out of context. For example, he quotes some verses from the Aeneid that describe Saturn escaping from Jupiter in order to prove that Noah’s grandson, Sabatius Saga, called Saturn, was escaping from Ninius, king of Babylon, called Jupiter: The all good and peaceful Saturn, having hardly escaped from the said Belus and Ninus, came to seek refuge by his grandfather Noah on the first year of the reign of Semiramis, fourth queen of Babylon. And so Virgil demonstrated in a excerpt where he said: Primus ab aethereo venit Saturnus olympo, / Arma Jovis fugiens, et regnis exul ademptis.35

Here, Lemaire reads the mythological episode outside of its original context, relating it as a supposed historical event. By identifying a proper mythological vocabulary and separating it from a mythological world, he thus makes mythology an indirect way of speaking about historical events. Such reading of mythological texts relies mostly on proper names, which are treated as common names. It implies that the mythological names no longer refer to one specific character, god or hero, as was once the case, but instead should be added to the common dictionary as synonyms for “founder,” “founder’s son” or “founder’s grandson.” As a consequence, mythological names can be applied to historical characters: when Virgil spoke of Saturn, he actually meant Sabatius Saga. Such a separation of the proper name from the reality it describes is also achieved through the process consisting in reading mythological names as nicknames given to historical characters. For instance, Lemaire states from Annius that “Janus” was not a Roman god, but one of Noah’s many nicknames.36 Since there is only one existing real character, Noah,

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the ideas and actions once attributed to Janus are now attributed to Noah. Marie-Luce Demonet has noted that Annius transformed the relationship between Greek and Roman gods into a connection between pagan gods and biblical characters37 in order to write a coherent universal history. With Lemaire, such a connection between mythological and biblicalhistorical characters has both linguistic and symbolic consequences. Lemaire indeed explains why Noah was called Janus in a chapter where he collects all the names given to Noah: Sky, Sun, Gods’ father, World’s soul, Janus, Ogyges, etc. These names, he argues, reveal what Noah meant to those who knew him. Janus is used here as Noah’s major nickname, given to him because he was wise in all aspects of his life, and could thus be considered as having two faces. Lemaire does not mention that Janus was considered one of the Roman pagan gods, and merely transfers the symbolism of Janus onto Noah in order to enrich the portrait: Noah-Janus embodies prudence, the beginning and end of the year, the invention of doors and locks. The mythological character has suddenly disappeared behind the symbolism it conveys.

Conclusion Lemaire, inspired by Boccaccio and Annius, read certain mythological events as historical. In so doing, he reduced mythology to history, either factually or linguistically. But such a conclusion does not do justice to Lemaire’s work. This paper focuses primarily on the historical sections of the Illustrations, where Lemaire dispensed with fabulous events. In other parts of the book, in contrast, Lemaire is far more lenient about mythology, as when he narrates Paris’s judgment or the gods’ banquet organized for Thetis and Peleus’s wedding in great detail. Such a discrepancy regarding the place and function of mythology can be partly explained by the chronology of the book’s composition: Lemaire would have written some mythological pieces to please his friends, well before his mistress, Margaret of Austria, would have asked him to introduce a larger framework celebrating the antiquity of her genealogy.38 This new objective would have compelled him to abandon mythological tales in favour of plain historical truth. Yet mythology remains present in Lemaire’s history too. In one particularly relevant example concerning the Trojan Wars, Lemaire does not have the gods intervene in the battle as Homer did, except for one instance, where he translates a lengthy fragment of Homer’s narrative of the fight between Paris and Menelaus (which Venus interrupts in order to save her protégé). Lemaire acknowledges that Homer’s narrative is far from the historical truth, but shares it with the

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reader nonetheless “because it is beautiful and pleasant, and indicates antiquity.”39 At that moment he acknowledges that mythology remains a source of pleasure, one that will never fully be reduced to mere history.

Notes 1

Bruno Krusch established that the so-called “Fredegar’s chronicle” had been written by three different authors, two of them mentioning the Franks’ Trojan heritage. See Fredegarii et aliorum chronica. Vita sanctorum, ed. Bruno Krusch (Hanover: Impensis bibliopolii Hahniani, 1888), 3. 2 One can find a list of those texts in Maria Klippel, Die Darstellung der Frankischen Trojanersage in Geschichtsschreibung und Dichtung vom Mittelalter bis zur Renaissance in Frankreich (Bielefeld: Beyer & Hausknecht, 1936). M. Klippel’s work has been supplemented for the 16th century by R. E. Asher in National Myths in Renaissance France: Francus, Samothes and the Druids (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993). 3 For the diverse versions of the Trojan legend, see Colette Beaune, Naissance de la nation France (Paris: Gallimard, 1985). 4 Dictys Cretensis, Ephemeridos belli Troiani libri, ed. Werner Eisenhut, (1973; Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1994), and Daretis Phrygii De excidio Troiae historia, ed. Ferdinand Meister (Leipzig: 1873). 5 Robert Gaguin, Compendium de origine et gestis Francorum (Paris: Andreas Bocard, 1497), Ir. 6 The title could be translated into English as: “The Illustrious History of Gaul and the Peculiar Events of Troy.” 7 The dukes of Burgundy belonged to a younger branch of the French royal family. Lemaire happened to praise both families, as he left the Burgundian princess Margaret of Austria to go into service with the queen of France, Anne of Brittany, while publishing his work. 8 When he says so, he is thinking about the Historia destructionis Troiae written by Guido delle Colonne, which is a 13th-century rewriting of the Roman de Troie (The Story of Troy) by Benoît de Sainte-Maure. 9 Annius of Viterb, Antiquitatum variarum volumina XVII (Paris: Jean Petit and Josse Bade, 1515). The editio princeps was issued in 1498 in Rome. On Annius as a forger, see Roland Crahay, “Réflexions sur le faux historique: le cas d’Annius de Viterbe,” Bulletin de la classe des Lettres et des Sciences morales et politiques 69 (1983). 10 Pierre Jodogne, “Lemaire de Belges et Boccace,” in Il Boccaccio nella cultura francese. Atti del Convegno di studi “L’Opera del Boccaccio nella cultura francese,” Certaldo 2–6 settembre 1968, ed. Carlo Pellegrini (Florence: Olchki, 1971). 11 Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogie deorum gentilium, in Tutte le opere, vol. 7, ed. Vittore Branca (Milano: Mondadori, 1998), 23.

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In the De natura deorum by Cicero, the sceptic Cotta had already related homonymy with gods having a human origin. Cicero, De natura deorum, III, 21. In Œuvres completes de Cicéron, ed. P. Nisard, vol. 4 (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1864). 13 For medieval readings and rewritings of Virgil’s Aeneid, see Jacques Monfrin, “Les translations vernaculaires de Virgile au Moyen Âge,” in Lectures médiévales de Virgile: Actes du colloque organisé par l’École française de Rome (25–28 octobre 1982) (Rome: École française de Rome, 1985), and Francine MoraLebrun, L’“Enéide” médiévale. La naissance du roman (Paris: PUF, 1994). 14 My study focuses on the historical parts of the Illustrations; I do not deal here with the Paris-Oenone romance where mythological elements are treated differently. 15 We find in the Illustrations such phrases as “cause historiale” (II, 17, in ed. Stecher 2, 169) or “verité historiale” (II, 21, in ed. Stecher 2, 199). For the convenience of the reader, I quote the Illustrations in the only modern edition presently existing (Jean Lemaire de Belges, Œuvres, ed. Jean Stecher, vol. 1–2, Louvain: Lefever, 1882–91), but I first checked the text in the 16th-century editio princeps. 16 Illustrations II, 17, in ed. Stecher 2, 168–69. 17 Since Lemaire treats the Trojan War as a historical episode of the world’s history, literal reading is basic, and he keeps the word “historical” for readings that imply a transposition. 18 Boccaccio, Genealogie, VI, 4. 19 “Et à ceste cause, les Poëtes ont trouvé occasion de feindre, que l’enfant Ganymedes allant à la chasse, fut ravy par un aigle, et emporté au ciel.” Illustrations I, 17, in ed. Stecher 1, 107–8. In the article, all English translations from the Illustrations or from other texts are mine. 20 “A bon droit feint le poëte Homere que que le beau Paris fut soustrait de la bataille par la Deesse Venus.” Illustrations II, 17, in ed. Stecher 2, 168. 21 “[S]ur ce feignent les poëtes, qu’ilz furent translatez au ciel, et font l’un des douze signes du Zodiaque nommé Gemini. Et du temps des Payens idolatres, ilz estoient reclamez en mer, comme est aujourdhuy saint Nicolas. Car les fables disent, qu’ilz avoient obtenu de Neptunus Dieu de la mer, toute puissance pour garder les gens de peril et naufrage.” Illustrations II, 4, in ed. Stecher 2, 40. 22 Jean Seznec, La survivance des dieux antiques (Paris: Flammarion, 1993), 21. 23 John D. Cooke, “Euhemerism: A Mediaeval Interpretation of Classical Paganism,” Speculum 2, no. 4 (1927). 24 Raymond de Block, Évhémère, son livre & sa doctrine (Mons: Hector Manceaux, 1876), 117. 25 Jean Pépin, “Christianisme et mythologie: L'evhémérisme des auteurs chrétiens,” in Dictionnaire des Mythologies et des religions des sociétés traditionnelles et du monde antique, ed. Yves Bonnefoy [1981], vol. 1 (Paris: Flammarion, 1999). 26 I hope to develop this analysis further in a forthcoming work. 27 Lemaire indeed describes two periods in history: first, the golden age when the name of “god” was given to fair princes without idolatry. This age coincided with Noah’s time. It was followed by an age when idolatry appeared.

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“[A]pres la mort d’icelle [Hélène], l’aage aveuglee et erronee du temps d’adonques, qui estoit prodigue de forger nouveaux Dieux et Deesses par idolatrie, meit et rangea ladite Heleine au nombre et catalogue des Deesses immortelles.” Illustrations II, 24, in ed. Stecher 2, 230. 29 Annius continues the tradition that had begun with Eusebius of Caesarea, Orosius and Isidore of Seville. See Seznec, Survivance des dieux, 24, where he argues that during the Middle Ages, authors used the euhemerist theory when researching the story of humanity. 30 Vincenzo De Caprio, “Il mito delle origini nelle Antiquitates di Annio da Viterbo,” in Cultura umanistica a Viterbo: Atti della giornata di studio per il V centenario della stampa a Viterbo (Viterbo: Associazione Roma nel Rinascimento, 1991). 31 “Saturni dicuntur familiarum nobilium regum: qui urbes condiderunt: senissimi. Primogeniti eorum Joves et Junones. Hercules vero nepotes eorum fortissimi. Patres Saturnorum coeli: uxores Rheae: et caelorum Vestae.” Annius, Antiquitates, “Liber Quartus . . . continens Commentaria super Xenophontem de aequivocis,” 34v. 32 “[À] fin que la matiere de scrupule et murmuration soit tollue à plusieurs qui pourroient ouyr ce livre: Disans, qu’il n’est ja besoing si souvent ramentevoir aux oreilles Chrestiennes les noms des Idoles, que jadis les Payens adoroient: Cestasavoir, Saturne, Jupiter, et Hercules, etc. Tout homme de sain entendement peult bien congnoistre, que le nom de Coritus ou Jupiter couronné, estoit en ce temps là titre de dignité Royale ou Pontificale, si comme les Pharaons en Egypte, et les Cesars à Romme: Et ce qu’ilz appelloient Jupiter leur Dieu, c’est comme nous désignant le Pape, nostre tressaint pere: car Jupiter signifie, Juvans pater. Et Papa, Pater patrum. Ausurplus comme met Xenophon en es Equivoques, jadis au premier aage doré le plus ancien pere de chacune noble famille Royale, fondateur de Royaume ou de cité, estoit dit Saturne: Leurs enfans aisnez Jupiter et Juno: et leurs neveux les plus fors et les plus vaillans, estoient nommez Hercules.” Illustrations I, 12, in ed. Stecher 1, 81–82. 33 Boccaccio had already suggested such a definition in his Genealogie, VII, 14. 34 “Dieux, Demydieux, et Heroës: Cestadire . . . tous vaillans, preux et vertueux Princes.” Illustrations I, 8, in ed. Stecher 1, 53. 35 “Saturne homme tout bon et tout pacifique, ayant à peine peu eschapper des mains desditz Belus et Ninus, s’en vint rendre à refuge à son grand père Noë, le premier an du regne de Semiramis quatrieme Royne de Babylone. Et cecy demonstre Virgile en un passage, ou il dit: Primus ab aethereo venit Saturnus olympo, / Arma Jovis fugiens, et regnis exul ademptis.” Illustrations I, 5, in ed. Stecher 1, 34. In the Aeneid, Evander tells Aeneas the story of Saturn ruling over the Latium after he departed from Jupiter and the Olymp. Virgil, Aeneid, VIII, 319–20. In ed. Jacques Perret, vol. 2 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2012). 36 Illustrations I, 5, in ed. Stecher 1, 37; and Annius, Antiquitates, “De aequivocis,” 38v. 37 Marie-Luce Demonet, Les Voix du signe: Nature et origine du langage à la Renaissance (1480–1580) (Paris: Champion, 1992), 108.

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Jacques Abélard, Les Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye de Jean Lemaire de Belges: étude des éditions, genèse de l’œuvre (Geneva: Droz, 1976), 211. 39 “[P]ource quil est beau et delectable, et sent bien son antiquité.” Illustrations II, 16, in ed. Stecher 2, 152.

Works Cited Sources Annius of Viterb. Antiquitatum variarum volumina XVII. Paris: Jean Petit and Josse Bade, 1515. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Genealogie deorum gentilium. In Tutte le opere. Vol. 7. Edited by Vittore Branca. Milan: Mondadori, 1998. Cicero. Entretiens sur la nature des dieux / De natura deorum. In Œuvres complètes de Cicéron. Vol. 4. Edited by P. Nisard. Paris: Firmin Didot, 1864. Daretis Phrygii De excidio Troiae historia. Edited by Ferdinand Meister. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1873. Dictys Cretensis. Ephemeridos belli Troiani libri. Edited by Werner Eisenhut. Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1994. First published in 1973. Fredegarii et aliorum chronica. Vita sanctorum. Edited by Bruno Krusch. Hanover: Impensis bibliopolii Hahniani, 1888. Gaguin, Robert. Compendium de origine et gestis Francorum. Paris: Andreas Bocard, 1497. Lemaire de Belges, Jean. Les Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye. Lyon: Etienne Baland, 1511 (editio princeps of the first book). —. Le Deuxieme Livre des Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye. Paris: Geoffroy de Marnef, and Blois: Hubert Malican, 1512 (editio princeps of the second book). —. Le Tiers Livre des Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye. Paris: Geoffroy de Marnef, 1513 (editio princeps of the third book). —. Les Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye. In Œuvres. Vol. 1–2. Edited by Jean Stecher. Louvain: Lefever, 1882–91. Virgil. Énéide. Vol. 2. Edited by Jacques Perret. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2012. First published in 1936.

Secondary Literature Abélard, Jacques. Les Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye de Jean Lemaire de Belges: étude des éditions, genèse de l’œuvre. Geneva: Droz, 1976. Asher, R. E. National Myths in Renaissance France: Francus, Samothes and the Druids. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. Beaune, Colette. Naissance de la nation France. Paris: Gallimard, 1985. Block, Raymond de. Évhémère, son livre & sa doctrine. Mons: Hector Manceaux, 1876.

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Cooke, John D. “Euhemerism: A Mediaeval Interpretation of Classical Paganism.” Speculum 2, no. 4 (1927): 396–410. Crahay, Roland. “Réflexions sur le faux historique: le cas d’Annius de Viterbe.” Bulletin de la classe des Lettres et des Sciences morales et politiques 69 (1983): 241–67. De Caprio, Vincenzo. “Il mito delle origini nelle Antiquitates di Annio da Viterbo.” In Cultura umanistica a Viterbo: Atti della giornata di studio per il V centenario della stampa a Viterbo. Edited by Teresa Sampieri and Giuseppe Lombardi, 87–110. Viterbo: Associazione Roma nel Rinascimento, 1991. Demonet, Marie-Luce. Les Voix du signe: Nature et origine du langage à la Renaissance (1480–1580). Paris: Champion, 1992. Jodogne, Pierre. “Lemaire de Belges et Boccace.” In Il Boccaccio nella cultura francese. Atti del Convegno di studi “L’Opera del Boccaccio nella cultura francese,” Certaldo 2–6 settembre 1968. Edited by Carlo Pellegrini, 489–504. Florence: Olchki, 1971. Klippel, Maria. Die Darstellung der Frankischen Trojanersage in Geschichtsschreibung und Dichtung vom Mittelalter bis zur Renaissance in Frankreich. Bielefeld: Beyer & Hausknecht, 1936. Monfrin, Jacques. “Les translations vernaculaires de Virgile au Moyen Âge.” In Lectures médiévales de Virgile: Actes du colloque organisé par l’École française de Rome (25–28 octobre 1982). 189–249. Rome: École française de Rome, 1985. Mora-Lebrun, Francine. L’“Enéide” médiévale: La naissance du roman. Paris: PUF, 1994. Pépin, Jean. “Christianisme et mythologie: L'evhémérisme des auteurs chrétiens.” In Dictionnaire des Mythologies et des religions des sociétés traditionnelles et du monde antique. Vol. 1. Edited by Yves Bonnefoy, 342–55. Paris: Flammarion, 1999. First published in 1981. Seznec, Jean. La survivance des dieux antiques. Paris: Flammarion, 1993.

POLYPHONY OF LOVE IN THE HEPTAMÉRON CARIN FRANZÉN LINKÖPING UNIVERSITY

Marguerite de Navarre’s some seventy stories posthumously published as the Heptaméron in 1559 tell us a lot about Plato’s legacy during the Renaissance and especially of its transposition into a Christian and courtly framework.1 Syncretism and conjunctions of her time’s main ideas are characteristics of Marguerite’s culture and it determines her writings in various ways. Her “essential eclecticism,” to use Gelernt’s description, is nevertheless not a result of a passive reception but of a reworking that bears witness to a highly political consciousness.2 In the following paper I want to stress some of the central aspects of her intermingling of love and politics. Starting with Marguerites’ use of Ficino, I demonstrate how the author stages her time’s dominant ideas of love—Platonic, courtly and Christian—through strategic appropriations that reveal a social order of power relations, which sustains and is sustained by this polyphonic discourse.

Perfect Love It has been pointed out many times that Marguerite was well aware of Ficino’s philosophy of love. Her first introduction to it was probably made through her correspondence with Guillaume Briçonnet, Bishop of Meaux, who in turn had been instructed by Lefèvre d’Etaples. As Philippe Lajarte points out, Lefèvre met Ficino in Florence and it is probably Lefèvre that influenced Briçonnet’s mystical orientation, which is an important issue in the correspondence between Marguerite and the bishop between 1521 and 1524.3 But the use of Neoplatonism in her own writing is far from orthodox. It can be explained by the specific translations and transpositions of this philosophy into French.4 But also by a more general conception of love, as Reid puts it with a reference to Febvre: Reflecting on Marguerite’s Heptaméron, Lucien Febvre rightly observed that early sixteenth-century people were capable of intermingling sacred

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Polyphony of Love in the Heptaméron and profane love without hypocrisy in ways that may seem incongruous to modern interpreters. Clearly, Marguerite had a deep sense at an early date of the ironic conjunctures possible between earthly and heavenly love, yet she did not ridicule them.5

In fact, this conjuncture is a basic idea in the humanist tradition where the Neoplatonists tried to synthesise the Christian religion and the classical legacy. In the Heptaméron the neatest demonstration of the Neoplatonic doctrine is made in the discussion of the novella 19, when the character Parlamente, often considered a representation of Marguerite herself, gives her answer to a question of what it is to love “perfectly”: J’appelle parfaict amans, luy respondit Parlamente, ceux qui cherchent en ce qu’ils aiment qulque perfection, soit bonté, beauté, ou bonne grace, tousjours tendans à la vertu, et qui ont le cueur si hault et si honneste qu’ils ne veullent pour mourir mettre leur fin aux choses basses, que l’honneur et la conscience reprouvent. Car l’ame, qui n’est creée, que pour retourner à son souverain bien, ne faict tant qu’elle est dedans le corps, que desirer d’y parvenir. (“Those whom I call perfect lovers,” replied Parlamente, “are those who seek in what they love some perfection, whether it be beauty, goodness or grace, those whose constant goal is virtue and whose hearts are so lofty and so pure that they would die rather than make their goal that which is low and condemned by honour and conscience. For the soul, which was created solely that it might return to its Sovereign Good, ceaselessly desires to achieve this end while it is still within the body.”)6

If the goal of love in Plato’s Symposium is to reach truth through beauty, the sovereign good is now, in accordance with Ficino, the Christian God.7 It seems nevertheless that Parlamente does not trust reason, nor does she regard love as an act of the will in its ascendant movement as the Neoplatonists did.8 Instead she stresses that faith, or providence, surmounts love as such in the ascendency towards the goal: “Car foy seulement peult monstrer et faire recevoir le bien, que l’homme charnel et animal ne peult entendre” (“Only faith can reveal and make the soul receive that Good which carnal and animal man cannot understand”).9 This Christian, or perhaps more precisely, evangelical configuration of “platonic love” is nevertheless only one form among others in the Heptaméron even though it has been seen as the norm.10 Already in the discussion following the novella 8, the character Dagoucin contradicts the Neoplatonic concept of love as a medium through which a higher goal can be attained: “L’homme est bien

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desraisonnable, quand il a de quoy se contenter, et veult chercher autre chose” (“When a man already has everything he needs in order to be contented, it is very unreasonable of him to go off and seek satisfaction elsewhere”).11 Dagoucin is nevertheless often described as the most platonic of the storytellers or devisants, but he has in fact more in common with a lover following the courtly code, insisting as he does here on loyalty, “il fault qu’il s’arreste où l’amour le constraint, et pour quelque occasion qui puisse advenir, ne changer le cueur ny la volonté” (“A man must hold fast where Love constrains him and, whatever may befall him, he must remain steadfast in heart and will”).12 The reference to the courtly code becomes in any case clear in the discussion after the novella 70, which is a transposition of the medieval poem “La chastelaine de Vergi.” Dagoucin’s comment on the story points out the loyalty to a Lady as a condition for the courtly chevalier’s being. If there were no Lady to love and be rewarded by, “il faudroit au lieu d’hommes d’armes, faire des marchand: et en lieu d’acquerir honneur, ne penser qu’à amasser du bien” (“then instead of following the profession of arms, we should all turn into mere merchants, and instead of winning honour, seek only to pile up wealth”).13 It is hence not platonic love that is debated here but the courtly love code and its social function as a marker that distinguishes the feudal aristocracy from the bourgeoisie.14 If we now return to the discussion of the novella 8 and Dagoucin’s version of platonic love we can see that the courtly code is engaged already in this conversion. Dagoucin refers namely to the asymmetric relation between lover and beloved, which is a central trait in the courtly code, by an opposite example taken from the myth of androgyny recounted by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, “car si celle que vous aymez est tellement semblable à vous, et d’une mesme volonté, ce sera vous que vous aimerez et non pas elle” (“For if she whom you love is your true likeness, if she is of the same will, then it will be your own self that you love, and not her alone”).15 Whereupon the character Hircan (representing the feudal lord) objects: “vous voulés tomber en une faulse opinion: comme si nous devions aymer les femmes sans en ester aymé” (“[y]ou make it sound as if we ought to love women without being loved in return”).16 The non-reciprocity between lover and beloved that yields behind Dagoucin’s argument is essential for the Lady’s position within the courtly code, which in the final analysis is based on unfulfilled love. The tension between Hircan’s and Dagoucin’s opinions, is deployed as a main topic in the often-commented novella 10, which is told by Parlamente.

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Courtly Love In his classical study on the Heptaméron Lucien Febvre chooses to exemplify the entire collection by the novella 10 claiming that it is typical for the book and its writer.17 He traces its main theme back to the troubadours who in their lyrics articulated a negative ideal of renouncement at the core of their conception of love. Following the works of Huizinga, Febvres considers this literary event a “revolution étique” that is followed up in Marguerite’s work.18 In this novella the courtly code and the Lady’s position represented by Florida is clearly opposed to the knight Amadour’s gallantry, which is further on defended by Hircan’s “warrior-gallant ethic,” to use Robert Bernard’s formula.19 In other words there is in the story as well as in the following discussion a combat between perfect or courtly love and sexual fulfilment. From the Lady’s point of view the latter implies the beginning to her degradation from an idealized object of desire worthy of love and praise into an object of consummation and possession. This logic is clearly stated by Florida when she understands that Amadour is not contented with their relation: “Amadour, en un moment m’avez monstré, qu’en liue d’une pierre nette et pure, le fondement de cest edifice est assis sur un sablon leger et mouvant, ou sur la fange molle et infame.” (“[Y]ou have clearly demonstrated to me that I would have been building not upon the solid rock of purity, but upon the shifting sands, nay, upon a treacherous bog of vice.”)20 The relation’s “solid rock of purity” is hence unfulfilled love that in part also has an economic dimension insofar as it intercepts a social order where women are men’s property. Even though Amadour is inferior in regard to social position—“pour la maison dont elle estoit”—he seems to take for granted his ownership when he claims his right to posses his beloved: “maintenant que vous estes mariée, et que vostre honneur peult estre couvert, quel tort vous tiens je de demander ce qui est mien?” (”now you are a married woman. You have a cover and your honour is safe. So what wrong can I possibly be doing you in asking for what is truly mine?”).21 When the Lady Florida still refuses, Amadour tries to rape her, an attempt that he however gives up when she shouts out to her mother.22 The solution to this impossible love is also revealing of the specific importance of the courtly code for women in a patriarchal system of power relations. When both her husband (whom she has been forced to marry) and deceitful lover die—they are both engaged in the wars in Spain against the Moors—Florida decides to end her days in a convent, “prenant pour mary

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et amy celuy qui l’avoit delivré d’une amour si vehemente que celle d’Amadour, et de l’ennuy si grand que de la compaignie d’un tel mary.” (“[t]hus she took Him as a lover and as spouse who had delivered her from the violent love of Amador and from the misery of her life with her earthly husband.”)23 By a vocabulary that uses the mystic discourse of love where earthly relations become images of a heavenly order Florida points nevertheless to a social reality. As Bernard points out, “her tales do not constitute a theoretical treatise on love but rather a realistic portrayal of its various aspects.”24 The appropriation of platonic and courtly love that can be seen in this and other novellas is indeed tinged with Christian spiritual love, but to love God instead of a lover or a husband is also a way for women to maintain a different value than the one they have as objects of trade in the patriarchal and late feudal order. This social reality also becomes evident in the discussion after the novella 10. Hircan argues that Amadour only tried to fulfil his duty, whereupon Lady Oisille, the oldest and most authoritative storyteller asks: “Appellez-vous faire son devoir à un serviteur, qui veult avoir par force sa maistresse, à laquelle il doit toute reverence et obeissance?” (“Do you call it duty when a man who devotes himself to a lady’s service tries to take her by force, when what he owes to her is obedience and reverence?”).25 There is however no clear answer to be found to this question, not even among the female storytellers. First, it is not at all a given that Oisille, the group’s spiritual leader, should defend the courtly code’s duty based on the Lady’s superiority over the lover. Later on it becomes clear that she rather advocates the Christian marriage, which also has been seen as the most highly praised by Marguerite. Gelernt suggests that Marguerite “should have espoused the evangelical view of the Christian marriage in her treatise of love.”26 Continuing this line Bernard claims, “we find in the Heptameron an accurate account of the demise of the Platonic ideal and in its place not only an apology for marriage but also a witty and malicious parody of Platonic love.”27 I do think that this is a reductive and a too hastily drawn conclusion. The different voices—“la pluralité opininions” in the Heptaméron—constitute rather a discursive battlefield revealing the power relations not only between the Christian and platonic, or courtly versions of love, but also between the sexes.28 On the one hand we have Florida’s defence of her virtue represented as a protection of her own integrity as well as of her honour. On the other this traditional position for a woman in the feudal order is represented as a pure convention or as a symbolic game that does not change the social

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power relations in any real sense. As Saffredent (who in many ways echoes Hircan) explains it in the same discussion: “Elles ont l’honneur autant que les hommes en peuventdonner est oster” (“They have honour, just as men, who can give it to them or take it away, have honour”).29 Hence, in this cultural game men are agents with the power to give women honour by respecting and worshipping them according to the courtly code, but they can as well claim the right to take what belongs to them. As a response to Lady Oisille’s question about a man’s duty Saffredent makes clear that courtly love is but a cover for the sexual relation: Madame, quand noz maistresses tiennent leur rang en chambre ou en salles, assises à leur aise comme noz juges, nous sommes à genoulx devant elles. . . . Mais quand nous sommes à part, où l’amour seul est juge de noz contenances, nous sçavons tresbien qu’elles sont femmes, et nous hommes, et à l’heure le nom de maistresse, est converty en amye, et le nom de serviteur en amy. C’est de là où le proverbe est dict: De bien servir et loyal estre, de serviteur on devient maistre. (Madame, replied Saffredent, when our ladies are holding court and sit in state like judges, then we men bend our knees before them. . . . However, in private it is quite another matter. Then Love, is the only judge of the way we behave, and we soon find out that they are just women, and we are just men. The title “lady” is soon exchanged for “mistress,” and her “devoted servant” soon becomes her “lover.” Hence the well-known proverb: “loyal service makes the servant master.”)30

In this perspective, love is represented as an arena where power relations are acted out. Through sexual fulfilment the lady’s servant becomes master, as parfaicts amans she is his maitresse, and power is just about giving or not giving her love (which is her honour) away. In other words the lady has the power as long as she masters its forces. If she lets love be “the only judge” she loses that power, and her position is degraded according to the rules of the patriarchal feudal order. This is the social and political aspect of the configuration of love regardless of its platonic, courtly, or Christian shape in the Heptaméron, and a fundamental aspect of its discursive polyphony. The frame for these different voices and positions of love is nevertheless constituted by a common premise, which is pointed out in the prologue: “Au jeu nous sommes tous esgaulx” (”Where games are concerned everybody is equal”).31 It is Parlamente’s husband, the feudal lord Hircan who with this formula gives the first word to Simontaut, Parlamente’s serviteur or courtly lover. On this signal he confesses that he

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desires “pouvoir commander à toute ceste compaignie” (“the power to order everyone in our patty to comply with my wishes”).32 Through this social and courtly game that reverses positions Marguerite demonstrates the ritual but at the same time unstable character of the power relations among the storytellers. It can be conceived as a convention but in fact it undermines the stability of the discursive order. In this perspective the Heptaméron is not a work of Platonic inspiration, but it cannot be described as a treatise in favour of conjugal love either, as Bernard and Gelernt suggests, even though Oisille and Parlamente advocate this position in some of the discussions. Marguerite’s polyvalent treatment of love must in turn be seen in relation to a tradition of aristocratic marriages as political matchmaking, which is not always in accordance with the Christian ideal.33 But her insistence on parfaicts amans against this social backdrop also reveals a strategic appropriation making the female position a central element. Let us wrap up this argument by shortly turning to the novella 22, which is the story of a prior who tries to seduce and rape a nun.

Spiritual Love The centrality of the feminine position can be felt already in the setting of the story about a “prieur reformateur” who attempts to seduce “une saincte religieuse” but fails because of her virtuous perseverance. The chief rapists and seducers in the Heptaméron are monks and friars. This is not only a reflection of a traditional representation of a rapacious clergy, as for example in the fabliaux. It also shows that a spiritual discourse can be used in many ways. It is somewhat ironic that it is a responsible for the monastic reform, which engaged Marguerite herself, that is the target for the anticlerical critique in the story.34 More interesting for our purpose here is, however, the mention at the very beginning that this prior was “visitor de la grande religion des dames de Frontevaux” (“visitor to the celebrated order of the ladies of Fontevrault”).35 This monastery situated near Saumur in the lower Loire Valley of western France, was also a monastic order related to important aristocratic funding (hence the epithet “grande religion”), and it thus becomes an important frame of reference for the understanding of the representation of love and gender violence in the story. The monastery of Fontevrault was significantly enough founded at the beginning of the 12th century by Robert d’Abrissel in praise of the domna, the Virgin Mary of course, but also to real women from the feudal aristocracy. It is perhaps not the writer’s intention to make an allusion to

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this historical event, but it is in fact of special interest for an understanding of the ambiguous relation between spiritual and courtly love from a gender perspective. This is not only due to the monastery’s composition with monks and nuns on the same site. Important is also the fact that Robert confined his legacy to a woman.36 In 1115 the young widow Pétronille of Chemillé becomes Abbess of Fontevrault, and it had an obvious attraction for various famous aristocratic ladies.37 Very quickly it became a rich monastery. This attraction has given Robert a reputation as promoter of women during a misogynistic time. Michelet, who gave him the epithet the “wandering knight of monasticism,” is often quoted as an illustration of that reputation. From 1115 until the French Revolution, when it was dissolved, the abbey counted 36 abbesses all from the aristocratic milieu. As various historians have noted, there are social motives to women’s choice of a spiritual life. According to George Duby for exempel, the many aristocratic ladies who followed Robert did this because they were “weary of marriage.”38 Regarding the social context it seems clear that spirituality is an alternative to the constraints of women’s social life. On a more symbolic level it is also interesting to note that the monastery not only was dedicated to the Virgin Mary but also that the nuns had a special status, which can still be sensed in Marguerite’s novella.39 It has furthermore been suggested that the first troubadour, William IX, whose first and second wives and also a daughter became nuns at the monastery, invented courtly love lyric defying Robert’s spiritual homage to women.40 If there was a specific sensibility in the monastic order influencing the feudal court to create courtly love, it seems, however, plausible that feudal relations marked the behaviour in Fontevrault. In his study on its founder, Jacques Dalarun points out that the mere acceptation among the monks to serve the nuns must be put in relation to a society where Christian and chivalrous values conjugate.41 It is an interesting fact that several of the monks (many of them converted knights) were of a lower rank than the aristocratic nuns. This courtly context is maintained in the story, whose heroine is said to be “une nommée sœur Marie Herouët, dont la parole estoit si douce et agreeable, qu’elle promettoit le visage et le cueur ester de mesme” (“one by the name of Marie Héroet. Her voice was gentle and her words sweet, and gave promise that her face and her heart would be no less so”).42 In fact, she is the sister of the poet Antoine Heroët whose famous work La Parfaicte Amye (1542) develops the idea of a purely spiritual love, based chiefly on his reading of the Italian Neoplatonists.43 Marguerite, who protected the poet between 1524 and 1539, and further more made him

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“pensionnaire extraordinaire,” presents him in the story as a “sage et honneste gentil-homme,” a “man of wisdom and honour.”44 In fact, Marie’s defence of her virginity against the prior’s attempt to seduce, and when he fails, rape her with the words “qu’elle aimoit mieux mourir en chartre perpetuelle, que d’avoir jamais autre amy que celuy qui estoit mort pour elle en la croix” (“that she would rather languish in perpetual imprisonment than admit any other lover than Him who had died for her on the cross”), can be seen in the light of Heroët’s poem.45 In the same way as Sister Marie, the poem’s Amye “understands that salvation is the appropriate end of love that lifts the soul to God.”46 The articulation of a higher form of love emanating from a divine source, which also constitutes its end, takes nevertheless a very concrete form in the novella 22, namely as a protection against abuse and its following social debasement, which is a more or less inevitable consequence for women of the divided configuration of love into a high (spiritual) and a low (carnal) form within the patriarchal order. Or to quote Montaigne on this issue: “Peu de gens ont espousé des amies qui ne s’en soyent repentis . . . . C’est ce qu’on dict: Chier dans le panier pour après le mettre sur sa teste” (“Few men have made a wife of a mistress, who have not repented it . . . . ‘Tis, as the proverb runs, to befoul a basket and then put it upon one’s head”).47 The real implication of Marguerite’s appropriation of her time’s chief ideas of love lays hence in her revelation of the entanglement of power and love in social life, where the elevated version of love and the woman can function as a protection of integrity and as a political argument in the negotiation of power and love.

Coda Neoplatonism inspires the Renaissance version of courtly love, and in Marguerite’s stories it frequently sustains an ideology of chastity with its accompanying sublimation of love. In a male hegemony this configuration of love also functions as a point of resistance, a part of the interplay of power relations between the sexes. Women propelling chastity in this context can be understood as a paradigmatic solution to feminine subjugation in medieval and early modern society, and Marguerite de Navarre also uses the elevation of love, or spiritual love, as a critique against gender violence. In the case of Heptaméron the different conceptions of love are nevertheless deployed in the open discussions to each novella, where the so-called devisants play out their judgements about the stories, and it is

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hard to find any final conclusion. Regarding the novella 10 the female audience is for example asked by Parlemente not only to be a Parfaicte Amye but also to “diminuer un peu de sa cruauté, et ne croire point tant de bien aux hommes” (“be less harsh, and not to have so much faith in men”).48 In other words, the courtly code is here conceived as a convention in need of a more concrete experience of love and power, which also can be sensed in the work’s adaption of Neoplatonic and spiritual love in general. Paraphrasing Foucault, one can say that the renaissance queen puts the dominating discourse of love into a process impeding it to function as a general system of domination.49 Her playful use of different conceptions of love can nevertheless be related to what Febvre calls the ethical dimension of courtly eroticism, i.e. the introduction of unfulfilled desire at the centre of the conception of love.50 Most of the romances told in the courtly tradition display the impediments to love not as its immanent condition but as a narrative device, of which the telos is a romantic happy end. As we have seen, the writer of the Heptaméron is more sceptical towards this solution, or just more realistic.

Notes 1

The collection first appeared in 1558 under the title Histoire des Amans fortunez edited by Pierre Boaistuau. In 1559 Pierre Gruget edited the collection anew in the order we know it today and with the title L’Heptaméron des Nouvelles. See Marguerite de Navarre, L’Heptaméron, ed. Nicole Cazauran (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 14. 2 Jules Gelernt, World of Many Loves: The Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre (Chapel Hill: the University of North Carolina Press, 1966), 56. 3 Philippe de Lajarte, L’humanisme en France au XVIe siècle (Paris: Champion, 2009), 56. 4 See Katherine Crawford who points out that “French Neoplatonists reconfigured Ficino’s epistemology by dwelling on the gender issues created by the presence of women in a philosophy developed initially without them in mind. Inserting women into Ficino’s homosocial model enabled French apologists to restructure homosociability into heterosexual compatibility.” The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 150–51. 5 Jonathan A. Reid, King’s Sister—Queen of Dissent: Marguerite of Navarre (1492–1549) and her Evangelical Network (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 112. 6 Marguerite de Navarre, L’Heptaméron, 242–43, trans., Paul Chilton, The Heptameron (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 229. 7 See Gelernt, World of Many Loves, 43–44. 8 Ibid., 47. See also Paul O. Kristeller, “The European Significance of Florentine Platonism,” in Medieval and Renaissance Studies: Proceedings of the Southeastern Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. John M. Headley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 218–20.

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Marguerite de Navarre, L’Heptaméron, 243, trans., 229. See for example Christine Martineau, who claims that Marguerite’s Platonism must be seen as rejection of secular love and as defence of a purely spiritual version, in “Le Platonisme de Marguerite de Navarre?” Bulletin de l’Association d’Études sur l’Humanisme, la Réforme et la Renaissance 4 (1976). Gelernt argues that “to see the Heptameron as a demonstration of Neoplatonic doctrine misses the point.” World of Many Loves, 57. This is also the main argument in Robert W. Bernard, “Platonism—Myth or Reality in the Heptameron?”, The Sixteenth Century Journal 1 (1974). 11 Marguerite de Navarre, L’Heptaméron, 113, trans., 112. 12 Ibid., 113, trans., 113. 13 Ibid., 583, trans., 533. 14 See for example James A Schultz, Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 79–80. 15 Marguerite de Navarre, L’Heptaméron, 113, trans., 113. 16 Ibid., 113–14, trans., 113. 17 Lucien Febvre, Autour de l’Heptaméron: Amour sacré, amour profane (Paris: Gallimard, 1944), 191. 18 Ibid., 209–10. 19 See Bernard, “Platonism—Myth or Reality in the Heptameron?,” 4. 20 Marguerite de Navarre, L’Heptaméron, 146–47, trans., 143. 21 Ibid., 145, trans., 141. 22 Some scholars claim that this episode is based on Marguerite’s own. To be sure, rape is still an aspect of gender violence, but here it is clearly situated in a discussion of true love. See Patricia F Cholakian, Rape and Writing in the Heptaméron of Marguerite de Navarre (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 89 and Marguerite de Navarre: Mother of the Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 21. 23 Marguerite de Navarre, L’Heptaméron 157, trans., 153. 24 Bernard, “Platonism—Myth or Reality in the Heptameron?,” 4. 25 Marguerite de Navarre, L’Heptaméron, 158, trans., 153. 26 Gelernt, World of Many Loves, 156. 27 Bernard, “Platonism—Myth or Reality in the Heptameron?,” 4. 28 Marguerite de Navarre, L’Heptaméron, 64. 29 Ibid., 159, trans., 153. 30 Ibid., 158–59, trans., 153. 31 Ibid., 67, trans., 70. 32 Ibid. 33 “Major courtiers were preoccupied with arranging the marriage of children from the royal family and the chief noble houses. Especially on the international level, this form of ‘war by other means’ entailed calculating the territorial gains or concession and alliances that were their raison d’être,” according to Reid, King’s Sister, 61. See also Barbara Stephenson, The Power and Patronage of Marguerite de Navarre (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 122–23. 34 See Jane Dempsey Douglass, “Anticlericalism in Three French Women Writers,” in Anticlericalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Peter 10

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A. Dykema and Heiko A. Oberman (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 251 and Reid, King’s Sister, 476. 35 Marguerite de Navarre, L’Heptaméron, 247, trans., 255. 36 It has been pointed out that “sources from outside the monastery rarely even mention the men at Fontevrault.” Penny Shine Gold, The Lady and the Virgin: Image, Attitude, and Experience in Twelfth-Century France (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985), 103. 37 As Reto R. Bezzola points out: “La liste des nobles dames qui se retirent à Fontevrault est vraiment impressionnante. Nous trouvons parmi elles les plus célèbres beauté de l’époque.” Les origines et la formation de la littérature courtoise en occident (Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1960), 143. 38 George Duby, Le Chevalier, la femme et le prêtre, (Paris: Hachette, 1981), 170. 39 According to a contemporary witness, Robert said that: “Tout ce que j’ai érigé en ce monde, je l’ai fait pour les religieuses; c’est à elles que j’ai offert toute la force de mes talents, et ce qui est bien plus encore, je me suis soumis, moi et mes disciples, à elles pour le bien de nos âmes.” Quoted from Bezzolla, Les origines et la formation, 286. See also Gold, The Lady and the Virgin, 101. 40 Bezzola, Les origines et la formation, 296. There is a general confusion surrounding William’s marriages, which stems from the nature of the sources, 12th-century chronicles and Latin verse of rather allusive character. See Ruth E. Harvey, “The Wives of the ‘first troubadour’, Duke William IX of Aquitain,” Journal of Medieval History 19 (1993): 309. 41 Jacques Dalarun, L’impossible sainteté: La vie retrouvée de Robert d'Arbrissel (v. 1045–1116) fondateur de Fontevraud (Paris: Les éditions du cerf, 1985), 194. 42 Marguerite de Navarre, L’Heptaméron, 275, trans., 256. 43 It is also possible that it was Marguerite de Navarre herself that influenced the conception of love in La Parfaicte Amye where “le dépassement du plan de la chair, souhaitable, ne saurait procéder d’une violence volontaire imposée par la raison aux sens . . . . Le recours n’est pas ici l’ascèse anti-passionnelle, mais la grâce, l’infusion d’une passion plus ’véhémente’ encore que toute les autres, seule susceptible de l’emporter sur elles, la charité.” Jean Lecointe, “Héroët et Marguerite de Navarre devant le stoïcisme,” in Par élévation d’esprit: Antoine Héroët, le poète, le prélat et son temps, ed. A. Gendre and L. Petris (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007), 332. 44 Marguerite de Navarre, L’Heptaméron, 282, trans., 262. 45 Ibid., 278, trans., 258. 46 Katherine Crawford, The Sexual Culture, 136. 47 Michel de Montaigne, Essais. Livre 3, ed. Alexandre Micha (Paris: GarnierFlammarion, 1979), 69, trans. Charles Cotton, The Essays of Montaigne, Complete. Book 3 (1877), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3600/3600-h/3600-h.htm (accessed June 16, 2014). 48 Marguerite de Navarre, L’Heptaméron, 158, trans., 152. 49 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: The Will to Power, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1998), 92. 50 Febvre, Autour de l’Heptaméron, 210.

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Works Cited Bernard, Robert W. “Platonism—Myth or Reality in the Heptameron?” The Sixteenth Century Journal 1 (1974): 3–14. Bezzola, Reto R. Les origines et la formation de la littérature courtoise en occident. Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1960. Cholakian Patricia F. Rape and Writing in the Heptaméron of Marguerite de Navarre. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. —. Marguerite de Navarre: Mother of the Renaissance. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Crawford, Katherine. The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Dalarun, Jacques. L’impossible sainteté: La vie retrouvée de Robert d'Arbrissel (v. 1045–1116) fondateur de Fontevraud. Paris: Les éditions du cerf, 1985. Douglass, Jane Dempsey. “Anticlericalism in Three French Women Writers.” In Anticlericalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Edited by Peter A. Dykema and Heiko A. Oberman, 243–56. Leiden: Brill, 1993. Duby, George. Le Chevalier, la femme et le prêtre. Paris: Hachette, 1981. Febvre, Lucien. Autour de l’Heptaméron. Amour sacré, amour profane. Paris: Gallimard, 1944. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: The Will to Power. Translated by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin, 1998. Gelernt, Jules. World of Many Loves: The Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre. Chapel Hill: the University of North Carolina Press, 1966. Gold, Penny Shine. The Lady and the Virgin: Image, Attitude, and Experience in Twelfth-Century France. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985. Harvey, Ruth E. “The Wives of the ‘first troubadour’, Duke William IX of Aquitain.” Journal of Medieval History 19 (1993): 307–25. Kristeller, Paul O. “The European Significance of Florentine Platonism.” In Medieval and Renaissance Studies: Proceedings of the Southeastern Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Edited by John M. Headley, 206–29. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968. Lajarte, Philippe de. L’humanisme en France au XVIe siècle. Paris: Champion, 2009. Lecointe, Jean. “Héroët et Marguerite de Navarre devant le stoïcisme.” In Par élévation d’esprit: Antoine Héroët, le poète, le prélat et son temps. Edited by A. Gendre and L. Petris, 319–34. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007. Martineau, Christine. “Le Platonisme de Marguerite de Navarre?” Bulletin de l’Association d’Études sur l’Humanisme, la Réforme et la Renaissance 4 (1976): 12–35. Montaigne, Michel de. Essais. Livre 3. Edited by Alexandre Micha. Paris: GarnierFlammarion, 1979. —. The Essays of Montaigne, Complete. Book 3. Translated by Charles Cotton. 1877. Accessed June 16, 2014. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3600 /3600-h/3600-h.htm.

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Navarre, Marguerite de. L’Heptaméron. Edited by Nicole Cazauran. Paris: Gallimard, 2000. —. The Heptameron. Translated by Paul Chilton. London: Penguin Books, 2004. Reid, Jonathan A. King’s Sister—Queen of Dissent. Marguerite of Navarre (1492– 1549) and her Evangelical Network. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Schultz, James A. Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Stephenson, Barbara. The Power and Patronage of Marguerite de Navarre. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.

A FRENCH 16TH-CENTURY EDITION OF VIRGIL’S AENEID: HÉLISENNE DE CRENNE’S VERSION OF THE FIRST FOUR BOOKS SARA EHRLING AND BRITT-MARIE KARLSSON UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG

Introduction: De Crenne and Her Work During the first half of the 16th century, four texts were published under the name of Hélisenne de Crenne: Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d’amours, 1538,1 Les Epistres familières et invectives, 1539,2 Le Songe de madame Helisenne, 1540 and Les Quatre premiers livres des Eneydes du treselegant poete Virgile, Traduictz de Latin en prose Francoyse, par ma dame Helisenne, 1541.3 According to a source from the same century, this name represents a certain Marguerite Briet from Abbeville in France.4 In the present context, however, the name de Crenne will be used when referring to the author or translator of the texts in question. The work of de Crenne met with considerable success among its contemporary readers. The eight editions of her first book, appearing between 1538 and 1560, and the repeated editions of her first three books in one volume (called Les Œuvres) show the interest of de Crenne’s contemporary readers in her work; scholars do not hesitate to call Les Angoysses douloureuses a “best-seller” of the time.5 Like many women authors, de Crenne and her work then fell into oblivion until the beginning of the 20th century, when scholars regained interest in her work.6 In recent years it has attracted increasing attention, to which new editions of the first three books have contributed.7 This is, however, not the case with de Crenne’s translation of the Aeneid, still waiting for a new edition to be published. Throughout de Crenne’s work, including the translation of the first four books of the Aeneid, there is a focus on the theme of illicit love and

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its consequences. Furthermore, her first three books portray the psychological and literary development of their female protagonist, whose name incidentally coincides with the pen name indicated on the front page, that is “Hélisenne.” The first text edited under the name of Hélisenne de Crenne, Les Angoysses douloureuses, is immediately located within the exemplum tradition. On the title page it is indicated that, through her story, Lady Hélisenne exhorts everyone not to expose themselves to unreasonable love. Further on the narrator explains that she will offer herself and her own experiences as a negative example, having herself, although married, fallen in love with a young man. In Les Angoysses douloureuses the terrible torments she is subjected to are then described as a direct consequence of this illicit love. Numerous references are made to characters from Antiquity, among others to Dido, cited both as a positive example, a woman faithful to her husband even after his death, and as a negative example, succumbing to love and falling for Aeneas, something which will ultimately result in her own death. As for the protagonist Hélisenne, she may also be seen to constitute this form of double-edged example, succumbing like Dido to unreasonable love, yet finally emerging as an independent intellectual woman if we consider her image as it evolves in the work as a whole.

De Crenne’s Adaptation of Virgil’s Text De Crenne’s prose translation of the Aeneid was thus her fourth and last work. No further editions of this work appeared, and from this we may conclude that the translation, in contrast to de Crenne’s earlier works, met with no great success among its contemporary readers. Today there are only three known copies of the translation, all of them obviously originating from the same and only edition.8 Also among today’s critics, the translation has for the most part been disregarded.9 Due to the many discrepancies in relation to Virgil’s epic it is considered too free to be of any real value as a translation.10 However, de Crenne sometimes announces the deviations; moreover, we should keep in mind that translations during this period were for the most part free. Some of the criticism can thus be regarded as anachronistic, and despite the discrepancies in relation to the Virgilian text there are several motives for studying the translation, such as interest in de Crenne’s role in the intellectual debate of her time, her reuse of classical myths and her use of various sources for the translation. Last but not least calling for attention, is the issue of the role of the translation in de Crenne’s œuvre as a whole. All these viewpoints will be considered in the following. First, however, a

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few words about the introduction and about the general nature of the translation in relation to the Virgilian text. In the introduction to the translation, de Crenne immediately proclaims that a number of observations are made in it, the purpose of which is to elucidate and to function as decoration in the books. The translation project is thus clearly augmented by a didactic and aesthetic purpose.11 Then follows a dedicatory preface to King Francis I. Virgil was, de Crenne claims, the master and preceptor of eloquence among all Greek and Roman poets and historians, his prime work being the Aeneid. De Crenne briefly retells the subject matter of this work as a whole and thereafter very humbly, as would be expected in a dedicatory preface of the time, donates her imperfect work to the King. She modestly hopes that his splendid spirit may find some things added by her in it, especially so in the second book where she retells the tragic death of the Trojan hero Hector, who was held to be the King’s ancestor.12 De Crenne dismisses Homer’s version of Hector’s death.13 The Greek poet, she claims, retells Achilles’s cruel triumph over Hector with the purpose of excessively extolling his own nation. She will therefore give other, truer and more virtuous versions than Homer’s of Hector’s death. She mentions her other sources: Dictys Cretensis and Dares Phrygius, and their origins. The two works mentioned by de Crenne were the prime sources on the Trojan War during the Middle Ages. Their origin and reception according to de Crenne generally speaking agree with contemporary beliefs about them. By mentioning her sources, and by giving diverse versions of Hector’s death (as she does in her tenth chapter of book two), de Crenne implicitly claims a kind of ‘source criticism.’ Moreover, in the preface she displays historical awareness, literary erudition and intellectual capacity. It seems likely that not only the explicitly mentioned aesthetic and didactic purposes, but also her striving for recognition as an intellectual woman of her time were motivating factors behind her translation, and probably also behind her œuvre as a whole. After the dedicatory preface to the King follows a two-page long introduction about Virgil and then the actual translation. Unlike Virgil’s Aeneid, the books are divided into several chapters by de Crenne, each one preceded by an introduction where the events of the chapter are briefly summarized. The division into chapters is similar, although not identical, to the division made by Octovien de Saint-Gelais in his versified translation of the Aeneid into French. Saint-Gelais’ translation was first published in 1509 and later reedited several times, for example in 1540, that is the year before the publication of de Crenne’s edition. It is also

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commonly agreed that Saint-Gelais’ translation was one of de Crenne’s prime sources.14 Apart from the division into chapters, another striking feature of de Crenne’s text are the comments which are found in the margins of the text. These comments for the most part explain the identities of deities and mythical figures which occur in the text. Sometimes the comments clarify ancient customs and sometimes they comment on the alterations made by the translator. As regards Virgil’s and de Crenne’s style and versions of the events, some general differences between them deserve particular attention. In the Virgilian text, every word is filled with content. The exact interpretation and the characterization of the protagonists are, at least to some extent, ambiguous. To be fully understood, the text calls for an advanced and cooperative reader. In de Crenne’s version, the account is much lengthier. She provides her reader with more clear-cut explanations and backgrounds to the events. In the text as well as in the margins she also explains religious customs and myths. This may all be understood as a result of the text being in prose and of the author’s didactic ambitions. From a thematic point of view, passion plays a more dominant role in de Crenne’s version than in Virgil’s. This is probably best understood in connection with her earlier works. On a structural level it may be noted that the translation tends to be freer in the middle of de Crenne’s chapters than at the end of them. De Crenne’s Latinizing language is also a striking feature of the translation, entailing Latinisms which do not correspond to similar Latin words in the Virgilian text. These linguistic observations are probably best explained as a result of de Crenne’s wish to display her literary erudition.

De Crenne’s Dido With the aim of illustrating some of the general differences between de Crenne’s and Virgil’s versions of Dido, and also in order to shed some light on the question of which sources de Crenne may have used for her translation, two passages from the fourth book and one from the first book in the Aeneid will now be discussed in more detail. The first and most crucial passage comes from the fourth book and describes Dido shortly before the hunt: Virgil Aeneid 4.133–39: Reginam thalamo cunctantem ad limina primi Poenorum exspectant, ostroque insignis et auro Stat sonipes ac frena ferox spumantia mandit. Tandem progreditur magna stipante caterua

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Sidoniam picto chlamydem circumdata limbo; Cui pharetra ex auro, crines nodantur in aurum, Aurea purpuream subnectit fibula uestem. de Crenne, Eneydes 4, chap. 8 (fol. 82v): Incontinent après ceste chose entre les déesses determinée, la royne Dido stimulée d’imiter sa Fortune, ne voulut faillir d’au desduict de la chasse assister: parquoy sans dilation estant associée de la grande multitude de gens notables, de son triumphant & magnificque palais elle descendit. C’estoit souveraine delectation le contempler de sa venuste grace, beaulté & faconde: elle estoit aornée d’ung riche & sumptueux manteau Sidonyen subtilement ouuré, froncé & garny d’ung Limbe d’or soubz lequel portoit une noble & precieuse robbe purpurine, qui merueilleusement la decoroit. Ses deaurez cheueulx sur ses candides espaulles espars estoient de si grande splendeur, que d’Apollo representoient la similitude, sur lesquelz estoit adapté cercle d’or d’irradiante lumiere: la trousse auoit à son costé (qui fort bien luy seoit) faisant indice qu’elle estoit usitée, apte & habile à l’exercice de Dyane.

Three differences between the two versions strike us immediately. Firstly, there is Dido’s state of mind. In Virgil’s version of the events, Dido hesitates at the threshold. The reason for this is not explicitly mentioned. Nonetheless, it may be safely assumed that she hesitates because, for various reasons, she recognises that her emerging feelings for Aeneas are illicit. Her hesitation implies that she still has some, although affected, mental capacity to resist the passion forced upon her by the deities Venus and Cupid. On the other hand, de Crenne explicitly says that Queen Dido is incited to fulfil her Fate since “this thing” has been agreed upon by the Goddesses. Furthermore, de Crenne describes Dido as eager to participate in the hunt. In de Crenne’s version of the myth, Dido is thus much more unambiguously submitted to passion and to the will of the Gods.15 Dido’s state of mind in the passage well illustrates our general observation that passion plays a more dominant role in de Crenne’s version of the events than in that of Virgil. The second striking difference between the two versions is that the passage from de Crenne is longer. This may be a result of the translation being in prose. It may also reflect de Crenne’s ambition to adorn the text, as she says in her introduction. The clearest example of amplification in this passage is found in the more elaborate description of Dido’s dress. Our third and most wide-raging observation is that Dido’s beauty is likened to Apollo’s and that Dido herself is linked with Diana in de Crenne’s version. This has no explicit parallel in the Virgilian text. At first

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glance, one may suspect that the connection between Dido and Apollo/Diana is an independent invention by de Crenne. However, at various other points in the Aeneid, Virgil makes connections between on the one hand Dido and Diana, and on the other between Aeneas and Apollo. Through these connections, Virgil implicitly underlines the illicit nature of Dido’s and Aeneas’s passion. One passage in the Virgilian version of the myth linking Aeneas with Apollo is found shortly after the passage just discussed. In his description of how Aeneas leaves for the hunt, Virgil compares him at length with Apollo: Virgil Aeneid 4.141–50: . . . ipse ante alios pulcherrimus omnis infert se socium Aeneas atque agmina iungit. Qualis ubi hibernam Lyciam Xanthique fluent Deserit ac Delum maternam inuisit Apollo Instauratque choros, mixtique altaria circum Cretesque Dryopesque fremunt pictique Agathyrsi; Ipse iugis Cynthi graditur mollique fluentem Fronde premit crinem fingens atque implicat auro, Tela sonant umeris: haud illo segnior ibat Aeneas, tantum egregio decus enitet ore.

Could this adjacent passage have inspired de Crenne to link Dido with Apollo and Diana? It certainly could, as could the mere observation that the couple is heading for a hunt and that Diana is the protective goddess of hunting. All this makes the connection between her and Dido logical. Nevertheless, these connections are rather subtle, suggesting that de Crenne may also have found inspiration for the link between Dido and Diana primarily in the preceding tradition of Virgilian commentaries. In his commentary on the Aeneid 4.144, the influential commentator Servius (late 4th century) notes that Aeneas is linked with Apollo because of his arrows and because Apollo is hostile to nuptials. Finally, a connection is suggested between this passage and a passage in the first book where Dido is linked with Apollo’s sister Diana. It is pointed out that Diana and Apollo are siblings, and there cannot be marriage between siblings.16 The passage in the first book referred to by the commentator is Virgil Aeneid 1.494–504: Haec dum Dardanio Aeneae miranda uidentur, Dum stupet obtutuque haeret defixus in uno,

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Regina ad templum, forma pulcherrima Dido, Incessit magna iuuenum stipante caterua. Qualis in Eurotae ripis aut per iuga Cynthi Exercet Diana choros, quam mille secutae Hinc atque hinc glomerantur Oreades; illa pharetram Fert umero gradiensque deas supereminet omnis (Latonae tacitum pertemptant gaudia pectus): talis erat Dido, talem se laeta ferebat per medios instans operi regnisque futuris.

We may notice that the structure of Virgil Aeneid 1.494–504 and 4.141–50 is very similar. Moreover, the similar structure clearly underlines the connections which Virgil makes between Dido-Diana and Aeneas-Apollo. Let us now return to the description of Dido in de Crenne’s fourth book, the passage with explicit links between Dido and Apollo/Diana, book 4, chapter 8 (fol. 82, see quoted passage above). What if we compare this passage to de Crenne’s description of Dido in the first book, chapter 20 (fol. 18v), the description which corresponds to Virgil Aeneid 1.494– 504? Cependand en ce magnifique temple suruint la magnanime Dido: la reginale personne de laquelle, estoit decorée de souueraine formosité, resplendissant en telle venuste grace, beaulté & faconde, que l’excellence d’elle à exprimer seroit difficile: Estant doncques associée de tant de perfections se reduict dedans ce temple grand nombre, tant seigneurs que dames la suyuoient. Et en ceste pompe & magnificence ressembloit la preclare déesse Dyane: laquelle souuent en boys ou en prairie, sur la delectable verdure ses gracieuses Nymphes congrege, & la suyuent entre les sentes & florissans buissons plusieurs gentilles Orcades qui armonieusement chantent. Et ainsi elles portans trousses & sagettes à leurs colz blancz & deliez soulacieusement se delectent, comme celles qui de toutes hylaritez ont entiere possession. Estant doncques semblable la tres illustre Dido, la belle face de laquelle la manifestoit doulce & benigne, & à toute lyesse disposée en grand triumphe avec modeste alleure dedans ce sumptueux temple cheminoit, & estant paruenue entre la multitude populaire, à eulx elle adressa son propos s’en querant des edifices encommencez: lesquelz elle desiroit fort amplifier pretendant auec assiduité l’exaltation de son royaulme. Ainsi alla iusques au milieu du temple, ou il y auoit une place excellente, belle & spacieuse: en laquelle estoit posé ung riche tribunal qui seruoit de siege à la maiesté royalle: laquelle posée dedans iceluy estoit de gens en armes toute enuironnée.

Identical wordings describe Dido in the introductions to both these passages, talking about her venuste grace, beaulté & faconde (“her

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charming [Venus-like] grace, beauty and eloquence”). Other expressions are also similar. The passage which describes Dido in de Crenne’s fourth book evidently corresponds to the passage which describes her in the first book. What is more, de Crenne’s elaborated description of Dido in the fourth book for the most part resembles her description of Dido in the first book more than it resembles the Virgilian passage which she portends to translate. The correspondence between the two passages does not seem accidental; in our opinion, the resemblances are evident enough to suggest that de Crenne intentionally tried to connect the two passages with each other. Her manner of doing so is similar to Virgil’s linking between different passages within his Aeneid at other points. These suggestions certainly call for further study, but perhaps commentaries on the Virgilian text influenced not only the elaboration of isolated passages in de Crenne’s translation,17 but also the structure of the translation as a whole. Moreover, it may be that de Crenne primarily tries to connect passages within her translation which are particularly crucial for her version of the events in the Aeneid and possibly also for her own preceding œuvre.

De Crenne’s Aeneas We will now proceed to consider how Aeneas is described in de Crenne’s text in comparison to that of Virgil. At the beginning of the fourth book, Dido comments on Aeneas, talking to her sister Anna. She marvels at the great qualities Aeneas seems to possess: Virgil Aeneid 4.10–14: quis nouus hic nostris successit sedibus hospes, Quem sese ore ferens, quam forti pectore et armis! Credo equidem, nec uana fides, genus esse deorum. Degeneres animos timor arguit. Heu, quibus ille Iactatus fatis! quae bella exhausta canebat! De Crenne, Eneydes 4, chap. 2, fol. 78v: . . . quel est cest hoste en noz terres arriué, en la personne duquel tant de louables vertus resident: il est si prudent & discret en tous cas & en modestie, & gracieux entretien tous aultres excede, & si le iugeroit on par coniecture remply de magnanimité, forçe & puissance. Certes ie croy en consideration des vertuz prealeguées, que de la generation des dieux a esté produict: car c’est chose indubitable que timeur, trauail & fatigue les

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courages degenerez argue. Las à quelz extremes perilz & affaires ardues a il esté exposé? Quantes furieuses & sanguinolentes batailles, hyer nous dict estre par luy exterminées?

De Crenne’s version is substantially longer, adding qualities not mentioned by Virgil. While Virgil, for example, mentions “timor,” de Crenne triples the number of words describing the degenerated souls, adding that they are also subject to labour and fatigue. In comparison with Saint-Gelais’ translation, we find that de Crenne’s wording “timeur, travail & fatigue” is directly borrowed from him. However, Saint-Gelais also adds to the description of Aeneas that he is “froit et pose,”18 that is “indifferent and composed.” This description is not adopted by de Crenne, a circumstance which may be of importance for the interpretation of subsequent events. We further notice that in de Crenne’s version, Dido describes Aeneas as being “prudent” and “discreet,” showing signs of “modesty,” qualities that are mentioned neither by Virgil nor by Saint-Gelais.19 These adjectives somewhat change the impression of Aeneas, adding qualities that are not present in the original description. De Crenne partly incorporates Aeneas into the courtly tradition, stressing the importance of being tactful and discreet, above all in matters of love. Tactfulness, discretion and prudence are the most appreciated qualities in a man in Les Angoysses douloureuses, and the lack of these in the young man being the object of Hélisenne’s love is at the root of her anguish. On several occasions, Hélisenne suspects that the young man, called Guénélic, is all but tactful and discreet, bragging about their love, suggesting that his relation to Hélisenne is more intimate than is actually the case.20 In the Aeneid, Aeneas’s decision to move on to Italy will completely change the way in which Dido perceives him. Feeling betrayed and abandoned, she depicts him as deceitful and treacherous, concluding that he is not after all the progeny of the gods. These traits are found in both Virgil’s, Saint-Gelais’ and de Crenne’s versions; they are an important part of the framework of the fourth book, and form a prerequisite of Dido’s final decision to commit suicide. Virgil’s Dido, in her anger and disappointment, accuses Aeneas, using words like perfidious21 and atrocious22 when addressing him. In de Crenne’s version, Dido adds to the abuse, referring to Aeneas as cruel, inhuman, without trustworthiness or integrity.23 In addition to this, he is the most perverted and unrighteous of all faithless lovers ever.24 As regards Dido, de Crenne makes her say that she has, due to her female simplicity (“simplicité”), been moved by the distress and tears of Aeneas and his companions. Simplicity, thus

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associated in the text with female nature, is not mentioned by Virgil or by Saint-Gelais. Further on in the text Dido implores the gods that Aeneas be punished for his reprehensible behavior. This plea is present also in Virgil’s text, where Dido delivers this prediction more or less as an inevitable consequence of Aeneas’s deceitful conduct. With de Crenne, Dido furthermore insists that Aeneas should be used as a deterring example to others, to his contemporaries as well as to future generations, an aspect which is found neither in Virgil’s version, nor in Saint-Gelais’, while it is crucial to the rest of de Crenne’s work and constitutes an evident link between her adaptation of the Virgilian epic and her remaining œuvre. de Crenne, Eneydes 4, chap. 15, fol. 90r: Certes i’ay iuste cause d’adresser mes deplorables complainctes aux deificques puissances, affin que selon droict & raison, quelque vindicatif iugement sur toy se puisse promptement executer, à ce que toy estant puny de deserte condigne, cela puisse passer en manifeste exemple, tant aux modernes qu’a la posterité future, rendant tous amantz timides d’ainsi inconsiderément la foy violer.

When Virgil’s Dido because of her pain withdraws from scolding Aeneas, she leaves him apprehensive and hesitant, though not, as it would appear, about his forthcoming voyage to Italy. He does not follow Dido and her ladies-in-waiting back to her rooms, but returns to his ship and his men (lines 388–96) in order to prepare for the journey. He may be shaken and discomposed, he may wish to comfort Dido, but he never hesitates to leave her. In de Crenne’s version, Aeneas follows Dido back to her rooms, where he does his best to soothe her pain. As in Saint-Gelais’ version, he hesitates whether to leave Carthage or not, wavering in his decision, but finally decides to follow the orders of the gods. When Virgil’s Aeneas has received divine orders to depart for Italy he never hesitates about what to do, only about how to bring the news to Dido, whereas in Crenne’s and Saint-Gelais’ versions he is made to hesitate considerably more before making his decision. This may make him appear weaker. Such weakness, though borrowed from Saint-Gelais, may however also constitute yet another link to de Crenne’s earlier works. In Les Angoysses douloureuses Guénélic, the young man with whom Hélisenne falls in love, is depicted as a juvenile—it is indicated in the text that he does not have to shave yet25—needing to prove himself through battles and adventures of different kinds before being worthy of his beloved.

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Yet another difference in de Crenne’s version of the passage in comparison to Virgil’s and Saint-Gelais’ deserves particular attention; de Crenne’s Dido does not only stop speaking, being very weak and overcome by emotion, but she actually faints and needs to be carried back to her rooms by her ladies-in-waiting. Evidently, the force of love has a stronger impact on Dido, as well as on Aeneas, in de Crenne’s version of the myth. Love makes them frail and true victims, calling into mind the suffering and torments of the Hélisenne in Les Angoysses douloureuses.

Concluding Discussion: De Crenne’s Translation in Relation to the Rest of Her Work There are several ways of envisaging the position given to de Crenne’s version of the Aeneid within her work, being the last book to be published under this name. If we think of de Crenne as a woman striving to establish herself as an author and an intellectual woman within the literary field and the intellectual sphere, her translation of the Aeneid could be seen as a confirmation and the ultimate proof of her erudition. She had already shown the public that she was a woman of extensive reading through the numerous references and allusions to different sources in her earlier work. The translation of the Aeneid would thus represent the keystone in the author’s endeavours to prove herself an erudite woman, and perhaps also assert the capacity of women in general to perform intellectual work. The content and the structure of her earlier work might then partly be seen as a reading guide to her version of the Aeneid, preparing the reader for the changes she has introduced into this epic, slightly altering some of its features and functions. However, the œuvre of de Crenne could also be approached from a different angle, regarding the Aeneid à la Crenne rather as a kind of key to her earlier work, a guide to be used by the reader engaged in an intricate play with possible interpretations of her work: while it is true that all of her books pretend to warn women of the disastrous consequences of illicit love, this ambition is partly contradicted in the course of reading. Like Dido, Hélisenne constitutes a twofold example: at the outset of the narrations both women are faithful to their husbands—living or dead—and will be trapped in the snares of love. They are both in this way made ambiguous examples, emblematic of unfortunate love. In de Crenne’s adaptation of Virgil’s text, love is allowed to have an even greater impact on the characters affected by this disease. In her version, Dido says that she is not sure that she deserves to die26 and to be punished for having been surprised by the arrival of Aeneas and seduced by his charm and

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seemingly trustworthy manner. The weak and lovesick Hélisenne changes from being a negative example to a positive one by being killed off and sacrificed at the end of Les Angoysses douloureuses. The author does this in order to let Hélisenne emerge again and to strengthen the persona Hélisenne, who in Epistres familières et invectives is presented as a published author.27 Like Hélisenne, Dido will in a way survive through her example.28 The Aeneid used as an example consolidates the lessons suggested in the earlier work of de Crenne, proffering examples to both men and women of how to behave and act in different situations, the main lesson being that women should not let themselves be governed by love or by men, but rather seek to establish themselves as free intellectual beings in their own right. This becomes very clear in the second book of de Crenne, where the persona Hélisenne is presented as a published author. Having already made use of her wide reading in her earlier work, de Crenne, through the work accomplished by her translation of the first four books of the Aeneid, proves her consciousness of and familiarity with the contemporary commentary tradition linked to the Aeneid, as well as her capacity to make use of ancient mythology and adapt it to new contexts.

Notes 1

Hélisenne de Crenne, Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d’amours (1538), ed. Christine de Buzon (Paris: Champion, 1997) and idem, The Torments of Love, ed. Lisa Neal, transl. Lisa Neal and Steven Rendall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) 2 Hélisenne de Crenne, Les epistres familieres et invectives (1539), ed. Jerry C. Nash (Paris: Champion, 1996), and idem, A Renaissance Woman: Helisenne’s Personal and Invective Letters, ed. and transl. Marianna M. Mustacchi and Paul J. Archambault (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986). 3 Hélisenne de Crenne, Le Songe de madame Helisenne (1540) [= Madam Hélisenne’s Dream], ed. Jean-Philippe Beaulieu and Diane Desrosiers-Bonin (Paris: Champion, 2007), and idem, Les Quatre premiers livres des Eneydes du treselegant poete Virgile, Traduictz de Latin en prose Francoyse, par ma dame Helisenne [= The First Four Books of the Aeneid by the eminent poet Virgil, translated from Latin into French Prose by Lady Hélisenne] (Paris: Denys Janot, 1541).The language of the quotations from this book has in the present article been slightly modernized. 4 Nicolas Rumet, Nicolas et François Rumet, maïeurs et historiens d’Abbeville au XVIe siècle. De Abbavilla, capite comitatus Pontivi, excerptum ex Historia Picardiae Nicolai, et suivi d’extraits de la Chronique du pays et comté de Ponthieu, de François, ed. Ernest Prarond (Paris: A. Picard et fils, 1902).

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Jean-Philippe Beaulieu & Diane Desrosiers-Bonin, ed., Hélisenne de Crenne: L’Écriture et ses doubles (Paris: Champion, 2004), 11. 6 See e.g. Gustave Reynier, Le Roman sentimental avant l’Astrée (Paris: Armand Colin,1908) and Louis Loviot, “Hélisenne de Crenne,” Revue des Livres anciens 2 (1917): 137–45, accessed September 17, 2014, http://catalogue.bnf.fr/servlet/biblio ?idNoeud=1&ID=32858610&SN1=0&SN2=0&host=catalogue. 7 In 1997, 1996 and 2007 respectively. 8 Bibliothèque de France: Bibl. de l’Arsenal, Paris; Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire, Geneva; Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. The copy in Berlin escaped scholarly notice until 2011. Cf. Margaret Marshall, “The Aeneid and the Illusory Authoress: Truth, Fiction and Feminism in Hélisenne de Crenne’s Eneydes” (PhD Diss., University of Exeter, 2011), 38. 9 Patrick Amstutz mentions de Crenne’s translation only in a footnote. See page 16 in “Cinq grandes étapes dans l’art de traduire l’Énéide en français,” Revue des études latines 80 (2002). 10 Cf. Christine M. Scollen-Jimack, “Hélisenne de Crenne, Octovien de SaintGelais and Virgil,” Studi Francesi 26 (1982). 11 See also Scollen-Jimack, “Hélisenne de Crenne, Octovien de Saint-Gelais and Virgil,” 200. 12 In the second book of the Aeneid, Virgil briefly touches upon Hector’s death (lines 268–97), when he tells how Hector’s spirit in a dream warns Aeneas and instructs him to leave the burning Troy. 13 i.e. the version alluded to by Virgil. 14 See Thomas Brückner, Die erste französische Aeneis: Untersuchungen zu Octovien de Saint-Gelais’ Übersetzung (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1987), 215– 218, and Scollen-Jimack, “Hélisenne de Crenne, Octovien de Saint-Gelais and Virgil.” 15 This is reflected also in other passages, for instance in 4. 15 (corresponding to Virgil’s Aeneid 4.365–87) where de Crenne retells Dido’s outburst towards Aeneas and lets Dido defend her case and blame the Gods in a much more clear-cut way than Virgil does, cf. below. 16 Servius on Aeneid 4.144: INVISIT APOLLO: Apollini Aeneam vel propter sagittas, quibus in venatu utebatur, comparat; vel certe propter futurum infelix matrimonium: ut enim et supra diximus, nuptiis est hoc numen infensum. Vel Apollini Aeneam, ut in primo Didonem Dianae: quomodo germanorum nuptiae esse non possunt. See Servius, Servii grammatici qui feruntur in Vergilii carmina commentarii, vol. 1, ed. Georgius Thilo (Leipzig: Teubner, 1881). 17 Cf. Scollen Jimack, “Hélisenne de Crenne, Octovien de Saint-Gelais and Virgil,” 209. 18 Octovien de Saint-Gelais, Les énéydes de Virgille, translatez de latin en françois, par messire Octavian de Sainct Gelais, . . . reveues et cottez par maistre Jehan d’Yvry (Paris: A. Verard, 1509), accessed September 17, 2014, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k71496m, image 65. 19 Saint-Gelais calls Aeneas “sage” (“sensible,” “wise”) a description which does not figure in Virgil’s text and does not really correspond to de Crenne’s description. Ibid.

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20

See de Crenne, Les Angoysses douloureuses, 115–16, 192. Virgil Aeneid 4.366, perfide. 22 Ibid. 4.386, improbe. 23 De Crenne, Eneydes 4, chap. 15, fol. 109v: “O homme cruel, or ai ie certaine euidence qu’en ta personne inhumaine aulcune foy ou integrité n’habite.” 24 Ibid., chap. 15, fol. 89v: “celuy d’entre tous les desloyaux amans le plus peruers & inicque.” 25 De Crenne, Les Angoysses douloureuses, 102. 26 Idem, Eneydes 4, chap. 24, fol. 95v: “mieulx vault O femme miserable que sans plus differer tu meures. Helas ie ne scay toutesfois comme i’auroie telle peine meritée.” 27 See Britt-Marie Karlsson, “Hélisenne de Crenne didacticienne—une femme savante au XVIe siècle,” in Actes du XVIIIe congrès des romanistes scandinaves/ Actas del XVIII congreso de romanistas escandinavos, ed. Eva Ahlstedt et al., Romanica Gothoburgensia 69 (Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2012), 428–29, accessed September 17, 2014, https://gupea.ub.gu.se/handle/2077 /30607. 28 Diane S. Wood, Hélisenne de Crenne: At the Crossroads of Renaissance Humanism and Feminism (Madison-Teaneck: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), 143–51, investigates the relations between Virgil’s Dido, the Dido in de Crenne’s version of the Aeneid, and the double use made of Dido as both a negative and positive example in the rest of de Crenne’s work. Wood concludes that de Crenne goes “beyond the paradigm offered by Dido” (150–51), rewriting her story and incorporating it into a new context. 21

Works Cited Sources Crenne, Hélisenne de. Les Quatre premiers livres des Eneydes du treselegant poete Virgile, Traduictz de Latin en prose Francoyse, par ma dame Helisenne. Paris: Denys Janot, 1541 (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris [Bibl. de l’Arsenal], Rés., Fol. B.L.613). —. A Renaissance Woman: Helisenne’s Personal and Invective Letters. Edited and translated by Marianna M. Mustacchi and Paul J. Archambault. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986. —. The Torments of Love. Edited by Lisa Neal, translated by Lisa Neal and Steven Rendall. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. —. Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d’amours. 1538. Edited by Christine de Buzon. Paris: Champion, 1997. —. Les epistres familieres et invectives. 1539. Edited by Jerry C. Nash. Paris: Champion, 1996. —. Le Songe de madame Helisenne. 1540. Edited by Jean-Philippe Beaulieu and Diane Desrosiers-Bonin. Paris: Champion, 2007.

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Saint-Gelais, Octovien de. Les énéydes de Virgille, translatez de latin en françois, par messire Octavian de Sainct Gelais, . . . reveues et cottez par maistre Jehan d’Yvry. Paris: A. Verard, 1509. Accessed September 17, 2014. http://gallica .bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k71496m. Servius. Servii grammatici qui feruntur in Vergilii carmina commentarii. Vol. 1. Edited by Georgius Thilo. Leipzig: Teubner, 1881. Virgil. Opera. Edited by R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969.

Secondary Literature Beaulieu, Jean-Philippe, and Diane Desrosiers-Bonin, ed. Hélisenne de Crenne: L’Écriture et ses doubles. Paris: Champion, 2004. Amstutz, Patrick. “Cinq grandes étapes dans l’art de traduire l’Énéide en français.” Revue des études latines 80 (2002): 13–24. Brückner, Thomas. Die erste französische Aeneis: Untersuchungen zu Octovien de Saint-Gelais’ Übersetzung. Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1987. Karlsson, Britt-Marie. “Hélisenne de Crenne didacticienne—une femme savante au XVIe siècle.” In Actes du XVIIIe congrès des romanistes scandinaves /Actas del XVIII congreso de romanistas escandinavos. Edited by Eva Ahlstedt, Ken Bensson, Elisabeth Bladh, Ingmar Söhrman, and Ulla Åkerström, 425–40. Romanica Gothoburgensia 69, Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2012. Accessed September 17, 2014. https://gupea.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/30607. Loviot, Louis . “Hélisenne de Crenne.” Revue des Livres anciens 2 (1917): 137– 45. Accessed September 17, 2014. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/servlet/biblio ?idNoeud=1&ID=32858610&SN1=0&SN2=0&host=catalogue. Marshall, Margaret. “The Aeneid and the Illusory Authoress: Truth, Fiction and Feminism in Hélisenne de Crenne’s Eneydes.” PhD Diss., University of Exeter, 2011. Reynier, Gustave. Le Roman sentimental avant l’Astrée. Paris: Armand Colin, 1908. Rumet, Nicolas. Nicolas et François Rumet, maïeurs et historiens d’Abbeville au XVIe siècle. De Abbavilla, capite comitatus Pontivi, excerptum ex Historia Picardiae Nicolai, et suivi d’extraits de la Chronique du pays et comté de Ponthieu, de François. Edited by Ernest Prarond. Paris: A. Picard et fils, 1902. Scollen-Jimack, Christine M. “Hélisenne de Crenne, Octovien de Saint-Gelais and Virgil.” Studi Francesi 26 (1982): 197–210. Wood, Diane S. Hélisenne de Crenne: At the Crossroads of Renaissance Humanism and Feminism. Madison-Teaneck: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002.

PART IV LATIN, ITALIAN, AND SPANISH LITERATURE

TIMELESS GALLERIES AND POETIC VISIONS IN ROME 1500–1540 NADIA CANNATA SAPIENZA UNIVERSITÀ DI ROMA/ SAPIENZA UNIVERSITY OF ROME

Poets and Philosophers Between 1510 and 1540 the Vatican palaces were thoroughly reconstructed and a new system for visually embodying the place of the Holy See in the modern world was devised. This entailed a repositioning of the Classics within a new system of the arts and the usage of the fine arts as a universal language that was capable of signifying how a modern re-use of the antique was to be realised. A fundamental chapter of this story is constituted by the work carried out by Bramante and Raphael in reshaping the Belvedere court and in painting the Stanza della Segnatura, the pope’s library placed at the very heart of the immense structure of the new palaces. The northern window of the Segnatura, where Raphael painted the scene of a modern Parnassus, overlooks the Belvedere court, which Bramante imagined as a gigantic stage at the foot of the palace. Carousels, theatre performances and other forms of light entertainment were held there throughout the early decades of the Cinquecento, providing a modern version of the much wilder entertainments that the site saw in ancient Rome, as suggested, for example, by Tacitus’s Annales. Moreover, the imposing structure of the whole complex echoed the architecture of the Tempio della Fortuna in Palestrina. Placed at the vanishing point of the perspective of the landscape, visible from that window, lay the Mons Vaticanus, traditionally understood as having housed a temple dedicated to Apollo, and, later, as having provided the setting for St. Peter’s martyrdom. The hill, overlooking the buildings of the pope’s city, constituted an ideal, symbolic reminder of what was sacred both to art and Christianity. How the idea first took shape is an interesting topic in itself: a pagan temple dedicated to

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Apollo in that location is not recorded in any source, literary or archaeological. Neither Pliny nor Cicero, Horace or Martial mention it, nor does it appear in ancient topography. It was a projection of how things should have been—even if it had never happened that way.1 Above the northern window of the Segnatura, Raphael pictured the scene of a modern Parnassus, a timeless canon of poets. It is an interesting gallery, in the sense that the poets, both ancient and modern, are all represented according to their true likenesses, in an attempt to bring them to life: the chubby Tebaldeo, the ageing Sannazaro, the elegant and slim figure of Ariosto, Dante with his aquiline nose, Boccaccio’s and Petrarch’s well known profiles, one slightly more pensive than the other. Modern poets are dressed in contemporary costumes, the ancients are dressed all’antica, but this makes them no less recognisable: Sappho carries a piece of paper bearing her name, Ennius is portrayed as the youngest among the epic poets, Homer is evidently blind and so on. Yet, the presence in the same scene and at the same time of Homer, Sappho, Ariosto and Sannazaro—all wearing laurel wreaths—defies the constraints of time, as does the figure of Statius wearing Raphael’s face.2 When visitors moved their gaze around the room and onto the wall dedicated to the philosophers, they would find themselves observing a very similar scene: ancient and modern philosophers deep in conversation, caught in a timeless moment. And there again, ancients would bear the likeness of moderns—Plato as Leonardo da Vinci, Aristotle as Giuliano da Sangallo and Euclid as Bramante. Raphael would be visible as well, partly hidden on the right side.

Words and Works of Art The characteristic element of this rhetoric is constituted by the paradoxical pretension that the scene is true to life. The features of the ancients are designed to signify their adherence to historical truth, as testified by the antique artefacts that were frantically looked for, found, unearthed and displayed in private houses and palaces. Humanists, furthermore, conceived of philology and textual criticism as a means to acquire— together with the words, language and styles of Homer, Virgil, Ovid and the others—an insight into their souls. Where did Raphael get the idea of depicting a timeless hall of fame? From Giotto to the Sala dei Carraresi, to Lucignano and the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, through Andrea del Castagno and Luca Signorelli in Orvieto, troughout the Quattrocento and Cinquecento we find several galleries of viri illustres,3 although none of them has the depth, scope and

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complexity of Raphael’s and none features ancients and moderns conversing together in an ideally timeless scene where the ancients often bear the faces of the moderns. Such galleries do have literary precedents, and paramount among them appears to be the idea of grouping epigrams from all epochs in a single canonical collection, as was the case with the so-called Greek Anthology. The work had been recently rediscovered and was published in 1494 by Janus Lascaris, later chair of Greek studies at the invitation of Leo X in Rome. Even that edition, considerably less extensive than subsequent ones, contained a whole book dedicated to a gallery of illustrious personalities, within which a section was dedicated to the images of poets—from Homer onwards—and another to philosophers. Among them we find Aristotle measuring the earth with his hand and Plato gazing at the stars.4

Fig. 1. Raffaello Sanzio, School of Athens. © Vatican Museums.

We know that the anthology was being read, admired, loved and imitated in Rome in those very years, since its fortuna at the time can be proven both directly and indirectly. Let me retell a well known episode of Roman

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antiquarianism. In 1495 Praxiteles’ little statue of Cupid lying on a lion’s skin was unearthed in a Roman Villa belonging to Ulisse da Fano. The discovery, although not constituting quite such an event as that of the Laocoon, did stir enormous enthusiasm in Rome, as the statuette was well known through a series of ekphrastic epigrams collected in the 16th book of the Greek Anthology. Four years later, as reported by both Vasari and Condivi, Michelangelo carved another statuette representing a sleeping Cupid and then sold it as an ancient work to Raffaele Riario. The choice of motif may appear obscure, since there are very few extant statuettes of this kind, were it not for the fact that in that very same 16th book of the Greek Anthology—after the sequence devoted to Praxiteles’ Cupid—a few other epigrams mention another naked sleeping Cupid by an anonymous artist. Michelangelo must have come to the idea of producing his Cupid after Praxiteles’ was found in 1495 because he wanted to re-enact in reality what fiction had transmitted. Antiquarians in Rome were most eager to find the second Cupid and reconstitute the couple as described in the anthology—and Michelangelo complied.5 For the Segnatura to work, visitors would have to be aware not just of the conventional features associated with Homer and Virgil, of the appearance of Leonardo and Bramante, but they need also to recognize the scene within which they are framed: microtexts in a macro text, poems within an anthology. There again, one can find here a visual enactment of the original function of philology: to bring back to life and restore vividness to episodes belonging to the past as if they were present, and to project them onto contemporary culture and imagination. The pope’s library—the Segnatura—affords a peculiar type of ekphrasis: it reproduces as characters, alive and breathing in the Parnassus, figures which could be seen on display across the Belvedere in the court of statues: Homer bearing the face of the Laocoon, Calliope that of the Cleopatra (or Ariadne), a beautiful reclining woman figure also kept in the court. Conversely, Aristotle and Plato appear like cameos: colourful pictures mimicking the posture attributed to the two great philosophers by a handful of ancient Greek epigrams. This way they acquired the vividness, enárgheia, of visual perception, enhanced by the fact that they bore the features of two very well known contemporary artists. Of course, all the literary sources evoked in the paintings must find their humus in the literary and cultural awareness of the beholder; otherwise their enárgheia would have gone completely unnoticed.

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Fig. 2. Raffaello Sanzio, Parnassus. © Vatican Museums.

The Segnatura’s original function was that of a library; the idea of providing an ideal and paradigmatic description of the deeds of great men and displaying them alongside their books runs through history: the library in Alexandria contained statues and medallions of the authors whose texts were housed and preserved there, and so did apparently the library of Asinius Pollio in Rome, as described by Varro and in turn by Andrea Fulvio, an illustrious contemporary of Raphael. In addition, from St. Jerome, Isidorus, Petrarch and his contemporaries down to Renaissance historians the tradition of the De viris illustribus looms large. However, the concept of a library as a museum or of a museum as a library, and scattering it with images as part of its symbolic language was comparatively new. The most interesting example of such a project, together with the Segnatura, is perhaps Giovio’s museum on the shores of Lake Como.6 There, as in Rome, the intention was to extract from the flow of time the memory of those who deserved to participate in an idealised parade from whatever era in human history they had happened to inhabit.

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Poetic Parades In Rome, immediately after the Sack, a group of intellectuals who had worked with Raphael and for whom Giovio was of course no stranger, were party to an extraordinary idea. They contributed to an anthology, a monumental collection (approx. 4000 pieces) of Neo-Latin epigrams, imitating explicitly the Greek Anthology, apparently with the ambition of constituting a modern counterpart, a Latin Anthology ante litteram, preserving epigrams in Latin spanning from Ausonius to contemporary poets. Again, a hall of fame, or a parade of works that deserved to be preserved outside of time and history was presented. The authors whose poetry appears in the collection are the major authors of the Early and High Renaissance in Florence, Rome and the corti padane (Ferrara and Mantua) where an important movement was forming during the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Poliziano, Marullo, Navagero, Sadoleto, Casanova, Beroaldo, Strozzi (father and son), Tebaldeo and Castiglione were all part of this cultural milieu. The anthology was devised—as far as we can reconstruct—by Angelo Colocci, an unconventional and most interesting figure. He was an antiquarian from the school of Pomponio Leto, a linguist, a philologist, and important member of the papal entourage. Up to his death in 1547 he seems to have occupied a central position in many of the endeavours at the Renaissance papal court. Several manuscripts preserve the remains of that project, and the collection, as it appears in its present state, is a work in progress. Although the intention of publishing it as a unit is evident, the result is by no means a finished piece of work. The epigrams are organised in several categories, arranged in alphabetical order, and some of them are more polished than others. The category Pictura vel imagines, counting approximately 200 poems, is by far the most interesting, for two reasons: it deals with speculations about the relationship between the visual arts and poetry and many of the poems are ekphrastic writings describing some of the works of art already referred to (Cleopatra, Laocoon, Sleeping Cupids, and also the Apollo Belvedere, Orpheus, Hercules and Anthaeus). Most of them are unknown, whilst nearly all are in need of being critically edited for a full historical understanding.7 The first nucleus of the collection was constituted by the manuscript Vat. Lat. 3353, a monumental paper manuscript of about 400 pages, in folio format and divided into various sections, in a neat alphabetical arrangement:

Nadia Cannata Amatoria (antiqua) Amatoria Contra Amorem Arguta Experientia Casus vel historia Dedicatoria Tumuli (antiqua) Tumuli Epitaphia Fatu Fortuna Fortitudo Gratitudo Fructus Irrisio

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Iudicium Laudatoria Maledicta Maledicta Moralia Monitio Munera Oscena Pastoralia Pictura vel imagines Postulationes Preces Vitio Virtus Vota

The text began as a fair copy, but ended up incorporating various materials and being progressively degraded to a draft. It must have been copied after the second decade of the century by a copyist who happened to work for Angelo Colocci. Two more manuscripts are undoubtedly part of this projected collection of epigrams: one of them is Vat. Lat. 3352, which contains poems grouped in categories of the same kind, but also includes many more: Aenigmata (cc. 1–8) Amatoria (cc. 9–10) Amatoria antiqua (cc. 11–14) Amatoria (cc. 15–17) Amatoria in puerum (cc. 21–24) Amatoria (cc. 25–26) Amatoria (cc. 29–31) Amicitia (cc. 32–40) Amatoria (cc. 41–44) Contra Amorem (c. 51r) Arguta (cc. 52–62) Blanditiis (cc. 63–65) Casus Antiqua (c. 67) Casus vel historia (cc. 68–76) Dedicatio (cc. 76–82) De se (c. 83) De se (cc. 84–93)

Epitaphia (cc. 94–235) Excusatio (cc. 260–61) Experientia (c. 262) Fructus (cc. 264–65) Fortitudo (cc. 266–73) De Fortuna (c. 274) Factum (c. 276) Genialia (cc. 279–81) Gratitudo (cc. 282–90) Hortatio ad pacem (c. 300) Imprecatio (c. 308) Ingrata (c. 304 [sic]) Invitatio (c. 306) Iocus (cc. 308–13) Ironia (c. 314) Ithopia (c. 316) Iudicium (c. 317)

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The alphabetical order interrupts at the I of IUDICIUM, but the sequence is picked up in Vat. Ott. Lat. 2860 which resumes from LAUDATORIA as follows: Laudatoria antiqua Laudes (cc. 5–65) Maledicta (cc. 66–105) Monitio (cc. 106–109) Monstrum (cc. 110–11) Moralia (cc. 112–20) Munus (cc. 121–27) Obscaena (cc. 128–37) Pastoralia (cc. 138–53)

Pictura Pietas Postulationes Preces (cc. 154–71) Pudicitia (cc. 172–85) Varia (cc. 186–93) Virtus Vitio (cc. 194–98)

There is a fourth manuscript, housed at Harvard University Library (Houghton library, ms lat 358), which appears to be a copy of Vat. Lat. 3352. It contains the very same sections—Aenigmata to Iudicium—which are to be found in Vat. Lat. 3352, the same poems and consists of roughly the same amount of pages (approximately 300). It is made up of 19 gatherings of 8 and 12 sheets, regularly alternating, and was copied by one scribe who is also responsible for parts of the other epigrammatari. The manuscript is a fair copy; it presents no corrections or additions nor does it have blank pages other than at the end.8 Moreover, its collation with Vat. Lat. 3352 reveals no substantial variant readings. The nucleus of the whole project seems therefore to have consisted chiefly of 3 manuscripts, Vat. Lat 3352, 3353 and Vat. Ottob. Lat. 2860. However, there are other manuscripts preserved both in the Vatican library and elsewhere which are in one way or another part of that project. Some belonged to Colocci and share the same structure as the three main collections: Neo-Latin epigrams grouped in sections and clearly intended to become part of the anthology. Vat. Lat. 2836, for example, partially autograph by Angelo Colocci, is divided into Amatoria, Laus, Obscena, Pictura and the poems are often accompanied in the margins by notes such as placet or non placet, copiata, bis scripta—something Colocci normally does whenever he edits a text in view of publication and then transfers it to fair or fairer copies or working collections. We can identify at least ten more manuscripts that ended up as parts of this monumental project; mostly they contain contemporary poetry, although many also include ancient verse, and one, significantly, collects Latin translations of the poems which in the 16th book of the Greek Anthology describe the statues of the Muses and ancient philosophers.

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To these we should add the collections of individual authors whose poems ended up in the epigrammatari, some prepared by the authors in an exercise of self-editing, others the result of editorial work carried out by friends and admirers. To the first category belong two manuscripts of the Latin compositions by Fausto Maddaleni Capodiferro, to the other, among other examples, the already quoted Vat. Lat. 2835 collecting the thesaurus of Tebaldeo’s Latin poems edited by Bembo and Colocci.9 Tebaldeo is by far the most frequently represented author in the epigrammatari. The most representative section of the anthology is perhaps the one containing the ekphrastic epigrams, where one can still read some classical examples of the genre: Ausonius and Claudianus imitating Greek epigrams in their pieces on Myron’s cow or the Niobe, Hercules and Anthaeus and Afrodites Anadyomene. Such epigrams are accompanied by their modern counterparts: Tebaldeo wrote on the statue of Myron’s cow, of which several copies could be found in Rome at the time and on the Hercules and Anthaeus, the ancient statue temporarily housed in the Belvedere Court (of which Antico would provide a miniature copy recently exhibited in the National Gallery in Washington). The statue was then moved to Florence, where Lorenzo Lotto and other artists in Cosimo’s time would make sketches of it. It was at the time still missing some modern adornments, probably added only after the statue had been in Florence for a while. See, for example, the following poems on the group by Tebaldeo, all of which are transcribed in Vat. Ottob. Lat. 2860, c. 162v: Omnis quo Libiae lucta est superata iuventus Quem genuit lati qui regit arma maris Angente herculeo sublatum robore ad auras Antheum mira reddidit arte Myron. Esse suum natura potest hunc credere; matrem Tangat humum duro vivet in aere gigas.10 Amphitrionidae libicique expressa gigantis Quam bene ab egregio lucta myrone fuit Non homines tantum terram quoque decipit ipsam Quae nato auxilium non dare posse dolet.11 Fortibus Alcidae Antheus suspensus in ulnis Humani vires arguit ingenii Finem opifex voluit tibi luctae ostendere vivus Fingere principium si voluisset orat.12

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Fig. 3. Hercules and Anthaeus. Florence, Palazzo Pitti. © Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo.

There are sections devoted to modern works of art, such as the famous Beatricium, a coherent sequence of numerous poems which describe and eulogize the funerary monument to the young Beatrice da Nola executed by Tommaso Malvico. The tomb is lost and this wealth of poems, although of no particular literary interest, preserves the remains of what must have constituted a great social event. One also finds ekphrasis and descriptions of modern pieces of art, many lost or of problematic identification, others which are of great historical interest. An interesting case in point are two poems about an unfinished or incomplete marble statue of Bacchus:

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Hunc non perfecto finxit qui corpore Bacchum Digna est ingenti Daedala laude manus Immensam rerum satis est aequare parentem Exactum hunc potuit ferre nec illa Deum.13 Hoc qui cernis opus mirabile desine Bacchum Dicere bis genitum, dicito ter genitum.14

The artwork which first comes to mind by way of identification is Michelangelo’s statue (1497) which was treated as a piece of antiquity by Jacopo Galli who owned it—to the extent that the hand and penis had been knocked off, making the body incomplete—non perfecto as one of the poems says. But the second poem includes a phrase about the god being born a third time thanks to the artist, a phrase that also shows up in a poem about a lost Bacchus by Leonardo da Vinci. It may be a stock expression, or it could be that the expression indicates that the poem is about the Leonardo image. In other cases it is crystal clear what the poems are speaking of. The manuscripts contain several poems on Michelangelo’s Cupid, two of which tell the story of an old Mantegna who had lost his sight due to illness, being reawakened to life by the touch and feel of a wondrous piece of marble representing a flying numen from Cyprus. The poem must refer to Mantegna’s recognition of and excitement for the previously mentioned Fig. 4. Michelangelo, Bacchus. Florence, Museo del Bargello. statue of Praxiteles’ sleeping Cupid. The © Ministero dei beni e delle poem is by Tebaldeo who was in Mantua attività culturali e del turismo. at the time. The poem is not unknown, but the artefact it refers to has not been recognized.15 The little piece, discovered as stated in 1495, arrived in Mantua in June 1506. Mantegna died in September that year.

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Timeless Galleries and Poetic Visions in Rome 1500–1540 De Mantinea Dum cubat amisso visu iam morte propinqua Maxima picturae gloria Mantinae Audiit Ausoniae venisse a moenibus urbis Aligeri sculptam numinis effigiem Hanc rogat afferri et manibus dum singula tractat Membra aegro rediit qui fuit ante vigor Mira manus fabri saxo quae prebuit ipsi Non animam tantum sed dare posse dedit. Cedant Deucalion tua saxa animata fuere Illa haec non tantum sunt animata animant.16 De eodem Marmoea Idalii tangens simulacra volucris Mantinea inferno pictor ab amne redit. Fortunate lapis miracula qui videt ista Non coeli sed te coeli opus esse putat.17

Poems were also written by Tebaldeo about Mantegna’s oil painting of the sacrifice of Isaac, now at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna datable to 1495: Quis pictos Mantegna tibi natumque patremque spectando maestis temperet a lachrimis. Hic patri, ille deo paret dat colla secanda Natus, suspenso stat genitor gladio Si verum miseranda refert pictura repressam Caelesti haud miror voce fuisse manum.18 Ad Andream Mantegnam Qui satis hanc laudare queat Mantenga tabellam Qua patris hortatu victima factus Isaac Hic patri ille deo paret dat colla secunda Natus suspenso stat genitor gladio Certe ambo certe tibi se indulsere videndos Non simulare aliter tam facile hoc poterat Si sese iacere velut pictura fatetur Ipsum non miror penituisse Iovem.19 Ad eundem Ficta Zeusis aves uva decepit et ipsum Lintheolo pulchrum quod mage Parrhasius At tibi dum natum mactans depingitur Abram Angelus exclamat parce age parce sat est. Quis te igitur priscos tantum praestare negarit? Quantum prestat aves Angelus atque homines?20

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Fig. 5. Andrea Mantegna, The Sacrifice of Isaac. © Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien.

The projected edition of this collection raises several rather complicated questions, relating to the critical methodology to be adopted when editing a work which is made up of texts belonging to various authors writing at different times and places, poems that may have had individual methods of

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transmission, combined with the fact that the poems were collected by a critical editor who left the job incomplete. The section dealing with Pictura vel imagines undoubtedly includes precious materials and reveals a wealth of documents regarding the relationship between the arts— documents which are often much earlier than the period when such a debate was thought to have started. But, as we have seen, there are also many more sections of the book, which feed into many different aspects of poetic production and its social role in Rome at the time and improve our knowledge of Renaissance culture. It suffices for now to say—as we balance the arguments to make a decision—that none of the previous collections, Coryciana included, have the scope or breadth of this one, or, indeed, its size. The work seems both to be a striking example of the foundation of modernity and a desperate attempt to salvage, a few years after the Sack of Rome, the memory of a civilization about to dissolve and be left to the care of memory alone.21

Notes 1

Nadia Cannata, “Son come i cigni, anche i poeti rari: l’immagine della poesia fra umanesimo volgare e tradizione greco-latina,” Letteratura & Arte 8 (2010). 2 On laurel wreaths see Nadia Cannata and Maddalena Signorini, “Per trionfar o Cesare o poeta: la corona d’alloro e le insegne del poeta moderno,” in Dai pochi ai molti: Studi in onore di Roberto Antonelli, vol. I, ed. A. Punzi and P. Canettieri (Rome: Viella, 2014) and, of course, the bibliography therein. 3 On this topic, see, among others, Maria Monica Donati, “Gli eroi romani tra storia ed exemplum: I primi cicli umanistici di Uomini Famosi,” in Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, vol. 2, I generi e i temi ritrovati, ed. S. Settis (Turin: Einaudi, 1985); Roberto Guerrini, “Da Piediluco a Lucignano: Cicerone, Dante e i modelli letterari nei cicli degli Uomini Famosi,” in Piediluco, i Trinci e lo Statuto del 1417, ed. Maria Grazia and Nico Ottaviani (Perugia: Archivi dell’Umbria, 1988); idem, “I venerati volti degli antichi: Gli epigrammi di Francesco da Fiano nel salone dei Trinci a Foligno,” in Signorie in Umbria tra Medioevo e Rinascimento: l’esperienza dei Trinci (Perugia: Deputazione di storia patria per l’Umbria, 1989), vol. 2; idem, “Dai cicli di Uomini Famosi alla Biografia dipinta: Traduzioni latine delle Vite di Plutarco ed iconografia degli eroi nella pittura murale del Rinascimento,” Fontes 1 (1998). 4 I have identified the Greek Anthology as the source from which the galleries of poets and philosophers are drawn and indicated which epigrams I believe have inspired some of the scenes in the Segnatura in Nadia Cannata Salamone, “Evidentia in narratione: filologia e storia nell’iconografia del Cupido di Michelangelo e della Stanza della Segnatura,” in Segni per Armando Petrucci, ed. P. Supino and L. Miglio (Rome: Bagatto, 2002), and Cannata, “Son come i cigni.” More recently David Rijser, “Raphael’s Poetics: Ekphrasis, Interaction and Typology in Art and Poetry of High Renaissance Rome” (PhD diss., University of

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Amsterdam, 2006) discussed Raphael’s dealings with contemporary poets and the Segnatura. 5 See Cannata Salamone, “Evidentia in narratione.” 6 On Giovio and his Museum, see Paolo Giovio, Scritti d’arte: Lessico ed ecfrasi, ed. Sonia Maffei (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 1999); idem, Elogi degli uomini illustri, ed. Franco Minonzio (Turin: Einaudi, 2006); idem, Ritratti degli uomini illustri, ed. Carlo Caruso (Palermo: Sellerio, 1999); idem, Lettere, 2 vols., ed. Giuseppe Guido Ferrero (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1958); Paolo Giovio: Il Rinascimento e la memoria (Como: Presso la Società a Villa Gallia, 1985) and Barbara Agosti, Paolo Giovio, uno storico lombardo nella cultura artistica del Cinquecent (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2008), and more recently Naida Cannata, “Vasari, Paolo Giovio, le collezioni di ritratti e la retorica delle immagini,” in Giorgio Vasari e la nascita del museo, ed. Maia W. Gahtan (Florence: Edifir, 2012). With regard to the theme of memory, writings and images, see Lina Bolzoni, La stanza della memoria: Modelli letterari e iconografici nell’età della stampa (Turin: Einaudi, 1995); “Con parola brieve e con figura”: Emblemi e imprese fra antico e moderno, ed. Lina Bolzoni and Silvia Volterrani, with an introduction by Marc Fumaroli (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2009); Peter Burke, The European Renaissance: Centres and Peripheries (Oxford: Blackwells, 1998); Francis Haskell, History and its Images: Arts and Interpretation of the Past (London: Yale University Press, 1993); Salvatore Settis, “Continuità, distanza, conoscenza: Tre usi dell’antico,” in Memoria dell’antico, vol. 3, Dalla tradizione all’archeologia (Turin: Einaudi, 1987), 373–486 and Ecfrasi: Modelli ed esempi fra Medioevo e Rinascimento, 2 vols., ed. Gian Antonio Venturi and Monica Farnetti (Rome: Bulzoni, 2004). 7 Together with an art historian collegue, Dr Maia W. Gahtan, I am completing a critical edition and translation into English of the epigrams, which we hope to publish very shortly. 8 The bibliography on the manuscript is slim. See Roger E. Stoddard, “Latin Verse of the Renaissance: Collection and Exhibition at the Houghton Library,” Harvard Library Bulletin 1, no. 2 (1990): 31, n. 30 and Paul Oskar Kristeller, Iter Italicum: A Finding List of Uncatalogued or Incompletely Catalogued Humanistic Manuscripts of the Renaissance in Italian and other Libraries, vol. 2 (London: E. J. Brill, 1967), 228–30. 9 For Capodiferro, see Vat. Lat. 10377; as for Tebaldeo, see Nadia Cannata, “Per l’edizione critica del Tebaldeo latino: il progetto Colocci-Bembo,” Studi e problemi di critica testuale 47 (1993). 10 All Libyan youth is beaten in the struggle by him, whom the God reigning over the great sea generated. Myron rendered with wonderful art Antheum, elevated to the skies by the herculean strength squeezing him. Nature could believe him to belong to her: the giant will live if he touches mother earth, (even) in the hard bronze. 11 How well was the struggle of the son of Amphytrio with the Libian giant represented by Myron! Not only does he deceive men, but the very earth, who regrets she cannot give help to her son.

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Antheus, suspended in the strong arms of the son of Alcyde, shows the strength(s) of human intelligence. The living artist wanted to show you the end of the struggle: had he wanted to show you the beginning he would speak. 13 Vat. Ott. Lat. 2860, c. 161v, Vat Lat 2835, c. 246v: He who carved this Bacchum with an unfinished body, the Daedaelean hand deserves great praise. It may be equated to the great mother of all things: but he could bring the work to completion, nature could not produce the finished God. 14 Vat. Ott. Lat. 2860, c. 161v, Vat Lat 2835, c. 250r: You the beholder of this wondrous work, stop saying that Bacchus was born twice—say, rather, that he was born thrice. A. Venturi, Leonardo da Vinci pittore, Bologna, Zanichelli 1920 writes (pp. 160–61) that the Duke of Ferrara on April 1, 1505 had written to his orator in Milan that he wished to own a certain Bacchus by Leonardo belonging at the time to a certain Anton Maria Pallavicino, who could not give it to him having promised the statue to the Cardinal of Roano: G. Campori, Nuovi documenti per la vita di Leonardo da Vinci, “Atti e Memorie di Storia Patria per le Province dell’Emilia,” 1865 transcribes a poem by Flavio Antonio Giraldi from a ms in the Biblioteca Civica in Ferrara: Bacchus Leonardi Vincij/ Ter genitum posthac mortales Bacchum/ Me peperit docta Vincius ille manu/ Hoc qui cernis opus mirabile desine Bacchum/ Dicere bis genitus dicito ter genitum. On the Bacchus by Leonardo da Vinci: the famous Leonardus with his learned hand gave birth to me for the third time. You the beholder of this wondrous work, stop saying that Bacchus was born twice—say, rather, that he was born thrice. 15 See Giovanni Agosti, Mantegna I (Milan: Felitrinelli, 2007) and “Su Mantegna 2: All’ingresso della maniera moderna,” Prospettiva 72 (1993); Stephen J. Campbell, The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 327, n. 1. 16 Vat. Ottob. Lat. 2860, c. 161r, Vat. Lat. 2835, cc. 245v–246r, Vat. Lat. 3353, c. 3r. As he lies, blind, whilst death is approaching, the highest glory of painting, Mantegna, heard that from within the walls of the city of Rome the sculpted image of the winged deity has come. He asks for it to be brought and as he touches it with his hands: the lost vigour returned across the limbs to the ailing man. The wondrous hand of the artist which applied to the very stone gave it not just the soul, but the ability to give a soul. O Deucalion, your stones should step back, they were animated but these not only are animated, but they animate. 17 Vat. Ottob. Lat. 2860, c. 161r, Vat. Lat. 2835, c. 246r, Vat. Lat. 3353, cc. 242, 245v. As he touched the statue of the winged son of Idalius the painter Mantegna came back from the [infernal] river. Oh fortunate stone, who saw such miracles. The artist thinks not that the god comes from the skies, but that you belong to the skies. 18 Vat. Ottob. Lat. 2860, c. 159r. Who could refrain from crying, Mantegna, when seeing the painting of the son and the father? He obeys to the father, the other to God; the son offers the neck to be slashed, the father stays with the sword suspended in the air. If the painting really depicts the hand repressed by a godly voice, I would not be surprised. 19 Vat. Ottob. Lat. 2860, c. 162v. Who, Mantegna, could praise this painting enough? [The painting] in which at the request of the father, Isaac is made a

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victim. He to the father, the other obeys to God—the son and the father stay with the sword suspended. Clearly both conceded to be seen by you otherwise it would not have been possible to paint the scene easily. If he admits to speak as if he were the painting I would not be surpried if Jove himself would repent. 20 Vat. Ottob. Lat. 2860, c. 162v. Zeusis deceived the birds with painted grapes, but what is even more remarkable, Parrhasius deceived the artist himself with the curtain. But while Abram killing his offspring was being painted by you, the Angel exclaimed, “stop now, stop, it is enough.” Who could therefore negate that you are superior to the ancients Just as the Angel is superior to the birds and to men? The reference is, of course, to Pliny Nat. Hist. XXXV.36.65. 21 On epigrams and visual arts see, among others Maia Gahtan, “Neo-Latin and the Visual Arts in Italy”; “Ekphrasis”; “Epigrams and Epitaphs about Art and Artists”; “Pliny on Art and its Reception,” in Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Neo-Latin World: Macropaedia, ed. Philip Ford, Ian Bloemendal, and Charles Fantaezzi (Leiden: Brill, 2014), passim; idem, “Epitaphs in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives,” Journal of Art Historiography 5 (2011); David Rijser, “The Practical Function of High Renaissance Epigram: The Case of Raphael’s Grave,” in The Neo-Latin Epigram: A learned and Witty Genre, ed. Susanna de Beer, K. A. E. Enenkel, and David Rijser (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009); idem, “The Sculptor as Philologist: Interaction between Scholarship and the Arts in the Goritz Chapel and the Coryciana Rome 1512–1527,” in Officine del nuovo: sodalizi fra letterati, artisti ed editori nella cultura italiana fra Riforma e Controriforma, ed. Harald Hendrix and Paolo Procaccioli (Manziana: Vecchiarelli, 2008); Julia Haig Gaisser, “The Rise and Fall of Goritz’s Feasts,” Renaissance Quarterly 48 (1995); John Shearman, “Castiglione’s Portrait of Raphael,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 38 (1994); idem, Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

Works Cited Agosti, Barbara. Paolo Giovio, uno storico lombardo nella cultura artistica del Cinquecent. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2008. Agosti, Giovanni. “Su Mantegna 2: All’ingresso della maniera moderna.” Prospettiva 72 (1993): 66–82. —. Mantegna I. Milan: Felitrinelli, 2007. Bolzoni, Lina. La stanza della memoria: Modelli letterari e iconografici nell’età della stampa. Turin: Einaudi, 1995. Burke, Peter. The European Renaissance: Centres and Peripheries. Oxford: Blackwells, 1998. Campbell, Stephen J. The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Campori, G. Nuovi documenti per la vita di Leonardo da Vinci. “Atti e Memorie di Storia Patria per le Province dell’Emilia.” 1865. Cannata, Nadia. “Son come i cigni, anche i poeti rari: l’immagine della poesia fra umanesimo volgare e tradizione greco-latina.” Letteratura & Arte 8 (2010): 197–211.

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—. “Vasari, Paolo Giovio, le collezioni di ritratti e la retorica delle immagini.” In Giorgio Vasari e la nascita del museo. Edited by Maia W. Gahtan, 61–69. Florence. Edifir: 2012. In English as “Vasari, Giovio, Portrait Collections and the Rhetoric of Images.” In Giorgio Vasari and the birth of the Museum. Edited by Maia W. Gahtan, 67–79. London: Ashgate, 2014. Cannata Salamone, Nadia. “Per l’edizione critica del Tebaldeo latino: il progetto Colocci-Bembo.” Studi e problemi di critica testuale 47 (1993): 49–76. —. “Evidentia in narratione: filologia e storia nell’iconografia del Cupido di Michelangelo e della Stanza della Segnatura.” In Segni per Armando Petrucci. Edited by P. Supino and L. Miglio, 35–59. Rome: Bagatto, 2002. —. Gli appunti linguistici di Angelo Colocci nel manoscritto Vat. Lat. 4817. Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 2012. Cannata, Nadia, and Maddalena Signorini. “Per trionfar o Cesare o poeta: la corona d’alloro e le insegne del poeta moderno.” In Dai pochi ai molti: Studi in onore di Roberto Antonelli. Vol. I. Edited by A. Punzi and P. Canettieri, 439– 73. Rome: Viella, 2014. “Con parola brieve e con figura”: Emblemi e imprese fra antico e moderno. Edited by Lina Bolzoni and Silvia Volterrani, with an introduction by Marc Fumaroli. Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2009. Donati, Maria Monica. “Gli eroi romani tra storia ed exemplum: I primi cicli umanistici di Uomini Famosi.” In Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana. Vol. 2, I generi e i temi ritrovati. Edited by S. Settis, 97–152. Turin: Einaudi, 1985. Ecfrasi: Modelli ed esempi fra Medioevo e Rinascimento. 2 vols. Edited by Gian Antonio Venturi and Monica Farnetti. Rome: Bulzoni, 2004. Gahtan, Maia W. “Epitaphs in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives.” Journal of Art Historiography 5 (2011): 1–24. —. “Ekphrasis.”; “Epigrams and Epitaphs about Art and Artists.”; “Pliny on Art and its Reception.” In Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Neo-Latin World: Micropaedia. Edited by Philip Ford, Ian Bloemendal, and Charles Fantaezzi. Leiden: Brill, 2014. —. “Neo-Latin and the Visual Arts in Italy.” In Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the NeoLatin World: Macropaedia. Edited by Philip Ford, Ian Bloemendal, and Charles Fantaezzi, 537–58. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Gaisser, Julia Haig. “The Rise and Fall of Goritz’s Feasts.” Renaissance Quarterly 48 (1995): 41–57. Giovio, Paolo. Lettere. 2 vols. Edited by Giuseppe Guido Ferrero. Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1958. —. Ritratti degli uomini illustri. Edited by Carlo Caruso. Palermo: Sellerio, 1999. —. Scritti d’arte: Lessico ed ecfrasi. Edited by Sonia Maffei. Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 1999. —. Elogi degli uomini illustri. Edited by Franco Minonzio. Turin: Einaudi, 2006. Guerrini, Roberto. “Da Piediluco a Lucignano: Cicerone, Dante e i modelli letterari nei cicli degli Uomini Famosi.” In Piediluco, i Trinci e lo Statuto del 1417. Edited by Maria Grazia and Nico Ottaviani, XCIII–CIV. Perugia: Archivi dell’Umbria, 1988.

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—. “I venerati volti degli antichi: Gli epigrammi di Francesco da Fiano nel salone dei Trinci a Foligno.” In Signorie in Umbria tra Medioevo e Rinascimento: l’esperienza dei Trinci. Vol 2, 459–67. Perugia: Deputazione di storia patria per l’Umbria, 1989. —. “Dai cicli di Uomini Famosi alla Biografia dipinta: Traduzioni latine delle Vite di Plutarco ed iconografia degli eroi nella pittura murale del Rinascimento.” Fontes 1 (1998): 137–58. Haskell, Francis. History and its Images: Arts and Interpretation of the Past. London: Yale University Press, 1993. Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Iter Italicum: A Finding List of Uncatalogued or Incompletely Catalogued Humanistic Manuscripts of the Renaissance in Italian and other Libraries. Vol. 2. London: E. J. Brill, 1967. Rijser, David. “Raphael’s Poetics: Ekphrasis, Interaction and Typology in Art and Poetry of High Renaissance Rome.” PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 2006. —. “The Sculptor as Philologist: Interaction between Scholarship and the Arts in the Goritz Chapel and the Coryciana Rome 1512–1527.” In Officine del nuovo: sodalizi fra letterati, artisti ed editori nella cultura italiana fra Riforma e Controriforma. Edited by Harald Hendrix and Paolo Procaccioli, 257–65. Manziana: Vecchiarelli, 2008. —. “The Practical Function of High Renaissance Epigram: The Case of Raphael’s Grave.” In The Neo-Latin Epigram: A learned and Witty Genre. Edited by Susanna de Beer, K. A. E. Enenkel, and David Rijser, 103–34. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009. Settis, Salvatore. “Continuità, distanza, conoscenza: Tre usi dell’antico.” In Memoria dell’antico. Vol. 3, Dalla tradizione all’archeologia. 373–486. Turin: Einaudi, 1987. Shearman, John. Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. —. “Castiglione’s Portrait of Raphael.” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 38 (1994): 69–97. Stoddard, Roger E. “Latin Verse of the Renaissance: Collection and Exhibition at the Houghton Library.” Harvard Library Bulletin 1, no. 2 (1990): 19–38. Venturi, A. Leonardo da Vinci pittore. Bologna, Zanichelli 1920.

A FAREWELL TO ARCADIA: MARCANTONIO FLAMINIO FROM POETRY TO FAITH* GIOVANNI FERRONI UNIVERSITY OF PADOVA

Marcantonio Flaminio, the son of the humanist and teacher Giovanni Antonio Flaminio, was born in Serravalle in 1498 and died in Rome in the house of Reginald Pole—the powerful and controversial cardinal of England—on February 16, 1550.1 Although Flaminio has received quite scant attention from scholars of Italian literature until recently (he has had more success with historians), his person and his life, at first as humanist and poet and then as a writer and thinker who devoted his work to evangelism, are not only important in themselves but also emblematic of the cultural and religious development during the first half of the sixteenth century in Italy. It is well known that this was a time in which the refined intellectual elite of the peninsula, with its humanistic culture and religious unease, was strongly affected by the Reformation and its pressing theological questions. Flaminio took part in this profound change and participated by joining the group of the so-called spirituali in Viterbo (1541–1542) and by becoming one of the most important disciples of the Spanish reformer Juan de Valdés. Flaminio was a prominent member of that elite, and his poetry, which was highly representative of that part of Italian culture, can therefore be treated as a symbol of the end of Renaissance renewal of pagan antiquity. By reconstructing in a broad outline some of Flaminio’s ideas on poetry and the early part of his poetic path (until 1539–1540, just before his meeting with Valdés) in this paper, I attempt to show how the use (or the non-use) of mythology as a means of poetic expression and as an aesthetic ideal constitutes a relevant example of the above-mentioned cultural change in Italy. As is common in Latin humanistic poetry, in Flaminio’s carmina2 mythology represents a useful tool for expressing philosophical and moral concepts or for praising influential men. But in contrast to many of his

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contemporaries he seldom referred to minor or obscure ancient traditions, he never wrote about complicated metamorphoses and never invented new fabulas, as famous poets such as Pontano did. Only some poems from Flaminio’s early production—following the example of Michael Marullus’s (ca. 1453–1500) Latin hymns3 and first published in Flaminio’s collections from 1515 and 15294—are “pure” mythological texts. Despite Marullus’s strong philosophical approach to this kind of poetry, Flaminio’s hymns are less intellectualistic: he employed the names of ancient gods and goddesses—such as Bacchus, Pan, or Diana—not only in order to symbolize and invoke cosmic and spiritual forces, but also to speak about himself, his own poetry and his (fictive?) loves. Thus the general atmosphere of those first two collections—and especially that of 1515—seems elegiac rather than philosophical. The most common kind of literary mythology that a reader can find in Flaminio’s poetry is the pastoral. He nevertheless used the typical form of bucolic poetry—the eclogue—on very few occasions because he preferred to practise a new kind of lyric, the so-called lusus pastoralis.5 This was probably invented in the early sixteenth century by the Venetian poet, humanist, and politician Andrea Navagero (1483–1529).6 It is not easy to define this kind of poetry: generally it results from the conjunction of the epigram (in the broad sense of the humanist epigram) and the eclogue with the well-known influence of the Greek Anthology. Its length thus varies from four to dozens of verses, as does the range of its meter: the most commonly used are elegiac distich, hexameter, phalecian hendecasyllabic, and iambics. The setting is always pastoral and the themes are, among others, sacrifices and prayers to pagan gods and goddesses, complaints or the rejoicing in love as well as idyllic and rustic scenes from life. Even if the lusus may seem to offer little by way of innovation, it represented a break in the tradition of Latin bucolic poetry and the epigram. According to Paolo Giovio’s Elogia,7 which contains a short biography of Navagero, the Venetian poet left the widespread model represented by Martial: his epigrams ended “non salsis aculeatisque finibus, sed tenera illa, et praedulci prisca suavitate.”8 Also Navagero contributed to the attention of the epigram, choosing new models (the Greeks), new themes (pastoral), and a new style (distinguished by “sweetness”). Moreover, it is remarkable that the lusus not always has an allegorical meaning, in contrast to most of the Italian Renaissance eclogues. The lusus is not used e.g. to represent historical or political facts. One could say that the lusus was a mixed genre but with a pure, free and apparently simple meaning.

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Although it is very difficult to specify the chronology of each of Flaminino’s pieces of poetry, he arguably wrote pastoral epigrams during four periods of his life. The first period was between 1519 and 1521, during a stay in Genua with his friend and patron Stefano Sauli;9 the second was in 1526, when Flaminio was at home, in Serravalle, during a period of convalescence after a serious illness;10 the third was ten years later, between 1536–1537, when he wrote some epigrams in order to thank and praise the young Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, who helped the poet to obtain two ecclesiastical benefices. It was a significant event because for Flaminio it meant personal financial independence and, hence, freedom.11 Finally, the fourth period was approximately in 1539, after his move to Naples and, probably, just before his acquaintance with Valdés. These four periods represent four moments in Flaminio’s life in which he did not have economic problems and enjoyed a free and peaceful life. He finally had time to dedicate himself to poetry and studies. To Flaminio poetry, particularly the pastoral genre, required peace and quiet; it was thus not compatible with political or other commitments. Writing poetry was connected with otium—his most intense existential aspiration—and the pastoral was its most appropriate expression. In the above-mentioned collection published in Venice in 1529 one can read an interesting but little-known carmen that probably dates back to 1526–1527. It is, if I am not mistaken, the first farewell to poetry and to Arcadia that we can find in Flaminio’s work: Abibo, silvae, nam Gibertus accivit, Carissimae silvae mihi; tamen verum Fatebimur, multo ille carior nobis. Quod si Giberto in hac recondita valle, Saltuque vestro nos Dei frui vellent, Si nunc legendo, nunc iocando securam Quiete vitam degeremus in dulci, Oh quid hilarius, quid beatius nobis? Sed hunc tenet, tenuitque semper invitum Orbis regendi cura, maximi patris Amor, bonorum supplices preces. At mi Tam longe abesse, tam diu nefas: quare Valete silvae, iam valete convalles.12

It seems likely that the poem refers to the last days of Flaminio’s stay and convalescence in Serravalle and to the beginning of the decade during which he was a member of Giovan Matteo Giberti’s familia in Verona.13 Although Giberti is dearer than “silvae” and it is “nefas” for Flaminio to live without his friend and patron—and hence it is right to bid farewell to

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the homeland—it is made clear that it is better to spend life together in a “recondita valle,” reading and writing pastoral poetry (“nunc legendo, nunc iocando”), far from the uncomfortable and hard tasks related to the pope’s Curia or to the government of the Veronese diocese. The conclusion of the poem makes it clear that it is impossible to compromise between poetry on the one hand and the duty of friendship and the courtier’s commitments on the other hand. To leave the “silvae” means not only to leave a beloved place but also to abandon the poetry that could be written there. As already mentioned, the lusus is the poetry of otium, that is, freedom and fullness of humanitas and life. We can find further evidence of the correspondence between poetry and pastoral in some lines of another carmen, written about 1537 in honour of Alessandro Farnese. From the very first lines, the poet introduces the main subject of the text and refers to the Cardinal’s great help in obtaining “optata . . . otia” (line 3). Then, after praising the pope’s nephew for his munificence, blaming the rich men, who do not support poets, and reminding the reader of the positive relationship between Augustus and Virgil, Flaminio finally identifies the particularity of the poet among other kinds of intellectuals and scientists:14 Scilicet ingeniis varia est vis insita. Rerum Invigilant alii caussas aperire latentes; Et convexa poli penetrant, manesque sub imos: Hic iura imperiis describit: at ille rotundo Attentum ore tenet populum magnumque senatum. At si quem placidis nascentem vidit ocellis Castalii regina chori, et formosus Apollo, Ille urbis strepitum fugit, viridantia silvis Rura colens, gaudet longos extendere in annos Magnanimum heroum divino carmine laudes.

In the last five hexameters Flaminio gives the reader much more than a definition of the poet, he gives us a picture of him. Even if in Flaminio’s opinion it is the duty of the poets to celebrate great men,15 the aim of poetry—to bestow glory and immortality—does not correspond either to its essence or to the poets’ ideal. Poets are distinguished from others because they live a peaceful and quiet life, not in noisy cities but in an idyllic environment. It means that they do not pursue outward signs of power—wealth or honour—but rather cultivate their inner freedom. Moreover, their “nature”—poetry being a gift of the “gods”—is different from that of the orators, politicians, or astronomers mentioned in the quoted passage: the lifestyle of poets and their work can be represented in

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terms of Arcadia. To Flaminio real poetry—despite its manifold uses and the poets’ celebratory tasks—seems therefore to be similar to Virgil’s Bucolica. Although this analysis is necessarily oversimplified, it can be concluded that in Flaminio’s poetry the pastoral represents the “true” nature of the poet; it embodies an existential desire and represents its expression. Furthermore, it is sometimes a metaphor or projection of an aesthetic and literary ideal. During the sixteenth century bucolic poetry with its humilis stilus was well known as the most straightforward one and was therefore considered less important in the literary canon. Within this context, Flaminio’s poetic choices appear not at all so predictable or obvious; hence the great interest of his literary position and of his representation of the poet’s nature. But in order to trace Flaminio’s thoughts on poetry we may consider not only his verse but also his prose writing. According to Flaminio the best poetry was also the simplest poetry. This becomes clear in a late and significant letter, written (February 22nd, 1549) as a reply to his friend Galeazzo Florimonte, who criticized him for writing poems on unoriginal subjects and without invention, clever concepts, or poetical wit. Flaminio, who strongly disagreed, replies that all of the best ancient poets were aware that the sweeter the poems and the closer they were to nature— whose imitation is the poet’s duty—the more delight they give. (It remains implied that the aim of poetry is to delight the reader.) In his opinion great poets do not show off their originality because they do not need hidden meanings or subtle ideas to achieve sweetness and to delight the reader. In fact, they used common and easy concepts like Catullus did in his famous and, in Flaminio’s opinion, astonishingly sweet phalecian hendecasyllabic Lugete o Veneres Cupidinesque, Acmen Septimius suos amores and Miser Catulle desinas ineptire.16 Flaminio finally claims in this letter that the excellence of the poets does not consist in finding or inventing new and uncommon concetti, but, on the contrary, it is the skill in expressing common ideas in uncommon forms and ways that matters. The surprise must not arise from inventio; it is only by means of the poet’s style—i.e. the elocutio—that an expert reader with good taste in poetry can gasp in astonishment.17 So, by giving primacy to style, in this letter Flaminio stresses the importance of the reader’s emotional involvement and participation rather than the role of rational and intellectual communication. The concept of poetry as a mere question of style, its appraisal as retelling, re-writing and renewing subjects which are often very similar or identical, is essential in order to understand Flaminio’s literary production,

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especially the lyric collection, which he wrote between 1539 and 1540, the fourth and the last period of his pastoral poetry. In the autumn of 1538, driven by a desire for freedom, Flaminio left his patron, the bishop of Verona, and moved to Naples, probably in order to meet the charismatic Spanish reformer Juan de Valdés. Since it was too expensive to rent a house in the city, he accepted the hospitality of his friends: at first he lived in Sessa with the above-mentioned Galeazzo Florimonte, and then, from spring 1539 until the beginning of 1540, with Giovan Francesco Alois who had a villa in the countryside close to Caserta. It was there that Flaminio could feel free again and enjoy the marvellous landscape. Among other intellectual, especially spiritual, occupations—according to his letters he had long since meant, for example, to study the New Testament and some works of St. Augustine18—he wrote a collection of 24 pastoral poems (epigrams and elegies).19 This time he composed a cycle of lusus, instead of a group of unconnected pieces of poetry. This is a rare example of a Latin pastoral canzoniere—probably the first one, in fact— and it has a setting (the mount Tavurno near to Caserta), characters (two lovers, goats, shepherds), and a plot all of which may be useful to summarize briefly. The young shepherd Iolla loves the beautiful shepherdess Hyella, but his father forces him to marry a rustic maid, Nisa. Because of her grief, Hyella dies, whereupon her young goat dies too. Iolla, all other shepherds and all of nature mourn Hyella’s demise in various ways. Iolla expresses his grief and his desire for death in order to join Hyella in the Elysian Fields.20 This summary makes it clear that Flaminio preferred to stress the simplicity of the plot instead of focusing on the novelty of it. If we consider that the reader is always informed indirectly, sometimes only “by chance,” about the few events that take place in the story line,21 we can understand to what extent the creation of a mournful and tender tone, the conjunction of pastoral and elegy, and sweetness of style represented Flaminio’s real purpose. There is no doubt that the stylistic quality of the Hyella cycle lies in its suavitas. It is not a coincidence, in this connection, that Flaminio makes Catullus the tutelary deity of the book: in the proemium he begs the Catullan Muse to leave Sirmione, to come to the Campanian lemon groves and to aid him with her “fistula dulci” (line 11) in glorifying Hyella.22 By means of this invocation to the Muse Flaminio gives the reader a valuable indication as to how to define his collection: it is a particular kind of Catullan pastoral poetry.23 Furthermore, in the late spring and early

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summer of 1539, writing an epistle in verses in order to invite Galeazzo Florimonte to Caserta, he promises that the friend will enjoy a lot of pleasures—landscape, sun, flowers, fruits, and friendship. Among them, there is also the new little book, which Flaminio presents in these terms:24 Huc ades, Galatee, quid moraris? Si venis cito, carminum libellum Ostendam tibi, quem legens putabis Te vesci ambrosia, et tibi repleri Ora nectare . . . .

The sweet taste which characterizes the “libellum” is the effect of good poetry on the reader and the stylistic hallmark of the pastoral. It is exactly because of the sweetness and the ease (which distinguish the best poetry, as we have seen) that the pastoral, in Flaminio’s profane work, can embody poetry itself. The collection of poems for Hyella represents the peak of Flaminio’s humanistic and mythological poetry, but also marks its end. The years 1539–1540 represent a final turning point in his life: from that time on, after the beginning of the relationship with Valdés and with his disciples and followers in Naples, Flaminio definitively turned to the most important religious themes relating to salvation—such as grace, the predestination and the free will—and he abandoned mythological poetry forever. In the letters written by Flaminio between the late 1530s and early 1540s we find some statements which explain quite well the reasons why such a choice was made and why. During this period poetry seems to lose its importance in Flaminio’s thought. Already in 1537 he had in mind to leave other topics and to devote himself to the study and meditation of Christian texts.25 On July 15, 1539, Flaminio writes to Gerolamo Seripando about the question de gratia et libero arbitrio and regrets having wasted his time dedicating himself to the idle talk of poets rather than to Holy Writ.26 In the letter to his friend Giovan Francesco Bini of February 27, 1540—close in time to the writing of his pastoral collection—he confesses that it is almost impossible to be restored from the madness of poetry, and he expresses the hope that he will forget its false beauties and turn to God.27 Later, on August 6th, 1542, in a letter to Galeazzo Florimonte about the literary education of boys, he suggests that it would be better if they did not read great poets such as Terence, Catullus or Tibullus who, despite their elegantia, can have severe consequences for their Christian moral. In the same letter he claims that the figure of the

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humanist, which he had liked so much, now seems to him a vain character.28 Although Flaminio’s spiritual concerns date back at least to the early 1520s, it is not until his conversion to a reformed, evangelical faith that the humanistic confidence in the possible agreement between Christian truths and “things” and the lies and “words” of pagan antiquity disappears. It is therefore remarkable that Flaminio, even in his later religious production, never tried to “convert” the pagan pastoral mythology into the received truth and he never used allegories in order to make classical language and imageries able to express Christian concepts or mysteries. How unusual this behaviour was in the Italian context is demonstrated not only by the general tradition of the pastoral, but more specifically, by Jacopo Sannazaro’s works—a reference point for the poetic culture of early sixteenth-century Italy. This is particularly remarkable in the Neapolitan cultural background, especially with reference to the poem De partu virginis published in 1526. The poem saw great success and was widely read despite the criticism expressed by Erasmus of Rotterdam for its inappropriate mixture of Christian themes with classical imagery and style.29 Sannazaro could have been an important example to Flaminio, who evidently knew him and his work very well: already in the late spring or early summer of 1514, when Flaminio was 16 years old, he met the old poet in person in Naples. Later, in an epigram celebrating Sannazaro’s Piscatoria, he defined him as “divino proxime Virgilio.”30 The influence of Sannazaro’s work on Flaminio’s poetry became clear in the 21st poem of the Hyella collection, which is a translation of a passage from the 12th eclogue of Arcadia, thus representing an explicit tribute to Sannazaro’s vernacular masterpiece. In the epistle, written in verse to his friend Mario Galeota, who asked Flaminio to publish the collection, he turned down the offer saying that his “ineptas | nugas” (lines 2–3) were inferior to Sannazaro’s “carmina tam venusta, tamque | polita” (lines 6–7).31 This was of course a common topos modestiae but it is quite revealing that Sannazaro here represents the touchstone for Flaminio’s work. In the opening lines of the important elegy De se proficiscente Neapolim, the church founded by Sannazaro in Mergellina (the architectonical equivalent of the De partu virginis) is taken as a metonym of the whole city of Naples, thus making it both a physical and literary destination:32 Pausilypi colles, et candida Mergillina Et myrteta sacris consita litoribus, Si mihi post tantos terrae marisque labores Contigerit vestrae limina adire Deae;

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Limina, quae vates specula fundavit in alta Actius, Eois clarus et Hesperiis; His ego pileolum figam, et calcaria, et ensem, Et quaecumque vagus arma viator habet.

Flaminio did not imitate Sannazaro’s religious poetry despite his appreciation for the poet. Considering the fact that the importance of Sannazaro’s figure and poetic choices are not under discussion, Flaminio’s attitude towards the connection between poetry and religion is even more remarkable. In the same elegy, written in 1538 before the departure to Naples and the acquaintance with Valdés, Flaminio promises that he will write religious poetry:33 Me iuvat umbrosis vitam nunc degere in hortis, Et Phoebo, et Musis otia digna sequi. Tum rerum caussas, eventaque dicere: qua sint Lege colenda homini numina sancta deum: Qui deceant mores, faciat quae vita beatum: Quid verum falsis distet imaginibus. In primis celebrare Patrem fidibus iuvat, a quo Ex nihilo Vates omnia facta canunt; Caelicolae quem Tergeminum venerantur et Unum; Qui mare, qui terras, qui supera alta regit. O utinam ille suo me sistat numine sancto Ad fortunati litora Pausilypi!

The promise was not fulfilled and he did not write any philosophical or theological poetry during his stay in Naples. Under Valdés’s influence Flaminio’s approach to religion—compared to the quite intellectual program expressed in the lines quoted above—would change completely in the following years. Moreover, although the larger part of the elegy is used to praise Virgil’s work34 and the pagan poetry still seems compatible with spiritual interests, the prospect of passing life “umbrosis . . . in hortis” and among “otia digna” would no longer prove sufficient to assuage Flaminio’s existential unease. This elegy therefore represents a watershed and it is one of the last signs of the value of poetry in Flaminio’s intellectual life. After the collection to Hyella, he abandoned poetry for a long period of time; it was not until seven years later, in 1545–1546, that his verse paraphrase of Psalms was published.35 With the exception of some verse epistles, he did not compose any original work until 1548–1549 when he wrote his last collection of poems, De rebus divinis carmina, 21 lyric meditations on the death of Christ and its redeeming power.36

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Despite the lack of poetic productivity, Flaminio’s late letters show not only the persistence of his interest for poetry, and his skills in judging its merits, but they also reveal that he spent parts of his last years collecting, ordering and editing his own poems.37 Shortly before the first edition of the important anthology Carmina quinque illustrium poetarum38—which contained a large part of Flaminio’s poetry and in whose publication Flaminio himself seems to have played an important role—the pastoral collection composed in Caserta was also printed. In fact, in 1548, Marcantonio’s (outward) opposition notwithstanding, Cesare Flaminio, a cousin of the poet, arranged for the publication of that “libellus” together with another group of selected and unpublished poems in Lyon by the famous printer Gryphus.39 It was almost certainly for this occasion that Flaminio wrote two new poems, which were added to the publication: he put the former at the beginning of the book and the latter at the conclusion, after the last piece in the collection itself. Texts like the Renaissance vernacular lyric collections which imitate Petrarch’s Canzoniere often provide a framework which is used by the poet in order to create a new (or different, or in his opinion more coherent) picture of himself. In this case Flaminio, who dedicates the book to his close friend Francesco della Torre, wants to distance himself from the literary sphere, which he finds incongruous with his current role and interests. So he lies in the first poem when claiming that he wrote his lusus when he was young,40 but the lie—a topos that he repeats in the last poem—is used in order to assert another truth, namely his farewell to pastoral poetry:41 Haec, dulcissime Turriane, lusi Molli carmine, nec laborioso, Dum ver florida laetum agebat aetas, Quam iocus decet, ac leves cachinni. Nunc Musas vocor ad severiores, Nunc rerum iuvat explicare caussas, Et caelum memorare, caelitesque, Et qui caelitibus praeest beatis. O molles elegi, lyraeque dulces, O et myrtea serta, fistulaeque, Faunique, Dryadesque, iam valete, Et cum frondiferis, Hyella, silvis. At tu, progenies Iovis supremi, Patris deliciae, deumque amores, Per quam magna canunt sacri poetae, Felix Uranie, mihi benigno

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Ades numine, supplicemque tolle Me tuo rutilante curru ad astra.

It is hard to overstate the importance of this poem and of the farewell to a type of poetry which, as pointed out above, represented for Flaminio the real and the best one. Furthermore, compared with the farewell mentioned at the beginning of this paper, this piece is very different: there is no more questioning of the contrast between otium and negotium, but of the impossible agreement between the mythology of the ancients and the “Musas . . . severiores,” that is, religious poetry. Although it is quite surprising that in this carmen Flaminio uses pagan nouns and platonic terminology in order to name the Father, the Son, the angels and the saints, we have to consider that it is not a religious poem but the last poem of a humanistic collection. Flaminio seems to look back to the late 1530s when writing this poem. Moreover, the cross-references to the elegy De se proficiscente Neapolim notwithstanding, the final lines of Haec, dulcissime Turriane, lusi highlight the differences between these two programmatic texts: they express not only the promise of a forthcoming spiritual poem and a claim of divine inspiration, but also—by alluding to Elijah’s assumption into heaven—a desire for a union with God which is typical of Flaminio’s late spirituality and writings.42 This time the promise to write religious poetry would be kept: the main purpose of Flaminio’s last collection, De rebus divinis carmina, was simply “caelum memorare,” to praise and to thank Christ, “Patris delicia, deumque amor.” Therefore the new spiritual poetry does not have any relation to the fables of the ancients. Only Flaminio’s ideas of poetry seem to remain the same. Also, in his spiritual poems he still pursues sweetness of style and he does not show any interest in the variety or the novelty of subject matter. However, the suavitas is not an end in itself but Flaminio used it in order to express God’s love for men and hence to persuade men to love God. Thus, already the dedicatory poem underlines the distance between the new “parvum libellum sed pium” and the “prisca vatum carmina | nugis referta inanibus”43 which he imitated until ten years earlier.

Notes

I would like to thank the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) for its financial support, which gave me the opportunity to attend the symposium in Stockholm. 1 On Flaminio’s life and work, see Ercole Cuccoli, M. Antonio Flaminio: Studio con documenti inediti (Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1897), Carol Maddison,

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Marcantonio Flaminio: Poet, Humanist and Reformer (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965) and Alessandro Pastore, Marcantonio Flaminio: fortune e sfortune di un chierico nell’Italia del Cinquecento (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1981). On his pastoral poetry see Giovanni Ferroni, “Dulces lusus”: Lirica pastorale e libri di poesia nel Cinquecento (Alexandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2012), 225–270. 2 Unless otherwise specified, all quotations of Flaminio’s poetry are from Marcantonio Flaminio, Carmina, ed. Massimo Scorsone (Turin: Edizioni RES, 1993). I cite Flaminio’s poems by book, text number, pages and occasionally by line. 3 Cp. Michael Marullus Tarchaniota, Hymnes naturels, ed. Jacques Chomarat (Geneva: Librarie Droz, 1995); idem., Inni naturali, ed. and trans. Donatella Coppini (Florence: Le Lettere, 1995). On this work, see the recent studies collected in Michael Marullus: Ein Grieche als Renaissancedichter in Italien, ed. Eckard Lefèvre and Eckart Schäfer (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2008), 99–178. 4 Cp. Michaelis Tarchaniotae Marulli, “Neniae.” Eiusdem, “Epigrammata nunquam alias impressa.” M. Antonii Flaminij, “Carminum libellus.” Eiusdem, “ecloga Thyrsis” (Impressum Fani: in aedibus Hieronymi Soncini, Idibus Septemb. 1515), and Actii Synceri Sannazarii, “Odae.” Eiusdem, “Elegia de malo Punico.” Ioannis Cottae, “Carmina.” M. Antonii Flaminii, “Carmina” (Venetiis, 1529 mense Decemb.). The former edition contains Flaminio’s hymn Ad Bacchum (fol. 15v–16r), the latter includes the Hymnus in Pana (fol. E2r–F1r), Hymnus in bonam valetudinem (fol. F1r–F2r), Hymnus in Dianam (fol. F2r), Hymnus in Auroram (fol. F2v–F4r). 5 On this topic, see William Leonard Grant, “The Neo-Latin Lusus pastoralis in Italy,” Medievalia et Humanistica 11 (1957), and Massimo Scorsone, “Il lusus pastoralis: lineamenti di storia di un genere letterario.” Proteo: Quaderni del Centro Interuniversitario di Teoria e Storia dei Generi Letterari 3, no. 1 (1997). 6 On Navagero’s lusus see Fred J. Nichols, “Navagero’s Lusus and the Pastoral Tradition.” Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Bariensis: Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of the Neo-Latin Studies, Bari, August 29–September 3 1994, ed. Rhoda Schnur et al. (Tempe: Medieval & Renaissance Text & Studies, 1998). See also Ferroni, Dulces lusus, 71–94. 7 Elogia veris clarorum virorum imaginibus apposita, quae in musaeo Iouiano Comi spectantur. Addita in calce operis Adriani pont. vita (Venetiis: apud Michaelem Tramezinum, 1546). 8 Ibid., fol. 48v. Flaminio praised Navagero and his work in two epigrams: see I, 38, 49 and II, 25, 92. 9 According to Maddison, Marcantonio Flaminio, 29, we have to date back to this period the epigrams III, 10–14, 23, 25 and 27. On the stay in Genua by Sauli see also Flaminio’s verse letter to Christophe de Longueil V, 29, 168–69. 10 To this second phase belongs the most part of the lusus collected in Flaminio’s third book. 11 Cp. III, 1–2 and VI, 1, 3, 5–10; see also I, 17, 22 and 29. 12 Appendice, 5, 330. In the 1529 edition the text is on fol. G2v.

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On Giberti, the renowned bishop of Verona, see Adriano Prosperi, Tra evangelismo e controriforma, G. M. Giberti: (1495–1543) (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1969). 14 II, 4, 74–75, lines 39–48. 15 Cp. ibid., lines 22–26: “At sapiens recte dispensat dona deorum; | Dat panem patriae; reficit labentia templa; | Et Musas fovet, et sacros ante omnia vates. | Ergo illum dulci tollunt super aethera cantu, | Mortalemque vetant invisae occumbere morti.” 16 On the importance of Catullus’s reception, see Walther Ludwig, “Catullus renatus—Anfänge und frühe Entwicklung des catullischen Stils in der neulateinischen Dichtung,” in Litterae Neolatinae: Schriften zur Neulateinischen Literatur, ed. Ludwig Braun et al. (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1989), and Giovanni Parenti, “La tradizione catulliana nella poesia latina del Cinquecento,” in Il rinnovamento umanistico della poesia: L’epigramma e l’elegia, ed. Roberto Cardini et al. (Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2009). 17 Cp. Marcantonio Flaminio, Lettere, ed. Alessandro Pastore (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo & Bizzarri, 1979), 166–169. 18 Cp. ibid., 50 (letter of August 9, 1537). 19 See IV, 1–24, 115–40. On carmen 25, which closes Flaminio’s fourth book, see infra. A reading of the collection is given by Domenico Chiodo, Suaviter Parthenope canit. Per ripensare la ‘geografia e storia’ della letteratura italiana (Cosenza: Rubbettino editore, 1999) 85–98 and by Ferroni, Dulces lusus, 248–70. See also Cuccoli, M. Antonio Flaminio, 214–25. 20 See also Chiodo, Suaviter Parthenope canit, 93 and Maddison, Marcantonio Flaminio, 98. 21 Hyella’s death is announced in IV, 3, lines 13–14 (“Caper miselle; Hyella bella est mortua; | Luge, miselle; bella Hyella est mortua”) but it is related to her goat’s sadness. To the reasons of her death Flaminio dedicates only four lines: cp. IV, 7, lines 1–4. In IV, 10, line 9 the reader is informed that the maid was not yet fifteen; IV, 18, lines 7–10 speaks incidentally about Iolla’s marriage. 22 Cp.: “O quae venusta Sirmionis litora | Colis, Catulli candida | Musa, et beatam citrii silvam doces | Pulchram sonare Lesbiam, . . . Nobisque versus dicito, | Per quos Hyella vivat, usque dum tua | Formosa vivet Lesbia.” (IV, 1, 115–116, lines 1–4 and 26–29). 23 According to Cuccoli, M. Antonio Flaminio, 215 the collection seems “una grande egloga, in cui diversi momenti sono considerate a sé e svolti in altrettanti carmi.” For Maddison, Marcantonio Flaminio, 98 it is a case of “the songs of an Arcadia without the prose links.” 24 V, 8, 148–151: 150–151, lines 73–76. 25 Cp. supra note 18. 26 Cp. Flaminio, Lettere, 75–82: 77. 27 Ibid., 89–90: 89. 28 Ibid., 124–128: 127. 29 For the same reasons Erasmus also criticized Marullus and Pontano (Cp. Ludwig, Catullus renatus, 187–88). For a closer analysis of Sannazaro’s use of classical sources in his religious poem, see the paper of Clementina Marsico, “Dii

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veteres fugere, novis altaria lucent ignibus.” Classical Mythology in the Religious Poetry of Battista Mantovano and Jacopo Sannazaro in this volume. 30 II, 20, 91. 31 V, 43, 180. 32 II, 7, 80–84, lines 1–8. On this elegy see Fokke Akkerman, “Marcantonio Faminio’s Voyage to Naples: On Carmen 2.7,” in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Hafniensis: Proceedings of the Eighth International Congress of the Neo-Latin Studies, Copenaghen 12 August to 17 August 1991, ed. Rhoda Schnur et al. (New York: Binghamton, 1994). 33 II, 7, 82, lines 49–60. 34 See, ibid., 82–83, lines 61–102. 35 Marcantonio Flaminio, Paraphrasis in triginta psalmos versibus scripta (Venetijs: ex officina Erasmiana apud Vincentium Valgrisium, 1546). 36 Marcantonio Flaminio, De rebus divinis carmina ad Margaritam Henrici Gallorum Regis Sororem (Lutetiae: Ex officina Rob. Stephani, 1550). On this work, see Cuccoli, M. Antonio Flaminio, 243–46, Massimo Scorsone, “Musae severiores: Della lirica sacra di Marcantonio Flaminio,” Atti dell’Istituto veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti 155 (1996–1997) and Giovanni Ferroni, “Liber ultimus: Note sui De rebus divins carmina di Marco Antonio Flaminio,” in Roma pagana e Roma cristiana nel Rinascimento, Atti del XXIV Convegno Internazionale (Chianciano Terme-Pienza 19–21 luglio 2012), ed. Luisa Secchi Tarugi (Florence, Cesati, forthcoming). I am preparing a critical edition, with commentary, of this poetic collection. 37 Cp. Flaminio, Lettere, 166–70 (to Galeazzo Florimonte), 174–75, 176–77, 178– 81, 182–83, 184–85, 186–87 (to Ulisse Bassiano). 38 Carmina quinque illustrium poetarum quorum nomina in sequenti charta continentur (Venetiis: ex officina Erasmiana Vincentii Valgrisii, 1548). 39 Marcantonio Flaminio, Carminum Libri II ad Franciscum Turrianum una cum Paraphrasis in triginta Psalmos versibus scripta (Lugduni: apud Sebastianum Gryphium, 1548). The two books of carmina are followed by the Paraphrasis. On the reasons—partly false—for the publication of the profane carmina see the Cesare Flaminio’s dedication letter (3–6). 40 Cp. I, 1, 5, lines 5–8: “. . . hoc munere, quod mihi dederunt | Formosae manibus suis Camoenae, | Dum colo Aonios puer recessus, | Potest dignior ullus esse, quam tu.” 41 IV, 25, 140. 42 Cp. VIII, 15 and 21, 302–3, 309–10. See also Flaminio, Lettere, 171–73 (to Caterina Cibo). 43 VIII, 1, 287, lines 15, 16–17. The collection is dedicated to Margaret of France (1523–1574), duchess of Berry and later duchess of Savoy.

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Works Cited Actii Synceri Sannazarii, “Odae.” Eiusdem, “Elegia de malo Punico.” Ioannis Cottae, “Carmina.” M. Antonii Flaminii, “Carmina.” Venetiis, 1529 mense Decemb. Akkerman, Fokke. “Marcantonio Faminio’s Voyage to Naples: On Carmen 2.7.” Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Hafniensis: Proceedings of the Eighth International Congress of the Neo-Latin Studies, Copenhagen 12 August to 17 August 1991. Edited by Rhoda Schnur, Ann Moss, Philip Dust, Paul Gerhard Schmidt, Jaques Chomarat, and Francesco Tateo, 285–97. New York: Binghamton, 1994. Carmina quinque illustrium poetarum quorum nomina in sequenti charta continentur. Venetiis: ex officina Erasmiana Vincentii Valgrisii, 1548. Chiodo, Domenico. Suaviter Parthenope canit: Per ripensare la ‘geografia e storia’ della letteratura italiana. Cosenza: Rubbettino editore, 1999. Cuccoli, Ercole. M. Antonio Flaminio: Studio con documenti inediti. Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1897. Elogia veris clarorum virorum imaginibus apposita, quae in musaeo Iouiano Comi spectantur: Addita in calce operis Adriani pont. vita. Venetiis: apud Michaelem Tramezinum, 1546. Flaminio, Marcantonio. Paraphrasis in triginta psalmos versibus scripta. Venetijs: ex officina Erasmiana apud Vincentium Valgrisium, 1546. —. Carminum Libri II ad Franciscum Turrianum una cum Paraphrasis in triginta Psalmos versibus scripta. Lugduni: apud Sebastianum Gryphium, 1548. —. De rebus divinis carmina ad Margaritam Henrici Gallorum Regis Sororem. Lutetiae: Ex officina Rob. Stephani, 1550. —. Lettere. Edited by Alessandro Pastore. Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo & Bizzarri, 1979). —. Carmina. Edited by Massimo Scorsone. Turin: Edizioni RES, 1993. Giovanni Ferroni. “Dulces lusus”: Lirica pastorale e libri di poesia nel Cinquecento. Alexandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2012. —. “Liber ultimus: Note sui De rebus divins carmina di Marco Antonio Flaminio.” Roma pagana e Roma cristiana nel Rinascimento, Atti del XXIV Convegno Internazionale (Chianciano Terme-Pienza 19–21 luglio 2012). Edited by Luisa Secchi Tarugi, 301–310. Florence: Cesati, 2014. Grant, William Leonard. “The Neolatin Lusus pastoralis in Italy.” Medievalia et Humanistica 11 (1957): 94–98. Lefèvre, Eckard, and Eckart Schäfer, eds. Michael Marullus: Ein Grieche als Renaissancedichter in Italien. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2008. Ludwig, Walther. “Catullus renatus—Anfänge und frühe Entwicklung des catullischen Stils in der neulateinischen Dichtung.” In Litterae Neolatinae: Schriften zur Neulateinischen Literatur. Edited by Ludwig Braun, WiduWolfgang Ehlers, Paul Gerhard Schmidt, and Bernhard Seidensticker, 162–94. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1989. Maddison, Carol. Marcantonio Flaminio: Poet, Humanist and Reformer. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965.

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Marullus, Michael Tarchaniota. Hymnes naturels. Edited by Jacques Chomarat. Geneva: Librarie Droz, 1995. —. Inni naturali. Edited and translated by Donatella Coppini. Florence: Le Lettere, 1995. Michaelis Tarchaniotae Marulli, “Neniae.” Eiusdem, “Epigrammata nunquam alias impressa.” M. Antonii Flaminij, “Carminum libellus.” Eiusdem, “ecloga Thyrsis.” Impressum Fani: in aedibus Hieronymi Soncini, Idibus Septemb. 1515. Nichols, Fred J. “Navagero’s Lusus and the Pastoral Tradition.” In Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Bariensis: Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of the Neo-Latin Studies, Bari, August 29–September 3 1994. Edited by Rhoda Schnur, J. F. Alcina, John Dillon, Walther Ludwig, Colette Nativel, Mauro de Nichilo, and Stephen Ryle, 445–52. Tempe: Medieval & Renaissance Text & Studies, 1998. Parenti, Giovanni. “La tradizione catulliana nella poesia latina del Cinquecento.” In Il rinnovamento umanistico della poesia: L’epigramma e l’elegia. Edited by Roberto Cardini and Donatella Coppini, 63–100. Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2009. Pastore, Alessandro. Marcantonio Flaminio: fortune e sfortune di un chierico nell’Italia del Cinquecento. Milan: Franco Angeli, 1981. Prosperi, Adriano. Tra evangelismo e controriforma, G. M. Giberti: (1495–1543). Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1969. Scorsone, Massimo. “Musae severiores: Della lirica sacra di Marcantonio Flaminio.” Atti dell’Istituto veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti 155 (1996– 1997): 83–115. —. “Il lusus pastoralis: lineamenti di storia di un genere letterario.” Proteo: Quaderni del Centro Interuniversitario di Teoria e Storia dei Generi Letterari 3, no. 1 (1997): 23–33.

HERO AND LEANDER IN VARIOUS ATTIRES: CONFIGURATION OF DESIRE IN THE MYTHOLOGICAL POETRY OF FRANCISCO DE QUEVEDO SOFIE KLUGE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN DENMARK

José María de Cossío once observed that Francisco de Quevedo (1580– 1645) only uses classical myth very sporadically as his primary material.1 Hence, only the early Fábula de Apolo y Dafne, a lost fable recounting the love of Venus and Adonis, and one “insignificant romance” qualify as fábulas in the rather vague sense of his monumental study of the afterlife of classical mythology in Spain. The latter, a romance on the theme of Hero and Leander (“Hero y Leandro,” Parnaso 241; Blecua 210),2 is dismissed on account of its culteranist bend,3 and its thematic kinship with the widely acclaimed mythological sonnet “Describe a Leandro fluctuante en el mar” (“He describes Leander fluctuating in the sea”)4 (Parnaso 200a; Blecua 311) goes wholly unmentioned. Apparently, nothing is to be gained from pursuing the function of classical myth in the serious part of Quevedo’s poetic œuvre,5 nor should the myth of Hero and Leander be attributed any particular significance. However, Parnaso 200 and 241 are not the only Quevedean poems based on this well-known ancient love story. The Hero and Leander myth is also the iconographic heart of two of the most famous sonnets from the Canta sola a Lisi cycle: “Afectos varios de su corazón fluctuando en las ondas de los cabellos de Lisi” (“Various emotions of his heart fluctuating in the waves of Lisi's hair”) and “Amor constante más allá de la muerte” (“Love constant beyond death”) (Parnaso 269a and 281b; Blecua 449 and 472). Moreover, there exists a burlesque version, the romance “Hero y Leandro en paños menores” (“Hero and Leander in underwear”) (Parnaso 639; Blecua 771). What should be made of this recurrence of the Hero and Leander myth in Quevedo’s poetry?

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I believe that Quevedo’s diverse groomings of the Hero and Leander myth must be understood as the centerpiece of his critical involvement with the prominent branch of Renaissance love lyric epitomized by Juan Boscán’s Leandro, beacon of Garcilaso de la Vega’s famous “Pasando el mar Leandro el animoso” (“As the brave Leander crossed the sea”) and widely read by European poets of the period.6 According to my argument, Quevedo did not simply adopt the empathetic and sentimental secular conception of love underlying this tradition, but questioned it pointing to the depravity, foolishness, and even insanity of lovers as seen from a transcendental perspective.7 To that effect, Quevedo has recourse to the late antique and medieval allegorical interpretation of the Hero and Leander myth as a moral fable recounting the danger and depravity of physical love. The result was a dialectical mediation of heterogeneous views of amorous desire, a typical Baroque conciliation of contemporary cultural contradictions through literary encyclopedism. In order to demonstrate this, I will begin with a brief survey of the various interpretations of the Hero and Leander myth that went into its making.

Hero & Leander: Myth and Allegory Together with casual references in Virgil (Georgics 3:258–63), Martial (De spectaculis 25), and Statius (Silvae 1:2,87–90; 1:3,27–8), Ovid’s treatment of the myth in Amores (2,16,31), Ars amatoria (2:249), Tristia (3,10,41 and 589), and, not the least, in the 18th and 19th of his Epistulae heroidum has led scholars to conclude that the tale of Hero and Leander was widely known in the ancient world.8 The epitome of antiquity’s conception of romantic love and a foundation myth of ancient erotic poetry and romance,9 the story of the two sweethearts separated by the Hellespont is—this must be taken heed of—not just any myth, but the supreme classical myth about amorous passion. However, like all the other ancient myths the story of Hero and Leander was eventually attributed multiple other meanings, passing from the realm of eroticism and romance to philosophy and morality. Late Antiquity saw the full emergence of the allegorical interpretation of ancient myth suggested by Plato and systematized by Stoics and Neoplatonists of the Hellenistic period and the early Christian era. Fulgentius’s Mythologiae (5th or 6th century) is the first extant work to allegorize the myth of clandestine young love. Its detached dissection of the myth,10 with the underlying conception of desire as a brief and perilous youthful fancy that can only temporarily defer the inevitable sensual and affective numbness of old age, contrasts conspicuously with the gripping

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treatment of the same material in Ovid’s above mentioned Heroides: from the “Urmythos” of tragic romantic love, the story of Hero and Leander had become an “Ur-Allegorie” of the vanity of physical love; and as such a tale fraught with moral instruction, the myth wandered into the Middle Ages where it fell in with the mythography epitomized by Berchorius’s famous Metamorphosis Ovidiana moraliter explanata (1340). To be sure, another important development line in the history of the myth began around the same time, when the theme of Hero and Leander was taken up as a poetic material for the first time since Ovid by the Greek author Musaeus.11 Musaeus was a literary writer and his exploration of the myth reveals no allegorical or moralizing intention. Instead, the 343-verse poem is a pathetic and sentimental rendering of the story with special emphasis laid on the fatality of the lovers’ initial meeting at a festival for Aphrodite at Sestos (42–220): the overwhelming power of love at first sight. If Fulgentius had transported the tale into the realm of morality, his contemporary certainly re-rooted it in the sphere of romance. In his work, the fable of Hero and Leander is once again a good story read not for its hidden moral or philosophical meaning, but for the engaging plot and moving characters. Contrary to Fulgentius, Musaeus remained largely unknown to the Latin-oriented West before the Fall of Constantinople. It was Ovid who saw the myth through the Middle Ages. In the 12th and 13th centuries, the Heroides was one of the most popular Latin texts,12 but in the age of moral mythography the mythical heros and heroines of Ovid’s epistles were mostly interpreted allegorically as figures of virtue or vice.13 Not until 1517, when Musaeus’s book was published in a bilingual Greek-Latin edition, did the full non-moralized version of the Hero and Leander myth become known to Renaissance Europe.14 It was rapidly distributed across the continent in various vernacular translations.15 By the same time, the Heroides were beginning to be explored in more aesthetic and less moral terms.16 Thus, after a millennium of moral allegory, the time was finally ripe for the re-flourishing of the Hero and Leander myth as the epitome of romantic love. Notable fruits of this development include Bernardo Tasso’s Favola di Leandro e d’Hero (1537), Boscán’s Leandro (1543) and Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (1598).17 Boscán, the congenial Spanish translator of Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano, modeled the greater part of his much-imitated poem on the Renaissance Neoplatonist concept of love.18 Although he does on one occasion intersperse a note warning that “fin’ amour” may degenerate into pestilent lust,19 the first three fourths of the Leandro are essentially an exploration of the myth along the line of the Neoplatonist philosophy of

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love as developed by Marsilio Ficino, Pietro Bembo, Castiglione, and Leone Ebreo. The main accent here is on the spiritual nobility and physical beauty of the two lovers, on their ritualized courtship, and the “mechanics” of love: how it enters through the eyes; how it progresses from the enjoyment of physical beauty to the contemplation of spiritual splendor. Then the poem changes its tone. Following a brief account of Hero and Leander’s physical union (2235–39), the last part is divided into a 250verse study of the agony of separation (2268–2510) and a dramatically charged description of the lovers’ last hours (2510–2790): Leander on the shore; the Fates ready with their knives in hands; Hero in her tower with the lamp in the window, its flame symbolically extinguished by the wind as her lover drowns in the sea (2766–71). Mythographically, Renaissance poets such as Tasso the Elder and Boscán took their lead from Giovanni Boccaccio (Genealogia deorum gentilium, c. 1360) whose sensibility to the poetic qualities of myth represented a counterweight to the mythography of Fulgentius and Berchorius.20 Thus, Leander’s eloquent invocation of Venus (2628–2777) is emphatically amoral and pays tribute to Boccaccio’s encyclopedic perspective. Significantly, the poem ends not with a moralizing cave amorem, but with the lovers’ joint apotheosis: “Y así se fueron juntas las dos almas/ a los campos Elisios para siempre” (“And thus the two souls went to the Elysian fields together forever,” 2789–90). Restoring the lovers’ prelapsarian innocence and revoking the moralization of desire common to the interpretation originated with Fulgentius, Boscán’s poem is, indeed, a de-allegorization and re-mythification of the fable. The implied movement away from the moral investment of the myth toward a celebration of desire is continued in Garcilaso’s famous sonnet XXIX. This entire poem constitutes an in medias res snapshot of the ardent Leander striving across the strait in the storm. The first quatrain describes the situation using a distinctively positive and even heroic vocabulary: “animoso” (“brave”), “esforzó” (“made an effort”), “embraveziendo” (“roughing”), “ímpetu furioso” (“furious energy”). The second quatrain then introduces the sonnet’s central idea, that Leander does not fear death as much as he dreads losing the object of his desire (“y más del bien que allí perdía muriendo/que de su propia vida congojoso,” “more worried about the treasure he left there, dying/ Than concerned for his life”). This idea, which reestablishes the Hero and Leander story as an erotic foundation myth about the death-defying power of desire, is elaborated in the direct speech of the last tercet:

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Ondas, pues no se excusa que yo muera, dejad me allá llegar, ya la tornada vuestro furor esecutá en mi vida. (Waves, since I must die, Let me reach my goal, and upon return Execute your fury on my life.)21

In his address to the deaf waves (“nunca fue su voz dellas oída,” “his voice was never heard by them”), knowing they will eventually defeat him, Garcilaso’s Leander asks for just another night with his beloved. He, and with him the poem, thus becomes a kind of “carpe diem” figure, the embodiment of the ardent lover clinging to his worldly joys in the face of inevitable death. The poems of Boscán and Garcilaso with their disinterested, nonallegorical or, simply, poetic use of the old romantic myth were familiar to Quevedo as was, no doubt, Musaeus’s version of the story. A learned man, he owned a Latin copy of Ovid’s text.22 He knew the related elegiac poetry of Propertius, Tibullus, and Catullus.23 Indeed, Quevedo had all the prerequisites of a Renaissance humanist, yet his use of classical mythology and the classical genres differed from that of his intellectual models. Quevedo’s Baroque classicism breathes a different air: an air with a moral note,24 less unequivocally enthusiastic about ancient pagan culture, more contemplative.25 In what refers to his Hero and Leander poems, this was due to the continuous influence of moral mythography.26 Despite the disinterested revival of the myth prompted by the 16th-century divulgation of Musaeus’s text, moral allegoresis of classical mythology persisted.27 With the advent of the Counter-Reformation, which increased the focus on morality and cultivated a more strained relationship with pagan culture, this tradition gained in strength. Characteristic of this tendency in Spain is Juan Pérez de Moya’s Philosophía secreta (1585),28 vademecum of the blooming mythological genres of the period,29 which adopts Fulgentius’s allegorical reading of the Hero and Leander myth almost word by word— with one significant exception: from the guiding light of love, Hero’s torch is here transformed into a suspicious escort to the “peligroso camino al deseo” (“the dangerous path to desire”). With this Counter-Reformation re-allegorization of the myth, we have almost reached the moment— presumably around the turn of the century—when Quevedo wrote his dialectical Hero and Leander poems. However, before turning to these, the semantic interrelation of woman/Hero, fire/torch, and desire thus implicit in Pérez de Moya’s rewriting of Fulgentius, I will briefly introduce a final

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probable inspiration: Sebastian de Covarrubias’s emblem 47, “Kaka tria,” “Three Evils” (fig. 1). The impact of the emblematic genre on the Renaissance and Baroque imagination has long since been acknowledged,30 and Covarrubias 47 is certainly relevant to the imaginary universe of Quevedo’s poem—not as a direct source, but as something that reveals its noetic-aesthetic deep structure. The “picture” shows a woman standing in the sea carrying a torch with a ship in the background. The “subscription” then presents sea, fire, and woman—the key elements of the Hero and Leander myth—as kindred phenomena to be treated with equal caution (“vivamos recatados, en el tratar qualquiera dellas,” “So let us be cautious in dealing with whichever of them”).31 Indeed, Covarrubias’s emblem clearly demonstrates the intricate web of correspondences woven between shipwreck, fire, and amorous passion in early 17th-century imagination. At the same time, however, the presence of the ship in the background points to the concept of constancy as a positive antidote to the “Three Evils.”32

Fig. 1. Sebastian de Coverrubias, Emblemas morales (Madrid, 1610). Courtesy of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Both semantic nexuses—sea/fire/woman and ship/constancy—appear, as we shall now see, in Quevedo’s ambiguous configuration of desire in his poems on the Hero and Leander theme. Here, a truly Baroque dialectical mediation of Renaissance love lyric and the Counter-Reformation moral

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critique of amorous passion is achieved through what may be termed a negotiation of the concept of desire.

Ambigious Figures of Desire Like most of their literary models, Quevedo’s two principal Hero and Leander poems (Parnaso 200a; Blecua 311 and Parnaso 241; Blecua 210) focus on the element of desire. This was because history, as already noted, had made this particular myth the supreme classical myth about amorous passion. Mimicking the poetic idiom of the important Renaissance branch of this tradition, but re-introducing elements of the tradition that this branch had marginalized, Quevedo turns both into something completely different. Thus, the poem “Describe a Leandro fluctuante en el mar” relies immediately on Garcilaso XXIX, with which it shares the obliteration of the courtship part of the story and the secret marriage (weighty in Musaeus, prolix in Boscán); the dramatic “in medias res” perspective; the marginal presence of Hero or almost exclusive focus on Leander, and more. Most conspicuous, however, is the use of the fire metaphor to describe not the flame of the lovers’ mutual affection, but the burning desire of Leander, the prototypical Lover. Flota de cuantos rayos y centellas, en puntas de oro, el ciego Amor derrama, nada Leandro; y cuanto el Ponto brama con olas, tanto gime por vencellas. Maligna luz multiplicó en estrellas y grande incendio sigue pobre llama: en la cuna de Venus, quien bien ama, no debió recelarse de perdellas. Vela y remeros es, nave sedienta; mas no le aprovechó, pues, desatado, Noto los campos líquidos violenta. Ni volver puede, ni pasar a nado; si llora, crece el mar y la tormenta: que hasta poder llorar le fue vedado. (Fleet of so many sparks and bolts full-blown In darts of gold, the blind-one Love outpours, Leander swims; as Hellespont so roars

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Hero and Leander in Various Attires With waves, so them to conquer he makes moans. Light evil multiplied in stars that shone, And feeble flame precedes great fire that soars; In Venus’ craddle, he who truly adores, His fear of losing them could not condone. He sail and oarsmen is, a thirsty boat; Yet all to no avail; from bonds set free Fierce Notus liquid fields now domineers. He can't turn back, or reach far shore remote; If he sheds tears, increase both storm and sea: Thus he was even denied the balm of tears.)33

I have described Garcilaso’s sonnet as a kind of downplayed “carpe diem” celebration of individual desire rather than of reciprocated love. Although the idea that love was like a flame or fire was, of course, ancient, the Toledan poet seems to be the originator of the explicit metaphorical interrelation of Leander and the torch or lamp or flame: in whichever form, the source of light was traditionally in Hero’s possession and she used it to guide her lover on his nocturnal swim.34 However, Garcilaso’s innovation was already implicit in Boscán’s parallel between the blowing out of the light in Hero’s window and the final blow to Leander’s impetus.35 Still, neither Boscán’s epyllion nor Garcilaso’s sonnet rival Quevedo’s conspicuous exploration of this metaphor. In the sonnet of the later poet, the lover is not merely burning with the flame of love; he is a veritable fleet of sparks and flames (“Flota de cuantos rayos y centellas,” “Fleet of so many sparks and bolts full-blown”) comparable to the host of golden arrows discharged by Amor. His “great fire” (“grande incendio”) is hyperbolically or even paradoxically said to defy the wet element, navigating after the “feeble flame” (“pobre llama”) of Hero’s lamp under the scattered light of multiple stars into which the malevolent light of the moon has been dispersed (“Maligna luz multiplicó en estrellas/y grande incendio sigue pobre llama,” “Light evil multiplied in stars that shone,/ And great fire follows feeble flame”). In a tangible abrogation of Boscán’s Neoplatonism, the desiring lover is represented as a lone sailor steering his vessel through the moonless night, navigating after a minuscule light in the distance. As suggested by this image, the fire metaphor merges insensibly with the nautical metaphor that underlies the whole poem from the very first word (“flota,” “fleet”). Desirous Leander is not only a cascade of fiery sparks, but also a bold ship whose bows break the waves, his groans

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likened to their roaring (“cuanto el polo brama/con olas, tanto gime por vencellas,” “as Hellespont so roars/ With waves, so them to conquer he makes moans”). This intersection of the fire and the ship metaphor is basically made possible because the sea is the “cradle of Venus” (“cuna de Venus”), in whose element “he who truly adores” (“quien bien ama”), according to the second quatrain, need fear to lose his way. In the sea of love, the constant lover swims secure—at least for a while.36 The first tercet develops the ship metaphor further, describing how Leander is both the “sail” (“vela,” which also means “candle” and thus sustains the poem’s entwinement of igneous and nautical metaphors) and the “oarsmen” (“remeros”) of the “thirsty boat” (“nave sedienta”) that his body constitutes.37 Then the tone of the poem changes from the heroicromantic to the tragic, as it is laconically declared that it was “all to no avail” (“mas no le aprovechó”). The south wind rages wild, domineering “the liquid fields” (“Noto los campos líquidos violent”). The storm catches the swimmer-vessel in deep water, impeding his progress as well as his return (“Ni volver puede, ni pasar a nado,” “He can't turn back, or reach far shore remote”). Yet his troubles do not stop here. In Quevedo’s poem, the hero is cruelly forbidden to lament his predicament, because his sobbing will only augment the sea that threatens to swallow him up and the tempest that beats the waves (“si llora crece el mar y la tormenta;/que hasta poder llorar le fue vedado,” “If he sheds tears, increase both storm and sea”). Burning with a transcendental and almost object-less desire (after all, Hero and her lamp are reduced to a “poor flame”), Leander dies alone with no Hero following him to the Elysium. The poem may be said to follow its Renaissance models principally in the exploration of “Desire” as an idea or general concept. Boscán’s Neoplatonist framing of this issue has been cut away and so has Garcilaso’s Epicurean sensuality with its positive suggestion of the object of desire as something that sweetens the agony of moribund man. What remains is the emphasis on the desirous subject at the mercy of nature’s forces which, in Quevedo’s poem, is abandoned to its own pent-up wordless yearning (in Boscán, Leander mutters Hero’s name as he drowns; in Garcilaso, as we have seen, the lover supplicates the waves that they grant him another night of pleasure before his death). This gloominess was a result of the projection of the negative conception of desire inherent in the moral mythographic and emblematic traditions onto the Renaissance lyrical foundation. Neoplatonic philosophy, sensuous Epicureanism, anti-erotic sexual scare, and unwavering Stoic love—these are the most important metamorphoses of the Hero and Leander myth, all of which are echoed in

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Quevedo’s palimpsest poem. Hence, concluding my discussion of Quevedo’s Hero and Leander sonnet, I will underscore its mosaic or multifacetted, collage-like quality. “Describe a Leandro fluctuante en el mar” is a complex mixture of apparently incongruous views of amorous passion. As such it typifies the mediation of conflicting perspectives characteristic of Baroque literary aesthetics on a broad scale and most eminently characteristic of Baroque poetic mythography.38 The “Romance de Hero y Leandro” (Parnaso 241; Blecua 210) in many respects affirms this picture of Quevedean poetic mythography. It presents Leander as a figure of desire, revealing a compound notion of amorous passion and sexual love based on the same elements that made up the palimpsest of the sonnet. However, while the ballad at first glance reveals a conceptual incongruity similar to that of the sonnet, it actually tends to dissolve the discord of the conflicting discourses that it refers into a kind of elevated contrapuntal polyphony. Here reigns a playful attitude that is demonstratively self-referential and intertextual and hovers high over the conflict of heterogeneous elements—not tilting to either one of them, but orchestrating them in elegant arrangements. The sonnet selfconsciously paraded as a variation on Garcilaso XXIX, but the pronounced tragedizing tone of the tercets basically impeded the emergence of the sublime heroicomic manner39 which dominates the romance. In this respect, the ballad may be said to take the mosaic quality of the sonnet to its logical conclusion: the unpreoccupied view of the conflicting discourses as purely aesthetic elements. The moral element of the poem is advertised, once again, in the nautical/navigation topic (“piloto el deseo,” “Desire a pilot to become”;40 “bajel,” “bark”; “caravana de fuego/ navegó reinos salobres,” “caravan of flitting fire/the briny kingdom sailed”; “Nuevo prodigio del mar,” “This of the sea new prodigy,” etc.) as well as in poetic imagery such as the butterfly41 and the salamander.42 Dark and severe in tone (“Atrevióse,” “attempted”), the first 28 verses—or half of the total 56—appear as a kind of enlarged version of the sonnet, with the same haunting image of the tragically silenced lover (“Si llora crece su muerte/ que aún no le dejan que llore;/ si ella suspira le aumenta,/ vientos que le descomponen,” “If he sheds tears his death then grows,/ Thus [the gods] don't let him cry;/ if [Hero] casts sighs, the winds arise/ That him do stupefy”). Yet the whole presentation of the myth and its motivic matrix, Leander drowning, differs from that of the sonnet. Traces of a less serious, more self-conscious narrator draw it toward the heroicomic, as in the lines: ¡Indigna hazaña del golfo, siendo amenaza del orbe,

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juntarse con un cuidado para contrastar a un hombre! (Unworthy exploit of the Gulf, To all the globe a threat, To join such forces with concern And one mere man beset.)43

Another English translator of the poem catches the tongue-in-cheek manner of this passage very well using an exclamation mark to indicate its melodramatic and humorous tone.44 However, especially the ending of the poem with its almost parodic emphasis on catastrophe (the verb “morir,” “to die,” used 6 times in the last 8 lines to which we may add the occurrence of “muerte,” “death,” and “expiraron,” “expired”) reveals the ballad’s essential heroicomic outlook: Murió sin saber su muerte, y expiraron tan conformes, que sin verle muerto añadió la ceremonia del golpe. De piedad murió la luz, Leandro murió de amores, Hero murió de Leandro, y Amor, de invidia, murióse. (She died not knowing of his death, And they did so soul-wed, The ceremony of her crash Invented him seen dead. The light died from sympathy; Leander died love-tried, And Hero died Leander stuck, and Love from envy died.)45

In a cascade of wordplay, tragic myth is essentially presented here as nothing but a dream or a play on the world’s great stage. With this relativization of the ancient world’s greatest myth of doomed love, we have moved decisively away from the serious compassionate philography of Canta sola a Lisi, approaching the burlesque “Hero y Leandro en paños menores.” Thus, while the sonnet “Describe a Leandro fluctuante en el mar” in many respects points to the Hero and Leander inspired poems in Quevedo’s “canzoniere,” the ambiguous heroicomic treatment of tragic romantic love in the “Romance de Hero y Leandro” finds a relative in

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Quevedo’s only extant mythological burlesque, which can, alas, only be alluded to in this context. As different modes of the same myth—the very one singled out by history as the epitome of amorous passion and the paragon of unlawful lascivious lust, respectively—Quevedo’s five Hero and Leander poems taken together negotiate the idea of “Desire.” Thus, instead of a linear chronological development passing from tragedy to burlesque (difficult to sustain given the insecure dating of Quevedo’s poems), the relation between Quevedo’s various versions of this myth must be seen as complementary. They are like the points in a constellation which circumscribes “Desire” in its various touching, erotic, humorous, ludicrous, heroic, tragic, steadfast, and condemnable aspects. Although every one of them shows traces of all the mythographic trends that went into their making, each individual poem arguably magnifies one trend more than the others (see fig. 2). CANDOR

“Describe a Leandro fluctuante en el mar” (Parnaso 200a; Blecua 311)

“Hero y Leandro en paños menores” (Parnaso 639; Blecua 771)

PATHOS BURLESQUE “Afectos varios de su corazón fluctuando en las ondas de los cabellos de Lisi” (Parnaso 269a; Blecua 449) “Amor constante más allá de la muerte” (Parnaso 281b; Blecua 472)

“Romance de Hero y Leandro” (Parnaso 241; Blecua 210)

HEROICOMEDY Fig. 2: Versions of the Hero and Leander myth in Quevedo’s poetry.

Thus, in the three sonnets, the pathetic or tragedizing influence from Ovid’s epistles, Musaeus’s novel, and its Renaissance versions dominates with the result of desire being presented in a somber, un-ironic light. In the

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“romances,” on the other hand, different degrees of a more detached, either heroicomic or burlesque, perspective on the ancient myth and its core theme prevails. The antecedents of this perspective must be sought in the allegorical tradition dating back to Fulgentius and including Quevedo’s contemporary, Juan Pérez de Moya.

An Equivocal Epoch Why are there so many different mythographic perspectives present at the same time in Quevedo’s Hero and Leander poetry? Is it the fruit of his proverbial erudition? Or should it be seen as evidence of the very protean personality that led him to explore practically all existing literary genres, poetic registers, and discursive modes? This question can only be answered with reference to the larger cultural currents of which the individual poems are the reflection.46 Even if such a contextualization can only be suggested here, it is the necessary complement of the preceding discussion of Quevedo’s Hero and Leander poems: not an exhaustive explanation of their ambiguous configuration of desire, but a frame that puts it into perspective. Indeed, comparison between Quevedo’s poetic mythography and that of his contemporaries suggests that we have to do with a broader cultural trend. In the mythological poetry of so “modern” a poet as Luis de Góngora, we encounter traces of the moral allegoresis of myth along with a sensual exploration of the mythical universe; and in so allegorical an author as Calderón, there is an empathetic involvement with the mythical characters that goes directly against the grain of his moral mythography.47 Thus, in the 17th century, we repeatedly find that ambiguous representation of myth, which is both so perplexing and so fascinating. As the quoted names indicate, this ambiguity persisted through most of the century. This persistence would seem to indicate the epochal nature of the issue, its relation to some kind of “Zeitgeist.” This spirit may be described as the tentative mediation of Renaissance poetic mythography and Counterreformation suspicion of ancient myth. As fiction, fable or chimerical fantasy pagan myth was always seen as the natural image of human imagination. Renaissance artists of all kinds acknowledged this, although they also puzzled over the mysterious hidden meaning of classical mythology, endowing it with ennobling interpretations of various kinds. As Jean Seznec demonstrated, allegory throve all through the 15th and 16th centuries exactly as it had done in the Middle Ages.48 However, with the progressing of the theological crisis of the 16th century came an emphasis on the fundamental irreconcilability of

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the pagan fancies and Christian myth, which made allegory an aggressive appropriation of pagan culture (rather than an exploration of it). As in the days of early Christendom, ancient myth was once again perceived as a threat to the Christian dogma. The change in tone and outlook from Boccaccio’s Genealogia to Pérez de Moya’s Philosophía is highly revealing in this respect, and it reflected an ideological development that is also observable in the various forms of literary mythography of the period, though in a much more ambiguous way: 17th-century mythological poetry, epyllion, and drama rested on classical and Renaissance models which provided a counterweight to the unequivocal moralization of myth by late sixteenth- and early 17th-century mythographers and emblematists. As my discussion of Quevedo’s Hero and Leander poetry has suggested, the antagonism between pagan literature and Christian moralization, which 17th-century mythological poetry had to incorporate, took two main forms: the honest display of conceptual heterogeneity, as in “Describe a Leandro fluctuante en el mar,” and the heroicomic dissolution of heterogeneity into aesthetic play, as in “Romance de Hero y Leandro.” In both forms, mythological poetry assumed a mediating function reconciling cultural contradictions under the auspices of art. Whereas the former exhibits and underscores conflict, the latter dissolves it into a kind of aestheticist play. Both types of mediation are aesthetically valid expressions which testify to the profound antinomies of the 17th century as well as their various mediations in the literature of this epoch. Indeed, in the mythological literature of Quevedo, Góngora, Calderón, and others we repeatedly find that very negotiation of heterogeneous and even conflicting perspectives, which may be seen as a defining feature of Baroque literary aesthetics.

Notes 1

José María de Cossío, Las fábulas mitológicas en España (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1952), 251. More recently, the leading quevedista Fernández Mosquera has backed this observation, specifying that when Quevedo did use mythology in the love lyric it was in a merely ornamental way—as a means of emphasizing the beauty of the lady or the desperation of the lover. Santiago Fernández Mosquera, La poesía amorosa de Quevedo: Disposición y estilo desde “Canta sola a Lisi” (Madrid: Gredos, 1999), 157. 2 Parnaso numbers refer to the author’s (presumable) ordering of his poems as found in Parnaso español, monte en dos cumbres dividido, published posthumously by Quevedo’s friend, Josef Antonio González de Salas, in Madrid in 1648. Blecua numbers refer to the modern edition used here: Francisco de Quevedo, Poesía original completa, ed. José Manuel Blecua (Barcelona: Planeta, 1999.

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Cossío, Las fábulas mitológicas en España, 254–55. Here and subsequently all translations from Quevedo’s Hero and Leander poems are taken from Poems of Love and Strife, Death and Life: A Representative Anthology of Quvedo’s Lyric Poetry, ed. and trans. Carl W. Cobb (York, S. C.: Spanish Literature Publications Co., 1991), unless otherwise indicated. 5 While no study of the use of myth in Quevedo’s serious work exists, Guerrero Salazar has studied the role of myth in the satiric oeuvre. Susana Guerrero Salazar, La parodía quevediana de los mitos (Málaga: Universidad de Málaga, 2002). 6 Warren Boutcher, “ ‘Who Taught Thee Rhetoricke to Deceive a Maid?’ Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Juan Boscán’s Leandro, and Renaissance Vernacular Humanism,” Comparative Literature 52, no. 1 (2000). 7 Leander might easily have found his way to the madhouse of Quevedo’s early satire Casa de los locos de amor. 8 E. J. Kenney, “The Metamorphoses of Hero,” in Style and Tradition: Studies in Honor of Wendell Clausen, ed. Peter Knox and Clive Foss (Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1998). 9 Rosati’s introduction to P. Ovidii Nasonis Heroidum epistulae XVIII–XIX: Leander Heroni, Hero Leandro, ed. Gianpiero Rosati (Florence: Le Monnier, 1996), 15 and 26. 10 Fulgentius divides the elements of the Hero and Leander story into “disiecta membra”: swimming by night = risking danger; lantern = light of love; extinguishing of the flame = the death of love; nakedness = vulnerability of the lover. See Fulgentius the Mythographer, trans. Leslie George Whitbread (Ohio: Ohio State University, 1971), 85–86. 11 Kenney, “The Metamorphoses of Hero,” 60. 12 Merritt R. Blakeslee, “La ‘Chanson de femme,’ les Héroïdes, et la ‘Canso occitane’ a voix de femme,” in Hommage à Jean-Charles Payen: farai chansoneta novele. Essais sur la liberté créatrice au Moyen Age, ed. Centre de recherche sur la modernité (Caen: Centre de Publications de l’Université de Caen, 1989), 74. 13 See Patricia B. Philippy, “ ‘Loytering in love’: Ovid’s Heroides, Hospitality, and Humanist Education in The Taming of the Shrew,” Criticism 40, no. 1 (1998): 28: “The moralized treatment of the Heroides in Renaissance editions and translations, however, subdued Ovid’s heroines by depicting them as examples of vice and virtue. . . . Comments such as those of Ubertinus Clericus, written in 1481 and persistently reprinted throughout the 16th century, typify this reading of the heroic epistle as useful in instructing men (and some women) with figures originally intended as moral exempla.” 14 The first printed edition of Musaeus’s text, in Greek, dates to 1484. 15 Italian translation by Bernardo Tasso, 1537; French by Clément Marot, 1541; English by George Chapman, 1616. 16 In England and France, Ovid’s epistles occasioned the re-emergence of the elegiac genre in the 15th and 16th centuries [cf. Paul White, “Ovid’s Heroides in Early-Modern French Translation,” Translation and Literature 13, no. 2 (2004); Deborah S. Greenhut, Feminine Rhetorical Culture: Tudor Adaptations of Ovid’s Heroides (New York: Peter Lang, 1988); Helen Moore, “Elizabethan Fiction and Ovid’s Heroides,” Translation and Literature 9 (2000)]. Notable Spanish 4

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Renaissance versions of the Heroides from this period include the Bursario of Rodríguez de Cámara (between 1425 and 1450); Gutierre de Cetina’s translation of epistles 1:1 and 1:7 (before 1560); an anonymous translation of the entire work from the end of 16th century or beginning of the 17th century; and the translation by Diego Mexía de Fernangil (1608). See Agapito Rey and Antonio Solalinde, Ensayo de una bibliografía de las leyendas troyanas en la literatura española (Bloomington: Indiana University Publications, 1942), 26–28 and the revision of their list by Antonio Alatorre, “Sobre traducciones castellanas de las Heroidas,” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 3 (1949). Further the chronology in Philip Krummrich, The Hero and Leander Theme in Iberian Literature 1500–1800: An Anthology of Translations (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2006), 5–13 and 381–86. 17 Bernardo Tasso, Favola di Leandro e d’Hero (In Vinegia: Per Bernadino Stagnino, 1537); Juan Boscán, Leandro, in Obra completa, ed. Carlos Clavería (Madrid: Cátedra, 1999); Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander, in Elizabethan Minor Epics, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (London: Routledge, 1963). 18 Otis H. Green, Boscán and “Il Cortegiano”: The “Historia de Leandro y Hero” (Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1948), 3. 19 “[Hero] Començó a querer bien muy sanamente,/ sanamente según ella entendía,/ mas este su entender era engañoso./ Debaxo de’sta sanidad andava/ la pestilencia, entrando por las venas,/ esperando matar súpitamente” (“[Hero] began to love him very healthily,/ healthily as she understood it,/ but her understanding was false./ Under health went/ pestilence, entering the veins,/ waiting to suddently kill.” Juan Boscán, Obra completa, ed. Carlos Clavería (Madrid: Cátedra, 1999), 341–46). Here and subsequently, translations of Boscán and Garcilaso are mine. 20 Boccaccio’s Genealogia, which assembled classical myths from a range of texts and proposed to analyze them, was highly characteristic of this new attitude. Although Boccaccio, who remained the essential mythographic reference of artists, poets, and scholars for centuries to come, followed the allegorical method of the medieval tradition and claimed to be inspired by the divine light, he also defended the profane poetic quality of the ancient fables. 21 Garcilaso de la Vega, Obra poética y textos en prosa, ed. Bienvenido Morros (Barcelona: Crítica, 2001), 59. 22 Felipe Maldonado, “Algunos datos sobre la composición y dispersión de la biblioteca de Quevedo,” in Homenaje a la memoria de don Antonio Rodríguez Moñino (Madrid: Castalia, 1975), 55. 23 Paul Julian Smith, “Affect and Effect in the Lyric of Quevedo,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 22 (1986), and idem., Quevedo on Parnassus: Allusive Context and Literary Theory in the Love-Lyric (London: The Modern Humanities Research Association, 1987). 24 Alexander Augustine Parker, The Philosophy of Love in Spanish Literature 1480–1680, ed. Terence O’Reilly (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1985), 153–74; Ignacio Navarrete, Orphans of Petrarch: Poetry and Theory in the Spanish Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), chapter 5; Alfonso Rey, Quevedo y la poesía moral española (Madrid: Castalia, 1996).

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Rodrigo Cacho Casal, “The Memory of Ruins,” Renaissance Quarterly 62 (2009). 26 The tradition of “medical” Ovidianism, which treated love from a therapeutic point of view, should also be mentioned in this context. Cf. Ryan D. Giles, “A Galen for Lovers: Medical Readings of Ovid in Medieval and Early Renaissance Spain,” in Ovid in the Age of Cervantes, ed. Frederick de Armas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010). 27 Thus, Fulgentius’s Mythologiae was reprinted numerous times during the 16th century (e.g., Basel 1521, 1536, 1543, 1549, 1560 and 1564). 1599 then saw the joint edition of Fulgentius’s chief work, Firmicus Maternus’s De errore profanarum religionum, and Albricus’s De deorum imaginibus (published in Heidelberg together with Hyginus’s Fabulae). 28 Juan Pérez de Moya, Philosophía secreta, ed. Eduardo Gómez de Baquero (Madrid: Nueva Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 1948). 29 W. G. Chapman, “Las comedias mitológicas de Calderón,” Revista de Literatura 5, no. 9–10 (1954). 30 D. J. Gordon, The Renaissance Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 51–74. 31 My translation from the Spanish. 32 Use of nautical imagery to illustrate the idea of constancy is found in numerous emblem books of the period, such as Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera’s Discursos del amparo de los legitimos pobres, y reducción de los fingidos (1595). The first editions of the Discursos work did not include illustrations, but in the 1598-edition the motto “Patientia et Constantia” is accompanied by a picture of a ship in a stormy sea. More than a hundred years later, such use of the ship image resonates in Galatea’s aria from Händel’s Aci, Galatea e Polifemo (1708). 33 Spanish text as provided by Blecua (Quevedo, Poesía original completa, 327). English translation by Charles W. Cobb, Poems of Love and Strife, 7. 34 Thomas Gärtner, “Wer löscht das Feuer? Zur Rezeption der Hero-und-LeanderSage in Mittelalter, Renaissance und Neuzeit,” Orbis litterarum 64, no. 4 (2009). 35 “Él, viéndose morir entre’stos males,/ la postrer cosa que hizo el desdichado/ fue alçar los ojos a mirar su lumbre./ . . ./ Y allí un golpe le dio del mar tan bravo,/ que le sorbió del todo un instante,/ y en este mismo punto, un torbellino/ acabó de matar la lumbrecilla,/ testigo fiel y dulce mensagera,/ d’estos fieles y dulces amadores.” (“Seeing himself dying between these evils,/ the last thing the wretch did/ was to lift the gaze to see his light./ . . ./ And there he received so fierce a blow from the sea/ that it absorbed him totally for a moment,/ and at this very point a whirlwind just killed the small light,/ faithful testimony and sweet messenger/ of these faithful and sweet lovers”). Juan Boscán, Leandro, 324, lines 2760–71 (my English translation). 36 The ship/ constancy/ Leander nexus thus established points directly to the “amor constante más allá de la muerte” of Quevedo’s utmost famous sonnet (Parnaso 281b; Blecua 472), where the lyrical I pretends to cross the Styx like Leander crossed the Hellespont in order to be with his beloved (“Nadar sabe mi llama el agua fría,” “My flame can swim where chilling waters rise”), his ardent soul—like Leander’s in Parnaso 200a—significantly metaphorized into a flame. Though both

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Parnaso 281b and the interesting variation of the Leander-motif in 269a (“En crespa tempestad del oro undoso,” “In crisp tempest of wavering gold”) essentially confirm my argument and the findings of my analysis, I am unfortunately not able to go into further detail here. However, these particular poems are the subject of innumerable excellent studies. 37 The logic underlying Covarrubias 47 with its interrelation of navigation, fire, and desire may explain the apparent oddness that an important element of the classical myth—Leander’s physical exposure, the fragility of his naked body in the stormy sea—seems to be annulled with his metamorphosis into a solid vessel in Quevedo’s poem. See Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco, Emblemas morales de Don Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco, Capellán del Rey N. S. Maestrescuela, y Canónigo de Cuenca, Con sultor del santo Oficio. . . (Madrid: Luis Sánchez, 1610). 38 For an elaboration of these complex points, see Sofie Kluge, “Amazonas del mar y sátiros acuáticos: Góngora y la literatura mitológica,” Revue Romane 44, no. 1 (2009); idem., Baroque Allegory Comedia: The Transfiguration of Tragedy in Seventeenth-Century Spain (Kassel: Reichenberger, 2010); idem., “ ‘Yo, que al teatro del mundo/Cómica tragedia fui.’ Mito, tragedia, desengaño y alegoría en Eco y Narciso de Calderón,” Anuario Calderoniano 5 (2012); idem., “Ambiguous Allegories: What the Mythological Comedia Reveals About Baroque Tragedy,” Comparative Drama 47, no. 2 (2012); idem., “Un epilio barroco: el Polifemo y su género,” In Los géneros poéticos del Siglo de oro: Centro y periferías. Edited by Rodrigo Cacho Casal and Anne Holloway (London: Tamesis, 2013). 39 Not completely identical with the tragicomic, the “heroicomic” combines the ludicrous and the heroic, and is a form of high burlesque. Cacho Casal, “Góngora y los orígenes del poema heroicómico,” in Dire, taire, masquer les origines dans la péninsule ibérique, du Moyen Âge au Siècle d’Or, ed. Florence Raynié and Teresa Rodríguez (Toulouse: Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, forthcoming). 40 This may be a reference to Alciatus’ emblem “In avaros, vel quibus melior conditio ab extraneis offertur,” the “pictura” of which, in Diego López’ contemporary Spanish edition, carries the number 88 and shows a ship. Góngora coins a similar image in Soledad I, 403-404: “Piloto hoy la Codicia, no de errantes/Árboles, mas de selvas inconstantes,” “Pilot today Greed, not of errant/Trees, but of inconstant forests”. Luis de Góngora, Soledades, ed. Robert Jammes (Madrid: Castalia, 1994), 279. 41 See, for example, the emblem by Juan de Borja (Emblemas morales, 1581), reproduced in Antonio Bernat Vistarini and John T. Cull, Enciclopedia Akal de Emblemas españoles ilustrados (Madrid: Akal, 1999) as number 1042, with the motto “Fugienda peto.” The “picture” of this emblem shows a butterfly getting burned by the flame of a candle. To the literary history of this emblematic motive with special reference to Spanish poetry of the Golden Age, see Allan S. Trueblood, “La llama y la mariposa: motivo poético del Siglo de Oro,” in Letter and Spirit in Hispanic Writers, Renaissance to Civil War: Selected Essays, ed. Alan S. Trueblood (London: Tamesis, 1986), 26–34. 42 See Emblemata: Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts, special ed., ed. Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schöne (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche

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Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1978), 736–40. Especially interesting in the present context is the “Mea vita per ignem” emblem in Vaenius’s Amorum Emblemata (1608), treating the topic of “Liebesglut” (ibid., 739). 43 Quevedo, Poems of Love and Strife, 69. 44 Krummrich, The Hero and Leander Theme, 301–3. 45 Ibid., 69. 46 For an explication of the stylistic complexity of the poesía amorosa in the more general light of Gracián’s conceptist “poétique de la pointe,” see Mercedes Blanco, Introducción al comentario de la poesía amorosa de Quevedo (Madrid: Arco/Libros, 1998), 6–26, drawing on idem., Les rhétoriques de la pointe: Baltasar Gracián et le conceptisme en Europe (Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1992). See also the discussion of Quevedo’s cultivation of paradox with reference to metaphysical poetry in Parker, The Philosophy of Love, 158–73. Further, Anders Cullhed’s examination of the love lyric in terms of the category of time, Quevedo: El instante poético, trans. Marina Torres and Francisco Uriz (Zaragoza: Fernando el Católico, 2005). 47 For the use of myth in Calderón and Góngora along this line, see Kluge, “Amazonas del mar”; idem., “Mito, tragedia, desengaño y alegoría”; idem., “Ambiguous Allegories”; and idem., “Un epilio barroco.” 48 Jean Seznec, La survivance des dieux antiques (Paris: Flammarion, 1980).

Works Cited Alatorre, Antonio. “Sobre traducciones castellanas de las Heroidas.” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 3 (1949): 162–64. Alciato, Andrea, and Diego Lopez. Declaracion magistral sobre las Emblemas de Andres Alciato. Najera: Juan de Mongaston, 1615. Alonso, Dámaso. “El desgarrón afectivo en la poesía de Quevedo.” In Poesía Española: Ensayo de métodos y límites estilísticos, 497–580. Madrid: Gredos, 1981. Bernat Vistarini, Antonio, and John T. Cull. Enciclopedia Akal de Emblemas españoles ilustrados. Madrid: Akal, 1999. Blakeslee, Merritt R. “La ‘Chanson de femme,’ les Héroïdes, et la ‘Canso occitane’ a voix de femme.” In Hommage à Jean-Charles Payen: farai chansoneta novele. Essais sur la liberté créatrice au Moyen Age. Edited by Centre de recherche sur la modernité, 67–75. Caen: Centre de Publications de l’Université de Caen, 1989. Blanco, Mercedes. Introducción al comentario de la poesía amorosa de Quevedo. Madrid: Arco/Libros, 1998. —. Les rhétoriques de la pointe: Baltasar Gracián et le conceptisme en Europe. Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1992. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Genealogia de gli dei gentili. Venice: G. A. Bertano, 1574. Boscán, Juan. Obra completa. Edited by Carlos Clavería. Madrid: Cátedra, 1999. Boutcher, Warren. “ ‘Who Taught Thee Rhetoricke to Deceive a Maid?’ Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Juan Boscán’s Leandro, and

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Renaissance Vernacular Humanism.” Comparative Literature 52, no. 1 (2000): 11–52. Cacho Casal, Rodrigo. “The Memory of Ruins.” Renaissance Quarterly 62 (2009): 1167–1203. —. “Góngora y los orígenes del poema heroicómico.” In Dire, taire, masquer les origines dans la péninsule ibérique, du Moyen Âge au Siècle d’Or. Edited by Florence Raynié and Teresa Rodríguez. Toulouse: Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, forthcoming). Chapman, W. G. “Las comedias mitológicas de Calderón.” Revista de Literatura 5, no. 9–10 (1954): 35–67. Cossío, José María de. Las fábulas mitológicas en España. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1952. Covarrubias Orozco, Sebastián de. Emblemas morales de Don Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco, Capellán del Rey N. S. Maestrescuela, y Canónigo de Cuenca, Con sultor del santo Oficio. . . . Madrid: Luis Sánchez, 1610. Cullhed, Anders. Quevedo: El instante poético. Translated by Marina Torres and Francisco Uriz. Zaragoza: Fernando el Católico, 2005. Emblemata: Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts. Special edition. Edited by Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schöne. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1978. Fernández Mosquera, Santiago. La poesía amorosa de Quevedo: Disposición y estilo desde “Canta sola a Lisi.” Madrid: Gredos, 1999. —. Introduction to Aproximación a la poesía amorosa de Quevedo. Edited by Santiago Fernández Mosquera. Alicante: CVC, 2006. Accessed August 7, 2014. http://cvc.cervantes.es/literatura/quevedo_critica/p_amorosa/introduccion.htm. Francisco de Quevedo: Un Heráclito cristiano, Canta sola a Lisi y otros poemas. Edited by Lía Schwartz and Ignacio Arellano. Barcelona: Crítica, 1997. Fulgentius the Mythographer. Translated by Leslie George Whitbread. Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1971. Garcilaso de la Vega. Obra poética y textos en prosa. Edited by Bienvenido Morros. Barcelona, Crítica, 2001. Gärtner, Thomas. “Wer löscht das Feuer? Zur Rezeption der Hero-und-LeanderSage in Mittelalter, Renaissance und Neuzeit.” Orbis litterarum 64, no. 4 (2009): 263–82. Giles, Ryan D. “A Galen for Lovers: Medical Readings of Ovid in Medieval and Early Renaissance Spain.” In Ovid in the Age of Cervantes. Edited by Frederick de Armas, 3–19. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. Góngora, Luis de. Soledades. Edited by Robert Jammes. Madrid: Castalia, 1994. Gordon, D. J. The Renaissance Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Green, Otis H. Boscán and “Il Cortegiano”: The “Historia de Leandro y Hero.” Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo,1948. Greenhut, Deborah S. Feminine Rhetorical Culture: Tudor Adaptations of Ovid’s Heroides. New York: Peter Lang, 1988.

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Guerrero Salazar, Susana. La parodía quevediana de los mitos. Málaga: Universidad de Málaga, 2002. Kenney, E. J. “The Metamorphoses of Hero.” In Style and Tradition: Studies in Honor of Wendell Clausen. Edited by Peter Knox and Clive Foss, 55–71. Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1998. Kluge, Sofie. “Amazonas del mar y sátiros acuáticos: Góngora y la literatura mitológica.” Revue Romane 44, no. 1 (2009): 94–111. —. Baroque Allegory Comedia: The Transfiguration of Tragedy in SeventeenthCentury Spain. Kassel: Reichenberger, 2010. —. “ ‘Yo, que al teatro del mundo/Cómica tragedia fui.’ Mito, tragedia, desengaño y alegoría en Eco y Narciso de Calderón.” Anuario Calderoniano 5 (2012): 169–97. —. “Ambiguous Allegories: What the Mythological Comedia Reveals About Baroque Tragedy.” Comparative Drama 47, no. 2 (2012): 187–207. —. “Un epilio barroco: el Polifemo y su género.” In Los géneros poéticos del Siglo de oro: Centro y periferías. Edited by Rodrigo Cacho Casal and Anne Hollloway, 153–70. London: Tamesis, 2013. Krummrich, Philip. The Hero and Leander Theme in Iberian Literature 1500– 1800: An Anthology of Translations. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2006. Maldonado, Felipe. “Algunos datos sobre la composición y dispersión de la biblioteca de Quevedo.” In Homenaje a la memoria de don Antonio Rodríguez Moñino. 405–28. Madrid: Castalia, 1975. Moore, Helen. “Elizabethan Fiction and Ovid’s Heroides.” Translation and Literature 9 (2000): 40–64. Moya de Baño, Francisca. El tema de Hero y Leandro en la literatura española. Murcia: Universidad de Murcia, 1966. Navarrete, Ignacio. Orphans of Petrarch: Poetry and Theory in the Spanish Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Olivares, Julian. The Love Poetry of Francisco de Quevedo: An Aesthetic and Existential Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Ovide moralisé en prose: Texte du quinzième siècle. Edited by Cornelis de Boer. Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company, 1954. P. Ovidii Nasonis Heroidum epistulae XVIII–XIX: Leander Heroni, Hero Leandro. Edited by Gianpiero Rosati. Florence: Le Monnier, 1996. Parker, Alexander Augustine. The Philosophy of Love in Spanish Literature 1480– 1680. Edited by Terence O’Reilly. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1985. Pérez de Moya, Juan. Philosophía secreta. Edited by Eduardo Gómez de Baquero. Madrid: Nueva Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 1948. Philippy, Patricia B. “ ‘Loytering in love’: Ovid’s Heroides, Hospitality, and Humanist Education in The Taming of the Shrew.” Criticism 40, no. 1 (1998): 27–53. Poesía erótica del Siglo de Oro. Edited by Pierre Alzieu, Robert Jammes, and Yvan Lissorgues. Barcelona: Crítica, 2000. Quevedo, Francisco de. Parnaso español, monte en dos cumbres dividido. Madrid: Josef Antonio González de Salas, 1648.

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—. Poesía original completa. Edited by José Manuel Blecua. Barcelona: Planeta, 1999. —. Poems of Love and Strife, Death and Life: A Representative Anthology of Quvedo’s Lyric Poetry. Edited and translated by Carl W. Cobb. York, S. C.: Spanish Literature Publications Co., 1991. Rey, Alfonso. Quevedo y la poesía moral española. Madrid: Castalia, 1996. Rey, Agapito, and Antonio Solalinde. Ensayo de una bibliografía de las leyendas troyanas en la literatura española. Bloomington: Indiana University Publications, 1942. Seznec, Jean. La survivance des dieux antiques. Paris: Flammarion, 1980. Smith, Paul Julian. “Affect and Effect in the Lyric of Quevedo.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 22 (1986): 62–76. —. Quevedo on Parnassus: Allusive Context and Literary Theory in the LoveLyric. London: The Modern Humanities Research Association, 1987. Trueblood, Alan S. “La llama y la mariposa: motivo poético del Siglo de Oro.” In Letter and Spirit in Hispanic Writers, Renaissance to Civil War: Selected Essays. Edited by Alan S. Trueblood, 26–34. London: Tamesis, 1986. Yvancos Pozuelo, José María. El lenguaje poético de la lírica amorosa de Quevedo. Murcia: Universidad de Murcia, 1979. White, Paul. “Ovid’s Heroides in Early-Modern French Translation.” Translation and Literature 13, no. 2 (2004): 165–80.

“DII VETERES FUGERE, NOVIS ALTARIA LUCENT IGNIBUS”: CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY IN THE RELIGIOUS POETRY OF BATTISTA MANTOVANO AND JACOPO SANNAZARO*

CLEMENTINA MARSICO LUDWIG BOLTZMANN INSTITUTE FOR NEO-LATIN STUDIES

For Humanists, the imitatio is the necessary condition of every artistic form.1 From a very specific aesthetic theory, originally Aristotelian, the Moderns look to the Ancients in order to find the models to satisfy the primary, mimetic requirement of every art form, as the Ancients themselves first imitated nature and did it extremely well. The Classics become venerable fathers, living teachers and peers to talk to every day: the Ancient world—that is the best of all possible worlds—is perceived as congenial and in tune with their own. The textualized learning of Latin, the language in which Humanists write, but do not speak, increases and strengthens the imitation, a process also theorized in detail.2 In Renaissance criticism, in fact, the images used to explain the will to absorb the Classical world in a comprehensive way are very familiar. Take for example the classic mellificatio, the digestion metaphor or the selfdescription of being dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants.3 Very detailed and explanatory of the methodological process of imitatio is the famous “mosaic” paragon in the third preface of the Profugiorum ab erumna libri by Leon Battista Alberti.4 Given that “nullumst iam dictum quod non sit dictum prius,”5 the author is still able make an original contribution to literature thanks to his personal plan and the “tiles” selected: the old materials in a new, organic and unitary project assume several different meanings, some even completely opposite to the original meanings they first expressed. In particular, for Renaissance poets and artists, the large repertoire of Classical mythology is essentially an enormous repository of images,

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metaphors and concepts to renew. The “recycling” possibilities, by which the material is revitalized and the pagan Olympus radically changed, are innumerable. From the infinite examples of this approach to ancient texts, two poems have been chosen here for examination, both presenting a very clear semantic gap: Battista Spagnoli’s Adolescentia (Mantuan to most English readers) and Jacopo Sannazaro’s De partu Virginis. The works were both very successful and printed throughout Europe during the Renaissance, translated into foreign languages and widely imitated. In these works, the Neo-Latin poets renew Classical myths and genres, developing a peculiar representation of spirituality in an effort to unite the Christian religion and the revival of ancient literature. The selection of these very different texts derives from the following passage of Erasmus’s Ciceronianus, in which the two poets are compared: [Sannazaro] rem sacram tractare non piguit, quod nec dormitanter eam, nec inamoene tractavit, sed meo quidem suffragio plus laudis erat laturus, si materiam sacram tractasset aliquanto sacratius: qua quidem in re levius peccavit Baptista Mantuanus, quanquam et alias in huiusmodi argumentis uberior.6

According to Erasmus, Mantuan was more respectful of the sacred subject than Sannazaro (“levius peccavit”).7 Here the comparison is probably between their two Marian poems, the De partu and the Parthenice Mariana, where Battista, in fact, is perfectly in line with the Christian orthodoxy and language.8 But alias, says Erasmus, Mantuan was “uberior”: the similar—and exuberant—way in which the sacred matter is classically reinterpreted both in the De partu and in the Adolescentia might lead one to assume that with alias Erasmus was referring to this second text.9

I Mantuan’s Adolescentia, edited in Mantua in 1498,10 is a veritable bestseller of the first half of the 16th century; several generations of European students were in fact trained with it.11 The recent critical edition prepared by Andrea Severi, which includes a wide investigation on sources, allows us greater access to a text long neglected in our tradition of study.12 In this context only a few brief pieces to exemplify Mantuan’s method of writing, especially in terms of his “rewriting” the Classics, can be given. The Adolescentia consists of ten eclogues in which a spiritual ascent is developed, albeit by means of multiple and eccentric digressions. The most important story is that of the shepherd Candidus, the alter ego of the

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author, who after leaving the secular life and its pleasures joins the Carmelite order. In parallel with this story, however, many lively and realistic collateral events are illustrated throughout the text moving it thereby away from the canonical style of bucolic poetry. Mantuan’s world is characterized by a corporeality, a rustic realism and a biting satire unprecedented in Latin pastoral.13 The first passage to be presented is from the seventh eclogue, which tells the tale of the shepherd Pollux at the turning point of his life. After a vision of a woman, he abandons the path to perdition and, like Candidus (and obviously Battista), chooses the monastic life in the Carmelite order. The event is narrated by two shepherds, Galbula and Alphus. Below the passage in which Galbula explains how it is possible that a deity be led by a simple shepherd like Pollux: Cum Paris Iliaca tria numina vidit in Ida (aut Paris aut alius puerum qui obtruncat ad aram) pastor erat; quando coelesti exterritus igne venit ad ostentum pedibus per pascua nudis, pastor erat Moses, Moses a flumine tractus; exul apud Graios Amphrysia pastor Apollo rura peragravit, posito deitatis honore; coelestes animi Christo ad praesepia nato in caulis cecinere Deum pastoribus ortum, et nova divini partus miracula docti pastores primi natum videre Tonantem, et sua pastores infans Regnator Olympi ante magos regesque dedit cunabula scire.14

The verses are imbued with literary reminiscences, especially those derived from Virgil (Mantuan’s chief model). In addition to this, note how pagan myth was very naturally intertwined with the Christian tradition. Paris is next to Abraham, who is caught in the dramatic and violent moment of the sacrifice of Isaac (recalled by the harsh expression “qui obtruncat ad aram,” thereby evoking the cruelty of Pyrrhus).15 Abraham, however, is less central than Paris, the first of the shepherds quoted in Mantuan’s list. Moses and Apollo soon follow; the patriarch and the pagan god are united together as shepherds (one “venit per pascua” and the other “rura peragravit”). Finally, Galbula mentions the shepherds of the nativity, considered worthy of being the first to hear the good news of the birth of Christ, describing him as Tonantem, which is a typical trait of Jupiter.16 It is again a complete mixture of pagan and Christian material. From a linguistic perspective, in Humanistic poetry the transition of expressions from the pagan vocabulary to the Christian one is quite

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common. In Mantuan’s Latin—a combination of mediaeval and humanist elements17—consider for example, in addition to the Tonans epithet, the use of Olympus for the Heavenly Kingdom, avoided by the author in a text more religiously committed, the aforementioned Parthenice. In the transition from the first to the second version of the work, Mantuan replaces, in fact, the adjective olympiacus, first attributed to Jesus, with aethereus, as the former was too affiliated with the pagan world. Regarding this point, the passionate defense by Mantuan’s brother Tolomeo in an Apologia responding to detractors who criticize the poet’s linguistic choices is particularly interesting: Audivi etiam spectari limis et, ut inquit Appuleius, morsicantibus oculis a quibusdam, quod nisi male memini in prima est Parthenice, cum Olympiacum ponit pro caelesti. Volunt enim ab Olympo, qui ponitur pro caelo fieri Olympium et Olympicum, ab Olympia vero urbe Olympiacum. Huic obiectioni paucis respondeo, sumi etiam Olympiacum pro caelesti . . . . Nos exponimus dictum a poeta nostro Christum esse stirpem Olympiaca, non ab Olympia urbe, sed a Deo Olympio, id est caelesti. Dicebatur etiam ab antiquis Iupiter Olympio. . . . Deum autem noster, qui secundum nominis etymologiam verus est Iupiter, potest recte dici Olympius, hoc est caelestis. Et ab ipso Deo Olympio Christus naturalis Dei filius Olympiaca stirps potest appellari.18

Returning to the seventh eclogue, the text continues by narrating the vision that led Pollux to his conversion. It is a Christian reinterpretation of the myth of Hercules at the crossroads, where, instead of two women,19 the protagonist is a Nymph (although in reality she is the Virgin Mary), who successfully warns Pollux to alter his path, moving him away from the umbrosa silva where he is headed, attracted by the pleasant entrance. The Virgin is not instantly recognized. She is, in fact, described with these verses: “ecce puellari virgo stipata corona / ora, manus, oculos habitumque simillima nymphae.”20 Again, there is a fusion of Classical language and Christian material, resulting in the vision of the Virgin, very similar to a Nymph, reminding us of the scene of Dido’s entry in the first book of the Aeneid (Dido too appears “magna iuvenum stipante caterva”).21 The role of the woman is explained in the next eclogue, when Alphus asks Candidus who the Nymph who appeared to Pollux was: Non erat illa Dryas neque Libetris nec Oraeas; venerat e coelo superum Regina, Tonantis Mater, anhellanti pacem latura iuventae. Huic Tethys, huic alma Ceres famulantur . . . . Ista potest nigro depellere nubila coelo,

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Ista potest siccis fluvios dare frugibus imbres; cum volet, Ista novos duris emittere campis; cum volet, emissos poterit restringere fonts . . . Nil opus est modo Pana sequi neque caetera ruris numina quae veteres frustra coluisse feruntur.22

She is the Virgin herself, also referred to as the Mater Tonantis to which all the ancient gods bow. Thanks to her, erotic love is replaced with Christian devotion. Later, the poet illustrates the exaltation of the woman’s powers, again in line with the pagan Classics. See, for example, the allusion to the verse “cum libet, haec tristi depellit nubila caelo” where Tibullus (I 2, 49) speaks about the witch who helps the furtive lovers and chases the clouds from the sky.23 The reference is bold: a power is given to the Virgin that in the pagan world belonged to a witch. There are other several stylistic reminders of Classical writers. The conclusion of the passage, for example, is built with the juxtaposition of two Ovidian verses (Metamorphoses II.16 and Fasti II.271: “fluminaque et nymphas et cetera numina ruris,” “Pana deum pecoris veteres coulisse feruntur”), here reversed in meaning.24 The poet’s main intention is to illustrate how the ancient myths dissolve away as a result of the growing strength of the new religion. The eclogue continues with a prayer of thanksgiving addressed to the Virgin, which comes off, however, as rural and almost comical, rightly defined a sort of “rite apotropaic.”25 The Virgin is asked to prevent the flooding of the Po, to protect children from the witch, to kill moles and even to defend the ham from mice. There is an abundance of similar examples in the text. From the few that have been selected it is still clear that the Adolescentia is a veritable mosaic of micro-tiles drawn from the language of ancient and modern classics (there are also several quotations, in fact, from Petrarch, Boccaccio, Basinio, Strozzi). In the later De calamitatibus temporum, Mantuan celebrates the triumph of the Christian God against Apollo and the whole of nature (“Dii veteres fugere, novis altaria lucent / ignibus et nobis tua numina sola supersunt”); the solemn and powerful religion that he depicts, on the other hand, overflows with phrases, figures, myths of the Classical past. While these elements were rejected as belief, they were widely used as images.26 This particular employment of the Classical, however, only rarely implies a deep assimilation of the texts; ancient myth seems to serve as mere embellishment of the Christian material without actually having an impact on it. These considerations will be revisited later as the analysis of the second text shall now be undertaken.

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II Sannazaro’s De partu Virginis was printed in 1526, first in Naples, then in Rome.27 It is obviously impossible to do a complete analysis of the Marian poem, to which Sannazaro dedicated the last part of his life;28 just a few examples of his typical complex use of Classical models will be mentioned. The well-known De partu preface consists of a triple invocation of the caelicolae, the Muses and the Virgin, by which the poet immediately clarifies his intentions of treating a sacred subject—the story of the Virgin’s childbirth in its eschatological meaning, or rather the liberation of mankind from sin—through an eminently Classical form.29 The invocation of the Muses, in fact, indicates the need for Classical poetry to give an appropriate facies to the religious subject, in accordance with the desire to “adorn the sacred things with the profane ones”:30 Nec minus, o Musae, vatum decus, hic ego vestros optarim fonteis, vestras nemora ardua rupes, quandoquidem genus e coelo deducitis et vos virginitas sanctaeque iuvat reverentia famae: vos igitur, seu cura poli seu virginis huius tangit honos, monstrate viam, qua nubila vincam, et mecum immensi portas recludite coeli; magna quidem, magna, Aoenides, sed debita posco, nec vobis ignota: etenim potuistis et antrum aspicere et choreas, nec vos orientia coelo signa nec eoos reges latuisse putandum est.31

The poet enhances a feature of the Muses entirely congenial to his own poem: the Muses assist the poet in writing in part by their divine origin, and in part thanks to their virginal nature.32 Moreover, the poet adds “debita posco,” because the Muses–after having been placed at, for example, Achilles and Hector’s battle or Aeneas’s wanderings–have also witnessed the antrum and the choreas, the Orientia coelo signa and the eoos reges. As for example in Sedulius, Giovenco and Dante’s works,33 the pagan gods are placed within the Christian universe; although they must support the poetic ornatus, they also serve to open the author’s eyes to the mysteries of Christianity. Throughout the entirety of the poem, Christian deities and pagan Muses are clearly juxtaposed. The first Gospel event narrated is the Annunciation, although the poet greatly expands the biblical story with new and fantastic tales. Take, for example, the description of God and his speech while he witnesses the cruel fate of the humans’ souls, condemned to the infernal darkness:

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Viderat aetherea superum regnator ab arce undique collectas vectari in Tartara praedas Tisiphonemque imo conantem cuncta profundo vertere et immanes stimulantem ad dira sorores, nec iam homini prodesse alto quod semina coelo duceret aut varios animum excoluisset ad usus: tantum letiferae poterant contagia culpae! Tum pectus pater aeterno succensus amore sic secum: ‘Ecquis erit finis? tantis ne parentum prisca luent poenis seri commissa nepotes, ut quos victuros semper superisque crearam pene pares, tristi patiar succumbere leto informesque domos obscuraque regna subire?34

The language is completely structured on ancient models: the superum regnator (which is a Classical expression)35 evokes a severe and indignant God, intent on observing “ab arce,” true to a widespread pattern in Latin literature, especially like that found in the epic tradition. Besides the precise Classical echoes (the Virgilian “succensus amore” or the Ovidian attack of the speech, for example),36 mythology also materializes on the page through the description of the scenery and of God. Human souls are relegated to the sad misery of Tartarus, described with the dark colors of Virgilian’s hell, inhabited by the Furies, incited by Tisiphone to make prey of the souls of the dead. The representation of God using Classic stylistic features and expressions reminds one of the pagan image of Jupiter, derived especially from the third book of Claudian’s De raptu Proserpinae, as shown by Francesco Tateo.37 Traces of Classical literature can also be detected within the most intense moments of Christ’s story: At mater, non iam mater sed flentis et orbae infelix simulacrum, aegra ac sine viribus umbra, ante crucem demissa genas, effusa capillum, stat lacrimans tristique irrorat pectora fletu.38

These are the first lines of the famous and dramatic piece on the Virgin at the foot of the Cross (which also had an independent diffusion both in manuscripts and prints).39 The poet constructs it as an erudite and touching mosaic of ancient wailings: the Virgin assumes the traits of Creusa, of Aristaeus and, in particular, the Virgilian mother of Euryalus and the Ovidian Thisbe.40 Mythology, expertly merged with the Christian tradition, allows the poet to create a very intense text in which the pain of the Virgin is amplified by the memory of these ancient planctus. More

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specifically in the quoted verses, the attack (“at mater”) recalls a passage of De rerum natura where the heifer desperately looks for her son, already sacrificed;41 like the Virgin, “non iam mater” recalls the Virgilian Nature unable to nourish the cut flower in the distressing parallel with the dead body of Pallas.42 The Virgin has become an “infelix simulacrum,” like Creusa,43 and “effusa capillum,” she “stat lacrimans,” like Aristaeus on the banks of the maternal river.44 The sources fill the page with the lamenting cries of Classical figures which fulfill the function of increasing the Virgin’s tragedy. These multiple references to Classical sources, and in particular the woman’s howl and kisses of despair that follow (“. . . tum luctisono ululatu / cuncta replens, singultanti sic incipit ore / incipit et duro figit simul oscula lingo”),45 provoked unforgiving criticism from censors, including Scaliger, who considered these verses inconvenient from a religious point of view.46 The index of allusions to the Classical world is vast; consider, for example, the figure of the angel who announces the birth to the shepherds in the third book: Nec mora, Laetitiam choreis tum forte vacantem advocat (haec magni motusque animosque Tonantis temperat et vultum discussa nube serenat) . . . Illicet adsunt, iucundae visu facies, Cantusque Chorique Gaudiaque Plaususque et honestis ignibus ardens rectus Amor, quem nuda Fides Spesque inscia luctus vadentem mira unanimes pietate sorores observant . . . . succinctae occurrunt Horae properantibus alis, insomnes Horae, nanque his fulgentia divum limina et ingentis custodia credita coeli.47

The angel is classically described as the Letitia, in line with the Classical personification of Fame in Virgil or of Envy in Ovid.48 She is accompanied in her flight, however, by the Christian images of Faith, Hope and Charity, although the crowd is also composed by Cantus, Chorus, Gaudium and Plausus (later in the text the inculpata Voluptas, the Gratia and finally the Concordia can be seen). Laetitia crosses the threshold of the Christian heaven that is protected, incongruently, by the Classical Horae as they have also been found guarding the gates of Olympus in Homer.49 The Christian tradition is again totally mixed with mythology. The famous speech by the Jordan River in the third book can be given as another example. Taken by a sudden joy upon the news of Christ’s

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birth, its waters swell in response thus evoking the words revealed to it by the sea-god Proteus. Sannazaro himself, in a letter, explains to the reader that he introduces this pagan god as a prophet in his Christian poem as he was usually called vates by the Ancients (as had already been done in the fourth book of the Odyssey): “Proteo . . . essendo chiamato vates da’ poeti, mi parse non inconveniente che come dio marino predicesse quelle cose ad un fiume.”50 The myth is presented here as an absolute prefiguration of Christian revelation. Proteus talks about the main episodes of Christ’s life, albeit always through the filter of Classic mythology. For instance, the miracle of Christ walking on water (Mt 14:25; Mc 6:48; Io 6:18–19) is similar to the episode of the Ovidian Circe, who ventures her feet in a boiling sea:51 Aut intempesta gradiens ut nocte per altum libera substrato ponet vestigia ponto vixque undas sicco tanget pede? scilicet olli adnabunt blandae Nereides; humida passim sternent se freta, tum fundo Neptunus ab imo excitus, agnoscet dominum positoque tridente cum Phorco Glaucoque et semifero comitatu prosiliet trepidusque sacris dabit oscula plantis.52

In addition, Sannazaro inserts the Nereids into the scene, which swim next to Christ’s feet. Neptune also materializes from the Jordan’s water, with Phorcus and Glaucus (who are with the sea-god even in the fifth book of the Aeneid),53 and recognizes Christ as his Lord then, positoque tridente, kissing Christ’s feet.

III As has been attempted to show, notwithstanding with the limited number of examples in the present analysis, the poets are deeply faithful to the Classical imitatio. The most sublime subjects of the sacred history are joined to the formal refinement that Latin was able to reach, after a century of Humanistic poetry and philology. For the poets, the mythological dimension, the Classical style and the sacred story are different parts of the same picture: they are the tools used to encompass the ancient words and images to spread a new message, the Christian one. The contamination is constant, linguistic and thematic, proving in fact to be one of the most interesting features of these works, although the elements themselves are obviously very different from each other (the more “archaic” Mantuan results are not to be forgotten). Sometimes the Classical myth is shown as

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a prefiguration of an eternal truth (we have seen the case of the “virgin” Muses, or that of Proteus);54 while sometimes it merely reminds the reader of the world in which the myth itself was born: the ancient world of the epic, inhabited by powerful and thundering gods, nymphs and shepherds. For this reason, the contamination is often a formal fact: the Classical world provides vocabulary and images absolutely necessary to make poetry according to Humanist theory. The Ancients’ “form” is the only way to express oneself at the highest level and therefore the best way to express the noblest message: the Christian revelation. From this perspective, as noted by Alfonso Traina, a iunctura derived from the scabrous Virgilian tale of Pasifae, for example, can be effortlessly used for the newborn Jesus.55 Sannazaro himself explains that it is impossible to create poetry in any other way: “è bisogno che ’l dicamo noi come possemo, maxime non partendone da la latinità.”56

Notes *

I would like to thank Mariangela Regoliosi and Andrea Severi for reading the manuscript and for their useful suggestions. 1 The bibliography on imitation in the Renaissance is huge; I merely refer to the recent Martin McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Amedeo Quondam, Rinascimento e Classicismo. Materiali per l’analisi del sistema culturale di Antico Regime (Rome: Bulzoni, 1999), also for further bibliography. 2 On this aspect and on the peculiar situation of diglossia in which Humanists live, see Donatella Coppini, “Gli umanisti e i classici: imitazione coatta e rifiuto dell’imitazione,” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa 19 (1989): 269– 85; Francesco Bausi, “Modi e forme della poesia umanistica (tra latino e volgare),” in L’identità nazionale nella cultura letteraria italiana: Atti del III Congresso Nazionale dell’ADI (Galatina: Congedo, 2001), 89–96; Donatella Coppini, “Poesia latina umanistica fra Quattrocento italiano e Cinquecento europeo: Note,” in El cardenal Margarit i l’Europa Quatrecentista, ed. Eulalia Miralles, David Prats, and Mariàngela Villalonga (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2008), 235–49. 3 Cf. Seneca Epistulae 84; Quintilian Institutio X.1.19; Ioannis Saresberiensis Metalogicon, ed. J. B. Hall (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991), III 4. 4 See Leon Battista Alberti, Profugiorum ab erumna libri, ed. G. Ponte (Genoa: Tilgher, 1988), 80–83. For a wide and enlightening commentary on this text, see Roberto Cardini, Mosaici. Il nemico dell’Alberti (Rome: Bulzoni, 1990). 5 This is the famous statement of Terence Eunuchus 41, quoted in Alberti’s preface. 6 Desiderio Erasmo da Rotterdam, Il ciceroniano o dello stile migliore: Testo latino critico, traduzione italiana, prefazione, introduzione e note, ed. Angelo Gambaro (Brescia: La Scuola, 1965), 278.

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For Erasmus’s opinions on Mantuan, see Lee Piepho, “Erasmus on Baptista Mantuanus and Christian Religious Verse,” Erasmus of Rotterdam Society 14 (1994): 46–54. In an earlier well-known letter Erasmus describes Mantuan as a “Christian Virgil” (Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami Opus Epistolarum, ed. Percy Stafford Allen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906–1958), I, ep. 49, 163). 8 Erasmus explicitly quotes Sannazaro’s De partu; so it seems very likely that the comparison is with Mantuan’s work on the same subject (the Parthenice). 9 This is the interpretation of the Ciceronianus’s passage proposed by Andrea Severi in Battista Spagnoli Mantovano, Adolescentia: Studio, edizione e traduzione, ed. Andrea Severi (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2010), 423–25, with which I agree. The editor of the Ciceronianus, instead, translates the passage referring to Mantuan as follows: “quantunque anche sotto altri rispetti sia pù ricco in argomenti di questo genere” (“though he shows more rich in other respects when treating in this kind of subject”; cf. Erasmo, Il ciceroniano, 279); I should like to suggest that alias refers to other Mantuan’s works. 10 For Mantuan’s life, see Wilfred P. Mustard, ed., The Eclogues of Baptista Mantuanus (Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1911), 11–30, and most recently Baptista Spanuoli Mantuanus, Adulescentia: The Eclogues of Mantuan, ed. and transl. Lee Piepho (New York: Garland, 1989), XV–XX; for the bibliography of his works printed through 1959 see Edmondo Coccia, Le edizioni delle opere del Mantovano (Rome: Istitutum Carmelitanum, 1960). The first important modern study on his poetry was Vladimiro Zabughin, “Un beato poeta: Battista Spagnoli, il Mantovano,” L’Arcadia 1 (1917). For a wide bibliography on the Adolescentia, see Mantovano, Adolescentia; for a detailed discussion of the composition and publication history, see ibid., 63–193 and also Lee Piepho, “Mantuan and Religious Pastoral: Unprinted Versions of His Ninth and Tenth Eclogues,” Renaissance Quarterly 34 (1986): 644–72; idem, “Mantuan on Women and Erotic Love: A Newly Discovered Manuscript of the Unprinted Version of His Eclogues,” Renaissance Studies 3 (1989): 14–17 and the introduction of Piepho’s second edition of Adulescentia (Adulescentia: The Eclogues of Baptista Manutuanus 1498, ed. Lee Piepho, accessed October 10, 2012, http://www. philological.bham.ac.uk/mantuanus/intro.html). 11 According to Grant “Mantuan’s first eclogue was probably the best-known NeoLatin pastoral ever written in Europe.” William Leonard Grant, Neo-Latin Literature and the Pastoral (Durham: The University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 129; for Mantuan’s popularity see Mustard, The Eclogues, 30–34, 40–57; Renata Fabbri, “Le ecloghe di Battista Spagnoli il Mantovano,” in Letteratura, verità e vita: Studi in ricordo di Gorizio Viti, ed. Paolo Viti (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2005); Mantovano, Adolescentia, 391–475; Lee Piepho, Holofernes’ Mantuan: Italian Humanism in Early Modern England (New York: Peter Lang, 2011). 12 It is the already mentioned Mantovano, Adolescentia by Severi. For a complete English version see the quoted on-line edition by Lee Piepho (but the Latin edition is Mustard’s).

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On this aspect see Fabbri, “Le ecloghe,” 248–55; Grant, Neo-Latin Literature, 127–29; the introduction of Piepho’s edition and Mantovano, Adolescentia, 47–53, 208–37. 14 Mantovano, Adolescentia, VII 27–39. 15 The editors report Virgil Eclogues II.60–61 (Mantuanus, Adulescentia) and Virgil Aeneid II.663 for line 28; Claudianus Carminum Minorum 29.13 for line 36; Virgil Aeneid X.436 for line 39 (Mantovano, Adolescentia). 16 The same epithet, e.g., in the Parthenice Mariana I 228 (“pabula et amplexus fuerant latura Tonati”; Giovanni Battista Spagnoli, La Partenice Mariana di Battista Mantovano, Introduzione, testo latino e versione metrica, note, ed. Ettore Bolisani, Padova: Tipografia Antoniana, 1957, 36). 17 For Mantuan’s Latin, which displays many irregularities of vocabulary, syntax and meter, see Mustard, The Eclogues, 58–60; Mantovano, Adolescentia, 193–202 and the review of this book by Angelo Piacentini, Neulateinisches Jahrbuch 15 (2013). In the quoted verses note, e.g., the non-classical use of ad ostentum or deitatis (typical of Christian and Late Latin). 18 The same substitution in the Parthenice II sive Catharinaria; see Mantovano, Adolescentia, 187 from which I quote the text of the Apologia. 19 Josse Bade has already pointed this out in his commentary (Mantuanus, Adulescentia, 122). 20 Mantovano, Adolescentia, VII 89–90. Later Mantuan defines the Virgin again as “sancta Nympha” (Mantovano, Adolescentia, VIII 200). 21 Virgil Aeneid I.497. For the second verse, Badius notes an echo of Mercury’s appearance in Aeneid IV and Piepho of Venus’s famous appearance to her son in Aeneid I (Adulescentia: The Eclogues, eclogue VII, notes). 22 Mantovano, Adolescentia, VIII 79–82, 99–102, 115–16. 23 Mustard, The Eclogues, 144. 24 Mantovano, Adolescentia, 231. 25 Fabbri, “Le ecloghe,” 252; Mantovano, Adolescentia, 231. 26 See Donatella Coppini, “Poesia dell’umanesimo. Latina. Introduzione,” in Antologia della poesia italiana, II, Quattrocento-Settecento, dir. Cesare Segre, Carlo Ossola (Torino: Einaudi-Gallimard, 1998), 61. 27 For the chronology of the De partu, see Iacopo Sannazaro, De partu Virginis, ed. Charles Fantazzi and Alessandro Perosa (Florence: Olschki, 1988); Carlo Vecce, “Maiora numina. La prima poesia religiosa e la Lamentatio di Sannazaro,” Studi e problemi di critica testuale 43 (1991); Marc Deramaix, “La genèse du De partu Virginis de Jacopo Sannazaro et trois églogues inédites de Gilles de Viterbe,” Mélanges de l’Ecole Française de Rome: Moyen Age 102, no. 1 (1990). 28 On this aspect see Carlo Dionisotti, “Appunti sulle Rime del Sannazaro,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 140, no. 2 (1963); Sannazaro, De partu, LVIII–LIX. 29 For the preface, see Debora D’Alessandro, “Il proemio del De partu Virginis di Jacopo Sannazaro,” Studi rinascimentali 3 (2005). 30 The statement is in one of Sannazaro’s letters to Antonio Seripando, published in an appendix of the critical edition by Fantazzi and Perosa. It is interesting to note the difference between this and the preface of the Mantuan’s Parthenice Mariana

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(that is a Sannazaro’s model), where the Muses are moved away by the poet (“Sed neque Pierii fontis, neque Phocidis undae / nunc vada sunt tentanda mihi: maiore Camena / et maioris opus nunc est ope numinis . . .,” I 6–8; Battista Spagnoli, La Partenice Mariana, 24). 31 I quote from the edition by Fantazzi and Perosa; see Sannazaro, De partu, I 8– 18. A first modern commentary to the text, after the Fillipo Scolari’s commentary of 1844 (Le opere latine di Azio Sincero Sannazaro, Venice: Tip. All’Ancora), was prepared by Stefano Prandi (Jacopo Sannazaro, De partu virginis: Il parto della Vergine, volgarizzamento di Giovanni Giolito de’ Ferrari (1588), Bari: Città Nuova, 2001). See also the important Alfonso Traina, “Imitatio virgiliana e clausole anomale nel De partu Virginis del Sannazaro,” in Filologia umanistica per Gianvito Resta, ed. Vincenzo Fera and Giacomo Ferraù (Padova: Antenore, 1997), and about the Classical sources of the poem Debora D’Alessandro, “Il De partu virginis di Iacopo Sannazaro e le sue fonti classiche” (PhD diss., Università di Napoli Federico II, 1998). 32 On this aspect see Francesco Tateo, Tradizione e realtà nell’Umanesimo italiano (Bari: Dedalo, 1967), 92–94. 33 Sannazaro tells the reader that he himself is part of this tradition: “Che de essere securo da’ frati, Sedulio, Iuvenco, Aratore et Prudentio lo hanno già assequito, et possea io anchora dire: ne forte tumultus surgeret in populo, et Pieriis pompare modis” (Sannazaro, De partu, 88–89). 34 Ibid., I 33–45. 35 See Virgil Aeneid II.779; VII.558; X.437 (Sannazaro, De partu virginis: Il parto della Vergine). 36 Cf. Virgil Aeneid VII.496 and Ovid Amores III.I.15 (Sannazaro, De partu virginis: Il parto della Vergine); see also Virgil Aeneid I.136 (“post mihi non simili poena commissa luetis”), Virgil Georgics IV.454 (“magna luis commissa”) for line 42. 37 Tateo, Tradizione, 96–97, to which I refer also for a wider examination of the relationship between the De partu and Claudian’s work. 38 Sannazaro, De partu, I 333–36. 39 Cf. ibid., IX–XIV, XXI–XXV, XXXV–XXXVII, LXXIV–LXXV; must be added to manuscripts a Venetian print of 1523 quoted by Prandi (Sannazaro, De partu virginis: Il parto della Vergine, 11). 40 On these two models (Virgil Aeneid IX.475–97 and Ovid Metamorphoses IV.137–61) see Sannazaro, De partu virginis: Il parto della Vergine, 282. 41 Lucretius De Rerum Natura II.355–58 (“at mater viridis saltus orbata peragrans / quaerit humi pedibus vestigia pressa bisulcis, / omnia convisens oculis loca si queat usquam / conspicere amissum fetum . . .”). 42 Virgil Aeneid XI.68–71 (“qualem virgineo demessum pollice florem / seu mollis violae seu languentis hyacinthi, / cui neque fulgor adhuc nec dum sua forma recessit, / non iam mater alit tellus virisque ministrat”). 43 Virgil Aeneid II.772 (Sannazaro, De partu virginis. Il parto della Vergine). 44 Virgil Georgics IV.353–56 (“. . . O gemitu non frustra exterrita tanto, / Cyrene soror, ipse tibi, tua maxima cura, / tristis Aristaeus Penei genitoris ad undam / stat lacrimans, et te crudelem nomine dicit”).

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45

Sannazaro, De partu, I 341–343. Idem, De partu virginis: Il parto della Vergine, 282. 47 Idem, De partu, III 93–95, 102–7, 113–15. 48 Idem, De partu virginis: Il parto della Vergine, 349. 49 Homer Iliad V.749–51. 50 Sannazaro, De partu, 92 (letter to Seripando of April 13, 1521). Sannazaro was very devoted to the figure of Proteus: he appears also in his Rime (I, XI), in the Arcadia (Ecl. VI 51) and in the IV of the Eclogae piscatoriae; see Tateo, Tradizione, 80. 51 Ovid Metamorphoses XIV.48–50: “. . . ingreditur ferventes aestibus undas, / in quibus ut solida ponit vestigia terra, / summaque decurrit pedibus super aequora siccis” (Sannazaro, De partu virginis: Il parto della Vergine, 379–80). 52 Sannazaro, De partu, III 470–77. 53 Virgil Aeneid V.822–26. 54 Tateo, Tradizione, 93–94. The teaching of Egidio da Viterbo has an important role, as is well known, regarding this attitude; in terms of his relationship with Sannazaro, see lastly Debora D’Alessandro, “I pastori Lycidas e Aegon nel De partu Virginis di Jacopo Sannazaro (III 186–97),” Vichiana 2 (1999), also for further bibliography. 55 Traina, “Imitatio virgiliana,” 1793 (cf. Sannazaro, De partu, II 367 and Virgil Eclogues VI.53). 56 Sannazaro, De partu, 103; see also the other letters to Seripando, that are an important self-reflection about Humanistic poetry. On this aspect and for the peculiar representation of spirituality of this text, see Mariangela Regoliosi, “Dittico intertestuale: per una lettura del Panormita e del Sannazaro,” in Studi latini in ricordo di Rita Cappelletto (Urbino: Quattroventi, 1996). 46

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Eulalia Miralles, David Prats, and Mariàngela Villalonga, 235–49. Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2008. D’Alessandro, Debora. “Il De partu virginis di Iacopo Sannazaro e le sue fonti classiche.” PhD diss., Università di Napoli Federico II, 1998. —. “I pastori Lycidas e Aegon nel De partu Virginis di Jacopo Sannazaro (III 186– 97).” Vichiana 2 (1999): 129–34. —. “Il proemio del De partu Virginis di Jacopo Sannazaro.” Studi rinascimentali 3 (2005): 11–22. Deramaix, Marc. “La genèse du De partu Virginis de Jacopo Sannazaro et trois églogues inédites de Gilles de Viterbe.” Mélanges de l’Ecole Française de Rome: Moyen Age 102, no. 1 (1990): 173–276. Dionisotti, Carlo. “Appunti sulle Rime del Sannazaro.” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 140, no. 2 (1963): 188–211. Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami Opus Epistolarum. Edited by Percy Stafford Allen. 11 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906–1958. Desiderio Erasmo da Rotterdam. Il ciceroniano o dello stile migliore: Testo latino critico, traduzione italiana, prefazione, introduzione e note. Edited by Angelo Gambaro. Brescia: La Scuola, 1965. Fabbri, Renata. “Le ecloghe di Battista Spagnoli il Mantovano.” In Letteratura, verità e vita: Studi in ricordo di Gorizio Viti. Edited by Paolo Viti, 245–48. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2005. Grant, William Leonard. Neo-Latin Literature and the Pastoral. Durham: The University of North Carolina Press, 1965. Ioannis Saresberiensis Metalogicon. Edited by J. B. Hall. Turnhout: Brepols, 1991. McLaughlin, Martin. Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Mustard, Wilfred P., ed. The Eclogues of Baptista Mantuanus. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1911. Piacentini, Angelo. Review of Spagnoli Mantovano, Battista. Adolescentia: Studio, edizione e traduzione. Edited by Andrea Severi. Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2010. Neulateinisches Jahrbuch 15 (2013): 279–83. Piepho, Lee. “Mantuan and Religious Pastoral: Unprinted Versions of His Ninth and Tenth Eclogues.” Renaissance Quarterly 34 (1986): 644–72. —. “Mantuan on Women and Erotic Love: A Newly Discovered Manuscript of the Unprinted Version of His Eclogues.” Renaissance Studies 3 (1989): 14–17. —. “Erasmus on Baptista Mantuanus and Christian Religious Verse.” Erasmus of Rotterdam Society 14 (1994): 46–54. —. Holofernes’ Mantuan: Italian Humanism in Early Modern England. New York: Peter Lang, 2011. Quondam, Amedeo. Rinascimento e Classicismo: Materiali per l’analisi del sistema culturale di Antico Regime. Rome: Bulzoni, 1999. Regoliosi, Mariangela. “Dittico intertestuale: per una lettura del Panormita e del Sannazaro.” In Studi latini in ricordo di Rita Cappelletto. 247–52. Urbino: Quattroventi, 1996.

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Sannazaro, Jacopo. Le opere latine di Azio Sincero Sannazaro recate in versi italiani col testo a fronte. Edited by Filippo Scolari. Venice: Tipografia all’Ancora, 1844. —. De partu Virginis. Edited by Charles Fantazzi and Alessandro Perosa. Firenze: Olschki, 1988. —. De partu virginis: Il parto della Vergine, volgarizzamento di Giovanni Giolito de’ Ferrari (1588). Edited by Stefano Prandi. Bari: Città Nuova, 2001. Spanguoli Mantuanus, Baptista. Adolescentia: Studio, edizione e traduzione. Edited by Andrea Severi. Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2010. —. La Partenice Mariana di Battista Mantovano, Introduzione, testo latino e versione metrica, note. Edited by Ettore Bolisani. Padua: Tipografia Antoniana, 1957. —. Adulescentia: The Eclogues of Mantuan. Edited and translated by Lee Piepho. New York: Garland, 1989. Tateo, Francesco. Tradizione e realtà nell’Umanesimo italiano. Bari: Dedalo, 1967. Traina, Alfonso. “Imitatio virgiliana e clausole anomale nel De partu Virginis del Sannazaro.” In Filologia umanistica per Gianvito Resta. Edited by Vincenzo Fera and Giacomo Ferraù, 1793–99. Padua: Antenore, 1997. Vecce, Carlo. “Maiora numina: La prima poesia religiosa e la Lamentatio di Sannazaro.” Studi e problemi di critica testuale 43 (1991): 49–94. Zabughin, Vladimiro. “Un beato poeta: Battista Spagnoli, il Mantovano.” L’Arcadia 1 (1917): 61–90.

PROTEUS AND THE PURSUIT OF CUPID: THE FINAL POEM OF NICOLAS BRIZARD’S METAMORPHOSES AMORIS (1556) JOHN NASSICHUK THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO

Nicolas Brizard’s collection of Latin poems entitled Metamorphoses Amoris is a work of considerable ingenuity which appeared in Paris in 1556,1 the same year that Ronsard published the Second livre d’Hymnes with a lively preface by Estienne Jodelle,2 and Rémy Belleau produced his important collection of Petites inventions based on Henri Estienne’s recent edition of Anacreontea.3 In this period of intense vernacular production and collaboration, Brizard’s achievement seems to have been printed and sold with relatively little public acknowledgement. Indeed, the preface of François Habert’s Métamorphoses de Cupidon, which appeared some five years later in 1561,4 contains almost no mention of the Latin original.5 Yet, despite its inherent usefulness to the modern scholar, Habert’s loose and incomplete paraphrase hardly constitutes a sufficient replacement for Brizard’s work. Their relative lack of publicity notwithstanding, the Metamorphoses Amoris did acquire a certain contemporary readership posterior to the release of Habert’s text, as the appearance of a second edition in 1569 will attest. As such, these Latin poems merit some detailed attention in their own right. The technical virtuosity displayed by the author, as well as the sheer variety of objects which appear as the products of metamorphosis, reveal a striking similarity to the highly descriptive poems published the same year by Ronsard, Belleau and others. For this reason, the present study shall attempt to characterize the poetics of metamorphosis which constitute the central object of Brizard’s collection, through an analysis of the lengthy final piece where the reader finds the god of Love converted into a series of different animals and objects. Before beginning the analysis of the Metamorphoses Amoris’ closing poem, some general presentation of the collection and its author shall be in order.

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A native of Attigny in the Ardennes region of France around the year 1560, according to his modern biographer,6 Nicolas Brizard studied at Reims before embracing, at least temporarily, the life of the itinerant humanist and preceptor. Finding himself in Venice during the year 1548, he had the good fortune to cross the path of Pierre de Selve, who was then serving as Henri II’s ambassador to that city and republic. It was under the auspices of this benefactor that the poet claims, in the preface to his collection, to have received a most timely assistance. Undertaken shortly after this encounter, at a time when Brizard was in Germany serving as tutor to the children of an aristocratic Spanish family, the Metamorphoses Amoris, declares the author, were published only seven years later at the urging of friends.7 By September 1556, Brizard was a professor of letters in the prestigious Collège de la Marche, a section of the University of Paris. It was indeed from this celebrated address that he signed and dated the preface to his work. The collection itself contains some twenty poems, all composed in dactylic hexameter and each of which recounts the sensational metamorphosis of Cupid, or Amor, into a beast, a plant, a substance or an inanimate object. In addition, the author has added, as kind of epilogue to the Metamorphoses Amoris, a small and most interesting section of Latin love elegies, many of which are translated from Petrarch’s vernacular poetry. The elegies serve as a fitting epilogue to the poetic descriptions of Cupid. Every one of the various metamorphic destinies described in the main collection is presented as “being” somehow revelatory of a particular characteristic of Love’s many-faceted experience. At the beginning, after the preface and an encomiastic epigram signed by Nicolas Chesneau, a fellow professor at the Collège de la Marche, Brizard offers the reader a list of all sixty-six guises adopted by Cupid in the twenty-piece collection of his metamorphoses.8 While the majority of the poems are dedicated to the description of a single metamorphosis—Amor conversus in nivem, Amor conversus in speculum, Amor conversus in cervum etc.—, two of them present the narration of rapid metamorphic sequences. In the first of these, namely the collection’s eighth piece, Brizard recounts Cupid’s transformation into “various small gifts.”9 The second is the collection’s final poem, and the object of the present study, which concludes with a dynamic (and somewhat dramatic) enumeration of metamorphoses. The central conceit of the poem is the vertiginous power of selftransformation displayed by the diminutive but mighty love-god. Brizard’s originality consists here in comparing the son of Venus to the sea-god Proteus, known particularly for his rapid and continual metamorphoses. A long list of metamorphoses furnished by Brizard, which constitutes the

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poem’s most important section, attests to his knowledge of the principal ancient poetic sources on Proteus,10 since most of the forms adopted in various texts by this enigmatic divinity appear also in the French humanist’s narration, henceforth attributed to Cupid. A seemingly eclectic choice of images and metamorphic objects suggests also some affinity with texts such as the Greek Anthology and the recently re-edited Anacreontea, creating a wide variety of figures that is not without some resemblance to later, baroque descriptions of metamorphosis.11 Brizard’s accommodation and amplification of the Proteus myth does not extend itself to the kind of extreme speculative, allegorical creativity often met with in Renaissance commentaries.12 It does suggest, nevertheless, a serious reflection on Love’s spiritual, even metaphysical, dimensions, one which may be characterized as a tributary of the ideas of Boccaccio and Erasmus on the subject.13 Indeed, Erasmus gives voice, in his famous Enchiridion, to a moral interpretation which resonates at several moments in Brizard’s verse narrative: “What is more like Proteus than the passions and lusts of fools, when they bring on first bestial desire, then wild rage, poisoned jealousy, and then only more and more monstrosities of vice?”14 The Metamorphoses Amoris, and in particular the twentieth poem, offer a somewhat more lighthearted illustration of Cupid’s distinctly protean tendencies. The final poem of Brizard’s collection presents a long, complex account of numerous metamorphoses, all founded upon the central theme of woman’s changing temper in love relationships. Of all the poems in the volume, it is doubtless this 375-verse narrative of Cupid’s continuous alterations which allows the mythological character’s role as an allegorical figure or vehicle to shine forth most clearly. Even in terms of the collection’s basic linear disposition, it would appear that this final piece fulfils an important structural requirement, one similar to that of an oratorical exordium. Indeed, the poem’s sheer length and the multitudinous variety of objects that it adduces, suggest an effort on the author’s part to encapsulate, in one defining show of rhetorical abundance, the most striking characteristics of the Metamorphosis Amoris as a whole. Here Cupid undergoes no fewer than thirty metamorphoses, the last of which—glossed as Amor conversus in nihilum by a marginal inscription— punctuates this seemingly endless string of mutations in such a way as to highlight the god’s ungraspable, elusive nature. The poem’s opening verses present its lovelorn hero, a youth named Erastes, as he repairs to a solitary forest, at dusk on a cold day during winter. This, explains the poet, is a habit of the long-suffering Erastes who, like the Petrarchan lover, constantly seeks the cover of solitude and

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savage nature in order to avoid others whilst he suffers from desire and unrequited love. In this way, Erastes seeks to cure himself of the wounds inflicted upon him by the cruel object of his passion, a young girl named Microthymé (i.e. “the small-hearted”). The stricken lover is little bothered by the cold; rather, it is the pain of love itself that pushes him to seek refuge in the solitude of the forest. An early five-verse sequence reveals the precise origin of Erastes’ woes. He is being tortured, driven insane, by the incomprehensible fickleness and variability that he perceives in Microthymé: Huc venit solito vehementer saucius igne Microthymes. Quae sic coeptos variaret amores, Et modo securos, tristes modo fingeret, et se Dissimilemque sui, similemque Cupidine falso Monstraret: nec erat quod consequeretur Erastes.15

The pleading Erastes invokes a famous Virgilian figure, the oracular oak from the Chaonian forest,16 asking it to explain the girl’s endless reversals and deceits—tot fraudes, tot perjuri—, thus to reveal the intention, whatever it may be, of such unfathomable inconstancy. After a sudden movement of sprouting leaves accompanied by a radiant flash of light, a divine voice emerges from the sacred bark and addresses the desperate, kneeling suppliant.17 Hence the invocation has successfully summoned the presence of divinity, and the anguished, enraptured youth now awaits whatever revelations the sacred tree may offer. Brizard’s language in the verses describing the oracular divinity’s manifestation tends to underscore the unusual, indeed supernatural, character of its presence. His use of the verb refulgere, for example, captures the radiating splendour of the lightning which flashes on both sides of the oak tree.18 It is only after this spectacular show of celestial radiance that the oracle deigns to speak forth from within the bark and the branches. Here Brizard ascribes to the oak a solemn speech of thirty-five hexameters. The oracle begins with cold reasoning, by asking the lovesick boy why he wastes his time in such idle speculation on the fleeting emotions of a girl. Why indeed does he waste his time in such constantly fruitless effort? Love, it declares, possesses evil, transformative powers much akin to those of crafty Proteus. Any attempt to bind or contain them shall only prove to be futile. In order to convince the listener of this, the oracle begins with a description of Proteus’ powers of mutability: Blande puer patrisque tui, matrisque voluptas, Cur operam infoelix misere deperdis Eraste?

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Nescis ut Thetros soboles Neptunia Proteus Assolet in varias corpus traducere formas? Hic modo fit serpens: modo curvis unguibus ales. Cum placet aequorei sumens imitamina piscis Vivit aquis: vento motas aspergine naves Irrorat: circum cauda luditque bisulca. Cum placet induitur furiosi terga leonis: Vel celerem se fingit aequum, vel saxa, vel ignem Quid non in formis Proteus audetque, facitque? Pluribus Idalius format sua membra Cupido.19

The last verse in this sequence, which suddenly introduces the figure of Cupid, is remarkable for its lack of syntactical markers or of ordering, dispositional words that link it to the preceding verses on Proteus. The pertinence of this mythological reference is nevertheless, by virtue of its position, clearly to be understood as a comparison to the collection’s central personage, namely Amor or Cupid. Brizard here uses the topographical epithet Idalius suggestively to evoke what is perhaps Cupid’s most celebrated metamorphosis. This refers to the episode occurring near the end of the Aeneid’s first book, where Venus, seeking to unite Virgil’s hero with Queen Dido, “pours over the limbs of Ascanius (Aeneas’ son) the dew of gentle repose and, fondling him in her bosom, uplifts him with divine power to Idalia’s high groves, where soft marjoram enwraps him in flowers and the breath of its sweet shade,”20 so that, back in Carthage, “Cupid, changed in face and form, may come in the stead of sweet Ascanius, and by his gentle gifts kindle the queen to madness and send the flame into her very marrow.”21 The addition of this one verse with reference to Amor confirms the entire passage’s significance, as Proteus’ dynamics of perpetual transformation are grafted upon the figure of the Love-god. Now, this tendency of Cupid to manifest himself suddenly, having borrowed the visage of another character, is not altogether unknown to French poets during the Renaissance. A remarkable Latin example of this is to be found in an early poem by the soon-to-be Calvinist Reformer Theodore of Beza. In the first of the four Sylvae that Beza published in his 1548 Juvenilia collection, a lengthy verse preface to the penitential Psalms, Cupid is explicitly represented as a divinity given to the arts of deceit and of transformation. As the swift-moving divinity seeks shelter one day at dusk, he spies the comely figure of Bathsheba, the object of King David’s shameful lust. In Beza’s fable, the son of Venus contemplates her in admiration, noting her beauty’s perfections, then adopts an ethereal bodily form undetectable to mortals:

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Proteus and the Pursuit of Cupid . . . et subito, pharetraque arcuque relictis, Aereum sumit corpus (mirabile dictu) Corporeis tantum rarum oculis, ut cernere nemo Mortalis possit, quantumvis cernat acute.22

Thus disguised, and protected against discovery, Cupid decides to infiltrate and inhabit the body of Bathsheba herself, into which he enters without trouble, like a ray of light. An early poem by Erasmus himself, written in elegiac distiches, also evokes the transformative powers of love.23 Working in the tradition of the Petrarchian Trionfo d’Amore motif, the young Erasmus enumerates several of Cupid’s more celebrated victims. The names of Hercules, Aeaces, Dido, Pyramus and Thisbe, as well as Samson and Solomon, are all adduced as testimony to the god’s irresistible might. In an anaphoric sequence, Erasmus twice uses the famous Virgilian phrase omnia vincit amor,24 then modifies it several verses later in order to underscore the love-god’s penchant for inducing passionate, emotional change: Omnia vertit amor, facit insipidos sapientes Atque Argi cecus lumina cecat amor. Omnia vertit amor: mutum facit esse disertum, In puerosque senes vertit amatus amor.25

Young, Latinizing humanists are hardly alone in exploiting this traditional theme, in their early poetic writings which may often correctly be regarded as exercises of Latin style. Poets writing in the vernacular also frequently refer to Cupid’s talents in the area of shape-shifting and disguise. In the ninth sonnet of Joachim Du Bellay’s Olive, for example, Cupid is suddenly revealed to be the lurking presence that the poet had taken for “le gracieux Zéphire,” a benign wind-god.26 Brizard’s comparison of Amor’s deceitful wiles to Proteus’ incessant metamorphoses thus constitutes another inventive contribution to this well-worked commonplace. Following the initial assimilation of the two mutable divinities, the next sixteen verses of Brizard’s final poem provides a description of Cupid’s remarkable powers of metamorphosis which indeed seem even more formidable than those of Proteus himself. In the art of deceit and transformation, it would appear that the son of Venus surpasses even the mysterious sea-dwelling divinity. Love, according to Brizard’s oracle, is “an animal that lives on wind and air,” one who “changes even his colours to suit the varied hues of each new land.”27 Poet and oracle attribute to this fearsome little deity a reach of powers commensurate with the very dimensions of Nature herself. The variety of hues proper to Iris, Juno’s

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variegated messenger, seems an appropriate analogy to the diversity of Cupid’s repertoire: Denique quam vario spectatur in aethere vultu Nuncia Iunonis dominae Thaumantias Iris? Cyprius ipse puer formis sua terga figurat Pluribus, et vultum species alternat in omnes. Ipse sibi vultus tot habet, quot pontus arenas: Quot segetes messis, quot poma autumnus: et aer Quot volucres: quot habet stellantia lumina coelum.28

It is at this point that the oracle’s revelation comes to an end, and the voice leaves its hearer with a final warning. The god of love, it declares, often frequents this very part of the forest and even practices its metamorphoses here. As a last utterance, the voice adds ominously: “Just wait, you shall see,” then trails off.29 This oracular speech has thus served to initiate the suffering lover to the arcane mysteries of his maddening illness. The lesson that it provides is little more than an introduction, an intriguing foretaste of what is about to unfold itself before Erastes’ bewildered gaze. At the moment that the oracle becomes silent once again and the poem returns to its narrative mode, Brizard carefully underlines the resolutely visual character of the event that is about to be told. Trembling and fearful, Erastes, as he cowers by the tree’s trunk to hide himself is nonetheless described as a “spectator” latuit spectator Erastes/ Arboris ad trucum . . . . He watches, dumbstruck, as a succession of rapid and detailed metamorphoses parades itself magnificently before him. As such, it may be said that the first 73 verses of Brizard’s final poem constitute a descriptive framing device, setting the stage for the remarkable and colourful 211-verse narrative spectacle that follows it. Here the poet puts forth a veritable catalogue of both animals and inanimate things, for each of which he is at pains to elaborate some kind of visual portrait. First to appear is a series of ferocious predators, beginning with the lion sporting a great, golden mane, followed in descending order by several others including the tiger and the bear: Ecce Amor emergit fulvo crudelis in armo, Atque jubas collo circum diffusus, habebat Ore suos rictus, quales decet esse leonis. Venit et Hircanae maculosus tigridis instar: Totus saevitiam torto spirabat in ore, Ungue cruentato, pastis et sanguine praedae Dentibus: is telum cursu penetrabile vicit. Post paulo venit Lybica villosior ursa:

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Proteus and the Pursuit of Cupid Pondere ventris iners, dura cervice, pedumque Ut solet esse hominum patulo discrimine tardus.30

This first series of images offers a representative sample of Brizard’s illustrative technique in this long list of constantly-changing objects. It presents Ovidian echoes, as exemplified by the descriptive association of the epithet villosior with ursa,31 and the use of the ablative sanguine with the participle of the verb pascere,32 but in general exhibits few wholly formulaic poetic borrowings. The list’s orderly beginning, which seemingly sets forth a hierarchical taxonomy of the animal kingdom, soon degenerates into a kind of random chaos, characterized by its unpredictable succession of objects with no apparent generic relation to one another. Indeed, after the Lion, tiger and bear have been described, Brizard adds to these three majestic animals several others in descending order, namely a coyote, a wolf, a snake, a donkey, a satyr and a wild boar. They are then followed by a wide array of both animate and inanimate things. No discernible logical or formal principle governs the order in which Cupid manifests himself variously as a double-bladed sword, a rock, a rolling river, pitch, a French hen, a mosquito, a fly, Death herself, a beautiful young boy, a misshapen elderly woman, a bee, a viper, the Sun, a dark cloud, a Greek column, a fragile bubble, a feather, a glass plane and the Lernean Hydra. This eclectic, highly-varied and apparently random list of forms successively adopted by the boy-god is reminiscent of the various and discreet objects often described in the epigrams of the Greek Anthology, a source available to humanist poets and consulted by them with increasing regularity at the midpoint of the sixteenth century, as James Hutton’s classic work has aptly demonstrated.33 Another possible influence is the Anacreontic corpus which was published, with an accompanying Latin version, by Henri Estienne as early as 1554.34 This second epigrammatic model thus constitutes a highly topical, even fashionable, reference at the time when Brizard’s work comes into print. Even poets writing in the French vernacular make extensive and detailed use of the famed collection with almost no delay. A brief, lighthearted ode by Pierre de Ronsard, for example, displays a similar list of metamorphoses: Plusieurs de leurs cors denués Se sont veuz en diverse terre Miraculeusement mués, L’un en serpent, et l’autre en pierre, L’un en fleur, l’autre en abrisseau, L’un en loup, l’autre en colombelle,

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L’un se vit changer en ruisseau, Et l’autre devint arondelle.35

Ronsard’s description evokes a series of metamorphoses to be found especially in Ovid, which narrate the destinies of various lovers transformed as a result of their amorous passion. The wide diversity in this list is quite similar to that of Brizard’s catalogue, except that it provides no context or details beyond the name of the objects themselves. In this singular poem which describes a long series of rapidly changing figures, the Latin author presents his reader with a more epigrammatic sequence of portraits, not unlike the ones which appear with imaged engravings in contemporary emblem collections. No rigid norm governs the dimensions of the portraits, all of which range in length from two (In vulpem, In viperam) to ten (In Asinum) to sixteen verses (In muscam), each separate figure receiving its own peculiar treatment. Setting formal considerations aside, perhaps the one consistent feature of each description is the poet’s attempt to characterize the object in such a way as to highlight its particular resemblance to the instability and fickleness of love. This rhetorical trait is most conspicuous in some of the longer descriptive portraits, as one significant example shall sufficiently demonstrate. Brizard’s ten-verse poetic image of Cupid transformed into a serpent exhibits a disposition of elements which begins with a detailed, realistic depiction of the slithering reptile, followed by a conclusive observation wherein the god of love is mentioned by name. After the image of the wolf has so terrified Erastes that he finds himself unable to utter a word, there appears the equally menacing figure of a dusky green serpent, sliding through the grass and making its distinctive hissing sound: Postea caeruleus tanquam per gramina Serpens Irrepit, resonant concusso sibila vento: Squamosusque suos sinuata volumina gyros Intorquet: vibrat linguam de fauce bisulcam: Inficit afflatu terram, plantasque veneno: Atque sua vires aspergine detrahit herbis Stellatus maculis, viridi livore timendus. Quem si tu digitis voluisses stringere, mox mox Ipse viam sibi fecisset. Nam lubricus anguis, Lubricus anguis Amor ferit, et fugit ocyus angue.36

This detailed portrait of the serpent includes a somewhat elaborate scene, which allows the authors to illustrate the devastating effects of the reptile’s venom—indeed of its very breath—on the surrounding flora. Brizard introduces the curious fantasy that one watching might be seized with the

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desire to touch the snake, a creature both fearsome and fascinating. Here finally, as the serpent strikes its victim, the poet names the divinity in disguise and notes that Love, having struck, disappears even more quickly than the biting serpent. Characterized by its stealthy and strangely attractive presence, its lightning-fast, painful bite and its quick disappearance, the snake thus shares many of the traits that distinguish Cupid. Much like Theodore of Beza in his Sylva preface to the penitential Psalms, Brizard here makes the infant son of Venus into a conspicuously diabolical figure. Whilst demonstrating considerable technical facility in these verses, the poet finely adumbrates his vast fresco of the love-god’s protean character, with a troubling, serpentine emblem. Such references to Love’s behaviours and characteristics appear in several of the metamorphic portraits. Brizard concludes the description of the ass, for example, by placing on the lips of Erastes a comparison of that animal to his own beloved Microthymé. Erastes claims that the unpredictable, cold-hearted girl is similarly sluggish and slow of thought; indeed, she is languid to such an extent that no flame of passion can move her.37 Microthymé herself appears, one of Cupid’s many disguises, immediately after the Lernean Hydra. This penultimate metamorphosis provokes a strong reaction on the part of Erastes, who, upon seeing the simulacrum of the young girl appear before him, eagerly leaps forward and moves to clasp her in his arms. The god of love has reserved a cruel surprise for him, however, in the form of a final and truly ultimate metamorphosis: Ibat ut inferret speratis bracchia membris; Dumque putat manibus iam iam retinere, paratque Dicere, nunc nostra es. Fugit ilicet ocyus Euro Non rediturus Amor. Tum se Cytherius heros In nihilum vertit, sedesque revisit avitas . . . .38

Hence disappearance, passing from presence to absence, is Love’s final transformation. This dramatic vanishing movement constitutes perhaps an ironic reference to the negative theological motif of “nothingness” as it manifests itself on several occasions in sixteenth-century poetry and prose.39 Its theological underpinnings are doubtless rather slight in this instance, however, as the poet uses the motif simply as a graceful way of bringing his narrative listing of Cupid’s various forms to a close. Microthymé’s disappearance inspires her lover’s final, plaintive speech wherein he recapitulates the list of visions that he has just encountered. Now, this dynamic kaleidoscope of images takes its primary inspiration from the ancient narratives of Homer, Virgil and Ovid, which

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represent Proteus as a mutable, even ungraspable, sea-shepherd and divinity, the ever-faithful servant of Neptune. All of the metamorphic figures evoked in these classic works’ characterizations of Proteus, as well as several others, appear in the list compiled by Nicolas Brizard as a representation of tricky Cupid’s unfathomable wiles, though not in the same order. It is obvious, from this comparison, that Brizard’s text exhibits at least two fundamental innovations with respect to his ancient sources: (1) he has lengthened considerably the list of described metamorphoses, and (2) he has transferred it from the traditional figure of Proteus to that of Cupid. In addition, each metamorphosis here becomes the object of at least some narrative treatment, instead of simply appearing in the midst of an enumeration. It should also be observed that although Brizard has listed the successive figurations in an order that seemingly defies any overarching, rational and linear disposition, there do appear some discrete associations within the group which are distinctly absent in the ancient sources. Hence his list begins, as already mentioned, with an ordered succession of animals: lion, tiger, bear, fox, wolf, snake, donkey; and contains some suggestive pairings of opposites: a rock followed by a rolling (or inconstant) river, a lovely boy followed by an ugly old woman, the Sun followed by a dark cloud. Perhaps the most conspicuous addition to the traditional list of protean disguises is one which appears toward the end of the metamorphic sequence, where Brizard lists three consecutive “fragile” objects: a bubble, a floating feather and a pane of glass. This underlying theme of fragility is also anticipated by the earlier appearance of an allegorical figure, namely, Death herself, in a metamorphosis described some fifty verses earlier, and itself announces Cupid’s final transformation into “nothing.” These motifs are particularly noteworthy insofar as they have no known antecedent in their relation to the Proteus myth. It seems likely that Brizard has added them, in sequence, as a manner of preparing the final transformation and disappearance of Amor/Cupid. A correlative possibility is that the poet has deliberately sought to amplify—and to narrate with greater thematic precision—the traditional description of Proteus’ rapid disappearance, that of the sea-god plunging quickly into the waves, which is found in similar formulae in both Virgil and Ovid. Such attention, however limited, at once to narrative order and to descriptive amplification, bespeaks a certain effort on the poet’s part to harness the highly-episodic material of Cupid’s protean metamorphoses within the linear plot-structure of a kind of fable. This tendency of Brizard’s final poem is amplified by the traditional moral connotations of the fragility theme, which appears frequently in late-mediaeval meditations

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on the life-cycle and the mortality of man. The bubble motif in particular has a distinguished history in this regard, one which reaches back to Varro’s famous disclaimer in the first lines of his De re rustica, where the aging author explains that he has decided to publish his treatise because, he says, growing older makes one more acutely aware of life’s fleeting, ephemeral quality: “homo bulla est, et eodem magis senex” (“Man is a water bubble, and an old man all the more so”). It appears during the Middle Ages as part of the traditional “misery of man” theme, in texts such as Bernard of Cluny’s De contemptu mundi.40 Then, during the Quattrocento’s final decade, the bolognese humanist Filippo Beroaldo developed it at length, making it the central motif of his Proverbiorum oratio.41 Hence it appears that Brizard’s copious amplification of the protean metamorphosis motif serves as a veritable locus of textual accommodation, inscribing the celebrated late-mediaeval and early humanist meditation on the fragility of life into a rewriting of the classical theme of transformation that takes its origin in Homer. Of course, it is the major innovation in Brizard’s poem, the transfer of the entire metamorphosis motif from Proteus to Cupid, which constitutes its single most striking feature. Already the additional meditation on life’s fleeting duration favours this recasting of the protean metamorphoses, for reasons which Edgar Wind’s important essay on “Amor as a god of Death” makes clear. In an attempt to summarize Pico della Mirandola’s treatment of the Proteus theme, Wind declares genially that “Mutability . . . is the secret gate through which the universal invades the particular.”42 Nicolas Brizard’s illustration of the nature of Love, through an adaptation of the traditional Protean theme of metamorphosis and mutability, reveals anew the enduring contingency of amorous passion and melancholic nothingness, by rehearsing in a variety of guises the delicate fragility that separates them.

Notes 1

Nicolas Brizard, Metamorphoses Amoris. Quibus adjectae sunt Elegiae Amatoriae. Omnia ad imitationem Ovidii (quoad licuit) conscripta, et elaborata: authore Nicolao Brizardo Attigniensi Rhemo (Paris: Maurice Menier and J. Hulpeau, 1556). 2 Pierre de Ronsard, Le second livre des Hymnes de Ronsard . . . . Paris: André Wechel, 1556. 3 Maurice F. Verdier, “Les introuvables editions des ‘Odes d’Anacréon’ (Rémy Belleau),” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 33 (1971). 4 François Habert, Métamorphoses de Cupido, qui se mua en diverses forms . . . (Paris: J. Kerver, 1561).

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On François Habert’s use of Brizard, see my article, “Les Métamorphoses d’Amour (1561) et la personnalité ovidienne de François Habert,” in “Le choix de la langue dans la construction des publics en France à la Renaissance,” ed. R.-C. Breitenstein and T. Vigliano, special issue, Le Français Préclassique 14 (2012). 6 Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Boulliot, Biographie Ardennaise, ou histoire des Ardennais qui se sont fait remarquer par leurs écrits, leurs actions, leurs vertus ou leurs erreurs (Paris: Ledoyen, 1830), vol. 1, 146. 7 Brizard, Metamorphoses Amoris, Aiiv: “Cum in Germania viverem apud illum Hispanum, qui hinc me suam in familiam studiorum gratia adsciverat, scripsi Amoris metamorphoses. Quas totum septennium suppressi: ne praeceps aeditio temeritatem argueret. Tandem hortatu amicorum cogor emittere quod diutius continueram.” 8 Ibid., Aiiiv–ivr: “Formae Amoris quae in hoc libro continentur.” 9 Ibid., 16r–20r: “Amor conversus in varia munuscula ut in in imagunculas, et victorialas, atque similia.” 10 These principal sources are: Homer Odyssey IV.360–570; Virgil Georgics III.388–529; Ovid Metamorphoses VIII.732–37. Brizard’s treatment of the theme attests to a particular preference for the Ovidian source. 11 On this topic, see Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, “La metamorphose animale dans la poésie amoureuse de l’âge baroque,” in La Métamorphose dans la poésie baroque française et anglaise, variations et resurgences, ed. Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1979): 21–32. 12 On this corpus, wherein the link to Cupid apparently goes unmentioned, see Philip Ford, “Protée à la Renaissance: interpretations allégoriques,” in Protée en trompe-l’œil: genèse et survivances d’un mythe d’Homère à Bouchardon, ed. A. Rolet (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009), 365–82. 13 See A. Bartlett. Giamatti, “Proteus Unbound: Some Versions of the Sea-God in the Renaissance,” in Exile and Change in Renaissance Literature, ed. A. Bartlett Giamatti (New Haven: Yale UP, 1984), 122, 141–42. 14 Desiderius Erasmus, Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami recognita et adnotatione critica instructa notisque illustrata, ed. Harry Vredeveld (Amsterdam: Brill, 1995), 5:18c–d: “Quid autem tam Proteus, quam adfectus et cupiditates stultorum, quae cum eas nunc in belluinam libidinem, nunc in iram ferinam, nunc in venenatam invidiam, nunc in alia atque alia vitiorum portent trahunt.” This passage, for which I have retained Giamatti’s translation, is quoted in the aforementioned study, Giamatti, “Proteus Unbound,” 142. 15 Brizard, Metamorphoses Amoris, 40r: “This way he comes, as usual deeply wounded by his flame/ For Microthymé. For this girl varies in such a manner her loves once begun,/ that she makes them seem now contented, now despairing, and shows/ Herself, through the wiles of a false Cupid, at times different and/ At times the same. Nor, indeed, was there anything firm for Erastes to pursue.” 16 Virgil Aeneid III.334–36. 17 Brizard, Metamorphoses Amoris, 40r: “Ilicet ad truncum supplex procumbit Erastes/ Sylvestresque Deos, et quercus numen adorat.” (“Thereupon Erastes falls to his knees before the tree’s trunk/ And adores the Sylvan gods and the divinity of the oak.”)

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Ibid., 40: “Tunc nudos foliis movere cacumina ramos,/ Ac deus intonuit, dextrum, laevumque refulsit.” (“Then the treetops’ bare branches shook with sprouting leaves/ And Jupiter thundered left and right.”) 19 Ibid., 40r–v: “Gentle boy, you who are the delight of your father and of your mother,/ why, Erasté, unhappy wretch, do you thus wend your work in vain?/ Know you not that Neptunian Proteus, the progeny of Thetis,/ is wont to change his body through various forms,/ making himself now a snake, now again a bird of prey with curved talons./ Taking as he pleases the shape of sea-dwelling fishes/ He lives in the water and with his forked tail/ splashes the boats propelled by the wind whilst he plays nearby./ Just as he pleases, also, does he don the skin of a raging lion,/ then fashions himself to be now a plain, now rocks, now fire./ What form will Proteus not dare to try, and even achieve?/ Idalian Cupid also reshapes his limbs in several guises.” 20 Virgil Aeneid I.691–94: “At Venus Ascanio placidam per membra quietem/ Inrigat, et fotum gremio dea tollit in altos/ Idaliae lucos, ubi mollis amaracus illum/ Floribus et dulci aspirans complectitur umbra.” 21 Ibid., I.657–60: “At Cytherea novas artis, nova pectore versat/ Consilia, ut faciem mutates et ora Cupido/ Pro dulci Ascanio veniat, donisque furentem/ Incendat reginam atque ossibus implicet ignem.” 22 Theodore Beza, “Praefatio poetica in Davidicos Psalmos, quos poenitentiales vocant,” in A View from the Palatine: The Juvenilia of Theodore of Beza, ed. Kirk M. Summers (Tempe: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001), 22–25: “. . . and suddenly, having abandoned the quiver and the bow,/ He assumed an ethereal body (a miracle to tell)/ so little perceptible to eyes of the flesh that no one/ Could see it, no matter how acutely they looked.” (My translation, with a borrowing from that of Summers.) 23 Desiderius Erasmus, “Elegia Erasmi de Praepotenti virtute cupidinis pharetrati,” in Opera omnia, 312–16. The Latin text may also be found in idem, The Poems of Desiderius Erasmus, ed. C. Reedijk (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1956), 141– 42. 24 Ibid., in Erasmus, The Poems, 141, lines 19–22: “Omnia vincit amor; adamantea claustra relaxat/ Ferrea ceu stipulam vincula rumpit amor./ Omnis vincit amor sine cede et sanguine certans/ Et domat indomitos non domitandus amor.” 25 Ibid., 142, lines 43–46: “Love transforms all things; he renders the insipid, wise;/ And blind Love makes blind the eyes of Argus./ Love transforms all things; he silences those who chatter/ And beloved Love turns old men into childish boys.” 26 Joachim Du Bellay, Olive, ed. Ernesta Caldarini (Geneva: Droz, 2007), IX, 9– 11: “Que dy-je las! Zephire n’est-ce point,/ C’est toy, Amour, qui voles en ce point,/ Tout à l’entour, et par dedans ces retz . . . .” 27 Brizard, Metamorphoses Amoris, 40v: “Si nescis animal quod vento vivit et aura,/ Disce: capit quotcumque potest reptare colores:/ Admotaque suum varia tellure colorem/ Mutat: et alternis pingit sua membra figuris.” 28 Ibid., 40v: “Finally, with how variable a visage does the daughter of Thaumas, Iris,/ Messenger of mighty Juno, show herself in the heavens?/ The Cyprian lad himself embodies his own figure through many/ Forms, and alters his face in every

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guise./ He possesses as many faces as the sea has grains of sand,/ As the harvest has fields, as the autumn yields fruit,/ As the sky has birds, as the heavens have shimmering lights.” 29 Ibid., 40v–41r: “Saepe solet vultus illic mutare serenos,/ Atque nova tenerum velare in imagine corpus./ Siste (videbis enim) dixit Iovis arbor: et haesit.” (“Often he is wont to change his serene appearance in these parts/ And veil his tender young body with a new image./ ‘Stay, for you shall see’, said the tree sacred to Jupiter, then it stopped.”) 30 Ibid., 41r: “Here cruel Love emerges in his tawny skin,/ And with a mane spreading round his neck, he had/ Gaping jaws for a mouth, such as are worthy of a lion./ He came dappled also, in the image of a Hyrcanian tiger:/ Wholly consumed by cruelty did he breathe through twisted maw,/ With a gory claw, the blood of prey dripping from/ His teeth, swift in his running course he vanquished the piercing arrow./ A bit later he comes again, now more hirsute than an African shebear,/ Hampered by his stomach’s weight, stiff of neck, his feet/ Similar to those of men, with spreading digits slowing his gait.” 31 Cf. Ovid Metamorphoses XII.319, XIII.836. 32 Cf. Ovid Metamorphoses VIII.170, Amores III.viii.10. 33 James Hutton, The Greek Anthology in France and in the Latin Writers of the Netherlands to the Year 1800 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1946): passim. 34 John O’Brien, Anacreon Redivivus: A Study of Anacreontic Translation in MidSixteenth-Century France (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995): 5–48. 35 Pierre de Ronsard, “Ode à sa maîtresse,” in Les Meslanges de Pierre de Ronsard, dédiées à Jan Brinon (Paris: Gilles Corrozet, 1555). Quoted from Pierre de Ronsard, Oeuvres completes, vol. VI, ed. P. Laumonier (Paris: Marcel Didier, 1965), 258. 36 Brizard, Metamorphoses Amoris, 41r: “Thereafter a serpent of seemingly dusky green hue stole/ Through the grass, a resounding hiss vibrating in the wind./ As it wraps scaly coils into winding/ Rolls, it flicks a forked tongue in its throat,/ Infecting the earth and the plants with venomous breath/ and dripping saliva which deprives the grass of living force;/ Such is this starry, spotted creature, in its verdant malice most fearsome./ This snake, if you ventured to touch it with your fingers, would/ Very quickly forge a path for itself. For as a gliding serpent,/ A gliding serpent Love strikes, and flees even more quickly than a serpent.” 37 Ibid., 41v: “En mea Microthyme tarda segnissima mente:/ Usqueadeo languens nullo ut moveatur ab igne.” 38 Ibid., 44r: “He went to throw his arms around her desired limbs/ But at the very moment when he attempted finally to seize her with his hands,/ And prepared to say: ‘now, you are mine,’ just then, Love fled, faster than the west wind,/ Never to return. At that moment, the Cytherean hero/ Turned into nothing and returned to his ancestral home.” 39 See Jan Miernowski, Le Dieu Néant. Théologies négatives à l’aube des temps modernes (Leiden: Brill, 1998), passim; idem, Signes dissimilaires. La quête des noms divins dans la poésie française de la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 1997), 91– 126.

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40

Bernard of Cluny, Scorn for the World: Bernard of Cluny’s De contemptu mundi, ed. Ronald E. Pepin (East Lansing, Colleagues Press, 1991), 63, I, lines 859–62: “Turbo levissimus atque brevissimus est homo flatus./ Ipse laboribus, ipse doloribus est generatus./ Hic caput exerit, emicat, interit, est quasi bulla;/ Bulla citacius, aura fugacius haud perit ulla.” (“Man is a spinning top most fleeting, a breath most brief. He is born to hardships, born to sorrows. He thrusts out his head, he springs forth, he dies: he is like a bubble. No bubble vanishes more quickly, no breeze more swiftly.”) English translation R. E. Pepin. 41 On this subject, see my article, “Homo bulla est: Proverbe et enseignement éthique chez Filippo Beroaldo l’Ancien,” in “Les proverbes: réalités et representations,” ed. M. N. Fouligny and M. Roig Miranda, special issue, Europe XVI–XVII 18 (2014). 42 Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaisance (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), 161.

Works Cited Sources Beza, Theodore. A View from the Palatine: the Juvenilia of Theodore of Beza. Edited by Kirk M. Summers. Tempe: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001. Brizard, Nicolas. Metamorphoses Amoris. Quibus adjectae sunt Elegiae Amatoriae. Omnia ad imitationem Ovidii (quoad licuit) conscripta, et elaborata: authore Nicolao Brizardo Attigniensi Rhemo. Paris: Maurice Menier and J. Hulpeau, 1556. Cluny, Bernard of. Scorn for the World: Bernard of Cluny’s De Contemptu Mundi. Edited and translated by Ronald E. Pepin. East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1991. Du Bellay, Joachim. Olive. Edited by Ernesta Caldarini. Geneva: Droz, 2007. Erasmus, Desiderius. Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami recognita et adnotatione critica instructa notisque illustrata. Vol. 1–7. Edited by Harry Vredeveld. Amsterdam: Brill, 1995. —. The Poems of Desiderius Erasmus. Edited by C. Reedijk. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1956. Habert, François. Métamorphoses de Cupido, qui se mua en diverses formes . . . . Paris: J. Kerver, 1561. Ovid. Metamorphoses 1–8. Translated by Frank Justus Miller, revised by George Goold. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1916. Ronsard, Pierre de. Le second livre des Hymnes de Ronsard . . . . Paris: André Wechel, 1556. —. Oeuvres completes. Vol. 6. Edited by Paul Laumonier. Paris: Marcel Didier, 1965. Virgil. Georgics; Aeneid 1–6. Translated by H. Rushton Fairclough, revised by George Goold. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1999.

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Secondary Literature Boulliot, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph. Biographie Ardennaise, ou histoire des Ardennais qui se sont fait remarquer par leurs écrits, leurs actions, leurs vertus ou leurs erreurs. Vol. 1. Paris: Ledoyen, 1830. Ford, Philip. “Protée à la Renaissance: interpretations allégoriques.” In Protée en trompe-l’œil: genèse et survivances d’un mythe d’Homère à Bouchardon. Edited by A. Rolet, 365–82. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009. Giamatti, A. Bartlett. “Proteus Unbound: Some Versions of the Sea-God in the Renaissance.” In Exile and Change in Renaissance Literature. Edited by A. Bartlett Giamatti, 115–50. New Haven: Yale UP, 1984. Hutton, James. The Greek Anthology in France and in the Latin Writers of the Netherlands to the Year 1800. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1946. Mathieu-Castellani, Gisèle. “La metamorphose animale dans la poésie amoureuse de l’âge baroque.” In La Métamorphose dans la poésie baroque française et anglaise, variations et résurgences. Edited by Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, 21– 32. Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1979. Miernowski, Jan. Le Dieu Néant. Théologies négatives à l’aube des temps modernes. Leiden: Brill, 1998. —. Signes dissimilaires. La quête des noms divins dans la poésie française de la Renaissance. Geneva: Droz, 1997. Nassichuk, John. “Les Métamorphoses d’Amour (1561) et la personnalité ovidienne de François Habert.” In “Le choix de la langue dans la construction des publics en France à la Renaissance.” Edited by R.-C. Breitenstein and T. Vigliano. Special issue, Le Français Préclassique 14 (2012): 157–69. —. “Homo bulla est: Proverbe et enseignement éthique chez Filippo Beroaldo l’Ancien.” In “Les proverbes: réalités et représentations.” Edited by M. N. Fouligny and M. Roig Miranda. Special issue, Europe XVI–XVII 18 (2014): 205–21. O’Brien, John. Anacreon redivivus: A Study of Anacreontic Translation in MidSixteenth-Century France. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Verdier, Maurice F. “Les introuvables editions des ‘Odes d’Anacréon’ (Rémy Belleau).” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 33 (1971): 359–63. Wind, Edgar. Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), 161.

CHIRON AND THE AMBIGUITY OF PRINCELY POWER: MACHIAVELLI’S INTERPRETATION OF A MYTHOLOGICAL CHARACTER ANDREA POLEGATO UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS

This article examines the original re-elaboration of the myth of Chiron in Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, written in just few months in 1513 after a terrible year marked by the end of the republic of Florence, the return to power of the Medici family, and Machiavelli’s imprisonment and subsequent exile. In the dedicatory letter, introducing the opuscolo (little work) to Lorenzo, grandson of Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449–1492) and prominent member of the Medici family in Florence, Machiavelli presents his political treatise as un dono (a gift) in order to acquistar grazia (acquire favor) with the prince. He offers to Lorenzo, who now holds power in Florence, his own knowledge acquired through the study of ancient history and through his experience of modern affairs.1 As Albert Russell Ascoli pointed out, it is a practical knowledge offered to a “powerful patron who, it is hoped, will reciprocate.”2 Despite his low status and humble origins, Machiavelli dares to address the prince directly because as he says, the art of politics is like painting a landscape in which the perspective from the top of the mountains is combined with that from the plain. Similarly, politics requires a double perspective; the perspective of the prince should be paired with that of the people in order to have an effective overview of politics. These two metaphors—politics as landscape painting and the book as an interchange between prince and subject— underscore Machiavelli’s belief that the knowledge he is willing to provide represents a crucial element for Lorenzo’s power. Machiavelli also formulates a hope at the end of the dedicatory letter. As he writes:

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Chiron and the Ambiguity of Princely Power Your Magnificence, take this small gift in the spirit with which I send it. If your Magnificence considers and reads it diligently, you will learn from it my extreme desire [uno extremo mio desiderio] that you arrive at the greatness that fortune and your other qualities promise you.3

Machiavelli’s gift, his own knowledge, is not just a mere result of his studies and experiences but also contains an extreme desire (extremo mio desiderio) to merge with Lorenzo’s fortune and qualities.4 In other words, the advisor’s prudence aspires to mingle with the ruler’s virtue, and this word-pairing, prudence and virtue, accompanies the reader throughout the entire book.5 For example, in Chapter 7, Machiavelli presents Cesare Borgia, also known as Duke Valentino, as the best model for political action and defines him as prudente e virtuoso (prudent and virtuous).6 In Chapter 3, while introducing the most important subject of his book—the discussion of new principalities—the ancient Romans are indicated as another example worthy of imitation on account of virtù e prudentia loro (their virtue and prudence). Machiavelli adds: For the Romans did . . . what all wise princes should do: they not only have to have regard for present troubles but also for future ones, and they have to avoid these with all their industry because, when one foresees from afar, one can easily find a remedy for them but when you wait until they come close to you, the medicine is not in time because the disease has become incurable.7

In this passage prudence is defined as the ability to foresee difficulties before they become too overwhelming to be faced. Virtue, on the other hand, means industry, will, and force.8 We find once again prudence and virtue, and the necessity of their marriage, in chapter 26, at the end of the treatise, where Machiavelli observes: [In Italy] there is great virtue in the limbs, if it were not lacking in the heads. . . . everything follows from the weakness at the head, because those who know are not obeyed, and each thinks he knows . . . .9

By detecting the lack of leadership, of “head,” in the virtuous body of Italy (i.e., its people), Machiavelli is urging the Medici to take advantage of this opportunity and combine the virtue of the people with the prudence of a ruler. The word-pairing prudence and virtue and the necessity of their fusion is also present in Machiavelli’s re-elaboration of the myth of Chiron in chapter 18 that has been considered the most scandalous part in an already scandalous book. This chapter belongs to the central section of The Prince

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dedicated to the qualities that the new prince should have in order to seize power and maintain it. This section addresses issues that have often been raised in ancient and Humanist specula principis, the texts dedicated to the education of young princes. In this section, Machiavelli takes into consideration questions such as if the prince should be feared or loved, if it is more important to be considered generous or parsimonious, etc. Chapter 18 begins by discussing if the prince should be faithful or astute, especially in war. Machiavelli first compares an ideal world prizing integrity and honesty with the experience, drawn from history, according to which: The princes who have done great things are those who have taken little account of faith . . .; and in the end they have overcome those who have founded themselves on loyalty.10

Machiavelli explains this fact by distinguishing dua generazione di combattere (“two kinds of combat”): Thus, you must know there are two ways of combat: one with laws, the other with force. The first is proper to men, the second to beasts; but because the first is often not enough, one must have recourse to the second. Therefore it is necessary for a prince to know well how to use [sapere bene usare] the beast and the man.11

In Machiavelli’s terminology, the word “laws” (legge) usually summarizes a variety of terms such as: faith, trust, religion, agreements, and reputation. In the context of this chapter, which considers if a prince should maintain his integrity or not, it is clear that “laws” signifies keeping one’s own word. While this habit qualifies a man as a man, the use of force belongs to wild animals. Cicero, who posed the same question, concluded that the former should be prized while the latter should be taken into consideration only when there is no other alternative. For Machiavelli, it is not a matter of choosing or prizing one way over the other, but rather of being ready to utilize both of them. Combining the way of man and that of beast for a prince is so important that Machiavelli chooses to employ a powerful image to explain it: the figure of Chiron, the centaur.12 Chiron, half god half horse, is a legendary figure in Greek culture. Despite his physical appearance, the son of Cronus (Saturn) does not share any of the characteristics of the centaurs. According to Homer, Ovid, and Pliny the elder, the centaurs are notorious for their beastly desires, and brutal habits.13 They are depicted as wild creatures dedicated to drunkenness, lust, and deception. Chiron’s behavior is quite the opposite:

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despite his animal-half nature, he is a divine creature, peace-loving, and kind. He is learned, skilled in medicine, astrology, and music, and therefore is the tutor of a number of important mythological figures such as, Achilles, Theseus, Asclepius, etc. It is on account of all Chiron’s skills that Ancient and Medieval authors (Apollodorus, Plutarch, Dante) and humanist commentators (Salutati, Landino) have usually stressed Chiron’s divine nature while his beastly qualities are hardly mentioned. Beyond the differences among their interpretations, these authors see in Chiron a symbol of the importance of reason (metaphysical or moral) in guiding low instincts and elevating man spiritually.14 Machiavelli’s interpretation is different. He describes the Centaur in this way: This role was taught covertly to princes by ancient writers, who wrote that Achilles, and many other ancient princes, were given to Chiron the centaur to be raised [nutrire], so that he would look after them with his discipline [i.e., teaching]. To have as teacher a half-beast, half-man means nothing other than that a prince needs to know how to use both natures; and the one without the other is not lasting.15

Machiavelli clearly states the importance of cultivating both natures, without prioritizing the man over the beast or vice-versa. The preference of either one is just a matter of circumstances, “because the [laws are] often not enough.” Consequently, Chiron is the tutor of princes not on account of his useful skills but rather for his twofold nature, beast and man. He is therefore entitled to teach both ways: laws, the way of man, and force, the way of the beast. This interpretation of Chiron was widely criticized, especially in France in the second part of the 16th century. For example, Innocent Gentillet, who wrote the essay Anti-Machiavel, challenges Machiavelli’s emphasis on Chiron’s bestial side and, by reaffirming the humanist interpretation of this myth, rejects the idea that the centaur had a beastly nature.16 Chiron is represented as a centaur only because of his skill in hunting.17 Machiavelli seems to confirm Gentillet’s criticism by focusing mainly on its bestial side: Thus, since a prince is compelled of necessity to know well how to use the beast, he should pick the fox and the lion, because the lion does not defend itself from snares and the fox does not defend itself from wolves. So one needs to be a fox to recognize snares and a lion to frighten the wolves. Those who stay simply with the lion do not understand this. A prudent lord, therefore, cannot observe faith, nor should he, when such observance

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turns against him, and the causes that made him promise have been eliminated.18

It is interesting to notice that Machiavelli defines the beast in two different ways. While in the previous passage, usare la bestia (“using the beast”) means making use of force, in the passage above it means using force and fraud. Between the two definitions there is a discrepancy. According to Mario Martelli, this discrepancy can be explained if we compare this part of chapter 18 with its most likely source, Cicero’s On Obligations.19 In his writing, Cicero first opposes man and beast in comparing the two ways of fighting, and then, in a later passage, links astuteness and force to the fox and the lion as symbols for the two ways of violating the laws.20 While in Cicero the two passages clearly refer to two different contexts, Machiavelli conflates them, which creates the two interpretations of the beast. However, this discrepancy also reveals Machiavelli’s attempt to redefine the beastly nature. The beastly nature that Machiavelli urges the prince to adopt is not a mere call for the use of either astuteness or force. Therefore, it cannot be confused simply with the human low instincts, as Gentillet implies. In order to better understand, Machiavelli’s attempt, it is worthwhile to compare his interpretation of the fox and the lion with those of two other authors who have linked them to human behaviors. Dante Alighieri, whose description of Chiron probably served as a source for Machiavelli, presents the two animals as symbols of two opposite behaviors.21 In the Inferno, Guido da Montefeltro, Lord of Urbino and one of the great Ghibelline captains, says: While I still had the form of the bones and the flesh my mother gave me, all my actions were not those of a lion, but those of a fox[.]22

In other words, one can choose either nature. Cicero, in the passage discussing the two ways of violating the laws, “inflicting injustice,” writes: There are two ways of inflicting injustice, by force or by deceit. Deceit is the way of the humble fox, force that of the lion. Both are utterly alien to human beings, but deceit is the more odious.23

Beyond their different allegorical use of the fox and the lion, Cicero and Dante do not consider the two animals together, and they never associate the two beastly behaviors to the same individual.

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On the contrary, in introducing the two beasts Machiavelli makes an interesting move. The fox and the lion are not treated just as fixed symbols but are caught in action, competing with other beasts—the lion dealing with snares, and the fox fighting against a pack of wolves. As there are only two “ways of combat,” as Machiavelli says, the only method applicable in this context is that of the beast. Moreover, this conflict is made even more dramatic by its life-threatening potential. In a kind of practical experiment, the two beasts are placed in front of unsuitable enemies and therefore are likely to succumb to them. In an opposite situation, they would more likely succeed. Machiavelli’s choice to depict the two animals in this way conveys three ideas. As mentioned above, competing with other beasts makes laws helpless and the use of force necessary. Then, each animal behaves in a mechanical way: the fox possesses the cunning intelligence to avoid snares while the lion has the strength to terrify (sbigottire) the wolves. Finally, taken separately, the fox and the lion reveal their own inadequacy in facing unfitting enemies. In order to make an effective use of the way of the beast, the prince has to consider that fox and lion are interdependent and not self-sufficient. In the following chapter, Septimius Severus (145–211) is the only worthy of imitation among the roman emperors of the same period. Although Severus was as rapacissim[o] (“the most rapacious”) as Commodus, Antoninus, and Maximinus, he did not come to a bad end because he knew well: “how to use the persons of the fox and the lion, whose natures I say above [in chapter 18] are necessary for a prince to imitate.”24 It is now possible to better understand the aforementioned discrepancy between the two definitions of beast employed in the text. Chiron teaches both ways, the way of man and the way of the beast. Moreover, with having two opposite natures, he is the only one entitled to teach how the way of the beast should be applied to human conflict. This way is originally conceived by Machiavelli as a combination of cunning intelligence, represented by the fox, and force and energy, represented by the lion. In the interdependency of the two natures, there emerges once again Machiavelli’s urge to pair prudence and virtue.25 Indeed, the prince who is able to follow the way of the beast is called prudente (“prudent lord”). In another writing, The life of Castruccio Castracani, which Machiavelli dedicates to Castruccio, an ambitious condottiero and lord of Lucca in the 14th century, the protagonist is described as a kind of centaur: “he first became an excellent horseman, riding even the wildest horse with skill,” and at the same time known for his prudenza e animo (“prudence and courage”).26

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As we have seen, Machiavelli’s desire to merge prudence and virtue is expressed throughout the whole treatise. However, in this context the two virtues merge at the level of the beast, giving an original connotation to the notion of prudence itself. In the previous century, Giovanni Pontano had already separated the idea of prudence from justice. In other words, for more than a millennium, the concept of prudence was conceived within the boundaries of man’s political community and its laws, i.e. justice. In such a context, a man was considered virtuous on account of the effects of his actions on the community. As an important consequence of Pontano’s move, prudence became the primary political virtue. By disconnecting prudence from the conceptual horizon defined by justice, its efficacy was measured only through fortune and contingency. In The Prince, Machiavelli follows this interpretation. Indeed, prudence is defined as the ability to foresee difficulties before they become overwhelming. At the same time, through the image of Chiron, Machiavelli enriches it with beastly features. As Ménissier has recently pointed out, the prudence envisioned by Machiavelli and symbolized by Chiron’s twofold nature has interesting points of contact with the cunning intelligence represented by another Greek mythological figure, Mètis.27 According to Détienne and Vernant, who have completed the most important work on this subject, Mètis represents the kind of judgment that knows how to adapt to difficulties, combining “flair . . ., foresight, adaptability, pretense, resourcefulness, vigilance,” precisely the definition of prudence employed by Machiavelli in The Prince.28 In Greek literature, she is often associated with beasts, such as the fox and the octopus. As Machiavelli’s lion that terrifies (sbigottisce) the wolves, the octopus paralyzes its enemies. Mètis is also linked to the specific senses of smelling and tasting, which are central metaphors in Machiavelli’s writings as well. In chapter 6, Machiavelli justifies the imitation of the deeds of great men of the Past, by writing: “a prudent man should always enter upon the paths beaten by great men, and imitate those who have been most excellent, so that if his own virtue does not reach that far, it is at least in the odor of it.”29 Sapore (“flavor”) is mentioned in the Discourses on the first Ten Books of Titus Livius (1513– 19). In the introduction to the first book, Machiavelli discusses the weakness of modern Italians and, once again, urges the importance of learning from history: This, in my opinion, arises not so much from the weakness into which the present religion has brought the world or from the harm done to many Christian provinces and cities by an idle ambition as from not possessing a

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The connection between Machiavelli’s interpretation of the myth of Chiron and the myth of Metis is compelling and a further investigation— which I intend to carry out in the future—would shed a light upon Machiavelli’s attempt to redefine the notion of prudence as it is related to the image of the centaur.

Conclusion In The Prince, Machiavelli defines a new political model the prince should imitate. This new form of power is summarized by the figure of Chiron who, first of all, combines man and beast. As we have seen, its beastly side is also the effective combination of two opposite qualities, that of the fox and that of the lion, and the notion of prudence itself is enriched by these beastly features. Finally, Chiron is also a teacher for princes. Indeed, it is not by chance that, among all the disciples of Chiron, Machiavelli mentions only Achilles, a warring prince, rather than, for example, Asclepius the god of medicine. In the necessary relationship between the teacher and his princely pupils, there emerges the same desire expressed by Machiavelli at the end of the dedicatory letter: his knowledge should be merged with Lorenzo’s fortune and power. Through the image of Chiron, the prince is reminded once again that he cannot achieve his goals without the knowledge that Machiavelli is eager to provide.

Notes 1

In Machiavelli’s letter to his friend Francesco Vettori, dated 10 December 1513, Machiavelli wrote that the Prince stems from his fifteen-year study and practice of arte dello stato (the art of the state), in which he learned the administrative and diplomatic duties and procedures while he served the Florentine Republic. Niccolò Machiavelli, Lettere, ed. Franco Gaeta (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961), 301–6. 2 Albert Russell Ascoli, “Machiavelli’s gift of counsel,” in Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature, ed. Albert Russell Ascoli and Victoria Ann Kahn (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 219. 3 “Pigli adunque vostra Magnificenzia questo piccolo dono con quello animo che io ‘l mando; il quale se da quella fia diligentemente considerato e letto, vi conoscerà dentro uno extremo mio desiderio che lei pervenga a quella grandezza che la fortuna e l’altre sua qualità le promettano.” Italics are mine. For the translation of the Prince, I refer to Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Harvey Claflin Mansfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); as for the original text, I follow Niccolò Machiavelli, De Principatibus, ed. Giorgio Inglese (Rome:

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Istituto Storico Italiano, 1994). From now on, I will indicate, after the title, the pages from the English translation in italics and the pages from the original text in Roman style. The Prince, 3, 183. 4 As Mario Martelli has pointed out in his edition of the Prince, the expression used here by Machiavelli appears to be loose if not wrong. Lorenzo cannot accept the little gift with the same spirit with which Machiavelli sends it, which is Machiavelli’s own desire for Lorenzo to achieve the greatness etc. However, at the same time Machiavelli’s inaccuracy in this passage bears witness to his strong desire to combine his knowledge with Lorenzo’s fortune and power. Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Principe, ed. Mario Martelli (Rome: Salerno, 2006), 61, note 36. 5 The idea of using the word-pairing virtue and prudence as an interpretative key for the analysis of Machiavelli’s re-elaboration of the myth of Chiron comes from Professor Massimo Scalabrini, who is currently working on an essay on virtue and prudence in Machiavelli and Francis Bacon. I therefore thank him for letting me read his work before its publication. The link between prudence and virtue is a pivotal concept in Machiavelli’s thought since his first political writings. In the Parole da dirle sopra la provisione del danaio (1503) Machiavelli writes: “Tucte le città . . . hanno hauto per defensione loro le forze mescolate con la prudentia: perché questa non basta sola et quelle, o non conducono le cose, o conducte non le mantengano. Sono dunque queste due cose el nervo di tucte le signorie.” (Italics are mine). Niccolò Machiavelli, “Parole da dirle sopra la provisione del danaio,” in I primi scritti politici, 1499–1512: Nascita di un pensiero e di uno stile, ed. Jean-Jacques Marchand (Padova: Antenore, 1975), 412. 6 The Prince, 27, 208. Cesare Borgia (1475–1507) was an Italian condottiero and the son of Pope Alexander VI. 7 “Perché ’ Romani feciono . . . quello che tutti e principi savi debbono fare: li quali non solamente hanno ad avere riguardo alli scandoli presenti, ma a’ futuri, et a quelli con ogni industria obviare; perché, prevedendosi discosto, vi si rimedia facilmente, ma, aspettando che ti si appressino, la medicina non è a tempo, perché la malattia è diventata incurabile.” Ibid., 12, 191. 8 For an analysis of the word pairing virtue and prudence in Machiavelli and his forerunners, see Alessandro Capata, Il lessico dell’esclusione: tipologie di virtù in Machiavelli (Manziana: Vecchiarelli, 2008), 71–72. 9 “Et in Italia non manca materia da introdurvi ogni forma: qui è virtù grande nelle membra, quando la non macassi ne’ capi. . . . E tutto procede dalla debolezza de’ capi: perché quegli che sanno non sono ubbiditi, et a ciascuno pare sapere . . . .” The Prince, 104, 309. 10 “[Si vede per experienza nelli nostri tempi] quelli principi avere fatto gran cose, che della fede hanno tenuto poco conto . . .: et alla fine hanno superato quelli che si sono fondati in sulla realtà.” Ibid., 69, 263. 11 “Dovete adunque sapere come e’ sono dua generazioni di combattere: l’uno, con le legge; l’altro, con la forza. Quel primo è proprio dello uomo; quel secondo, delle bestie. Ma perché el primo molte volte non basta, conviene ricorrere al secondo: pertanto ad uno principe è necessario sapere bene usare la bestia e lo uomo.” Ibid., 69, 263–4.

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Although Chiron is a hapax in Machiavelli’s writings, the centaur appears in the frontispiece of the first edition of his play, La Mandragola (“the Mandrake Root”). Due to the few publications of his works during his lifetime, it is reasonable to assume that he was personally involved in the choice of this image. For the autobiographical interpretation of Machiavelli’s Chiron in The Mandrake Root see Franco Fido, Le metamorfosi del centauro (Rome: Bulzoni, 1977), 116–22. 13 Sasso has analyzed in depth these authors’ interpretations of the myth of Chiron. See Gennaro Sasso, “Centauri, leoni e volpi: Su alcune fonti del diciottesimo del Principe,” in Machiavelli e gli antichi e altri saggi, ed. Gennaro Sasso (Milan: R. Ricciardi, 1987), 164–73 and 177–78. As Ménissier has already noticed, in the Odyssey Homer mentions the centaurs right before the episode in which Odysseus kills the Suitors. The particular place occupied by the centaurs in the text may suggest a justification of the use of violence by Odysseus in order to return to power. See Thierry Ménissier, Machiavel ou La politique du centaure (Paris: Hermann, 2010), 15. 14 According to Sasso, this interpretation is not shared by Xenophon, one of the few authors Machiavelli explicitly quotes in the Prince (Chapter 14). Xenophon in the Cyropaedia, a “mirror of princes” well known in the Renaissance, prizes Chiron’s animal characteristics without any moralistic intent or judgment; see Sasso, “Centauri, leoni,” 173–76. Erasmus of Rotterdam mentions another writer who did not share the common interpretation of the myth of Chiron, Plato the comic author. He calls “Chiron” an enemy of his because he was believed to have instructed Pericles in tyranny. On this, see Heather Ingman, “Machiavelli and the Interpretation of the Chiron Myth in France,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 45 (1982): 218. 15 “Questa parte è suta insegnata alli principi copertamente dalli antichi scriptori, li quali scrivono come Achille e molti altri di quelli principi antichi furono dati a nutrire a Chirone centauro, che sotto la sua disciplina li custodissi. Il che non vuole dire altro, avere per preceptore uno mezzo bestia e mezzo uomo, se non che bisogna ad uno principe sapere usare l’una e l’altra natura: e l’una senza l’altra non è durabile.” The Prince, 69, 264. 16 “Car cela [Machiavelli’s interpretation of Chiron] est faux et controuvé, et tenoit Chiron plustost de la divinité que de la bestise, et ne fut onques Achilles instuit qu’en toutes vertus heroiques.” Innocent Gentillet, Anti-Machiavel, ed. C. Edward Rathé (Geneva: Droz, 1968), 402. 17 “Mais doit on appeler ou bestise ou malice ce que Machiavel dit de Chiron? . . . Xenophon dit que Chiron fut . . . plain de grand savoir, et de toute vertu, generosité, pieté et justice. . . . Bien est vray que les pöetes ont dit que c’estoit un centaure, à cause qu’il se plaisoit à picquer les chevaux, et à la chasse . . . . Mais bien qu’il aymast les chevaux, et l’exercise de chevalerie, il n’estoit pas pourtant estimé tenir rien de la beste, ains plustost de la divinité.” Ibid. 18 “Sendo dunque necessitato uno principe sapere bene usare la bestia, debbe di quelle pigliare la volpe e il lione: perché el lione non si difende da’ lacci, la volpe non si difende da’ lupi; bisogna adunque essere volpe a conoscere e lacci, e lione a sbigottire e lupi: coloro che stanno semplicemente in su lione, non se ne intendono.

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Non può pertanto uno signore prudente né debbe osservare la fede, quando tale osservanzia li torni contro.” Italics are mine. The Prince, 69, 264. 19 Machiavelli, Il Principe, 234, note 40. 20 Cicero, De Officiis, bk I, 34 and 41. For an English translation of the passages, see Marcus Tullius Cicero, On Obligations, trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 13–14 and 16–17. 21 Machiavelli describes Chiron in these terms: “quelli principi antichi furono dati a nutrire a Chirone centauro”; while in the Inferno Dante says, “gran Chiron, il qual nodrì Achille” (Dante, Inferno, 12, line 71). Italics are mine. As Sasso points out, even though Machiavelli depicts the relationship between Chiron and Achilles in Dante’s same terms, his interpretation of Chiron is tutt’altra cosa, “quite another thing,” from Dante’s. See Sasso, “Centauri, leoni,” 165. 22 “Mentre ch’io forma fui d’ossa e di polpe / che la madre mi diè, l’opere mie / non furon leonine, ma di volpe.” Dante, Inferno, 27, lines 73–75. The English translation is from Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Mark Musa (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1984), vol. 1, 317. 23 Cicero, De Officiis, Book I, 41: “Cum autem duobus modis, id est aut vi aut fraude, fiat iniuria, fraus quasi vulpeculae, vis leonis videtur.” English translation is from Cicero, On Obligations, 16–17. The Latin text is quoted and commented by Sasso, “Centauri, leoni,” 163. 24 Severus “seppe bene usare la persona del lione e della volpe, le quali nature io dico di sopra essere necessarie imitare a uno principe.” The Prince, 78, 277. The Italics are mine. Later, in the same chapter, Machiavelli adds: “chi examinerà tritamente le actione di costui, lo troverrà uno ferocissimo lione et una astuttissima golpe.” Ibid., 79, 278. 25 Among all the disciples of Chiron, the tutor, Machiavelli mentions only Achilles, a warring prince. This choice makes more sense if one considers Machiavelli’s desire to merge knowledge and action, prudence and virtue. 26 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Portable Machiavelli, ed. and trans. Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1979), 522–23. “In prima ei si fece uno eccellente cavalcatore, perché ogni ferocissimo cavallo con somma destrezza maneggiava.” The original text is from Niccolò Machiavelli, “La vita di Castruccio Castracani da Lucca,” in Opere Storiche, ed. Alessandro Montevecchi andCarlo Varotti (Rome: Salerno, 2010), vol. 1, 14. 27 Ménissier, Machiavel, 301. 28 Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, trans. Janet Lloyd (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978). For a complete definition of prudence in The Prince and the role of Pontano in its redefinition, see Capata, Il lessico, 70–76. 29 “[D]ebbe uno uomo prudente entrare sempre per vie battute da uomini grandi, e quegli che sono stati excellentissimi imitare: acciò che, se la sua virtù non vi arriva, almeno ne renda qualche odore.” Italics are mine. The Prince, 22, 203. 30 Machiavelli, The Portable Machiavelli, 170. “Il che credo che nasca non tanto da la debolezza nella quale la presente religione ha condotto el mondo, o da quel male che ha fatto a molte provincie e città cristiane uno ambizioso ozio, quanto dal non avere vera cognizione delle storie, per non trarne, leggendole, quel senso né

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gustare di loro quel sapore che le hanno in sé.” Italics are mine. For the original text I refer to Niccolò Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, ed. Francesco Bausi (Rome: Salerno, 2001), vol. 1, 6.

Works Cited Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Translated by Mark Musa. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1984. Ascoli, Albert Russell. “Machiavelli’s Gift of Counsel.” In Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature. Edited by Albert Russell Ascoli and Victoria Ann Kahn, 219–57. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Capata, Alessandro. Il lessico dell'esclusione: tipologie di virtù in Machiavelli. Manziana: Vecchiarelli, 2008. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. On Obligations. Translated by P. G. Walsh. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Detienne, Marcel, and Jean-Pierre Vernant. Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978. Fido, Franco. Le metamorfosi del centauro. Rome: Bulzoni, 1977. Gentillet, Innocent. Anti-Machiavel. Edited by C. Edward Rathé. Geneva: Droz, 1968. Ingman, Heather. “Machiavelli and the Interpretation of the Chiron Myth in France.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 45 (1982): 217–25. Machiavelli, Niccolò. Lettere. Edited by Franco Gaeta. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961. —. I primi scritti politici, 1499–1512: Nascita di un pensiero e di uno stile. Edited by Jean-Jacques Marchand. Padova: Antenore, 1975. —. The Portable Machiavelli. Edited and translated by Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1979. —. The Prince. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. —. De Principatibus. Edited by Giorgio Inglese. Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano, 1994. —. Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio. Edited by Francesco Bausi. Rome: Salerno, 2001. —. Il Principe. Edited by Mario Martelli. Rome: Salerno, 2006. —. “La vita di Castruccio Castracani da Lucca.” In Opere Storiche. Vol. 1. Edited by Alessandro Montevecchi and Carlo Varotti. Rome: Salerno, 2010. Ménissier, Thierry. Machiavel ou la politique du centaure. Paris: Hermann, 2010. Sasso, Gennaro. “Centauri, leoni e volpi: Su alcune fonti del diciottesimo del Principe.” In Machiavelli e gli antichi e altri saggi, edited by Gennaro Sasso, 153–88. Milan: R. Ricciardi, 1987.

PART V GERMAN, POLISH, AND SWEDISH LITERATURE

JAN KOCHANOWSKI’S PIEĝNI: A POLISH TRANSFORMATION OF ANCIENT MYTHS ANJA BURGHARDT UNIVERSITY OF SALZBURG

Jan Kochanowski’s poetry is filled with traces of Greek and Roman antiquity. In Poland as elsewhere in Renaissance Europe, Italy was the main point of reference, the same humanists who were influential in other European cultures, were perceived and adopted widely in Poland. In my paper I shall begin with introducing briefly Jan Kochanowski, one of the most important Polish poets, certainly for the Polish Renaissance, and before Adam Mickiewicz in the 19th century. Since Kochanowski is not that well known outside of Slavonic studies, I will first provide an outline of his life together with a few remarks on some characteristics of the Polish Renaissance that might be different from at least that of Western Europe in this period. I will then turn to Kochanowski’s reception of Greek and Roman mythology in general. Finally I would like to discuss selected passages from his Odes (the pieĞni). I will focus on those written in Polish, leaving aside his Latin ones. As his poetic Œuvre shows, Kochanowski was a bilingual poet, bilingual Latin and Polish, as indeed a significant number of the Polish “upper class” was bilingual well into the 18th century. Seeing the variety of ethnicities and languages in the Rzeczpospolita, Latin was required as the lingua franca of the state.1

Introductory Remarks on Kochanowski and the Polish Renaissance Society The title “father” of Polish literature, i.e. of literature written in Polish (not in Latin), does not refer to the most important poet of the Polish Renaissance, Jan Kochanowski; it is reserved for Mikoáaj Rej (1505– 1569), an uneducated nobleman who stands somewhat in between

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medieval and Renaissance literature. Very popular during his life time, his works are nowadays regarded as rather humble reading despite their sometimes realistic, sometimes humorous details. Especially his feeling for language made him a central figure in the development of the Polish language and literature. Thus, apart from the demands of the growing book market for books in Polish in the middle of the 16th century, there were already works written in the vernacular, when Kochanowski began to use it in his poetry. In some way it seemed almost “natural” for Kochanowski, being certainly one of the most distinguished Latin-writing poets of the time, to also write in his mother tongue. In fact, we have few documents about Kochanowski’s biography. Born in 1530, he came from a noble family of moderate means; two of his brothers worked in the field of literature, translating ancient texts into Polish. In 1544 Jan Kochanowski began to study at the Krakow Academy. Many Polish and foreign humanists lived or stayed in Krakow, the Polish capital until 1569, due to its academy and the royal court. There were “guest lectures” at the academy and many students went abroad, especially to Italy. So did Kochanowski, who made three longer journeys to Italy in the 1550s. At Padua University he studied classical philology,2 and he probably also went to Venetia, Rome and Naples and Southern parts of Italy. He concluded this period of foreign studies by a stay in France in 1559, where he seems to have met Pierre de Ronsard in Paris. Having come back to Poland, he worked at the court, for some time he was a one of the king’s secretaries. There are two Latin poems with which he adopts the role of a court poet. However, after the death of King Zygmunt II. August in 1572 (if not earlier), he became critical of the court, and finally retired to his country estate not far away from Lublin in 1574 (officially in 1575).3 Also during his years at the courts he wrote poetry and prose, he met friends and fellow students from both Cracow and Padua in some kind of “literary” or “intellectual circles.” Throughout his life, Kochanowski wrote in both Latin and Polish. His main literary model was Horace and in particular Horace’s Carmina as is often highlighted in the Polish literature on the poet. The fact is stressed firstly, because in Padua, where Kochanowski had studied, Petrarca served as the main source of inspiration for most authors. Besides, if they turned to Horace, it was mainly to his Ars poetica and not so much to his odes.4 Secondly, since until the period of romanticism Kochanowski’s poetry remained the central point of reference for Polish poets, he made Horace’s lyrics one of the major sources of influence on Polish literature.5 Horace’s influence on Kochanowski (for example in form of direct quotations from

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his Carmina or in terms of its themes) is traced back mostly to Bernardo Tasso and—even more importantly—to Pierre de Ronsard.6 To be sure, in Kochanowski’s poetry there are also allusions to Homer, Virgil, Pindar and other Latin and Greek writers, who are important in the period; besides, his oeuvre shows influences of Neoplatonism. In most of Kochanowski’s writings we find traces of Roman and sometimes Greek antiquity. Thus, for example, in his early long poem Szachy (The Game of Chess, published around 1564), written in Polish, he adopts a Latin text by the Italian humanist Marcus Hieronymus Vida. He transfers the action away from the Olympus to the royal court in Denmark, where two young men engage in a “chess battle” for the hand of the young princess.7 Another example is his “journalism in verse,” such as Zgoda (Harmony) or in Satyr albo Dziki MąĪ (The Satyr, or The Wild Man, both dating from 1564), where we find allusions to ancient myths, transferring them to a somewhat political context. In the first one, Harmony (as an allegory) turns to the citizens (who are of different confessions and different ethnos), urging them to religious tolerance.8 In the second, the inhabitants are reminded of their virtues and duties to the state, especially in view of despotic Russia, the “Muscovite despots” as they are called in the text.9 As Barbara Otwinowska & ElĪbieta Sarnowska-Temeriusz point out, in his elegy III.16 (written in Latin) Kochanowski takes up the myth of love according to which love is explained as the search for one’s lost other half.10 Also in his later works, such as the fraszki we find traces of ancient myths, e.g. in the poem “To the Muses.” (The word Fraszki Kochanowski derived from the Italian word “frasca,” the collection—published in 1584—was written on various occasions and often has somewhat “volatile” subjects.) Also in his posthumously published long poem The Muse Kochanowski interweaves allusions to Homer’s Ilias, Pindar’s odes, Virgil’s Aeneis with direct quotes from two Horatian odes (III.4 & IV.9). Apart from the muses, we find a whole set of pagan gods who inspire the poet. With his treny he adopted a genre from antiquity, namely the “epicedium” or “threnos.” In a cycle of poems, written upon the death of his small daughter Ursula, the poems give a “history of personal sorrow.”11 Here Kochanowski turns repeatedly to figures from Greek myths, e.g. to Persephone, in the hope to travel to her realm so that he may see his daughter again. A direct adaptation of ancient mythological material is his tragedy Odprawa posáów greckich (The Dismissal of the Grecian Envoys), written for the wedding of the Polish nobleman Jan Zamoyski. It was premièred at the wedding in the presence of the King in 1578. Kochanowski chose an

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episode, preceding the Trojan War.12 The tragedy is written in a kind of blank verse in thirteen und eleven syllables. It follows the “common” Renaissance poetics. Poetically remarkable is (among other things) Cassandra’s vision. The hero of the play is not so much one particular character, as the very city of Troy. This shows through for example in the following passage, taken from Cassandra’s speech: O mury, nieĞmiertelnych rĊku roboto, Jaki koniec was czeka? Ciebie, mój bracie, StróĪu ojzcyzny, domu zacna podporo, Wkoáo murów trojaĔskich tesalskie konie Wáóczyü groĪą! A twoje oziĊbáe ciaáo BĊdzieli chciaá nieszczĊsny ociec pochowaü, Musi je u rozbójce záotem kupowaü. Nieprzepáacony duchu, z tobą pospoáu I ojczyzna umaráa: jednaĪ mogiáa Oboje was przykryje!—Lecz i ty, srogi Trupokupcze, niedawno i sam poáĊĪesz, Strzaáą niemĊĪnej rĊki prĊdką objeĪdĪon. . . (lines 525–36) (Oh walls, built by an immortal hand, which end are you to expect? You, my brother, guardian of the homeland, mainstay of the house, Thessaly horses threaten to drag you around the walls of Troj! The unfortunate father will wish to bury your cooled off body, which he must buy for gold from the murderer. Invincible will (or: Immortal spirit), together with you dies also the homeland: a shared grave mound will cover you jointly!—Oh, that also you, stern seller of the corps, shall soon succumb to a fast arrow, sent by a coward hand. . .) Translation: A. B.

The Belgian specialist of Old-Polish literature, Claude Backvis, argues that this choice of the Trojan state as the play’s actual hero, can be traced back to the social structure of Poland at this time;13 The szlachta, i.e. the gentry or—as the author and scholar of Polish literature and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1980, Czesáaw Miáosz puts it—“gentlemen farmers”14— were the class that shaped all of the political and social life; most readers and authors belonged to it.15 Strictly speaking, this class was divided into the wealthier magnates and the nobility. The Rzeczpospolita szlachecka was formed deliberately in the spirit of the ancient res publica.16 The title “Rzeczpospolita szlachecka” points to the fact that it is an oligarchic state, in which already during the Jagiellonian dynasty, i.e. 14th to 16th

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centuries, the gentry took part in the government by a kind of parliamentary system, the so-called sejmy. Due to their common participation in shaping political affairs as well as their common experiences centred on their estates, Backvis describes the gentry as a fairly harmonious social group. Accordingly, conflicts that arose out of the individuals’ development did not play so much of a role in this community. So here, I think, is one feature of a—if you like—particularly Polish adoption of Greek and Roman mythology: the emphasis on the collective.

Kochanowski’s PieĞni Let us now turn to the PieĞni, the collection of poetry which is most obviously rooted in Renaissance thought. In Polish scholarship it has been called a “manifesto of the Renaissance,” due to (i) its Neoplatonic foundation of the Beautiful as harmony, and due to (ii) its characteristics as a piece of literature. The use of animism and anthropomorphism, the variety of metaphors, the picture of a god-like artist (itself, of course, inspired by antiquity) are some of the grounds for this evaluation.17 As Miáosz points out: [T]hroughout all of Kochanowski’s songs . . . an affirmation of the Renaissance principle of the individual as an autonomous subject meditating upon the human condition and establishing his own relationship with the universe [is traceable].18

Kochanowski wrote a great variety of Odes, some of which were later set to music and are still sung in church, which certainly is one of the reasons behind his fame in contemporary Poland. Here I will focus on the socalled “Two books” (KsiĊgi dwoje), composed most probably from the 1550s until the 1580s.19 Book one comprises of 25, book two of 24 odes. The order of these poems seems neither strict nor particularly important; most pieces are linked only loosely and there is no “development” in the course of their chronology. However, the beginning and end are certainly well placed; Kochanowski here creates a frame that immediately underlines how much he is indebted to Horace. The first ode is entitled with the opening of Horace’s Carmen III.24: “Intactis opulentior,” and as Horace’s text poses questions on a prudent leadership and a virtuous life so does Kochanowski’s. The second book closes with Horace’s last carmen of the second book; “Non usitata nec tenui ferar” are its opening words. Kochanowski marks it as his role model by closely following Horace’s motifs. As Horace, Kochanowski reflects on his position as a poet, the role of inspiration and—with view to the public—of poetry. He

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adapts Horace’s remarks to his Polish context, here most obviously with the two regions which are as far away from Kochanowski as for Horace the Bosporus, Colchis, the river Rhone or the Scythians. O mnie Moskwa i bĊdą wiedzieü Tatarowie, I róĪnego mieszkaĔcy Ğwiata, Anglikowie, Mnie Niemec i waleczny Hiszpan, mnie poznają, Którzy gáĊboki strumieĔ Tybrowy pijają. (24, lines 17–20) (About me Moscow will know and the Tartars And Englishmen, inhabitants of diverse worlds. The German and the valiant Spaniard will be acquainted with me And those who drink from the deep Tiber stream.) Translation: Czesáaw Miáosz.

As Kochanowski transfers Horace’s details to a Polish context, he often also transfers ancient mythology to Polish circumstances (as pointed out earlier for the tragedy). As regards ancient myths, I think, there is one peculiarity: Kochanowski adopts mainly female figures. Thus we encounter Europa and Penelope; a frequent motif and/or addressee are the muses, the Sybil is mentioned, anf Fortuna is one of the recurrent ancient figures throughout the odes. The myths are frequently alluded to. From them a particular situation is taken, which is at the heart of the poem. The poem is presented by the very female voice itself, as in the cases of Europa and Penelope. Kochanowski does not adopt male voices from ancient mythology. Thus, Orpheus, for example, is reduced to some kind of “marker” of metapoetic reflection. As we shall see, the good life is the topic of the poems in which both Europa and Penelope are the speakers. There are other poems, on similar issues, which are clearly grounded in the value system of the Polish szlachta. In these cases, we have male speakers as well as male addressees. So, what I would like to suggest is, firstly, that Kochanowski adopted different sources, especially in his didactic or moral poems, namely from antiquity and from the szlachta; and secondly, in the case of his ancient sources he predominantly took up female mythical figures. In the case of the sources from the szlachta, he took up male speakers. Let us take a closer look at two odes, namely ode 6 and 17: Ode 6 of the first book is dedicated to the myth of Europa. The ode is inspired by Horace’s “Europa-Ode,” that is Ode III.27—with some significant changes, however. To begin with, the look backwards, which runs to quite a few lines in Horace’s case and describes the beauty of Europa’s home,

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and the loftiness of her life, is missing. Kochanowski concentrates on the barrenness of Crete and—or so we are invited to imagine—on the roughness of the sea. We find Europe sitting on the cliffs, shortly after the seduction/rape; she is as much in turmoil as the seas around her. She is overwhelmed with fear and remorse. On the one hand, she condemns herself for following the bull to the island, far away from her home and her father. On the other hand, she is full of doubts about whether and how she could have acted in a different way. Her main concern is the loss of her virginity, and she wishes—here Kochanowski is following Horace— that it all might turn out to be a bad dream. But in her awareness that what happened is reality, she prays to God (in Horace’s ode to “one of the gods,” lines 50–51 ), to have lions or other wild animals kill and eat her. In both texts we have a male voice answering Europa’s lament. But while Horace’s poem states explicitly that her father answers from afar (“pater urget absens,” line 57), it remains unclear in Kochanowski’s text who is actually answering Europa’s speech: it could be the (perhaps imagined) voice of her father as well as the voice of God, since he is the one to whom Europa turns in her sorrow. Kochanowski’s male voice opens the response with the words “despicable girl” (or: villainous, abominable young woman; “nikczemna dziewko,” line 45), and continues with the question why on earth she did not commit suicide, seeing how deep she has fallen. In comparison, death by jumping in the water from the cliff—so we read in Kochanowski’s poem—would by far be the better choice. That she herself and alone is bearing the guilt for what happened, remains unquestioned. In this end Kochanowski deviates from Horace; in Horace’s ode Venus appears at Europa’s side, accompanied by Amor after the father’s reprimand. She consoles Europa, explaining to her that Zeus was the one who raped/seduced her, making clear immediately that humans have no choice, “uxor invicti Iovis esse nescis” (line 73). At least a whole region will be named after her, something which Horace clearly depicts as a consolation. Kochanowski’s last distich, by contrast, gives a moral and didactic twist to the ode: a good young woman should be working with her spindle, rather than trusting Venus, who is only alluded to by “grim pagan.” So as Kochanowski does not mention Zeus but has Europa turn to “God,” in this ode the pagan gods disappear in favour of a Christian religious context. Another example of such a change with respect to religious traces is Kochanowski’s adaptation of Hades, alluded to when Europa hopes to have seen a dream, so that she will not have to come to Hades for her “sin.” Kochanowski takes from Homer the detail that two dream gates, made out of ivory, lead to Hades. Apart from the moral content, the

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wording too points to the fact that Hades is imagined as diabolic: the word for “ivory” in Polish is a composite, comparable to “elephant bone.” Dropping the “elephant,” we read about a “gate of bone” (“wrota koĞciane,” line 29). Though there are slight hints of irony in the text, I think it is impossible to read the poem as playing on values of the szlachta. Rather, Kochanowski adopts the ancient myth to the Polish context, here in terms of didactics and religion. The other main female figure from ancient mythology that Kochanowski incorporates in his odes is Penelope (I.17). In this case there is no clear pre-text; only a few details suggest that Penelope’s letter to Ulysses from Ovid’s Heroides might have served as a source of inspiration for Kochanowski. Kochanowski’s poem starts with a quatrain that serves as a short introduction. At the time of the sunset the speaker at first does not know whose voice he is listening to, and only in the course of the poem does it become clear that it is Penelope’s. Her speech referred directly for the rest of the poem. The main theme is her mourning over the absence of her beloved (“mi sie miáy mój,” line 7), for whom she has been waiting by now for twenty years. She briefly mentions what happened, blaming Paris as an adulterer. Also in this case we have moral undertones that emphasize matrimonial fidelity. Penelope interestingly describes her own fate as lying in Fortuna’s hand. The focus is on the fact that Ulysses still has not come back, whereas she expects all others to have returned. There is no mention of the suitors. In a touching comparison of herself to birds that flee companionship, she describes how much she has drawn back from other people, being ashamed of her tears. Into the long description of her grief biblical vocabulary is interwoven. Seeing her own helplessness, she trusts in God entirely (“Tobie go ja tam poruczam, mój BoĪe!”, “To you, my God, I entrust myself!”, line 32). But by contrast to the ode on Europa, in this case pagan and Christian elements remain in counterbalance, when Penelope at the end asks the wind and the sea to bring back Ulysses to the shores of his homeland.20

Concluding Remarks Why does Kochanowski choose ancient Greek and Roman myths for his female voices? What I would like to suggest is that it has to do mainly with questions of authority (in a broad sense). In general, in the Polish Renaissance (as elsewhere) women played only a marginal role in the public.21 So adopting a female voice was not an obvious choice for a Polish author. However, with female mythical figures, he has a woman

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who can be taken seriously, so to speak. In any case, especially for the Renaissance, what is rooted in antiquity has a certain weight. Therefore, when Kochanowski uses these figures for his comments on current issues in political and mainly moral debates, he strengthens his positions by means of reference to antiquity. Moreover, Kochanowski creates for himself the space to talk about themes in the way he wants to. This becomes apparent, I think, in Penelope’s “lament”: actually the Petrarchian concept of love which prevailed also in Poland and is found in most of Kochanowski’s love poems, allows only for a rather distant view of the beloved woman. There is hardly any room for her feelings. Yet, the ancient texts, Horace’s in the case of Europa, Ovid’s in that of Penelope, can serve as models for such a change of voice and perspective. By adopting the female point of view, backed up by the reference to the mythical figure, he can circumvent the Petrarchian convention and create a highly personal, sensitive poem that at the same time can take a different position on love and relationships. Kochanowski’s uses of myths from antiquity thus appear as adaptations which are adopted to either Polish circumstances or his own poetic intentions while at the same time being true to some of their characteristics and to his own cultural and literary tradition.

Notes 1

Axer points out that Latin was a living language. Jerzy Axer, “Latin as a factor in the Polish cultural identity in the period of the First Polish Republic (1500–1800),” in Mare Balticum—Mare Nostrum. Latin in the Countries of the Baltic Sea (1500– 1800), ed. Outi Merisalo and Raija Sarasti-Wilenius (Jyväskylä: Gummerus Kirjapani Oy, 1994), cf. in particular 159–60. In his article he focuses on its role in Polish historical memory. In “Latein als Sprache der Adelsnation in der polnischlitauischen Konföderation (16. bis 18. Jahrhundert): Eine These,” in Latein und Nationalsprachen in der Renaissance, ed. Bodo Guthmüller (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998), 133 he stresses its role as the national language of the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth. 2 Czesáaw Miáosz, The History of Polish Literature. 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 61. There is a vast literature on Jan Kochanowski. In what follows I give references mainly to literature in English as the most accessible language. Part VI of the collection edited by Samuel Fiszman, The Polish Renaissance in its European context (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), is dedicated to Kochanowski. 3 Miáosz: History of Polish Literature, 61; cf. also Janusz Pelc Jan Kochanowski. Szczyt renesansu w literaturze polskiej (Warszawa: PaĔstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1980), 544; for Kochanowski’s biography in detail cf. ibid., part 1, chap. 2.

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Ludwika Szczerbicka-ĝlĊk, “WstĊp,” introduction to Jan Kochanowski, PieĞni (Wrocáaw: Zakáad Narodowy Im. OssoliĔskich, 2008), XXI–XXII. 5 Cf. e.g. ibid., XXIII. 6 Ibid., XXII; for the role of Tasso cf. W. Floryan, Forma poetycka „PieĞni” Jana Kochanowskiego wobec kierunków liryki renesansowej (Wrocáaw: Nakáadem Wrocáawskiego Towarzystwa Naukowego, 1948), 32–33. A. Cohen, Ronsard, sa vie et son oeuvre (Paris: Gallimard, 1956) stresses Horatius’s importance for Ronsard.—When Kochanowski by “Ronsardum vidi” quotes Ovid’s Tristia, namely “Vergilium vidi tantum,” he puts himself into the twofold position of a follower: As Ovid is indebted to Virgil, so Kochanowski is to Ronsard. Further, Ronsard’s relationship to Virgil—I take it, in particular his attempt at writing a national Epos—is similar to Kochanowski’s to Ovid. 7 Since it belongs to Kochanowski’s most important and influential writings, I would like to also mention his Polish translation of the Psalms, the Psaáterz Dawidów (David’s Psalter, 1579). 8 In general, during the Renaissance Poland was a tolerant country, the Warsaw Confederation in January 1573 guaranteed the religious freedom. 9 Miáosz, History of Polish Literature, 62–63. 10 Barbara Otwinowska and ElĪbieta Sarnowska-Temeriusz, “Platonizm,” in Sáownik staropolskiej literatury, ed. Teresa Michaáowska (Wrocáaw: Zakáad Narodowy Im. OssoliĔskich, 1990), 591. 11 Miáosz, History of Polish Literature, 76, for the treny on the whole cf. 75–79. 12 By the way, there was an—anonymous—pseudohistorical romance, A story on the Destruction of the City of Troy, published in 1563, which “adopted” the Trojan war, or rather invented situations and events which can be found hardly in Homer’s Iliad. Cf. e.g. Miáosz, History of Polish Literature, 53. 13 Cf. Claude Backvis, Renesans i barok w Polsce—studia o kulturze (Warszawa: PaĔstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1993); for an English translation of some passages, cf. Miáosz, History of Polish Literature, 70–73. 14 Miáosz, History of Polish Literature, 71. 15 For the historical background cf. e.g. Jerzy Lukowski and Hubert Uawadzski, A Concise History of Poland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), in particular chap. 2 and 3, 38–132. For the power of the szlachta in Jagiellonian Poland cf. 60–62. As the authours point out, the often claimed “equality among all nobles” rather had the status of a fiction (65) which, in turn, had its role in the view of the 16th century as a kind of Golden Age (69); for the actual relationship between magnates and szlachta cf. 81. 16 Cf. e.g. Jörg K. Hoensch, Geschichte Polens, 2nd enlarged ed. (Stuttgart: Ulmer, 1990), 95. 17 The new edition of Kochanowski’s works, Dzieáa wszystkie gives a detailed commentary, including (possible) sources and pre-texts of Kochanowski’s works. For a detailed discussion of Kochanowski’s odes cf. Floryan, Forma poetycka. 18 Miáosz, History of Polish Literature, 66. 19 Szczerbicka-ĝlĊk, “WstĊp,” VIV–XV. 20 As in the work of other European authors, we can observe in Kochanowski’s writings an interweaving of Christian and pagan religious aspects. One of the main

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authorities for such an attitude towards the different religions is Marselo Ficino. Ficino’s writings were well known, certainly in Krakow. He was in correspondence with Callimachus, i.e. Phillipo Buonaccorsi, an influential figure for students at the Krakow university, cf. Tadeusz Ulewicz, “Polish Humanism and its Italian Sources: Beginnings and Historical Development,” in Samuel Fiszman, 223. Otwinowska and Sarnowska-Temeriusz point out that in Kopernikus’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium some echoes of Ficino’s De lunime et sole can be observed (“Platonizm,” 589). They continue that “[t]he views of Italian philosophers, and platonizing theorists of arts and aesthetics were well known in Polish intellectual circles, due to frequent journeys and either personal contact or correspondence of the Polish humanists, but also due to the import of Italian book editions.” (ibid., 590, translation: A. B.) For the vivid Polish-Italian relationship, cf. e.g. Il’ia Nikolaevich Golenishchev-Kutuzov, ItalҲianskoe vozrozhdenie i slavianskie literatury XV–XVI vekov (Moskva: Izdat. Akad. Nauk SSSR, 1963); cf. also R. C. LewaĔski, Storia delle relazioni fra la Polonia e Bologna (Bologna: Zuffi, 1951); Tadeusz Ulewicz, “Polish Humanism” and Petrarca e la Polonia (Padova: Ed. Antenore, 1982); Nice Contieri: Petrarca in Polonia e altri studie (Napoli: Morano, 1966) as well as articles in the collection: Relazioni tra Padova e la Polonia: Studi in onore dell'Universita di Cracovia nel VI centenario della sua fondazione (Padova: Ed. Antenore, 1964). 21 Cf. for example Bianka Pietrow-Ennker, “Women in Polish Society: A Historical Introduction,” in Women in Polish Society, ed. Rudolf Jaworski and Bianka Pietrow-Ennker (New York: East European Monographs, 1992), for a revealing historical survey of women in Polish society. From her discussion it is clear that women’s role in public was everything but equal to that of men. Though, as she points out, women’s high esteem within the family was—at least for noblewomen—transferred on to the “collective family” of the szlachta. In Phillips’ account of Polish Women authors until the 18th century also the social role of women shines slightly through, certainly their rather marginal place in public. See Ursula Phillips, “Polish Women Authors. From the Middle Ages until 1800,” in A History of Central European Women’s Writing, ed. Celia Hawkesworth (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).

Works Cited Sources Kochanowski, Jan. Dzieáa wszystkie. Vol. 4. PieĞni. Edited by Maria Renata Mayenowa and Krystyna Wilczewska. Wrocáaw: Zakáad Narodowy Im. OssoliĔskich, 1991. —. Odprawa posáów greckich. Edited by Tadeusz Ulewicz. Wrocáaw: Zakáad Narodowy Im. OssoliĔskich, 1974. —. PieĞni. Edited by Ludwika Szczerbicka-ĝlĊk. Wrocáaw: Zakáad Narodowy Im. OssoliĔskich, 1997.

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Secondary Literature Axer, Jerzy. “Latin as a factor in the Polish cultural identity in the period of the First Polish Republic (1500–1800).” In Mare Balticum—Mare Nostrum. Latin in the Countries of the Baltic Sea (1500–1800). Edited by Outi Merisalo and Raija Sarasti-Wilenius, 157–65. Jyväskylä: Gummerus Kirjapaino Oy, 1994. —. “Latein als Sprache der Adelsnation in der polnisch-litauischen Konföderation (16. bis 18. Jahrhundert): Eine These” [Latin as the language of the gentry nation in the Polish-Lithuanian Confederation (16th–18th century): A thesis]. In Latein und Nationalsprachen in der Renaissance. Edited by Bodo Guthmüller, 131–35. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998. Backvis, Claude. Renesans i barok w Polsce—studia o kulturze [Renaissance and Baroque in Poland—a study on culture]. Warszawa: PaĔstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1993. Cohen, A. Ronsard, sa vie et son oeuvre. Paris: Gallimard, 1956. Contieri, Nice. Petrarca in Polonia e altri studie. Napoli: Morano, 1966. Fiszman, Samuel, ed. The Polish Renaissance in its European context. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988. Floryan, W. Forma poetycka “PieĞni” Jana Kochanowskiego wobec kierunków liryki renesansowej [The poetical form of Jan Kochanowski’s PieĞni in the light of Renaissance poetry]. Wrocáaw: Nakáadem Wrocáawskiego Towarzystwa Naukowego, 1948. Golenishchev-Kutuzov, Il’ia Nikolaevich. ItalҲianskoe vozrozhdenie i slavianskie literatury XV–XVI vekov. Moskva: Izdat. Akad. Nauk SSSR, 1963. Translated into Italian by Lucio Dal Santo. Il rinascimento italiano e le letterature slave die secoli XV e XVI. Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1973. Hoensch, Jörg K. Geschichte Polens [History of Poland]. 2nd enlarged ed. Stuttgart: Ulmer, 1990. LewaĔski, R. C. Storia delle relazioni fra la Polonia e Bologna. Bologna: Zuffi, 1951. Lukowski, Jerzy, and Hubert Uawadzski. A Concise History of Poland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Michaáowska, Teresa, ed. Sáownik staropolskiej literatury [Dictionary of Old Polish literature]. Wrocáaw: Zakáad Narodowy Im. OssoliĔskich, 1990. Miáosz, Czesáaw. The History of Polish Literature. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Otwinowksa, Barbara, and ElĪbieta Sarnowska-Temeriusz. “Platonizm” [“Platonism”]. In Teresa Michaáowska, Sáownik staropolskiej literatury, 587– 92. Pelc, Janusz. Jan Kochanowski: Szczyt renesansu w literaturze polskiej [Jan Kochanowski: The height of the Renaissance in Polish literature; English summary: 542–52]. Warszawa: PaĔstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1980. Phillips, Ursula. “Polish Women Authors. From the Middle Ages until 1800.” In A History of Central European Women’s Writing. Edited by Celia Hawkesworth, 14–26. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.

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Pietrow-Ennker, Bianka. “Women in Polish Society: A Historical Introduction.” In Women in Polish Society. Edited by Rudolf Jaworski and Bianka PietrowEnnker, 1–29. New York: East European Monographs, 1992. Relazioni tra Padova e la Polonia: Studi in onore dell'Universita di Cracovia nel VI centenario della sua fondazione. Padova: Ed. Antenore, 1964. Szczerbicka-ĝlĊk, Ludwika. “WstĊp.” Introduction to Jan Kochanowski: PieĞni, V–LXXIX. Ulewicz, Tadeusz. Petrarca e la Polonia. Padova: Ed. Antenore, 1982. —. “Polish Humanism and its Italian Sources: Beginnings and Historical Development.” In Samuel Fiszman, The Polish Renaissance, 215–35.

MYTHOLOGY: A SIGN OF REAL POETRY? STINA HANSSON UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG

In 1668 Georg Stiernhielm, known in Sweden as “the Father of Swedish Poetry,” released a collection of his own verse under the proud title of Musæ Suethizantes, with a subtitle in Swedish saying “which means Muses, who have not until now begun to compose and perform in the Swedish language.”1 Bernt Olsson has pointed out that the phrase “in Swedish, and not in Latin” has to be added to the subtitle in order to convey its proper meaning, that the Latin muses had now, at the end of the 1660s, become Swedish ones.2 Ancient mythology had long had a domicile in Sweden. However, this homeland tended to exclude the Swedish tongue: this was located in the Neo-Latin poetry. When the Swedish poets wrote in Swedish, they did not use ancient mythology at all. Thus it must be said that the literary Renaissance came to Sweden twice: for the first time at the end of the 16th century in Latin writings, and then, some fifty years later, in vernacular literature. The thesis of this paper is a rather straightforward one: arguing that the use of Greco-Roman mythology in poems in Swedish—at the early stages of the process—first and foremost functioned as a way for Swedish poets to claim that what they wrote was something more and better than rhyming in the old Swedish way, which meant that their works were real Poetry in the Renaissance sense of the word. The use of ancient mythology in Swedish poems can thus—at least in the mid-17th-century context—be read as a sign meaning “this is indeed real Poetry.” And the same thing, I suppose, would also be true for poetic writings in the vernacular in many other countries in the periphery of Europe. I have recently finished a study on the Swedish poetry of marriage, or the epithalamia, from the 17th and 18th centuries.3 The material used for my study is the comprehensive main collection of marriage poetry at the University Library in Uppsala. My results are based on a thorough analysis

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of all the wedding poems from six periods: from the late 15th century until 1659, the 1670s, the 1690s, the 1720s, the 1750s and the 1790s. My observations and examples below come from this study. Until 1660 the vast majority of the Swedish epithalamia were written in Latin. Other learned languages, such as Greek and Hebrew, and some modern languages such as German and French, were used as well, but sparsely. The Swedish language was not much in use either. Before 1640 there were only three marriage poems written in Swedish in the collection used. The first of them has an astonishingly early date: it was written in 1606.4 Its author, Johannes Thomæ Bureus, was, along with the bridegroom in question, Johan Skytte, a well known propagator of the idea of Sweden’s glorious past, arguing that the old Swedes were indeed the Goths, written about by Jordanes, who had conquered all Europe and laid waste the whole of the Roman Empire.5 The shared opinions of author and bridegroom seem to provide an explanation for the choice of Swedish for the poem. It describes the old glory of the country, and gives ample honour to the bridegroom. Skytte is portrayed as an example to follow both for his contemporaries and all forthcoming generations of Swedes of gentle birth. But except for the nationalistic contents the poem is a very old-fashioned one, using the old Swedish folksongs from medieval days as its primary model of writing. From before 1640 there are also seven Latin poems containing rather small parts in Swedish. These parts are all dealing with what could be termed the Christian contents of the poems, i.e. the votum, a wish for a prosperous future for the newly wedded and a prayer to God, asking him to guarantee the new couple’s well-being on earth as well as in heaven. In full accordance with these contents, these Swedish parts are written as prayers or hymns, literary models that had been used in Swedish writing ever since the introduction of Christianity. This restriction of Swedish to Christian topics and old-fashioned forms is due to what could be called the principle of decorum: the idea that all elements in a work of literature should fit with each other. Swedish was still seen as a language of second rank, a humble cousin from the country, not to be used for treatment of more lofty poetical subject matter. The marriage poems written in Latin from before 1640 were quite different: here the poets were writing about all subject matters they wanted, very often ancient mythology, and were also using the metrics of ancient poetry, with distichon as their favourite one. A typical Latin marriage poem from the early 17th-century Sweden often contained a story about Phoebus and the nine muses coming to Sweden to pay their honour to the bridal couple, recapitulating their praise of the bride and bridegroom as well as their congratulations.

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The next wedding poem in the collection that is entirely in Swedish dates from 1645.6 It is remarkably modern, both because it is not dealing with Christian matters and because of its use of a new kind of versification. The poet calls himself “Tobias vir Peregrinus,” an author still unknown to us, who might have been a Swedish student performing his peregrinatio, his study tour abroad. Tobias might have learnt how to write modern marriage poems in the vernacular while staying at some German university, where the same development was taking place concerning poetry in the vernacular—but some twenty years earlier than in Sweden.7 Tobias’s poem was written in alexandrines and other kinds of iambic verses, accented and not syllabic as the older poetry in Swedish. This also meant that his poem could be read aloud with the same steady beat as the Latin poems. And, since marriage poems were presented to the wedding guests by being read aloud, the accented metre was a strong improvement regarding the poetic applicability of the Swedish language. The 1650s are, generally, seen as the decade of the breakthrough for the new kind of poetry in Swedish, organized according to the models of Renaissance poetry. In these decade, the old identification of the Swedes with the Gothic conquerors went through a modification, the Goths no longer being seen just as rude warriors, but also as a people having a cultural and literary heritage as valuable as—or even more valuable than— that of old Greece and Rome. The new orientation of the Gothic movement was of course due to Sweden’s recent promotion to one of Europe’s great powers. The glory of the country was now requiring that Sweden should not yield to any other country in any respect, not even to the fame of Ancient Greece or Rome. In 1651 the first poetics on poetry in Swedish was printed, Manuductio ad poesin Svecanam, with a Swedish subtitle roughly meaning, “a short manual on the writing of poetry in Swedish.” Its author, the grammar school teacher Andreas Arvidi, declares at the outset of his book that poems in Swedish should not be limited only to certain kinds of subject matters: Swedish poetry encompasses all kinds of things, heavenly as well as terrestrial, even these things above heaven and below earth that can be comprehended and written about, things with life and spirits as well as those without: thus there is nothing too big or too small to be treated in poetry in Swedish—just as they do in other languages.8

Arvidi’s words were confirmed by the weddings poems of the 1650s. The total number of poems all in Swedish had by now risen to ten, and there are also nine poems combining Latin with rather large sections in Swedish.

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Although the numbers are still low, the important thing is that the old “Swedish” constraints are no longer accepted by the authors, either in the choice of subject matter or in versification. Supposedly as an effect of this Swedish breakthrough, the number of the wedding poems began to increase rather quickly: from 150 poems in all during the long period from 1600 to 1659 to almost 300 poems in the 1670s only, around 420 in the 1690s and 1126 in the 1720s. The use of the Swedish language continued to increase. In the 1670s the share of poems in Swedish constituted more than half of the production of the decade. In the 1690s 85 per cent of the poems were in Swedish. It seems that special reasons were already now needed for not writing in Swedish: that the addressees had a high rank in academic life—when Latin was still preferred, or in society in general—with French and/or Italian to indicate the addressees’ aristocratic standing, or that the bridegroom or the bride simply could not understand Swedish: in such cases German was often the language chosen. In the 1720s the share of Swedish poems had risen to 95 percent. The change in wedding poetry from Latin to Swedish was, in most respects, a step rather easily taken. It was easy for the poets, who were long since familiar with the large number of topics and reference systems of Renaissance poetry, having studied their use at university and themselves made use of them in their poetical works in Neo-Latin. The new versification, with accented instead of syllabic verse was sometimes —as with alexandrines or other iambic or trochaic metres—also rather easily mastered, since the accenting is rather obvious in the Swedish language: when the principle was understood, the poets seem to have had no problems to adhere to it. A main difficulty, however, was how to adapt the classical metres to the peculiarities of the Swedish tongue. Latin poetry was, as is well known, structured around the length of the syllables, which was a thing almost impossible to copy in Swedish. If there were to be any Swedish hexameters written, these too had to build on accentuation, a difference not easily understood and dealt with.9 Stiernhielm is said to be the first one to succeed in doing this, in his heroic poem Hercules, printed in 1658. Most of the Swedish poets of the 1650s chose, however, not to use the problematic classical metres at all in their vernacular writings. There was, however, another difficulty to be faced when writing Renaissance poetry in Swedish, especially when it came to occasional poetry. The growing popularity of this kind of writing came to attract a much broader audience than the old learned one. This new audience had, in the worst cases, very vague ideas about the whole learned reference system forming the basis of Renaissance poetry, and did not know very

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much about one of its dominant parts, the Greco-Latin mythology. The new Swedish poetry was, to this broader audience, not very easy to follow, and could also, in relation to the religious ideals of orthodox Sweden, in initially be seen as sheer paganism. The problems at stake, when poetry in Swedish was first transformed into Renaissance poetry, are clearly shown in one of the wedding poems of my collection. It was written by a student at the University of Uppsala, Simon Skragge Håkonsson, at the very end of the 1640s or in the year 1650, and thus an early bird of the new Renaissance in Swedish.10 Skragge did not choose an easy way out when doing these new things: the poem’s main part is a long sequence in the most problematic of the Renaissance forms, hexameter. It was written for a marriage in the countryside in the province of Värmland, north of the Lake Väner. Although the bridegroom was a clergyman and a former student of Uppsala University, it can be supposed that the bulk of the audience consisted of lower clergy from the province and local unlearned country people—the kind of audience which supposedly would have had problems with the new poetic orientation. In spite of this, Skragge seems to have been eager to show himself as a real poet of the new kind, at least to the poet colleagues in Uppsala. The classical metre is one sign of this, another is that the Greco-Roman gods play the main part in the poem. In fact, the bulk of Roman gods has here been transported to Värmland. Skragge thus evokes a conventional topic of Neo-Latin wedding poetry. As far as I know, it is here done for the first time in the Swedish language. Skragge seems to have realized himself that he ought to justify the novelties of his poem to his countryside audience. In the opening verses he deplores the fact that he himself is not able to go to Värmland. But he will recompense bridegroom and bride, he explains, by writing them a letter of honour. But when trying to write this letter, meaning the actual poem, his imagination was instantly caught by “heathen manners.” His words in the poem are, however, to be understood in Christian terms, he says. He also asks the pious Christian listener for forgiveness. This shows that Skragge knows that the theme chosen was not quite appropriate for his kind of countryside audience. He ends this excuse by saying that time did not allow him to find a more suitable theme. Here he pretends that he is writing immediately before the arrival of the postman coming to fetch his letter and bring it forth to Värmland. That this part of the excuse is not to be taken quite seriously is testified to by the fact that Skragge also found the time to have his letter/poem printed. After this, the scene of the poem is altered to Värmland, where Skragge in his imagination sees a troop of gods arriving, preceded by a

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man with a sceptre in his hand. This man is said to be Mercury, who tells the wedding guests to greet the arrival of the King of all Gods. Although this god is Jupiter, Skragge makes him talk almost like the Christian one, saying, among other things: “I am looking with grace upon the sinners of earth, because of my son’s profound love for them” and “I will now bestow my grace upon Holmdal” (the parish where the wedding was taking place). Jupiter calls forward all the gods except Bellona (the goddess of war was never invited to weddings), and asks them to bring forth their congratulations one by one. Juno steps forward as the first, wishing the couple “fruit every year,” which is explained as a lot of “merry guys and dolls,” to please their parents’ eyes and hearts. Minerva then talks about the deep grief in Uppsala after the departure of the bridegroom, and introduces another well-known topic from Neo-Latin poetry, saying that she suspects that Venus is now trying to take control of a man belonging to her own learned company. Venus answers that students have the right to love as much as other people. She also refers to the young bride in the traditional manner of Latin poetry: she has been shot by Cupid’s arrows and is now in severe need of help from Venus. A half-god called “the herald of the gods of earth” then enters the stage and confirms to the audience that all gods are siding with Venus and not with Minerva. All their names are mentioned: Fame, Fides, Fortuna, Feronia, Tellus, Naiads, Dryads, Oreads, the Nymphs of Sala (which was the river of Uppsala), Sylvanus, Vulcan, Ceres and Orpheus. It is also said that these gods are now busy making the surrounding nature beautiful and the wedding party luxurious. Skragge must by then have felt that there were far too many ancient gods on scene for his rural audience to cope with. He introduces a personification called “Lijfröst,” meaning “the voice of life,” who strongly opposes all these names of fictive gods and emphasizes that it was long since these gods were taken for mighty kings by the blindfolded heathen inhabitants of earth. He explains that their names, however, are still used by Christian students in writing poetry, to remember the deeply mislead heathen world, now long since passed away; but what the students indeed mean with these names is the power of the great Trinity, the one and only Christian God over heavens and earth.

One might wonder wether the wedding guests believed this explanation. Mercury then returns and takes command of the preparations for the wedding and the grand wedding dinner, giving orders to everyone charged with this work. Through Mercury’s words, we are here given an unusually vivid description of a rural wedding feast in Sweden in the mid-17th

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century. Since he seems to know all that should be prepared for such a wedding, his Greco-Roman background here fades slightly away (he becomes more like an ethnologist portraying a piece of Swedish folk culture). For the benefit of those readers familiar with Swedish, I will quote a short part from his speech. Afterwards follows my attempt at translation. Täck är Landzens Seedh; hängier Löfkrantzer i Taaken Pryr Golfwen medh Grääs/ medh liufliga frögdbara Blomster/ Blommor på Dwken; laga til Faatringer ock Handkläd; Tager ok vth Fänstren. Men skuggiga rusker i stället At Wädret kan flächta ther an och swalka the warma. Lät siudas Skinckan/ seen krwser swaalen i rooser. Krwser Smörflagor som Toorn; lägg Brödh ther i jämpter Hweet-Kringlar Simblor småkakor Rååmala klaarbrö/ Mehr laga the fullsnälldt Wärmländers lustiga Jungfrwr Spritter Kallskålen: tage in och dricker en omgång; Sampt mitt i Glädien så snart Brugummen är ophögd; Tager wänliga Glaas/ mins Wännen sörgier i Sala. (Delightful the province’s tradition; hang up garlands of leaf in the ceilings. Adorn the floors with grass, with sweet joy-giving flowers, Flowers on the table-cloths as well; bring dishes for the servings, and napkins; Take all windows out. Replace them with shadowy branches so that the breezes can fan through them refreshing the hot. Let the ham be boiled, and curl its rind into roses. Curl flakes of butter like towers, put the bread close beside it, wheat pretzels, rolls, cookies, loaves of well-ground rye bread. Many more dishes are brought in by the merry maidens of Värmland. Bring in the cold beverages, pour out and let’s make a round of drinking, and, in the midst of the joy, as soon as the bridegroom is honoured, raise your glasses in friendship to greet the sorrowful friend stuck in Sala.)

At the end of the quote Skragge thus points to his grief at having to miss the whole party, and then portrays himself as a sorrowful swan—which was, as we know, one of the most common metaphors in Renaissance poetry for a real poet. After that follows—now in dactylic verse—an ambitious but unsuccessful attempt to render in Swedish the kind of humanist word-play that often adorns the Neo-Latin poetry of the period: with words all beginning with the same letters. This part of the poem is eccentric rather than artful. The letters in question seem, however, to have

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been carefully chosen, starting with the poet’s own initials followed by the initials of the bridegroom and the initials of the bride. Three Latin lines, in disticha, with congratulations, are followed by the poet’s name and this, in turn, by a postscriptum in hexameter addressed to the fictitious postman waiting for Skragge to finish his poem: “Postman be running fast, run speedily, don’t you look backwards ‘til you have delivered my letter right at the table in Holmdal.”

Conclusion In this paper I have pointed to the impact of ancient mythology for the new renaissance poetry in Swedish, and how the ancient gods, in the very beginning of the process of change, functioned as signs indicating that this is poetry of a quite new kind. In the 1670s as well as in the 1690s the classical elements were no longer sparse in the Swedish epithalamia. On the contrary, they had become immensely popular. They did not function as signs any longer. Instead they were handled as an abundant treasury, ready to be used in all kinds of Swedish poetry. From the first decades of the 18th century and onwards, however, the popularity of the classical elements faded away. In my material from the 1720s there are also some attacks on mythology to be found, saying that heathen gods have indeed nothing to do with Christian marriages. Marriage poetry from this time onwards got another favourite subject, Virtue. As a consequence, it lost many of the qualities it had had before: the lively and detailed storytelling, typical of the 1670s and 1690s, turned into dry and abstract preaching on how to lead one’s life virtuously. The aim of the marriage poems was no longer to increase the joy of the wedding parties but to try to change the addressees and the guests into more virtuous human beings. Up to the 1770s the marriage audiences seem to have endured this preaching with patience. But during the last decades of the 18th century the number of marriage poems declined very rapidly. New Pre-Romantic poetical ideals had emerged; and besides, who did wanted to listen to reproaches at a wedding party?

Notes 1 Georg Stiernhielm, Musæ Suethizantes, Thet är sång-gudinnor/ Nu först lärande Dichta och Spela på Swenska . . . (Stockholm, 1668). 2 Bernt Olsson, Den svenska skaldekonstens fader och andra Stienhielmsstudier, Skrifter utgivna av Vetenskaps-Societeten i Lund 69 (Lund: Gleerup, 1974), 13.

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3

Stina Hansson, Svensk bröllopsdiktning under 1600- och 1700-talen: Renässansrepertoarernas framväxt, blomstring och tillbakagång [Swedish Marriage Poetry in the 17th and 18th Centuries: Beginnings, Heydays and Declines of the Renaissance Repertoires] (Göteborg: LIR, Göteborgs universitet, 2011). 4 Johannes Thomæ Bureus, Marriage Poem to Johan Skytte and Maria Näfwe (1606). 5 Both the Author and the bridegroom acted as tutors to Prince Gustaf Adolf, later to become King of Sweden. Bureus was later on appointed antiquarius regni and Skytte had 1598 held a Latin oration in Marburg about the political virtues of the Old Swedish warriors. 6 Tobias vir Peregrinus, Marriage Poem to Magnus Knutsson Drefling and Catharina Johansdotter (1645). 7 Walter Baumgartner, “Lübecker Hochzeitsgedichte: Aspekte und Facetten,” in Der Wagen: Lübecker Beiträge zur Kultur und Gesellschaft, ed. Alken Bruns (Lübeck: Hansisches Verlagskontor, 2004), 58. 8 Andreas Arvidi, Manuductio ad poesin Svecanam, thet är/ en kort handledning til thet swenske poeterij/ vers- eller rijm-konsten, ed. Mats Malm (Stockholm: Svenska Vitterhetssamfundet, 1996), 17. 9 A discussion about the versification in the Swedish poetry of the new type is found in Carl Ivar Ståhle, Vers och språk i vasatidens och stormaktstidens svenska diktning (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1975), 220–39. 10 Simon Skragge Håkonsson, Marriage Poem to Andreas Hoflander and Karen Olofsdotter Skragge [1650?].

Works Cited Arvidi, Andreas. Manuductio ad poesin Svecanam, thet är/ en kort handledning til thet swenske poeterij/ vers- eller rijm-konsten. Edited by Mats Malm with an introduction by Mats Malm and Kristian Wåhlin. Stockholm: Svenska Vitterhetssamfundet, 1996. Baumgartner, Walter. “Lübecker Hochzeitsgedichte: Aspekte und Facetten.” In Der Wagen: Lübecker Beiträge zur Kultur und Gesellschaft. Edited by Alken Bruns. Lübeck: Hansisches Verlagskontor, 2004. Bureus, Johannes Thomæ. Marriage Poem to Johan Skytte and Maria Näfwe. 1606, Uppsala University Library. Hansson, Stina. Svensk bröllopsdiktning under 1600- och 1700-talen: Renässansrepertoarernas framväxt, blomstring och tillbakagång [Swedish Marriage Poetry in the 17th and 18th Centuries: Beginnings, Heydays and Declines of the Renaissance Repertoires]. Göteborg: LIR, Göteborgs universitet, 2011. Olsson, Bernt. Den svenska skaldekonstens fader och andra Stienhielmsstudier. Skrifter utgivna av Vetenskaps-Societeten i Lund 69. Lund: Gleerup, 1974. Skragge Håkonsson, Simon. Marriage Poem to Andreas Hoflander and Karen Olofsdotter Skragge. [1650?]. Uppsala University Library.

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Stiernhielm, Georg. Musæ Suethizantes, Thet är sång-gudinnor/ Nu först lärande Dichta och Spela på Swenska . . . . Stockholm, 1668. Ståhle, Carl Ivar. Vers och språk i vasatidens och stormaktstidens svenska diktning. Stockholm: Norstedt, 1975. Tobias vir Peregrinus. Marriage Poem to Magnus Knutsson Drefling and Catharina Johansdotter. 1645. Uppsala University Library.

HANS SACHS AND THE INTEGRATION OF THE MUSES INTO GERMAN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE KLAUS KIPF LUDWIG MAXIMILIAN UNIVERSITY OF MUNICH

When Hans Sachs, a shoemaker and amateur poet from Nuremburg, died in 1576 at the age of 82, he left behind the most comprehensive literary œuvre in German language that has yet to be surpassed over 400 years later.1 His work includes almost 4300 ‘Meisterlieder,’2 1610 rhymed poems (‘Spruchgedichte’), ca. 210 plays (tragedi, comedi, and shrovetide plays), six dialogues in prose and more than 70 spiritual and secular songs outside the ‘Meistergesang’ tradition.3 The mere breadth of his work has not been exceeded by any German writer to this day, not by Lessing, Goethe or Thomas Mann. Despite this, Hans Sachs has been commonly referred to by literary historians merely as a “fleißiger Verseschmied”4 or as a “Schusterpoet”5 for a long time.6 In this paper, I want to correct, or at least, augment this aesthetic judgement, and present Hans Sachs as a writer, who plays an important part in the fundamental change in the understanding of European poetry between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. The reception, integration and transformation of ancient mythology play an important and decisive part in this process, a fact that is obvious to any student of late medieval and early modern Latin literature.7 My objective is to show that the humanistic impulse of restoring poetry to standards of antiquity in German literature did not begin as recently as with the poetical reforms of Martin Opitz and his Buch von der Deutschen Poeterey in 1624,8 but can be traced back to the Reformation era, one example of which is the incorporation of the myth of the muses in works of Hans Sachs. In the Deutsches Wörterbuch by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Moritz Heyne states for the history of the German loanword “Muse”: die gelehrte dichtung des 17. jahrh. führt das wort, zunächst im plural, in die gehobene rede ein, indem sie, nach dem vorbilde der alten, den dichter

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After giving some examples from German Baroque literature (Opitz, Andreas Tscherning, Paul Fleming and Sigmund von Birken), Heyne continues: “das wort wird notwendiges zubehör der dichtersprache für lange hinaus, bis auf unsere zeit.”10 Recent lexicography has not revised this entry substantially: According to the actual edition of the most important etymological dictionary of the German language, the loanword Muse is derived from the 17th century.11 This may be true for the loanword ‘Muse,’ which is morphologically adopted into German; the foreign word ‘Musa’ (with Latin flection) is surely older. But my main intention is not word history, but to show to what extent the ancient myth of the muses was already being used by German authors in the 16th century to express their self-understanding as poets. Some of the most prominent and even striking examples for the depiction of muses in German literature of the 16th century can be found in the work of Hans Sachs. We find the word musa three times in the titles of “Spruchgedichte” (rhymed poems, that were not sung), two of them were transmitted in single prints and in the complete edition, that Sachs edited himself, the other one was only transmitted in manuscript, in one of the autograph ‘Spruchbücher,’ in which Sachs collected his own poems.12 I will focus on two of these ‘Spruchgedichte’ here. In all three poems, the muses appear as a group and they start a dialogue with the first-personnarrator, who bears a biographical resemblance to the author. The oldest poem is the Klagred der neun Muse oder kunst uber ganz Teutschland from 1534.13 Here the nine muses appear as a group and represent a metonymy of art according to the title. They lament the condition of the arts and announce their intention to flee Germany. The best known depiction of the muses in Sachs’s œuvre can be found in another ‘Spruchgedicht’ entitled Die neun Gab Muse oder kunst-göttin betreffend from 1536,14 which stayed popular within scholarship, because, in 1776, the young Goethe used it as a model for his poem Erklärung eines alten Holzschnitts vorstellend Hans Sachsens poetische Sendung.15 Die neun gab Muse is important for our understanding of the spread of humanism in German-speaking Europe, because it contains the oldest presentation of a vocation of a poet, which has even been called a “Dichterweihe.”16 In the poem, the muses are part of an autobiographical fiction, in which they endow the narrator with poetic virtues and consecrate him as a poet. This scene influenced Goethe, who began his Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung one year after he adopted Sachs’s poem under the title Hans Sachsens poetische Sendung.17 The third poem,

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in which the muses appear in the title, Ein gesprech mit den 9 muese, wer doch ursprüncklicher ursacher sey der aufruer im Tewtschlandt (1553),18 deals with the vocation to poetry by the muses. Here, the muses appear to the poet, who undergoes a crisis and wants to cease writing poetry, in a dream and convince him to hold on to poetry by reminding him of his vocation. But why is the adaptation of the myth of the muses by Hans Sachs remarkable at all? On the one hand, we do not find such a detailed recourse to this myth in the context of poetics in German literature before Sachs.19 On the other hand, Sachs uses ancient mythology in order to depict his self-image as a poet in a way that was only to be found among the members of the humanist movement, who wrote exclusively in Latin at that time. To illustrate the rareness of the muses in medieval German literature, it may suffice to state that we do not find a continuous tradition of this myth before 1500, but only single citations and allusions.20 The most prominent one is the double invocation of the (true) Helicon in Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan, where the muses are mentioned with their synonym Camenen.21 This is essentially different from the Latin literature of the Middle Ages, where we find an unbroken tradition of the muses, especially through the topos of invocatio, the appeal to the muses as agents of inspiration in the opening of a poem.22 Although this invocation has undergone fundamental change since the Christian poetry of late antiquity, in which a prayer to Christ or the Holy Ghost began to replace a plea to pagan goddesses. The existence of the muses, their function and their names did not fall into obscurity during the Middle Ages thanks to Boethius, Martianus Capella and Macrobius.23

Klagred der neun Muse oder kunst uber gantz Teutschland An interpretation of the first adaptation of the myth of the muses in Sachs’s œuvre will help us understand the poet’s affinity to the muses and humanistic poetics.24 If the muses threaten to flee Germany in the Klagred, than they have to be there in the first place. Normally, we would expect them to be in Greece, because they are—after all—Greek, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, who have grown up at the foot of Mount Olympus, and who reside at the same place or at the Helicon. This is logically trivial, but remarkable for the historian of ideas. The immigration of the muses to Germany is a new idea in 1534, which is found exclusively among German Humanists in Latin poetry or oratory. The most important example is Konrad Celtis’s famous ‘Ode to Apollo, the inventor of poetry,

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that he may come with his harp from the Italians to the Germans’ (Ode ad Apollinem repertorem poetices: ut ab Italis cum lyra ad Germanos veniat) from 1486,25 where Celtis appeals to Apollo, the ‘Mousagetes,’ as well as to the muses (under the synonym “Camaenae”), to come to Germany: “Tu veni incultam fidibus canoris / Visere terram” (II.3–4). Following Celtis’s appeal to Apollo and his crowd to come to Germany, the muses’ settlement in the North becomes a topos in NeoLatin poetry and in academic oratory in Germany.26 The settlement of the muses in Germany is presupposed in Sachs’s Klagred, because they say, that they spent a long time “im Teutschland,”27 where they spread their art: Vil zeyt thet wir verzehrn Im Teutschland, doch ehrlich gehalten Anfengklich von jungen und alten; Biß wir all kunst auß-gossen wol, Der glerten schier all winckel vol. Der freyen künstner uberal, Sinnreicher werckleut auch on zal Der bücher sumb ist auch nit klein.28

They have stated before, that they are coming from Germany, where they served for a long time: “Wir kummen her auß teutschem land, Da wir nun lang gedienet hand.”29 But now they threaten to leave Germany and to return to Greece, the Parnassus, Apollo, and Athene: Darumb wöll wir raumen Teutschland, lassen kunstloß und an verstand Und wieder in Kriechen mit ehrn Zu unserm Berg Pernaso kehrn, zu unserm gott Apolini Und unser göttin Palidi.30

This thread inverts the idea to invite the muses to Germany, which is found in Celtis’s Ode ad Apollinem, for the first time. Although this idea was common in Neo-Latin humanist poetry, it is new in German literature. It is remarkable, that Sachs introduces this mythological idea to German literature, because recent research tended to assume that Sachs’s knowledge of ancient history and mythology came exclusively from German translations.31 This assumption, I think, can no longer be held up in the light of the detailed reference to ideas available only in Latin literature. So, the Klagred and Sachs’s use of the myth of the muses provoke us to think differently about the relationship between Latin and the Vernacular in 16th-century Germany.32 I would not assert that Sachs

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used Celtis’s “Ode to Apollo” or any poem in his tradition directly as his source. On closer examination, Sachs’s muses have stayed in Germany for a indetermined time and they have taught there “kunst,” erudition, handcraft to ‘judicious craftsmen,’ and the writing of books. For Celtis, by contrast, the teaching of Apollo and the muses is restricted to the art of writing “carmina” that follow ancient rules and models. One cannot tie Sachs directly to Celtis and his followers, because he does not identify the beginning of the muses’ activity with the humanist movement, but he places it in the dim and distant past. Moreover he allows the teaching of the muses to reach a broader populous, which includes the mentioning of the “sinnreiche werckleut,” who do not belong to the elite self-image of humanism. However, a general parallel to humanist discourse on the muses can be seen in the depiction of their activity in certain countries like Greece, Italy and Germany and in their relocation from one country to another. Hence, Sachs stands surprisingly close to Neo-Latin poetic tradition due to the fact that he uses the myth of the muses for a discourse about art and poetry in generalʊin contrast to the vast majority of German-speaking literature before him.33

Die neun Gab Muse oder Kunstgöttin betreffend This ‘Spruchgedicht’ is not only the most prominent presentation of the muses in Sachs’s opus, but also the one, that is most frequently interpreted.34 In this poem, Sachs stylises his vocation as a poet in the context of a twenty-year-old apprentice, who falls asleep in the Imperial garden of Wels and meets in his dream “Neun weiblein, zart und adelich” (50).35 They are dressed in a pagan manner (“[n]ach heydenischer art,” 54) and introduce themselves as the nine muses, who have come from Parnassus in Greece (87) and were sent by Apollo and Pallas Athena (92–95) to recruit servants “im teutschen land” (91). Clio, the first Muse and their spokeswoman, has entrusted the narrator-author, with a lifelong ministry to German poetry, which is specified in different genres: O jüngling, dein dienst sey, Das dich auff teutsch poeterey Ergebst durch-auß dein leben lang, Nemblichen auff meistergesang, Darin man fürdert Gottes glory An tag bringst gut schriftlich histori, Dergleichen auf trawrig tragedi, Auf spil und fröliche comedi,

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The narrator tries to elude the service with reference to his youth and his lack of experience (132–41). Thereupon, the muses endue him with their nine gifts: Wiltu, so wöll wir dich begaben Mit den neun gaben, die wir haben, Damit wir vor begaben thetten Griechisch und lateinisch poeten, Dergleich vil teutscher im Teutschlandt. Ist meister Hans Folz dir bekannt Und etlich mehr bey deiner zeit? (147–53)

These gifts have previously inspired not only Greek and Roman poets, but also German writers like Hans Folz, a ‘Meistersinger’ and ‘Spruchdichter,’ who died in Nuremburg, when Sachs was 19 years old. In a scene that is reminiscent to a consecration by the laying of hands, Clio endues the future poet with the desire to the art of poetry,36 Euterpe with “lust und begir, / Wolgefallen, lieb, freud und gunst / Zu dieser hochgelobten kunst” (172–74), Melpomene gives the necessary diligence (“hohen fleiß / Zu dieser künsten grundt-erfarung,” 178–79), and Thalia “tägliche übung” (186). Polimnia is responsible for a reasoned disposition of every subject,37 Erato’s domain is the intelligence needed in invention (“scherpff und vernunfft, / Zu erfinden und speculiern / Zu mindern und zu applicirn / Nach rechter art ieden sententz / Durch vernünfftig experientz,” 196–200), Urania offers the power of poetic judgement,38 and Caliope, ultimately, endues the poet with a pleasant style and recitation (“[e]in stilum, / Den weisen gefellig, / Ein auß-sprechen süß und holdselig / Verstendig deutlich, on als stamlen,” 215–17). In the end, Clio, here the prima inter pares, embraces the endowments (“neun eygenschafft,” 223) with the (much-cited) order, that poetry shall serve God’s glory, the critique of vices, praise of virtues, that it shall teach the youth and shall enliven sad minds: “Nemlich das all deine gedicht / Zu Gottes ehr werden gericht, / Zu straff der laster, lob der tugendt, / Zu lehre der blüenden jugendt, / Zu ergetzung trawriger gmüt” (229–31). The poem has been interpreted several times, because it is central for Sachs’s self-understanding as a poet. Brunner interprets the nine gifts as “nichts anderes als eine Beschreibung der Eigenschaften, in denen er [scil. Sachs] selbst den Grund für den Erfolg seines Dichtens sieht,”39 Kugler holds an individual interpretation of the myth of the muses,40 and Klein, who has given in 1988 the most

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detailed analysis so far, states that Sachs stands in continuity with “ehrwürdige[n] mittelalterliche[n] Traditionen”41 through his “Auffassung von der Dichtung als ars, als einer lehr- und lernbaren Fertigkeit, die durch sinnvoll-zielstrebiges Bemühen, durch Fleiß und Ausdauer und fortwährende Übung zu erwerben ist.”42 This interpretation of poetry as a learnable and teachable ability was sharedʊaccording to Kleinʊwith every medieval poet.43 In a recent interpretation, Klein stresses the innovative potency of the poem: For the first time in German literature, inspiration is understood not as “externe Voraussetzung eines einmaligen, auf eine bestimmte Dichtung bezogenen Schreibprozesses,” but as “einmaliger Akt zu Beginn einer langen und . . . erfolgreichen Dichterkarriere.”44 Sachs claims for himself “eine poetische Begabung . . ., die ein ganzes Leben lang halt.”45 This interpretation is confirmed by Ein gesprech mit den 9 muese, wer doch ursprüncklicher ursacher sey der aufruer im Tewtschlandt.46 In this poem, written 17 years after Die neun Gab Muse,47 the muses appear to the poet who is “des dichtens vertrossen”48 and has “peschlossen, / Gar abzulassen von meim dichten,”49 due to the hardships of age50 and the passage of events in a dream and remind him to his life-long vocation to poetry in Wels: Als ich ir recht war-nam zw-leczt, Da warn es die neun kunst-göttinen, Die mir ains-mals waren erschinen, Als ich in pluender jugent noch Ains tags von Wels gen Salczpurg zog, Alda ich mich in het ergeben Zw dienst, die-weil ich het mein leben, Zw solcher tewtscher poetrey.51

After some debate, the poet awakes and follows the muses’ appeal to his life-long vocation52 and continues to compose poetry,53 because he is convinced, that the world’s wickedness calls for the moral impact of poetry. In Die neun Gab Muse, Sachs defines inspiration as die einmalige Ausstattung mit der psychischen Disposition und der pragmatischen Vernunft, dem handwerklichen Rüstzeug und den formalen Fähigkeiten, die mittelalterlicher Rhetorik und Dichtungstheorie zufolge Voraussetzungen des literarischen Schaffens sind.54

With the reference to a rhetorical origin for the nine gifts of the muses, Klein goes one important step further than previous research, but sheʊas well as all researchers before herʊdid not notice, that the designation of

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individual abilities to each muse, is not Sachs’s own inventionʊas most scholars seem to supposeʊ, and that it is not as perfectly consistent with medieval theory of poetry, as Klein stated in 1988. It has hitherto remained unnoticed,55 that the nine gifts, which the muses bestow upon the poet, are in accord with one of the most important interpretations of this myth in the transition from late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages, the rational allegory of the muses by Fulgentius the Mythographer,56 who wrote his influential allegories of the most important myths of Greek and Roman antiquity in the 5th or 6th century AD, which remained influential throughout the Middle Ages.57 In the Fabula de novem Musis in the first Book of his Mitologiae (I, chap. 15),58 he explains the names of the nine muses, which have been invented by Hesiod and canonized afterwards, in etymological as well as functionalistic manner. Fulgentius interprets the muses as nine types of knowledge, “doctrinae atque scientiae . . . mod[i]” (25, 19), which can be used as a universal method to acquire knowledge. These ‘ways of acquiring knowledge,’ ascribed by Fulgentius to the nine muses, correspond exactly to the nine gifts of the muses in Sachs’s poem. To show the relation of Sachs’s ‘Spruchgedicht’ with the Mitologiae, which I argue was his final source, I will present the abilities, which the muses represent allegorically, from the short abstract at the end of the Fabula de novem Musis (27, 5–11), alongside the nine gifts, which the muses donate to the poet in Sachs’s Die neun Gab Muse. The order, in which the muses are mentioned, is the same in Fulgentius’s prose as well as in Sachs’s poem.59 For Fulgentius, Clio is responsible for “uelle doctrinam” (27, 5), in Sachs’s poem she awards “[e]in bestendig, volkummen willen / Zu disen löblichen subtilen künsten” (167–68).60 Euterpe is identified by Fulgentius with the ability to “delectari quod uelis” (27, 6), in the ‘Spruchgedicht’ she donates “lust und begir, / Wolgefallen, lieb, freud und gunst / Zu diser hochgelobten kunst” (172–74). Fulgentius depicts Melpomene as being able to “instare ad id quod delectatus es” (27, 6–7), according to Sachs she donates “hohen fleiß / Zu diser künsten grundt-erfarung, / An mühe und arbeyt gar kein sparung” (178–80). The mythographer portrays Thalia as being capable enough to ‘grasp that, which you pursue’ (“capere ad id quod instas,” 27, 7); Sachs renders this as “[d]ie annemung des wercks” (184). Fulgentius’s fifth step, represented by Polimnia, is “memorari quod capis” (27, 8), in Sachs’s text this becomes “Einn nach-dencken . . . / Ein bewegen und regulieren, / Ein außtheylen unnd ordinieren” (190–92). For Fulgentius, Erato is responsible for “inuenire de tuo simile ad quod memineris” (27, 8–9), for Sachs she asserts: “Ich gib dir scherpff und

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vernunfft, / Zu erfinden und speculieren, / Zu mindern und zu applicieren” (196–98). For the seventh step, Fulgentius calls upon Terpsichore to “iudicare quod inuenias” (27, 9–10), for Sachs, she endows “unterscheid Eins ieden dings ware erkentnus, / Durch ein klare lautre verstendtnus, / Alle ding gründtlich zu probiern, / All materi zu judicieren” (202–6). For Fulgentius, the eighth Muse (Urania) is able to “eligere de quo iudicas” (27, 10), for Sachs, she has “Himlisch weißheit . . . / Das gut auß bösem zu erwehln, / Das unnütz vom nützen zu schehln” (208–10).61 The ninth muse, Caliope, according to Fulgentius, gives “bene proferre quod elegeris” (27, 10–11), Sachs makes her award “ein stilum, den weisen gefellig, / Ein auß-sprechen süß und holdselig, / Verstendig, deutlich, on als stamlen” (215–17). Sachs follows Fulgentius’s rhetorical interpretation of the muses step by step in identical order. Fulgentius’s rationalistic and technical understanding of the muses as steps towards knowledge acquisition (“doctrinae atque scientiae modi”) is compatible with Sachs’s own comprehension of poetry as a learnable ability, as “Poesie nach Maß und Zahl,”62 which has affinities to techniques of artisanry. However, it is not Sachs’s own invention, but one possible way to think about inspiration, that has a long tradition from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance. Therefore, it is not appropriate to judge Sachs’s understanding of poetry as merely medieval and to set it in opposition to Renaissance poetics, which is often—in a simplistic manner—identified with the Neoplatonic theory of ‘furor poeticus.’63 On the one hand, enthusiasm is by far not the only possible way for Renaissance humanism to think about inspiration,64 on the other hand, Sachs’s understanding of poetry, based on my reading of Die neun Gab Muse oder kunst-göttin betreffend, is not simply to be identified with the standard poetics of the Middle Ages. The reference to the myth of the muses as patrons of the arts, especially of poetry, is foreign to medieval German literature, and thus further reinforces the fact that Sachs’s poetics—as moralistic as it is—borrows aspects of humanist poetics. Rather, Sachs adopts a congenial late antique, rationalising interpretation of the muses that was widespread in the Latin Middle Ages and early modern era, but not predominant. Martianus Capella’s interpretation of the muses as patrons of science in general, especially of the Seven Liberal Arts, was equally influential, if not more important in the Middle Ages.65 For Renaissance poetics, Plato’s idea of the muses as the ones who inspired the poets, became most important and was revitalised by Petrarch. The notion going back to Hesiod, who invented the number and the descriptive names of the muses, which says that muses are patrons of

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different genres of poetry, is of course the most important and widespread interpretation. Fulgentius refers to it extensively in his prologue to the first book of the Mitologiae, which contains the Fabula de nouem musis as well. The question, in which way Sachs became acquainted with Fulgentius’s interpretation of the myth, can remain open here. Fulgentius’s work was widespread in the Renaissance, both in complete editions and in excerpts, especially in the influential mythographic handbooks.66 Giovanni Boccaccio entered the passages cited from Fulgentius’s Mithologiae in his influential compilation Genealogiae deorum gentilium (originating from 1370; printed frequently since 1471).67 Complete Latin editions of Boccaccios Genealogiae were printed several times in Germany, among them a commented one from 1532 by the philologist Jacob Micyllus (Moltzer) from Strasbourg.68 Fulgentius’s Mitologiae were also repeatedly printed in the beginning of the 16th century. Jakob Locher, who called himself Philomusus, edited and commented it in Augsburg in 1521.69 Micyllus finished another edition of the complete Mitologiae together with other mythographic manuals, such as the Fabularum liber of Hyginus and Palaiphatos’s De fabulosis narrationibus, as well as the Phainomena of Aratos and Proklos’s Sphaira in Basel in 1535, and he commented on all of these texts historically and philologically.70 Thus, there was no lack of the Latin text of Fulgentius’s Fabula de novem Musis in 1536, when Sachs wrote his Die neun Gab Muse. But we do not know of any German translation of Fulgentius’s Fabula de novem muses or of its excerpt in Boccaccio’s Genealogie. The mainstream research is still acting on the assumption, that Sachs used mainly German translations when he worked on antique subjects.71 This assumption is supported by the preserved catalogue of Sachs’s library, which registers many German translations of antique works, but apparently no editions in Latin or even Greek.72 Moreover, Sachs spoke of himself as “ungelehrte[r] mann / Der weder latein noch griechisch kann.”73 But the fact that Sachs makes use of Fulgentius’s interpretation of the muses, which—as far as we know—was available only in Latin in 1536, leads me to the assumption, that Sachs’s knowledge of Latin was good enough and his interest in mythology was strong enough, to acquire the detailed knowledge of Fulgentius’s rhetorical and rationalising interpretation of the muses even in Latin.74 Maybe there were other people who helped Sachs read Latin. We do know after all that Sachs visited a Latin school in Nuremberg for eight years (from the age of 7 to 15) and that his knowledge of Latin was good enough to translate comtemporary Latin

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dramas, among them Johannes Reuchlin’s Henno (1531) and Georg Macropedius’s Hecastus in 1549—although not flawlessly.75

Conclusion Hans Sachs has been interpreted by literary historians as a mere rhymer and prolific writer, who submitted all his subjects to a simplistic, civic morality.76 In contrast, I have tried to present him as an author who is paradigmatically interesting for his era, because he brings religious, historical, political, and social subjects into a vernacular language in an encyclopaedic manner, subjects that were rarely or never before treated in the German language and its vernacular literature.77 Sachs could be called a disseminator and transformer of discourses that were previously only available in Latin for the learned. He enriched German literature even though his talent as a poet was limited. In the context of the conflict between Renaissance Humanism and the Reformation, his usage of the muses to illustrate his self-image as poet is significant for German literature. A few decades later comparable adaptations of the myth of the muses can be found in the German literature of the 16th century, e.g. in Kaspar Scheits Fröliche Heimfahrt (1552), in which a narrator called “Philomusus” meets the muses, the fates, and “fama,”78 in Mathias Holtzwart’s Lustgart Newer Deüttscher Poeteri (1568), in which the author-narrator, led by allegorical characters, among them the muses, wanders through mythological and historical tableaus,79 or in Johann Fischart’s rhymed prologue to Bernhard Schmid’s version of Ritter Peter von Stauffenberg (1588).80 These recourses are characteristic of German literature in the early modern era, because they increasingly refer back to antiquity, especially to antique mythology, to articulate the self-image of the authors. This recourse to antiquity did not first begin in 1624—contrary to the impression that Martin Opitz and his fellow reformers tried to give—, but decades before during the Reformation era.81

Notes 1

For comprehensive overviews on Sachs and his œuvre, cf. Horst Brunner, “Hans Sachs,” in Fränkische Lebensbilder, vol. 7, ed. Gerhard Pfeiffer and Alfred Wendehorst, (Neustadt/Aisch: Degener, 1977); Eckhard Bernstein, Hans Sachs: Mit Zeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1993); Horst Brunner, Hans Sachs (Gunzenhausen: Schrenk, 2009). I would like to thank Niklas Holzberg (Munich) for important corrections and advices and Karina Marie Ash (Munich) for improving this paper linguistically.

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The Repertorium der Sangsprüche und Meisterlieder (ed. Horst Brunner and Burghart Wachinger, vol. 10–12, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986–87), that dedicates three complete volumes to Sachs, counts as many as 4288 resp. 4286 ‘Meisterlieder.’ 3 For an estimate of the exact numbers of Sachs’s poems, cf. Brunner, “Hans Sachs,” 78; Hartmut Kugler, “Meisterliederdichtung als Auslegungskunst: Zur impliziten Poetik bei Hans Sachs,” in Vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit: Festschrift für Horst Brunner, ed. Dorothea Klein, Elisabeth Lienert, and Johannes Rettelbach (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2000), 541 n. 4; Niklas Holzberg, “Möglichkeiten und Grenzen humanistischer Antikerezeption: Willibald Pirckheimer und Hans Sachs als Vermittler klassischer Bildung,” in Hans Sachs im Schnittpunkt von Antike und Neuzeit, ed. Stephan Füssel (Nürnberg: Carl, 1995), 19 n. 28; Brunner, Hans Sachs, 17–19. 4 Jan-Dirk Müller, “Fischarts Gegenkanon: Komische Literatur im Zeichen der imitation,” in Maske und Mosaik: Poetik, Sprache, Wissen im 16. Jahrhundert, ed. Jan-Dirk Müller and Jörg Robert (Münster: Lit, 2007) 284. 5 Cf. e.g. Thomas Habel, “Der Schuster-Poet auf dem Parnaß: Molanders HansSachs-Schelte von 1698,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 74 (1987). 6 For a history of these stereotypes, see Ferdinand Eichler, Das Nachleben des Hans Sachs vom 16. bis ins 19. Jahrhundert: Eine Untersuchung zur Geschichte der deutschen Literatur (Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1904); Dirk Rose, “ ‘Hans Sachs’: Entstehung und Funktion eines poetologischen Stereotyps in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in: Frühneuzeitliche Stereotype: Zur Produktivität und Restriktivität sozialer Vorstellungsmuster, ed. Mirosáawa Czarnecka, Thomas Borgstedt, and Tomasz Jablecki (Bern: Lang, 2010). 7 See the paper by Teresa Chevrolet in this volume. For Latin literature in Germany during the 16th century, see Walther Ludwig, “Musenkult und GottesdienstʊEvangelischer Humanismus in der Reformationszeit,” in Musenkult und Gottesdienst, ed. Walther Ludwig (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2001). 8 Cf. Jörg Robert, “Vetus Poesisʊnova ratio carminum: Martin Opitz und der Beginn der Deutschen Poeterey,” in Müller and Robert, Maske und Mosaik, 397– 441. 9 Moritz Heyne, “Muse,” in Deutsches Wörterbuch, ed. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, vol. 12 (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1885). 10 Ibid., 2336. 11 Cf. Kluge. Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. 24th ed., rev. Elmar Seebold (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002), 639. 12 Hans Sachs, Werke, ed. Adelbert von Keller and Edmund Goetze. Alphabetischer Registerband, ed. Roger A. Crockett (Hildesheim: Olms, 1982), 158–59. 13 Hans Sachs, Werke, ed. Adelbert von Keller and Edmund Goetze. (Stuttgart, 1870–1908; Hildesheim: Olms, 1964), vol. 4 (1870), 124–27. 14 Ibid., vol. 7 (1873), 202–10; Hans Sachs, Meisterlieder, Spruchgedichte, Fastnachtsspiele: Auswahl, ed. Hartmut Kugler (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003), 66–76.

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See Jens Haustein, “Über Goethes Erklärung eines alten Holzschnittes vorstellend Hans Sachsens poetische Sendung,” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 146, no. 231 (1994), and Hartmut Kugler, “Über Goethe und Sachs,” in Röllwagenbüchlein: Festschrift für Walter Röll zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Jürgen Jaehrling, Uwe Meves, and Erika Timm (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002). 16 Bernstein, Hans Sachs, 28. See ibid., 27 for an anonymous copper engraving of the Dichterweihe from 1829. 17 Cf. Kugler, “Über Goethe und Sachs,” 239. 18 Sachs, Werke, vol. 23 (1895), 17–26; see Reinhard Heinritz, “Politisches Musengespräch: Hans Sachs und die ‘Zensur’ in der Reichsstadt Nürnberg,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 85 (2003): 500–4. 19 Cf. Dorothea Klein, “Inspiration und Autorschaft: Ein Beitrag zur mediävistischen Autordebatte,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 80 (2006): 86. 20 See, also for the following examples, Manfred Kern, “Musae,” in Lexikon der antiken Gestalten in den deutschen Texten des Mittelalters, ed. Manfred Kern and Alfred Ebenbauer (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2003). The scope of the Lexikon der antiken Gestalten in den deutschen Texten des Mittelalters comprises narrative texts up to ca. 1350. 21 Cf. ibid., 408. 22 Cf. Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, 10th ed. (Bern: Francke, 1984), 235–52. 23 See Jan Söffner, “Musen,” in Mythenrezeption: Die antike Mythologie in Literatur, Musik und Kunst von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Maria MoogGrünewald (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2008), 446–48; Klein, “Inspiration und Autorschaft,” 64–86. For Boethius see Klaus Heitmann, “Boethius’ Verdammung der Musen im Mittelalter,” in Renatae litterae: Studien zum Nachleben der Antike und zur europäischen Renaissance. August Buck zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Klaus Heitmann and Eckhart Schroeder (Frankfurt/Main: Athenäum 1972). 24 See John L. Flood, “Kultur auf einem dürren Ast: Zu einem Einblattdruck des Hans Sachs,” in Natur und Kultur in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters: Colloquium Exeter, ed. Alan Robertshaw and Gerhard Wolf (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999), for the only detailed interpretation of this poem. 25 Humanistische Lyrik des 16. Jahrhunderts. Lateinisch und deutsch, ed. and trans. Wilhelm Kühlmann, Robert Seidel, and Hermann Wiegand (Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassiker-Verlag, 1997), 68–71. 26 See Jörg Robert, “Carmina Pieridum nulli celebrata priorum: Zur Inszenierung von Epochenwende im Werk des Conrad Celtis,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 124 (2002). 27 Sachs, Werke, vol. 4 (1870), 125, line 4. 28 Ibid., 125, lines 17–24. 29 Ibid., 125, lines 2–3. 30 Ibid., 126, lines 15–20. 31 For a critique of this view, see Holzberg, “Möglichkeiten und Grenzen,” 17–29.

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See Bernstein, Hans Sachs, 28, who indicates parallels between Sachs’s view and Celtis’s opening speech for the University of Ingolstadt (Oratio habita in gymnasio in Ingelstadio publice recitata). Flood, too, sees a parallel between Sachs’s Klagred and Celtis’s Ode ad Apollinem (“Kultur auf einem dürren Ast,” 284–85). 33 Bernstein, in contrast, stresses the difference between Sachs’s self-understanding and that of the German humanists. Eckhard Bernstein, “Der ‘teutsche tichter’ und die ‘poetae docti’: Zum dichterischen Selbstverständnis des Hans Sachs und der deutschen Humanisten,” in Hans Sachs im Schnittpunkt von Antike und Neuzeit, ed. Stephan Füssel (Nürnberg: Carl, 1995). 34 See Brunner, “Hans Sachs,” 88–90; Dorothea Klein, Bildung und Belehrung: Untersuchungen zum Dramenwerk des Hans Sachs (Stuttgart: Heinz, 1988), 247– 60; Bernstein, Hans Sachs, 26–28; Haustein, “Über Goethes Erklärung,” 8–10; Kugler, “Über Goethe und Sachs,” 243–44; Klein, “Inspiration und Autorschaft,” 88–91. 35 Sachs, Meisterlieder, Spruchgedichte, Fastnachtsspiele, 66–76 (this edition cited with verses in brackets). 36 “Ein bestendig, volkummen willen / Zu disen löblichen subtilen / Künsten gemelter poeterey“ (lines 167–69). 37 “ein nach-dencken ich dir gieb, / Ein bewegen und regulieren, / Ein außtheylen und ordiniern / Ein ieder materien sum, / Wer, was, wie, wo, wenn und warum” (lines 190–94). 38 “Himmlich weißheit gib ich hernach, / Das gut auß bösem zu erwehln, / Das unnütz von nützen zu schehln” (lines 208–10). 39 Brunner, “Hans Sachs,” 89. 40 Cf. Kugler in Sachs, Meisterlieder, Spruchgedichte, Fastnachtsspiele, 65: “Sachs läßt sie als allegorische Figuren auftreten, konfrontiert sie mit Frau Ehre und dem Dichter-Ich und interpretiert die von ihnen verliehenen Gaben auf eigene Weise.” 41 Klein, Bildung und Belehrung, 254. 42 Ibid. 43 Cf. ibid., 255: “Diese Auffassung teilt Sachs […] mit jedem Dichter des Mittelalters.” 44 Klein, “Inspiration und Autorschaft,” 89. 45 Ibid. 46 Sachs, Werke, vol. 23 (1895), 17–26. The poem has not yet been interpreted in this context, as far as I see. 47 Cf. ibid., 26, lines 6–7: “Anno salutis 1553, am 5 tag Novembris.” 48 Ibid., 17, line 11. 49 Ibid, 17, lines 12–13. 50 The narrator wants to be understood as the author Hans Sachs: He is 59 years old (ibid., 18, line 31), his birthday is November 5th (ibid., 17, lines 6–7), and he has just completed “[d]as zwainczigst buech meiner gedicht” (ibid., 17, line 10). 51 Ibid., 18, lines 6–13. 52 Cf. ibid., 19, lines 18–19: “Ewterpe sprach: ‘Dw pist erwelt / In unsrem dinst dein lebenlang.’ ”

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Cf. ibid., 25, lines 30–32: “Weil sie das von mir habn pegert, / Fach ich gleich an mit diesem spruech / Das ain-und-zwainzigiste puech.” 54 Klein, “Inspiration und Autorschaft,” 89. Cf. already Haustein, “Über Goethes Erklärung,” 9: “[D]ie Begabung ist an einen bestimmten, genau benennbaren Moment gebunden, sie stellt plötzlich einen neuen Zustand her, der das weitere Leben des Begabten bestimmen wird.” 55 This discovery is not my own: I owe it to my participation in the summer school “Musen: Atem, Erinnerung, Botschaft“ organized by Marc-Aeilko Aris and Thomas Ricklin for the Zentrum für Mittelalter- und Renaissancestudien at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 2008. Thomas Ricklin had presented Fulgentius’s interpretation of the muses before I presented Hans Sachs. Mischa von Perger (Augsburg) was so kind as to draw my attention to the obvious parallels between Fulgentius and Sachs, and he was so generous as to leave its publication to me. 56 For the various problems of his identity and dating, see Gregory Hays, “The Date and Identity of the Mythographer Fulgentius,” Journal of Medieval Latin 13 (2003). 57 For Fulgentius’s Mitologiae and their influence, see Jane Chance, Medieval Mythography, vol. 1 (Gainesville: The University Press of Florida, 1994), 95–128, and passim. For his interpretation of the muses, see the paper of Teresa Chevrolet in this volume. 58 Fabii Planciadis Fulgentii Opera, ed. Helm, 25–27. Cited hereafter with page and line (from this edition) in the text. 59 This, to me, seems to be a proof for the fact, that Sachs’s gifts cannot be independent from Fulgentius’s interpretation. 60 Cf. ibid, 26, lines 2–3: “cogitatio querendae cogitationem.” 61 Cf. ibid., 27, lines 1–2: “eligere enim utile caducumque despuere caeleste ingenium est.” 62 Kugler, “Meisterliederdichtung,” 551. 63 For this tradition, see Christoph J. Steppich, Numine afflatur: Die Inspiration des Dichters im Denken der Renaissance (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2002), especially 146–65 (‘furor poeticus’), 299–341 (the muses). 64 See Volkhard Wels, Der Begriff der Dichtung in der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), 221–37, and passim. 65 See Söffner, “Musen,” 446. 66 See ibid., 443–47. 67 Cf. Giovanni Boccaccio, Tutte le opera, ed. Vittore Branca, vol. 7–8 (Milano: Mondadori, 1998), part 1, 1074–82 (bk. II, chap. 2): “De VIIII Musis filiabus Iovis.” 68 Ioannis Bocatii, Peri Genealogias Deorum, Libri Quindecim, cum annotationibus Iacobi Micylli (Basel: Johann Herwagen, 1532). 69 Fulgentius Placiades, In Mythologiis. . . . Mythologiarum libri Tres, . . . Scholia Paraphrastica a Philomuso Addita sunt (Augsburg: Sigmund Grimm and Marx Wirsung, 1521).

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70

C. Iulius Hyginus, Fabularum Liber . . . Poeticon Astronomicon, libri quatuor; Palaephatus, De fabulosis narrationibus, liber I.; F. Fulgentius Planciades, Mythologiarum, libri III (Basel: Johann Herwagen, 1535). 71 Cf. Holzberg, “Möglichkeiten und Grenzen,” 17, with n. 20. 72 See Wolfgang Milde, “Das Bücherverzeichnis des Hans Sachs,” in 500 Jahre Hans Sachs: Handwerker, Dichter, Stadtbürger, ed. Dieter Merzbacher and HansJoachim Behr (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1994). 73 Sachs, Werke, vol. 21 (1892), 344 = Sachs, Meisterlieder, Spruchgedichte, Fastnachtsspiele, 28, lines 251–52. 74 See Holzberg, “Möglichkeiten und Grenzen,” for a similar argument. Michael follows a comparable intention, without detailed proof, however. Wolfgang F. Michael, “Hans Sachs, der Humanist,” Daphnis. Zeitschrift für mittlere deutsche Literatur 20 (1991). 75 Cf. Brigitte Stuplich, Zur Dramentechnik des Hans Sachs (Stuttgart: FrommannHolzboog, 1993), 55–79. 76 See, among many others, Bernstein, “Der ‘teutsche tichter.’ ” 77 Cf. Kugler’s introduction in Sachs, Meisterlieder, Spruchgedichte, Fastnachtsspiele, 11. 78 For an interpretation of this poem, see Anna Kathrin Bleuler, “Imitatio veterumʊimitato modernorum: Kaspar Scheits Fröhliche Heimfahrt im Spannungsfeld von autochthoner literarischer Tradition und RenaissanceHumanismus,” Daphnis. Zeitschrift für mittlere deutsche Literatur 38 (2009). 79 Mathias Holtzwart, Lustgart Newer Deüttscher Poeteri in fünff Büchern beschriben vnd gedicht . . . (Strasbourg: Josias Rihel, 1568). The poem starts with an invocation of the muses, maybe the oldest in German literature. 80 See Müller, “Fischarts Gegenkanon,” 309–17. 81 In this respect, my aim is analogous to that of Müller, “Fischarts Gegenkanon,” Bleuler, “Imitatio veterum,” or Robert, “Vetus poesis.”

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Humanistische Lyrik des 16. Jahrhunderts: Lateinisch und deutsch. Edited and translated by Wilhelm Kühlmann, Robert Seidel, and Hermann Wiegand. Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassiker-Verlag, 1997. Sachs, Hans. Werke. 26 vols. Edited by Adelbert von Keller and Edmund Goetze. Stuttgart, 1870–1908. Reprint, Hildesheim: Olms, 1964.

Secondary Literature Bernstein, Eckhard. Hans Sachs: Mit Zeugnissen und Bilddokumenten. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1993. —. “Der ‘teutsche tichter’ und die ‘poetae docti’: Zum dichterischen Selbstverständnis des Hans Sachs und der deutschen Humanisten.” In Hans Sachs im Schnittpunkt von Antike und Neuzeit. Edited by Stephan Füssel, 31– 45. Nürnberg: Carl, 1995. Bleuler, Anna Kathrin. “Imitatio veterumʊimitato modernorum: Kaspar Scheits Fröhliche Heimfahrt im Spannungsfeld von autochthoner literarischer Tradition und Renaissance-Humanismus.” Daphnis. Zeitschrift für mittlere deutsche Literatur 38 (2009): 527–54. Brunner, Horst. “Hans Sachs.” In Fränkische Lebensbilder. Edited by Gerhard Pfeiffer and Alfred Wendehorst, vol. 7, 77–96. Neustadt/Aisch: Degener, 1977. —. Hans Sachs. Gunzenhausen: Schrenk, 2009. Chance, Jane. Medieval Mythography. 2 vols. Gainesville: The University Press of Florida, 1994–2000. Curtius, Ernst Robert. Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter. 10th ed. Bern: Francke 1984. Eichler, Ferdinand. Das Nachleben des Hans Sachs vom 16. bis ins 19. Jahrhundert: Eine Untersuchung zur Geschichte der deutschen Literatur. Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1904. Flood, John L. “Kultur auf einem dürren Ast: Zu einem Einblattdruck des Hans Sachs.” In Natur und Kultur in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters: Colloquium Exeter. Edited by Alan Robertshaw and Gerhard Wolf, 279–92. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999. Habel, Thomas. “Der Schuster-Poet auf dem Parnaß: Molanders Hans-SachsSchelte von 1698.” Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 74 (1987): 183–87. Hays, Gregory. “The Date and Identity of the Mythographer Fulgentius.” Journal of Medieval Latin 13 (2003): 163–252. Haustein, Jens. “Über Goethes Erklärung eines alten Holzschnittes vorstellend Hans Sachsens poetische Sendung.” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 146, no. 231 (1994): 1–21. Heinritz, Reinhard. “Politisches Musengespräch: Hans Sachs und die ‘Zensur’ in der Reichsstadt Nürnberg.” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 85 (2003): 493–507. Heitmann, Klaus. “Boethius’ Verdammung der Musen im Mittelalter.” In Renatae litterae: Studien zum Nachleben der Antike und zur europäischen Renaissance. August Buck zum 60. Geburtstag. Edited by Klaus Heitmann and Eckhart Schroeder, 23–49. Frankfurt/Main: Athenäum, 1972.

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Heyne, Moritz. “Muse.” In Deutsches Wörterbuch. Edited by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, vol. 12, 2735–37. Leipzig: Hirzel, 1885. Holzberg, Niklas. “Möglichkeiten und Grenzen humanistischer Antikerezeption: Willibald Pirckheimer und Hans Sachs als Vermittler klassischer Bildung.” In Hans Sachs im Schnittpunkt von Antike und Neuzeit. Edited by Stephan Füssel, 9–29. Nürnberg: Carl, 1995. Kern, Manfred. “Musae.” In Lexikon der antiken Gestalten in den deutschen Texten des Mittelalters. Edited by Manfred Kern and Alfred Ebenbauer, 407–9. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2003. Klein, Dorothea. Bildung und Belehrung: Untersuchungen zum Dramenwerk des Hans Sachs. Stuttgart: Heinz, 1988. —. “Inspiration und Autorschaft: Ein Beitrag zur mediävistischen Autordebatte.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 80 (2006): 55–96. Kluge. Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. 24th ed. Revised by Elmar Seebold. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002. Kugler, Hartmut. “Meisterliederdichtung als Auslegungskunst: Zur impliziten Poetik bei Hans Sachs.” In Vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit: Festschrift für Horst Brunner. Edited by Dorothea Klein, Elisabeth Lienert, and Johannes Rettelbach, 541–56. Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2000. —. “Über Goethe und Sachs.” In Röllwagenbüchlein: Festschrift für Walter Röll zum 65. Geburtstag. Edited by Jürgen Jaehrling, Uwe Meves, and Erika Timm, 239–47. Tübingen: Niemeyer 2002. Ludwig, Walther. “Musenkult und GottesdienstʊEvangelischer Humanismus in der Reformationszeit.” In Musenkult und Gottesdienst. Edited by Walther Ludwig, 9–51. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2001. Michael, Wolfgang F. “Hans Sachs, der Humanist.” Daphnis. Zeitschrift für mittlere deutsche Literatur 20 (1991): 423–32. Milde, Wolfgang. “Das Bücherverzeichnis des Hans Sachs.” In 500 Jahre Hans Sachs: Handwerker, Dichter, Stadtbürger. Edited by Dieter Merzbacher and Hans-Joachim Behr, 38–55. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1994. Müller, Jan-Dirk. “Fischarts Gegenkanon: Komische Literatur im Zeichen der imitatio.” In Müller and Robert, Maske und Mosaik, 281–321. Müller, Jan-Dirk, and Jörg Robert, eds. Maske und Mosaik: Poetik, Sprache, Wissen im 16. Jahrhundert. Münster: LIT, 2007. Robert, Jörg. “Carmina Pieridum nulli celebrata priorum: Zur Inszenierung von Epochenwende im Werk des Conrad Celtis.” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 124 (2002): 92–121. —. “Vetus Poesisʊnova ratio carminum: Martin Opitz und der Beginn der Deutschen Poeterey.” In Müller and Robert, Maske und Mosaik, 397–441. Rose, Dirk. “ ‘Hans Sachs’: Entstehung und Funktion eines poetologischen Stereotyps in der Frühen Neuzeit.” In Frühneuzeitliche Stereotype: Zur Produktivität und Restriktivität sozialer Vorstellungsmuster. Edited by Mirosáawa Czarnecka, Thomas Borgstedt, and Tomasz Jablecki, 443–68. Bern: Lang, 2010.

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Söffner, Jan. “Musen.” In Mythenrezeption: Die antike Mythologie in Literatur, Musik und Kunst von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart. Edited by Maria Moog-Grünewald, 442–57. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2008. Steppich, Christoph J. Numine afflatur: Die Inspiration des Dichters im Denken der Renaissance. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2002. Stuplich, Brigitte. Zur Dramentechnik des Hans Sachs. Stuttgart: FrommannHolzboog, 1993. Wels, Volkhard. Der Begriff der Dichtung in der Frühen Neuzeit. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009.

FROM AESOP TO OWLGLASS: THE TRANSFORMATION OF KNOWLEDGE IN ANCIENT, MEDIEVAL, AND EARLY MODERN TRICKSTER-BIOGRAPHIES HANS JÜRGEN SCHEUER HUMBOLDT UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN

In his study Die Bezähmung der Zunge (The Taming of the Tongue) Ralf Georg Bogner draws our attention to the importance of the Vita Aesopi in the early modern era.1 According to his reading, the biography of Aesop has played a major part in disciplining the use of speech in premodern culture since the publication of Rinuccio da Castiglione’s (Milan 1474) and Heinrich Steinhöwel’s Latin and German translations of the Vita (Ulm 1476/77),2 followed up in the German tradition by additional revisions (Sebastian Brant, Basel 1501) and adaptations (Erasmus Alberus, Frankfurt 1550). Among other things the collection of stories, centered around the ancient inventor of the fable, contains the following exemplum which carries, as Bogner argues, the nucleus of a whole discourse on the ethics and practices of language: Asked by the philosopher Xanthus to serve his pupils one day the best, the other day the worst, Aesop, his slave, offers the same meal on both days: ox tongue. By doing so, he turns an ethical argument—i.e. that lingua, the tongue and its product, language, is able to achieve both the worst and the worthiest—into a quick-witted chreia. For Bogner this practice of speech has to be strictly separated from more abstract disciplinary contexts, such as rhetoric, logic, let alone theological and philosophical theories on language, because the mode of exemplary demonstration focuses entirely on the congruence between the doings and sayings of the sage, as he speaks and acts. Along the line of the ongoing process of civilization (Norbert Elias) Bogner follows the traces of the Aesopian argument through different literary genres from the 16th century up to its variations in baroque literature (most prominently in Gryphius’s mourning play Leo Armenius).

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But where would we be led by retracing the Vita Aesopi back to its original ancient context in the first century, when the life of Aesop was put down into writing for the first time, or even further on to its much older oral traditions partly reaching back to oriental sources?3 Which consequences can we draw from shifting our focus backwards in order to find out more about this particular discourse, that encompasses not only the example of the tongue, but also the literary form that constitutes the Vita Aesopi as a trickster-biography? By saying “trickster-biography” I do not simply refer to an early form or precursor of the picaresque novel, but rather to a genre in its own right: an encyclopedic collection of narrative, proverbial or otherwise exemplary schemes (such as apothegms, riddles, anecdotes, tales, and miracles), focused on a demonic character, half god, half animal, who behaves like a rogue or a jokester among his fellow people.4 Depending on its cultural and historical background the physiognomy of the trickster changes, yet his task remains the same throughout: to observe and negotiate human communication, operating between the state of nature and the sphere of transcendence both of which are either lost or inaccessible to mankind. As for the German-speaking countries, the most famous trickster in the 16th century is Till Ulenspiegel/Owlglass, a villain moving from town to town and thereby crossing worldly and sacred spaces alike. Yet, already in the 13th century Âmis, the parson, travels a similar route of trickery, as he is designed by the Stricker as the first man who invented fraud and cheating (der erste man . . ./ der liegen triegen aneviench, verses 40–41).5 The lives of Âmis, the medieval trickster, and of Owlglass, his early modern companion, share important features with the Vita Aesopi in terms of content and structure.6 This is particularly evident from the stories dealing with the introduction of the trickster into this world and with his life’s end. Although Aesop is not part of the Greek myth and its genealogical network, his story can only be told with reference to two major goddesses and the sacred and ritual sphere connected with them: Isis and Apollo. Both help to characterize Aesop as the maker of ȜȩȖȠȚ, the prototypical ȜȠȖȠʌȠȚȩȢ, by focusing the etiology and teleology of his discourse. In the beginning, Aesop lacks the natural faculty of speech, since an innate impediment of his tongue forces him to stay mute, which, after all, excludes him—in conjunction with his distorted and subhuman shape—from every activity within the Greek city-state (the most distinguished occupation of which is to participate in public speech among free citizens). Not until he meets a priestess of Isis and assists her in finding her way to the city is he granted the gift of language and a properly working tongue by the goddess of nature in reward for his piety and

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philanthropy. He starts using his new skill at once by naming everything around him according to the rule of nature and, moreover, by blaming Zenas, the slaveholder, for mistreating one of his fellow-slaves. His language, in other words, is meant to do justice to things and creatures, as well. By its simple frankness and truthfulness the ȜȩȖȠȢ of the fable presents itself here, as though it were articulating mother nature’s own voice. At the same time, Aesop draws a clear distinction between his way of telling animal lore and the sublime speech of the heroic epos and its mythic memory. In his first attempt to produce actual truth Aesop subverts the topos of the stream of inspiration, flowing out of the epic poet, as Mnemosyne and the Muses speak through his mouth. While he is still mute, Aesop’s fellows accuse him of having stolen his master’s figs. He proves his innocence by drinking warm water and emptying out his stomach, producing nothing else than the clear water of truth—as does the voice of the fable. Now, his eloquent opponents are forced to produce evidence in the same way and finally puke out the stolen figs, showing that their flux of eloquence contains nothing else than lies—as does the flood of words of the epic poem.7 The death of Aesop, however, takes place in the realm of the Delphic Apollo. Throughout his life, the sage keeps provoking the god, as he claims time and again to be the companion, if not the only legitimate leader of the Muses: the true Musagetes.8 Moreover, he threatens the Apollonian priests who finally accuse him wrongfully of having sacked Apollo’s temple and sentence him to death for having committed a sacrilege that he is entirely innocent of. Yet, the execution doesn’t simply kill Apollo’s foe, it rather sacrifices him to the god, which means that in the end Aesop completely merges into the Apollonian sphere. As a consequence, the citizens of Delphi fall prey to Apollo’s revenge for the unjustified murder of his pious worshipper, whereas Aesop himself becomes an object of worship, after a statue has been dedicated to him at Delphi.9 In this way, the unsurpassable naturalness of Aesopian speech in the name of Isis is juxtaposed by its unrivaled affinity to the divine in the name of Apollo. For the ȜȩȖȠȢ of Aesop touches on both the sphere of nature and the sphere of the sacred, though nothing else could be less compatible with the human tongue, which is, by the same token, the only means to relate to and to communicate with the natural and the transcendental order. The aporia of the Aesopian ȜȩȖȠȢ, that is: to communicate topics, which language can only refer to as non-topics, characterizes a range of other trickster-figures and their practices of language in the Greek tradition. They all act upon systems of nescience (or learned ignorance).

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Homer’s Odysseus can be considered their forefather, as his travels lead him along and across the threshold between life and death, while he is taking his way through all parts of the mythical world: the realm of Zeus (aether/air), Poseidon (water), Hades (earth) and Helios (fire), whose territories no mortal being is able to enter and to exit again except for the “man of twists and turns” (Robert Fagles), the polytropic hero. During the 5th and the 4th century the motif of his sea voyage is recoined and reused as a metaphor of the philosopher’s journey through the city-state. In this context, three new tricksters enter the picture: Socrates, Diogenes, and Menippos, each of them with a specific fashion of his life’s journey (ʌȜȐȞȘ). In the case of Plato’s Socrates his wanderings are motivated by an Apollonian oracle that dubs Socrates the wisest of all mortals. From this enigmatic assertion Socrates derives his mission to refute the truth of the divine word by moving from place to place in order to explore the knowledge of his fellow citizens.10 Turning to every expert in the city and asking questions about the good, the true, and the beautiful, Socrates figures out, that the empirical knowledge of his respondents does not suffice to answer these most elementary questions. They all get tangled up in their own contradictory assumptions (įȩȟĮȚ). Therefore, Socrates infers, the oracle can only be understood in the sense that it is coined towards the philosopher who knows nothing special, but one thing for certain: that he knows nothing at all. By way of this search (ȗȒIJȘıȚȢ) the Socratic ȜȩȖȠȢ becomes the blueprint of a both political and philosophical play of negations, focused on the soul and its faculty to search for true knowledge (‫݋‬ʌȚıIJȒȝȘ) in order to live a virtuous and pious life on the ground of constant self-scrutiny.11 The account of the death of Socrates is designed by Plato in analogy to the death of Aesop. Like his role model, Socrates is excluded from the community of the city-state and sentenced to death by the Athenians based on the ill constructed accusation of ܻıȑȕİȚĮ (the breaking of the divine law). In his dialogue Phaidon Plato describes the last days of the convicted philosopher in prison up to the point where Socrates takes the cup of poison. Moreover, he depicts the circumstances which permit Socrates to hold his last conversation among his friends and followers on the immortality of the soul. This is made possible by a double intervention of Apollo:12 First, the conversation takes place under the auspices of a law that forbids executions while the Athenian ship is on its annual mission to Delos, Apollo’s birthplace, in order to send thank offerings to him for his support of Theseus in his defeat of the Minotaur. No blood shall be shed before the ship returns to Athens because the city must remain pure during the period of the ship’s absence, which means, that for the time being

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Socrates’s life is sacrosanct in the name of Apollo. His second intervention takes on the form of a vision. In his dream Socrates is advised by the god to devote his life to the art of the Muses: ȝȠȣıȚț‫ ޣ‬ʌȠȚİ߿ țĮ‫݋ ޥ‬ȡȖȐȗȠȣ.13 He follows the command by starting off writing poetry: first, he composes a hymn to Apollo, then he turns to the fables of Aesop, transmitting them in verse. In short, as Socrates’s Muses are not different from those of Aesop, their practices of speech are closely related to each other. The figure of Diogenes, the cynic, is another representative of the urban trickster. His vita ties in with and intensifies basic patterns of the Socratic way of life. In fact, his biographer Diogenes Laertius addresses him as a “Socrates, gone mad” (ȈȦțȡȐIJȘȢ ȝĮȚȞȩȝİȞȠȢ),14 since he approaches his fellow-citizens in an extremely aggressive and offensive manner. Like Socrates he follows the call of Apollo who places his life under the motto ʌĮȡĮȤĮȡȐȟĮȚ IJާ ȞȩȝȚıȝĮ. In Diogenes’s interpretation the oracle seems to call upon him to adulterate the coinage of his city. Accordingly, the son of a banker starts his career as a forger, who not only turns over the economy of the state, but also inverts and perverts all kinds of traditional values fostered by his contemporaries.15 Even in his conversations with philosophers and potentates he performs the transvaluation of all values. The figure of Menippos, on the other hand, acts like another Aesop, or, more precisely, he is another “Aesop, going insane.”16 Born as a slave, he manages to collect as much money as it takes to buy one’s way out of his bondage. He succeeds in becoming a free citizen of Thebes—not due to his wisdom or piety, but rather due to his importunate manner of bagging. After having accumulated a large fortune by making loans to his fellow-citizens, he finally loses everything, as he falls victim to a plot and is robbed of all he possesses. He ends his life in total despair by hanging himself. Thus, Menippos surpasses the cynic ʌĮȡĮȤĮȡȐȟĮȚ IJާ ȞȩȝȚıȝĮ by redirecting the metaphor and shifting it from valuta to existence: IJާȞ ȕȓȠȞ ȝİIJĮȜȜȐȟĮȚ.17 After having replaced ijȚȜȠıȠijȓĮ—the love of wisdom—by ijȚȜĮȡȖȣȡȓĮ—the love of money, he falls prey to his own practice: Instead of chosing ȜȩȖȠȢ to rescue his soul he prefers and is killed by ȕȡȩȤȠȢ (sling). In the end, he finds himself tangled up in the loops of his language, being duped by just another (fatal) paronomasia. In that sense, he reinforces the insanity of his predecessor Diogenes to the point, where language turns against its user. In the life of Menippos, as one might conclude, the word itself becomes the trickster. Hence, a whole literary genre is named after him: the Menippean satire. Even though Diogenes Laertius commented upon the work of Menippos in the sense that he never had produced anything serious (ĭȑȡİȚ ȝ‫ޡ‬Ȟ ȠࠎȞ ıʌȠȣįĮȓȠȞ Ƞ‫ރ‬įȑȞ),18 we are not entitled to reduce his practice of

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speech to the comical effect. Neither shall we see in Aesop’s vomitingscene a mere parody of Homer, nor in Socrates, outwitting the sophists, sheer irony, nor in Diogenes, attacking his adversaries, a case of straightforward aggressiveness. We rather have to take into account that all these different ways and intensities of a trickster’s use of his tongue are rooted in the characteristic seriocomic mode of the Menippea: the ıʌȠȣį[ĮȚ]ȠȖȑȜȠȚȠȞ. This blatant contradiction, combining sternness and playfulness in one single oxymoronic concept, is—despite of the detailed and complex classifications of the genre (since Bakhtin, Frye, and Kristeva)19—the essential quality of the Menippean satire. Moreover, it seems to be crucial for the classification of trickster-biographies to consider the fact that the Menippean mode of ıʌȠȣįĮȚȠȖȑȜȠȚȠȞ is the defining moment of the utopian discourse since antiquity—commencing with Plato’s tale of Atlantis which is, in fact, presented to Socrates by Kritias as an April fool’s trick, told by Kritias, the grandfather aged 90, to his grandson, the ten-year-old Kritias, at the feast of the ܻʌĮIJȠȣȡȓĮȚ.20 In this regard, utopian writing operates—as the word that has become trickster—at the blind spot of human knowledge and its topical organization. At this spot, knowledge is not simply negated, but observed, checked and revised through the negation of unquestioned assertions. Seen against this background, ancient, medieval, and early modern trickster-biographies have three aspects in common: 1. the encyclopedic intention to collect examples—as many as possible— of every practice of speech that assists the trickster in penetrating and running through the spaces of knowledge making up our moral, economic, political, and religious world, until he has completed his course (of life); 2. the cunning intelligence, by which the trickster is able to escape the aporia (of being tangled up in words, or in mere assumptions about the world) switching from one space to the other in order to deconstruct every kind of positive knowledge (up to his own grave, which is not able to keep the trickster’s corpse in a horizontal position); 3. the importance of oracles/riddles (as modes of political and religious communication) and of money (as a mode of circulating values within the social order of men).21 This last aspect significantly shapes the basic structure of every tricksterbiography, which usually unfolds in form of a double-stranded career. After the exposition of the trickster’s way of thought and speech he first enters the “small economy” of the Ƞ‫ݭ‬țȠȢ (“myn hus,” as Steinhöwel puts it

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in his Esopus several times).22 On the inside this space includes everything concerning the family, its subsistence and reproduction; on the outside it is closely related to the adjacent socio-political sphere of Samos. Aesop has not passed this complex successfully until he is rewarded with the Samian citizenship for having predicted correctly an imminent attack of the Persians, and, moreover, is appointed to the office of the treasurer of Samos. The same is true for Âmis who at the end of the first part of his curriculum is appointed custodian of a cloister’s treasure. In Ulenspiegel the aspect of economy and politics applies to all sorts of professions, especially to crafts- and tradesmen, whose businesses are systematically worked through by the trickster. One of the characteristic patterns of Ulenspiegel’s actions consists in the way he usually finishes his business at the workshops: by defecating in his host’s room, after he has dispossessed him of everything valuable. After his taking control over the treasure of the community he lives in, the trickster is ready for superior tasks. Thus, Aesop seems to be predisposed for entering the “great world” and participating in the arcana imperii, the secrets of political power.23 These secrets are represented by the fact that the great rulers of the world use to communicate by exchanging riddles, in order to outwit each other in the art of posing and solving them. Here, again, Aesop celebrates his triumphs, as he turns out to be the real master of the enigmatic discourse, while he serves the Persian king Lycurgus and the Egyptian pharaoh Nectanabus as their counselor. During his courtly career he adopts a son named Enus, who denounces him for having plotted against the king. To substantiate his allegations Enus presents faked documents which are supposed to prove his father’s collaboration with rivaling kings in order to turn his cunning against Lycurgus and, moreover, to play all kings off against each other. As a result of this accusation Aesop is sentenced to death. He can escape his execution only thanks to his influential friend Hermippus, who helps him disappear by burying him alive. When the Persian king regrets his decision to have Aesop killed, since he is unable to solve Nectanabus’s latest riddles by himself, the trickster resurrects from his grave and unravels the machinations made up by his son. Yet, instead of punishing him for his treason Aesop presents his collected words of wisdom to Enus with the irritating effect, that his son casts himself down the “high gates” of the palace and breaks his neck. This scene clearly alludes to the death of the Sphinx, who throws herself into the abyss after Oedipus has solved her riddle, the enigma of human life. Precisely this mythological parallel offers the key to the whole episode. The name “Enus” is taken from the Greek IJާ ĮੇȞȠȢ, meaning “riddle,” which leads to the conclusion that the

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death of Enus fulfills and affirms what he was actually blaming his father for: Like Oedipus, who becomes the legitimate ruler of Thebes by solving the riddle of the Sphinx, Aesop now positively seizes power over all the kings, since he has been able to crack and overthrow their arcane discourse, figured in the name and in the fatal downfall of Enus. From now on only one space is still left for the trickster’s intrusion: the mysteries of the sacred sphere. To achieve this Aesop returns to Greece and travels straight to Delphi—with the familiar outcome of his being sacrificed to Apollo. Again, the analogies to the medieval and early modern trickster-biographies are striking: After the beginning of the second part of his vita, clearly flagged by a second prologue, Stricker’s Pfaffe Âmis keeps accumulating money, but is now presented as a master of manipulating basic speech-acts. Even though the 96 stories that make up the life of Ulenspiegel tend to register his tricks in a serial manner, the interest in economic exchange, in proverbs, and in plays on words is still a predominant feature. His visits to the court of the French king (history 27), and to the Pope’s Lateran church (history 34) confirm that Ulenspiegel, as well, is related both to the arcana imperii and to the mysteria caelorum, even if these episodes are merely integrated into the general catalogue of professions. The trickster-biographies, discussed in this paper, participate in a discourse centered on the problem of human knowledge. They all focus on its spatial i.e. topical order, observing and transforming it from the utopian point of view of a learned ignorance skilled in practical and philosophical dialectics. This meets with the quadripartite disposition of the vita (following the Vita Aesopi as its literary model), which allows the curriculum vitae of the trickster/sage for crossing every single space of the world, be it profane or sacred. It also matches the cunning use of language and the seriocomic mode of the Menippea. In this framework the trickster resides, watching everything that concerns the notion of ȞȩȝȚıȝĮ: the value of coins, the constitution of the state, the validity of knowledge, and the liability of words which are capable of binding and dissolving human obligations to nature and transcendence. In this field of discourse he lurks around equipped with Socratic ignorance, cynic aggression, Menippean self-entanglement and the storytelling skills of Aesop, the prudent master of ȜȩȖȠȢ.

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Notes 1

Cf. Ralf Georg Bogner, Die Bezähmung der Zunge: Literatur und Disziplinierung der Alltagskommunikation in der frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997). 2 Steinhöwels Äsop, ed. Hermann Oesterley (Tübingen: Fues, 1873). Rinuccio’s Latin translation corresponds to the ancient version that later became known as the Vita Westermanniana (cf. Ben Edwin Perry, “The Greek Source of Renuccio’s Aesop,” Classical Philology 29 [1934]), whereas Steinhöwel’s German translation is based on the Vita Planudea. 3 For centuries the Life of Aesop was considered an essential part of the corpus Aesopicum. Jean de La Fontaine did still not publish his collection of fables without introducing it by his adaptation of the Planudean text of the Vita (La vie d’Esope le Phrygien). The bonds between the ancient body of fables and the biography of their first inventor began to come undone since the mid-17th century (cf. Mahlon Ellwood Smith, “Aesop, a Decayed Celebrity: Changing Concecption as to Aesop’s Personality in English Writers before Gay,” PMLA 46, no. 1 [1931]). But they were not cut until philological critique was established in the 19th century and started to look upon the Vita as a mere compilation and concoction of anecdotes and proverbs. Even after the edition of the Aesopica: A Series of Texts Relating to Aesop or Ascribed to Him or Closely Connected with the Literary Tradition that Bears His Name by Ben Edwin Perry had been published in 1952 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), it took another four decades until Niklas Holzberg’s collection of studies Der Äsop-Roman: Motivgeschichte und Erzählstruktur (Tübingen: Narr, 1992) made a first effort to show that the Life of Aesop was a well structured and thoroughly composed work of art. Fundamental to the current reappraisal of the ancient text is Leslie Kurke’s Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2011). In the context of early modern studies in German literature Michael Schilling’s essay “Macht und Ohnmacht der Sprache: Die Vita Aesopi als Anleitung zum Gebrauch der Fabel bei Steinhöwel,” in Europäische Fabeln des 18. Jahrhunderts zwischen Pragmatik und Autonomisierung: Traditionen, Formen, Perspektiven, ed. Dirk Rose (Bucha: Quartus-Verlag, 2010) delivers a reading of the Vita Esopi as an introduction and preparatory hermeneutical tool for a subsequent reading of the whole body of the Aesopic fables. 4 Concerning the figure of the trickster cf. the seminal study by Paul Radin, Karl Kerényi and Carl Gustav Jung, Der göttliche Schelm: Ein indianischer MythenZyklus (Zürich: Rhein-Verlag, 1954), and among the more recent publications on the topic the essay by Erhard Schüttpelz, “Der Trickster,” in Die Figur des Dritten: Ein kulturwissenschaftliches Paradigma, ed. Eva Eßlinger et al. (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010). An interdisciplinary overview on the secondary literature is offered by Geider, “Trickster,” in Enzyklopädie des Märchens: Handwörterbuch zur historischen und vergleichenden Erzählforschung, founded by Kurt Ranke, ed. Rolf Wilhelm Brednich (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), vol. 13, col. 913–24. The word “trickster-biography” is my own. It is meant to refer to the combination of cunning

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intelligence, presented as a literary exemplum, and the scheme of a vita in terms of a legendary and hagiographical narrative. 5 Quotations refer to following editions: Kin’ichi Kamihara, ed., Des Strickers Pfaffe Amis (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1928) and Wolfgang Lindow, Ein kurtzweilig Lesen von Dil Ulenspiegel. Nach dem Druck von 1515 mit 87 Holzschnitten (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1978). The translations of Ulenspiegel are taken from the contemporary 16th-century English prints of Howleglas by Jan van Doesborch and William Copland, edited by Hill-Zenk, Der englische Eulenspiegel: Die Eulenspiegel-Rezeption als Beispiel des englisch-kontinentalen Buchhandels im 16. Jahrhundert (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010). 6 For the connection between Âmis, Ulenspiegel, and Asesop, cf. Jörgen SchulzGrobert, “Ulenspiegel und seine traurigen Brüder: Prototypische Figurenprofile bei Äsop und Niemand,” Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 144 (1999). 7 On the importance of the introductory exemplum with regard to the conception of speech in the Aesopian fable, cf. Louis Marin, “The Fabulous Animal,” in Food for Thought, transl. Mette Hjort (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Ulenspiegel’s entry into the world of speech-acts seems to echo Aesop’s pre-linguistic comment on the truth content of human language. In order to prepare him for his worldly life he is baptized no less than three times: once in the church with holy water, for the second time next to the ale-house with muddy water, for the third time in a bathhouse, sitting in a kettle of warm water, out of which he emerges “clen of the mudde” (“suber und schon,” Lindow, Ulenspiegel, 9–11) as a reborn child. 8 Leslie Kurke points out, that the special relation between Aesop and the Muses is subject to several changes during the process of textual transmission: “in fact each of the stages of Aesop’s ascent of wisdom is flagged or articulated in Vita G by significant mention of the divine daughters of Mnemosyne or their Hesiodic home on Helicon. Vita W, by contrast, has entirely effaced all mention of the Muses from Aesop’s story (together with excising every trace of Aesop’s feud with Apollo).” Kurke, Aesopic Conversations, 162. 9 Again one might think here of Ulenspiegel, whose coffin keeps standing upright at his burial: “Thus as Howleglass was deade, than they brought hym to be buryed. And as they would haue put the coffyn into the pytte wyth .ii. cordes, the corde at the fete brake, so that the fote of the coffin fel into the botome of the pyt, and the coffyn stode bolt vpright in the myddes of the graue. Than desyred the people that stode about the graue that tyme, to let the coffyn to stande vpryght. For in his lyfe tyme he was a very maruelous man, and he did many wonderfull thynges, and shall be buryed as meruelousli and in this manner they left Howleglas stand bolt vpryght in his graue” (Hill-Zenk, Der englische Eulenspiegel, 250)—“Bei Ulenspiegels Begräbtnis gieng es wunderlich zu. Wan als sie all stunden uff dem Kirchoff umb den Todtenboum da Ulenspiegel in lag, da legten sie ihn uff die beiden Seil und wollten ihn in daz Grab sencken. Da brach das Seil entzwei, das bei den Füßen was, unnd der Boum schoß inn das Grab, das Ulenspiegel kumbt uff die Füß z ston in dem Stock. Da sprachen sie alle, die dabeistunden: ‘Lassen ihn ston, wan er ist wunderlich gewesen in seinem Leben, wunderlich wil er auch sein in seinem

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Tod’ ” (Lindow, Ulenspiegel, 266). An analogous elevation, but more clearly directed to the salvation of the soul, happens to Âmis, who is said to have passed away as an abbot and is rewarded for his life’s achievement with his immediate ascent to heaven: do gedienet der phaffe Amis daz / daz im daz ewige leben / nach disem libe wart gegeben (Kamihara, Pfaffe Amis, verses 2508–10). 10 Cf. Plato Apologia 20c4–23c1. 11 In Plato’s dialogue Hippias Minor Socrates explicitly refers to the archetypical trickster-figure Odysseus in order to characterize his own philosophical practice. In this context, Hippias, the sophist, and Socrates meet in order to discuss the problem, whether Achilles or Odysseus is the greater hero, which amounts to the question, which epos is substantially more philosophical: either the Iliad or the Odyssey. Hippias’s answer sees Achilles in the privileged position. Achilles’s virtue, he argues, consists in truthfulness, while Odysseus’s strength lies in fallacy and deceitfulness. By equally declaring truthfulness and deceitfulness a virtue (ܻȡİIJȒ), Socrates leads his opponent to an aporetic conclusion: Both virtues seem to resemble each other to the point, where they become undistinguishable. The only discernable difference lies in the fact, that Odysseus uses his ability intentionally, whereas Achilles does so without any further consideration. As a result, the ܻȡİIJȒ of the former outstrips the ܻȡİIJȒ of the latter, so that, in the end, the liar seems to be preferable to the righteous. The last word of the dialogue reads ʌȜȐȞȘ (376c6) and addresses the turning of the Socratic discourse in the image of a ship in rough sea. Thus, Socrates finally finds himself in the position of a new Odysseus. The philosopher turns out to be a modernized urban trickster. 12 Cf. Plato Phaidon 57c1–61c5. 13 Ibid., 60e6–60e7. 14 Cf. Diogenes Laertius VI.54. 15 Ibid., VI.20–21. Cf. the groundbreaking work on the Life of Diogenes and the anecdotes of the cynics in Diogenes Laertius by Heinrich Niehues-Pröbsting, Der Kynismus des Diogenes und der Begriff des Zynismus (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1988); for a premodern response to the ancient material see Niklaus Largier, Diogenes der Kyniker: Exempel, Erzählung, Geschichte in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997). 16 Cf. Diogenes Laertius VI.99–101. 17 Ibid., VI.100. 18 Ibid., VI.99. 19 Cf. Michail Bachtin, Probleme der Poetik Dostoevskijs (Frankfurt a. M.: Ullstein, 1985); Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); Julia Kristeva, “Bachtin, das Wort, der Dialog und der Roman,” in Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik: Ergebnisse und Perspektiven, vol. 3, Zur linguistischen Basis der Literaturwissenschaft II, ed. Jens Ihwe (Frankfurt a. M.: Athenäum Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1972). For a more recent discussion of the Menippean satire, see Werner von Koppenfels, Der Andere Blick oder Das Vermächtnis des Menippos: Paradoxe Perspektiven in der europäischen Literatur (München: Beck, 2007). 20 On the Athenian “feast of betrayal” (ܻȡİIJȒ), cf. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Der Schwarze Jäger oder der Ursprung der attischen Ephebie,” in Der Schwarze Jäger:

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Denkformen und Gesellschaftsformen der griechischen Antike by Pierre VidalNaquet (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 1989), 108–9. 21 Cf. Christina von Braun, Der Preis des Geldes: Eine Kulturgeschichte (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 2012). 22 E.g. Xanthos in his speech to the Samians, as it has been suggested to him by Aesop: “Ir mann von Samia, ich bin nit ain wyssag noch vogeltichter oder ußleger verborgner ding, als ir wißen. Aber ich hab ain aygen knecht in mynem hus, der söliche ding sich bekennet wißend syn.” Oesterley, Steinhöwels Äsop, 63. 23 In Stricker’s Pfaffe Âmis the trickster-protagonist leaves behind the occidental topography of his provenance in order to head for Constantinople, the political center of the eastern empire. Even though Âmis’s performance does not rely on proverbs, he still operates on the basis of two different elementary types of assertion. By making use of (kataphatic) affirmations and (apophatic) negations he is able to turn falsehood into truth and truth into falsehood at his will.

Works Cited Sources Aesopica: A Series of Texts Relating to Aesop or Ascribed to Him or Closely Connected with the Literary Tradition that Bears His Name. Collected and critically edited, in part translated from Oriental languages with a commentary and historical essay by Ben Edwin Perry. Vol. I. Greek and Latin Texts. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1952. Des Strickers Pfaffe Amis. Edited by Kin’ichi Kamihara. Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1978. Diogenes Laertius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Translated by R. D. Hicks. Vol. II. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. Ein kurtzweilig Lesen von Dil Ulenspiegel. Nach dem Druck von 1515 mit 87 Holzschnitten. Edited by Wolfgang Lindow. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1978. Hill-Zenk, Anja. Der englische Eulenspiegel: Die Eulenspiegel-Rezeption als Beispiel des englisch-kontinentalen Buchhandels im 16. Jahrhundert. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010. Platonis Opera. Recognovit brevique adnotatione critica instruxit Ioannes Burnet. Vol. I and III. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Steinhöwels Äsop. Edited by Hermann Oesterley. Tübingen: Fues, 1873.

Secondary Literature Bachtin, Michail. Probleme der Poetik Dostoevskijs. Frankfurt a. M.: Ullstein, 1985. Bogner, Ralf Georg. Die Bezähmung der Zunge: Literatur und Disziplinierung der Alltagskommunikation in der frühen Neuzeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997. Braun, Christina von. Der Preis des Geldes: Eine Kulturgeschichte. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 2012.

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Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. Geider, Thomas. “Trickster.” In Enzyklopädie des Märchens: Handwörterbuch zur historischen und vergleichenden Erzählforschung. Founded by Kurt Ranke, edited by Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, col. 913–24. Vol. 13. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010. Holzberg, Niklas, ed. Der Äsop-Roman: Motivgeschichte und Erzählstruktur. Tübingen: Narr, 1992. Kristeva, Julia. “Bachtin, das Wort, der Dialog und der Roman.” In Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik: Ergebnisse und Perspektiven. Vol. 3, Zur linguistischen Basis der Literaturwissenschaft II. Edited by Jens Ihwe, 345–75. Frankfurt a. M.: Athenäum Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1972. Koppenfels, Werner von. Der Andere Blick oder Das Vermächtnis des Menippos: Paradoxe Perspektiven in der europäischen Literatur. München: Beck, 2007. Kurke, Leslie. Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2011. Largier, Niklaus. Diogenes der Kyniker: Exempel, Erzählung, Geschichte in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit. Mit einem Essay zur Figur des Diogenes zwischen Kynismus, Narrentum und postmoderner Kritik. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997. Marin, Louis. “The Fabulous Animal.” In Food for Thought. Translated by Mette Hjort, 44–54. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. First published: “L’animal-fable Esope.” Critique 34 (1978): 775–82. Niehues-Pröbsting, Heinrich. Der Kynismus des Diogenes und der Begriff des Zynismus. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1988. Perry, Ben Edwin. “The Greek Source of Renuccio’s Aesop.” Classical Philology 29 (1934): 53–62. Radin, Paul, Karl Kerényi, and Carl Gustav Jung. Der göttliche Schelm: Ein indianischer Mythen-Zyklus. Zürich: Rhein-Verlag, 1954 (engl.: The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology. With commentaries by Karl Kerényi and C. G. Jung. New York: Schocken Books 1956). Schilling, Michael. “Macht und Ohnmacht der Sprache: Die Vita Aesopi als Anleitung zum Gebrauch der Fabel bei Steinhöwel.” In Europäische Fabeln des 18. Jahrhunderts zwischen Pragmatik und Autonomisierung: Traditionen, Formen, Perspektiven. Edited by Dirk Rose, 39–54. Bucha: Quartus-Verlag, 2010. Schüttpelz, Erhard. “Der Trickster.” In Die Figur des Dritten: Ein kulturwissenschaftliches Paradigma. Edited by Eva Eßlinger, Tobias Schlechtriemen, Doris Schweitzer, and Alexander Zons, 208–24 Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010. Schulz-Grobert, Jörgen. “Ulenspiegel und seine traurigen Brüder: Prototypische Figurenprofile bei Äsop und Niemand.” Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 144 (1999): 99–112. Smith, Mahlon Ellwood. “Aesop, a Decayed Celebrity: Changing Concecption as to Aesop’s Personality in English Writers before Gay.” PMLA 46, no. 1 (1931): 224–36.

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Vidal-Naquet, Pierre. “Der Schwarze Jäger oder der Ursprung der attischen Ephebie.” In Der Schwarze Jäger: Denkformen und Gesellschaftsformen der griechischen Antike, 105–22. Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 1989.

MYTHS OF THE INVENTOR: INVENTING MYTHS IN THE LITERARY CONCEPT OF THE ARTISTIC INGENIUM IN GERMANY AND ITALY (1500–1550) RONNY F. SCHULZ TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN

Introduction In sixteenth-century Europe, we find the first modern artist biographies. Next to Italy with Giorgio Vasari, the father of art history, Germany shows a strong interest for art, and for its makers as well.1 As an example, I am going to analyze the lives of Albrecht Dürer and Filippo Brunelleschi in sixteenth-century biographies published in chronicles, obituaries and early art-historical writings, and their relation to mythology. At first glance it is conspicuous that both artists are characterized as inventors and that they are compared to famous mythological and antique artists. But these comparisons would be less interesting to contemporary readers, if the biographies did not proceed to substitute modern myths of contemporary artists for the old and well-known ones. First, I am going to interpret myths and mythological narrative techniques regarding the figure of the inventor, then I will discuss several texts on Dürer and Brunelleschi to show the importance of the recreation of myth in connection with artist biographies, followed by some general reflections on mythology and life-writing centred on famous artists.

Renewing Mythology Mythology, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss, can be regarded as a bundle of “mythemes,” in analogy to the structural linguistic terms phoneme and morpheme. Following this approach, mythological thinking is not the forerunner of logical, scientific thinking, but rather an alternative model to modern science. Dealing with antique myths implies the analysis of

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written texts as well. Lévi-Strauss is confronted with this problem when demonstrating his theory by interpreting the Oedipus myth: I am well aware that the Oedipus myth has only reached us under late forms and through literary transfigurations concerned more with esthetic and moral preoccupations than with religious or ritual ones, whatever these may have been.2

To accommodate this medial change, another approach is called for. I refer to Jean-Jacques Wunenburger and his essay on Mytho-phorie. Formes et transformations du mythe. Wunenburger states: La compréhension du rapport entre mythe oral et mythe écrit est inséparable de la naissance même de genres littéraires, en particulier en Occident. Le patrimoine littéraire (théâtre, poésie et plus tard roman) constitue, en effet, un lieu de conservation et de transformation d’un patrimoine religieux antérieur.3

Wunenburger postulates three types of myth transformation: 1) “la réanimation herméneutique,” 2) “le bricolage mythique,” 3) “la transfiguration baroque.”4 Wunenburger understands (1) “hermeneutic reanimation” as the exegesis of mythological texts in a new, often scientific, context. This analysis tends towards a reanimation of myths, in a sense that, e. g., pagan myths might be read as an anticipation of the Christian religion since the period of Late Antiquity. The second type (2) “bricolage mythique,” points to the medial change, when oral myths became written texts. Myth, transformed to a written text, is determined by a creative deconstruction. The last aspect, (3) “baroque transfiguration,” is a synthesis of the first and the second type. Wunenburger regards literary creation as a kind of free recreation of myth from ancient times and/or from a foreign cultural context.5 This last aspect is the most adequate one for my study. The term “baroque” however seems too narrow to describe the phenomenon of free recreation.6 Even Wunenburger’s idea of new compositions of mythemes, meaning the reconfiguration of mythological themes and scenes in a new context, is too narrow. It does not imply that complete writing anew of myths, replacing the old protagonists with new ones as a consequence, which will be at the centre of the following study.

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Myth or Legend? Let us now look at the classical antique myth of the artist-inventor: Daedalus. By constructing the labyrinth, he imitates nature. Ovid calls this building an imitation of the river Meander. Daedalus also deceives nature when he builds a wooden cow for Pasiphae that is convincing enough to deceive a bull, and by flying like a bird in the sky (cf. Ovid Metamorphoses 8.159–68 and 188–89; Diodorus of Sicily Bibliotheca historica 4.77.1).7 On the next level, classical sources present Daedalus as a creator of nature: It is said that his sculptures have to be tied like living creatures, so they do not run away (cf. Plato Meno 97d).8 Finally, Daedalus makes nature his servant; e.g. when he uses an ant to thread a piece of string through a snail shell (cf. Apollodor Bibliotheca epit. 1.14– 15). In catalogues of inventors from Antiquity to Renaissance we find Daedalus cited as the inventor of tools that are important for mankind as, e.g., the saw or the plumb bob, and he is even said to be the creator of the mast and sails of ships.9 This may be read to represent the mythical artistinventor able to conquer land, sea, and air. Daedalus masters nature by his “ingenium” and his hand. We can find interesting parallels by comparing this to an antique artist biography. In Pliny’s Naturalis Historia, Apelles’s life gives the example of a painter who “surpassed all the other painters”10 and who is very generous, even towards his enemies. His talent becomes apparent every time he competes with other artists. He vanquishes not only humans, but nature as well. For example horses, on seeing a horse painted by Apelles, begin to neigh (cf. Pliny Naturalis Historia 35.36.95). The artist’s work is unparalleled, so after his death, nobody can complete his fragmentary Venus for the people of Cos. Apelles’s inventions are described as “highly serviceable to others”—“Inventa eius et ceteris profuere in arte.”11 One central question is, whether the biography of Apelles should be considered a myth or rather a legend. Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, in Die Legende vom Künstler (Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist), mention the strong influence of the Hellenistic interest in artists’ lives on later artist biography writing, even treating it as an early exemplary case in this context. Apelles appears as a prime example of its impact, because his reputation survived, even though nothing of his painting has survived.12 From this point of view, the ancient reports on Apelles form the basis of a legend, not a myth. According to Kris’s and Kurz’s study, Apelles is not regarded as a mythic founder of art, but certain elements of mythological texts show up in real artists’ biographies as well.13 This is the outcome of rhetoric conventions that shaped mythic

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artist’s lives the same way as those of historical artists, but even more of the idea stated by Lévi-Strauss, that myth and history are two coexistent, alternative concepts. In antique catalogues of inventors we can clearly see that Lévi-Strauss’s interpretation works. Even when rational thinking appeared, mythical ideas persisted.14 That is why we can neither interpret the Apelles biography as a legend nor as a myth in the traditional sense, but, like Werner Wunderlich does,15 as an artist myth. What is more, as an artist myth in which the mythic character of the artist is replaced by a historical one.

Portrait of the Artist as a Mythic Hero According to Pliny, the inventions are a benefit for artists, not for mankind; this is evident from his treatment of the Daedalus myth in the seventh book of his Naturalis Historia. There, Pliny remarks that according to Aristotle, Daedalus’s cousin Euchir was the inventor of painting. Such a mythic genealogy is missing in an artist’s biography, which focuses on matters of dependency between masters and disciples. The Apelles biography is not a mythical tale, but it contains elements of mythological writing such as, e.g., the artistic capability to surpass nature. Sixteenth-century artist attributions were based on such antique biographical tales, sometimes even on their mythological elements. We can identify a number of aspects in sixteenth-century biographies that emphasize the uniqueness of the character concept that I will call the “artist-inventor.” 1) The artist-inventor needs to study Antiquity and nature in order to overpower (Latin term: “superatio”) the latter. 2) He is also a master in both theory and practice.16 3) He possesses an exceptional creativity, the so-called “ingenium.”17 4) Furthermore, the artist-inventor is a go-between, similar to a traveller, who transmits his new knowledge to the general public.18 5) The artist-inventor articulates the new and foreign in a new medium or sign system, thus becoming a creator himself. 6) The artist-inventor’s self-styling in his oeuvre sometimes reveals traces of historical or mythical persons. The aspects 1, 3, 4 and 5 have, to my mind, points of contact with the mythological idea of the inventor, as demonstrated in this study by the life of the mythical artist Daedalus.

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Dürer and Brunelleschi in Renaissance Texts By means of two sixteenth-century examples of artist biography, on Dürer and Brunelleschi, I would like to explain how the established mythologic conception is hidden beneath the surface of the artist’s biography like a palimpsest—but creates a new kind of mythology on the outside. One of the first traces of Albrecht Dürer in historiography is Jakob Wimpfeling’s Epithoma rerum Germanicarum usque ad nostra tempora (Straßburg, 1505): Eius discipulus Albertus Türer et ipse Alemanus hac tempestate excellentissimus est et Nurenbergae imagines absolutissimas depingit, quae a mercatoribus in Italiam transportantur et illic a probatissimis pictoribus non minus probantur quam Parasii aut Apellis tabulae.19 (His [i.e. Martin Schongauer’s] disciple Albrecht Dürer, also a German, was extremely excellent in that time and painted perfect tableaus in Nuremberg, which merchants brought to Italy and these [tableaus] were estimated by proven artists to be not lesser than those of Parrhasius or Apelles.)20

Even in the short biographical passage where Dürer is first mentioned, he is already compared to Apelles and Parrhasius. Christoph Scheurl, who often called Dürer “teutscher Apelles” (“German Apelles”), states in Vita reverendi patris domini Anthonii Kressen (1515): So hat er auch wolgefallen gehabt in den künstnern vnsers alters vnd Albrechten Dürer von Nurmberg inn großen wirden gehalten, den jch von wegen seiner übertreffenlikeit ainen teütschen Apellem pfleg zunennen.21 (He [Anthonius Kressen] was pleased by our contemporary artists and honored Albrecht Dürer from Nuremberg, who I usually call a German Apelles because of his excellence.)

Dürer is, in Scheurl’s own words, the greatest master of painting in the whole world.22 Subsequently, in the same document, he mentions that Dürer is the author of art books, just like Apelles of whom Pliny said that he was the first person to have written a book on art (cf. Pliny Naturalis Historia 35.36.79). After Dürer’s death, the first extensive collection of obituary poems prepared by Helius Eobanus Hessus and Thomas Venatorius shows a lot of allusions to Apelles such as:

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And we will also find epigrams like this one: Artis et ingenii laudem si fata morentur, Certum est Durerum non potuisse mori. Ergo sub hoc nondum totus iacet ille sepulchro, Ingenii famam vivus ad astra tulit.24 (If fate will detain the praise of genius and art, it is sure that Dürer cannot die. So all of him does not yet lie under this grave, He will carry the fame of his genius to the stars alive.)

Apart from the Apelles comparison, there are early allusions to the apotheosis of the artist. Dürer will not die forever, because his fame guides him to the stars. Later, the allusions vary, so for instance Georg Danebeck, a sixteenth-century Meistersinger, tells us how the public reproached Dürer for having painted the horse’s stirrups incorrectly; notwithstanding, the painter put the critics to silence, like Apelles did with his famous retort to a shoemaker.25 In the last third of the sixteenth century, Paul Eber remarks in Lebliche Contrafactur der bildung des Hochberümbten Malers Albrecht Dürers (1572): Jn manchen stücken merckt man schier, Das er auch hab des menschen sprach So viel müglich, wölln malen nach. Welchs warlich zu verwundern ist. ... Sein kunst gehalten lieb und werd. Vnd weil solch kunst von got allein Her kömpt, sol man jm danckbar sein.26 (In some paintings one observes That he tried to imitate the human language, as closely as possible, and that is really admirable. ... His art should be estimated highly, and because this art is of divine origin we should [always] be grateful to him.)

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The painter, inspired by God, is an exceptional artist; he is even able to paint the human language. This is comparable to the art of Daedalus, of whom it is told that he was able to sculpt true-to-life statues. In German sixteenth-century literary obituaries and biographies, Dürer is portrayed as a second Apelles, or as a German or “better” Apelles as well. Not to mention that he competed with Apelles directly, for example when he repainted the lost Calumnia fresco after Lucian’s description.27 In these written testimonies we come across almost all aspects on the artist-inventor known from the traditional catalogues.. Due to humanistic influences, elements from antique mythology, like the artist’s transfer to the stars after death, or the exact reproduction and subjugation of nature, are exploited to frame an ideal image of Dürer. Similar results are to be found in Giorgio Vasari’s Vita of Brunelleschi. The architect is revered as the first one since Antiquity to be such an excellent artist: cosi dunque Christianamente viuendo, lasciò al mondo odore della bontà sua, & delle egregie sue virtù. Parmi, che segli possa attribuire, che dagli antichi Greci, & da’ Romani in quà, non sia stato il più raro, né il più eccellente di lui . . . .28 (So he lived a Christian life, leaving the world an idea of his good character and his highly estimable virtue. I think, one could say, that since the ancient Greeks and Romans, there has been no one as rare and as excellent as him.)

But the reasons for his uniqueness are not only his “ingenium” and creativity. It is his Christian life as well that makes him the best representative of his art. Even his historical obituary is set in this manner by the Florentines: “Quantum Philippus Architectus arte Daedalea valuerit, cum huius celeberrimi Templi mira testudo, tum plures aliae diuino ingenio abeo [sic!] ad inuentae machinae documento esse possunt[.]”29 (How successful the architect Philippus was in the art of Daedalus attests this famous temple as well as many other machines that he invented thanks to his divine genius.)

Here, obviously, Brunelleschi is characterized as a Christian Daedalus.

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Conclusion In Renaissance biographies, the artist-inventor is characterized as the one who brings foreign and new knowledge to mankind; he improves art by his own “ingenium.” On the one hand, the artist’s biography—as many scholars, like Matteo Burioni, state—is influenced by a hero’s or statesman’s biography. So, for example, Vasari and his contemporaries often use a similar vocabulary to describe the hero’s battlefield (“campo” in Italian) and the artist’s canvas or paper (also “campo”).30 On the other hand, I assume that the artist biographies are based on antique mythological elements. In addition, the artist is supposed to be inspired by the Christian God as a divine master. Now the question is how to explain this combination of different sources. My hypothesis is that the blending of Christian and antique mythological elements does not express a Christianization, but constitutes in fact a legitimization of the artist’s own status as a creator.31 Dürer, in the manuscript to his Vier Bücher von menschlicher Proportion (Four books on Human Proportion, now in the British Library), claims that the artist is equal to God. This problematic statement was not printed, and modern researchers try to explain it against the background of a religious sixteenth-century society. One possible explanation might be to consider the artist a minor creator who depended on the model of the first and major creator, the Christian God. Consequently, the recycling of antique mythology does not only fulfil decorative purposes in accordance with rhetorical decorum. By virtue of the humanists’ dealing with mythical elements, the Christian assumption that only the Christian God is a creator or a major creator risked being seriously eroded, since the mythological concept may be regarded as a simultaneous, alternative concept to Christianity. The reinvention of the mythological inventor in sixteenth-century artist biographies serves to explain why an artist and his life are so exceptional. The myth also underscores the artist’s status of similarity or even equality to God. Mythological elements in these Renaissance texts oscillate between the rhetorical decorum and the historical example. Apart from its reuse in biographies of ancient heroes or rulers and in anecdotic writing,32 mythological narratives served as a base for Renaissance artists’ biographies. The demonstration of this fact was the aim of my deconstructive—i.e. against the background of mythological writing— reading of texts treating the life of Dürer compared to Vasari’s Vita of Brunelleschi.33

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Notes 1

On Vasari’s artist biography see Matteo Burioni, Die Renaissance der Architekten: Profession und Souveränität des Baukünstlers in Giorgio Vasaris Viten (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2008). 2 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth.” The Journal of American Folklore 68, no. 270 (1955): 432. 3 Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, “Mytho-phorie: Formes et transformations du mythe,” Religiologiques 10 (1994): 12–13. 4 Ibid., 14, 17, 18. 5 Cf. ibid., 15–20. 6 “Baroque” designates fairly manneristic or playful art rather than the serious replacement of old elements by new ones. 7 Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux takes it even a step further, seeing in the Minotaur the result of the inventor’s ingenium: “Le monstre apparaît donc comme le produit indirect de l’ingéniosité technique de Dédale.” Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux, Dédale: Mythologie de l’artisan en Grèce ancienne. Préface de Pierre VidalNaquet (Paris: François Maspero, 1975), 137. 8 Cf. Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz. Die Legende vom Künstler: Ein geschichtlicher Versuch. Mit einem Vorwort von Ernst H. Gombrich (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003), 95–96. 9 Cf. Polydore Vergil, On Discovery, ed. and transl. Brian P. Copenhaver (London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 458, III.14.1. 10 Pliny, The Natural History, transl. John Bostock and H. T. Riley (London: H. G. Bohn, 1857), vol. 6, 256. 11 Ibid., 263 and G[aius] Plinius Secundus, Naturalis Historia: Libri XXXI– XXXVII. Vol. 9, ed. Francisco Semi (Pisa: Giardini Editori e Stampatori, 1978), 2235, 35.36.97. 12 Cf. Kris and Kurz, Legende vom Künstler, 26. 13 Cf. ibid., 94. 14 Cf. Catherine Atkinson, Inventing Inventors in Renaissance Europe: Polydore Vergil’s ‘De inventoribus rerum’ (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 24. 15 Werner Wunderlich, “Der Mythos vom Künstler ohne Werk,” in Künstler, Dichter, Gelehrte, ed. Ulrich Müller and Werner Wunderlich (Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, 2005). 16 Often, the artist’s selfportraits show even the hands of the master, as e.g. Albrecht Dürer’s famous self-portrait (1500, Munich, Alte Pinakothek), to illustrate the artist’s practical skills as well. 17 This term designates the creative power of the artist, as formulated in the late sixteenth century by Juan Huarte de San Juan in his Examen de ingenios para las ciencias in 1575. 18 In my opinion it will be of great advantage to borrow the term “go-between” from intercultural studies to show how exceptional the “artist-inventor” is by bringing a new science to the public similar to the traveler informing the public about behavior and customs of foreign or new cultures.

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19

Albrecht Dürer, Schriftlicher Nachlass, vol. 1, ed. Hans Rupprich (Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1956), 290. 20 Translations, if not otherwise mentioned, by Ronny F. Schulz. 21 Dürer, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 294. 22 Scheurl characterizes the artist by his “maisterschafft der malerey in der gantzen welt” (ibid., 294). 23 Ibid., 303. 24 Ibid., 301. 25 Cf. ibid., 323. 26 Ibid., 324. 27 To my mind, the Calumnia frescos painted in 1521 in Nuremberg Townhall attest to the painter’s interest in styling himself as a second Apelles. 28 Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ piv eccelenti pittori, scvltori, et architettori . . . . (Florence: Giunti, 1568), 325. 29 Ibid., 325. 30 Cf. Burioni, Renaissance der Architekten, 23–30. 31 On the topic “artist as creator” see Virve Sarapik, “Artist and Myth,” Folklore 15 (2000): 48–51 and Ulrich Pfisterer, “Die Erfindung des Nullpunktes: Neuheitskonzepte in den Bildkünsten, 1350–1650,” in “Novità”: Neuheitskonzepte in den Bildkünsten um 1600, ed. Ulrich Pfisterer and Gabriele Wimböck (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2011). 32 Cf. Collections of examples or anecdotes (lat. facetiae) with legendary scenes from the life of an artist are found e.g. in Poggio Bracciolini’s Facetiae. 33 I would like to thank Irina Bartholdy/Berlin for proofreading the manuscript.

Works Cited Sources Dürer, Albrecht. Schriftlicher Nachlass. Vol. 1. Edited by Hans Rupprich. Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1956. Plinius Secundus, G[aius]. Naturalis Historia: Libri XXXI–XXXVII. Vol. 9. Edited by Francisco Semi. Pisa: Giardini Editori e Stampatori, 1978. Pliny. The Natural History. Translated with copious notes and illustrations by John Bostock and H. T. Riley. Vol. 6. London: H. G. Bohn, 1857. Vasari, Giorgio. Le vite de’ piv eccelenti pittori, scvltori, et architettori . . . . Florence: Giunti, 1568. Vergil, Polydore. On Discovery. Edited and translated by Brian P. Copenhaver. London: The I Tatti Renaissance Library, 2002.

Secondary Literature Atkinson, Catherine. Inventing Inventors in Renaissance Europe: Polydore Vergil’s ‘De inventoribus rerum.’ Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007.

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Burioni, Matteo. Die Renaissance der Architekten: Profession und Souveränität des Baukünstlers in Giorgio Vasaris Viten. Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2008. Frontisi-Ducroux, Françoise. Dédale: Mythologie de l’artisan en Grèce ancienne. Préface de Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Paris: François Maspero, 1975. Kris, Ernst, and Otto Kurz. Die Legende vom Künstler: Ein geschichtlicher Versuch. Mit einem Vorwort von Ernst H. Gombrich. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth.” The Journal of American Folklore 68, no. 270 (1955): 428–44. Pfisterer, Ulrich. “Die Erfindung des Nullpunktes: Neuheitskonzepte in den Bildkünsten, 1350–1650. In “Novità.” Neuheitskonzepte in den Bildkünsten um 1600. Edited by Ulrich Pfisterer and Gabriele Wimböck, 7–85. Zurich: diaphanes, 2011. Sarapik, Virve. “Artist and Myth.” Folklore 15 (2000): 39–59. Wunderlich, Werner. “Der Mythos vom Künstler ohne Werk.” In Künstler, Dichter, Gelehrte. Edited by Ulrich Müller and Werner Wunderlich, 37–47. Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, 2005. Wunenburger, Jean-Jacques. “Mytho-phorie: Formes et transformations du mythe.” Religiologiques 10 (1994): 1–26. Accessed September 19, 2014. http://www.unites.uqam.ca/religiologiques/.

RECONFIGURATIONS OF MYTHOLOGY IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY LUTHERAN COLLECTIONS OF AESOPIC FABLES ERIK ZILLÉN LUND UNIVERSITY

The Aesopic fable might not be the literary genre that spontaneously comes to mind while reflecting upon Greek and Roman mythology. The characters of the fables are primarily animals, plants, and objects, and the thematic concerns, above all, moral and inter-human affairs. However, in the ancient corpus of Aesopic fables, pagan gods and demigods often appear. Most commonly Zeus/Jupiter is called upon by fable characters such as the bee, the donkey, and the snake, all of them pleading for a better destiny.1 Also frequently figuring as characters in the Aesopic narratives, in many cases taking the place of Zeus/Jupiter or collaborating with him, are, among others, Aphrodite/Venus, Heracles, Apollo, and Hermes/Mercury.2 In the Roman fable collection of Phaedrus, 16 out of 93 fables make some kind of reference to mythological divinities.3 The moral added to one of Babrios’s Greek fables explains: ȀĮ੿ IJȠઃȢ șİȠઃȢ ǹ੅ıȦʌȠȢ ਥȝʌȜȑțİȚ ȝȪșȠȚȢ, ‫ ۄ‬ȕȠȣȜȩȝİȞȠȢ ਲȝ઼Ȣ ȞȠȣșİIJİ૙Ȟ ʌȡઁȢ ਕȜȜȒȜȠȣȢ [“Aesop brings even the gods into his fables in the course of cautioning us one against another”].4 Thanks to the fable’s function as a school genre, used all over Europe in the teaching of Latin, the Aesopic tradition enjoyed remarkable continuity during the Middle Ages.5 The genre could easily be harmonized with a Christian way of thinking, due not least to the combination of ethical commands and animal imagery, which has numerous equivalences in the Bible as well as in the writings of the Church Fathers.6 More actively, the fables were Christianised by means of allegorical interpretation. The fable about the fox fooling the raven into dropping the cheese it holds in its beak could be explained by using the cheese as a sign of the soul’s nourishment—incorporating virtues such as patience and love for one’s neighbour—and the fox as a representative of the Devil.7

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Interpretative procedures of this kind made the fables popular as exempla in Christian sermons, especially during the High Middle Ages.8 The Renaissance—however we choose to define the concept9— brought about a renewal of the Aesopic tradition. In the elementary teaching of classical as opposed to medieval Latin, as well as in the teaching of Greek, which was introduced as a school subject, the fables generally became required reading in classrooms all over the continent.10 On the basis of rediscovered Greek manuscripts, a number of voluminous Neo-Latin fable anthologies were compiled and printed in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Of special importance in the Germanspeaking part of Europe (the main focus of this paper) were the Latin fable collections published by Martin Dorpius and Joachim Camerarius in 1518 and 1538 respectively: Fabularum que hoc libro continentur interpretes, atque authores sunt hi [The translators and authors of the fables included in this book are] and Aesopi phrygis fabvlarvm celeberrimi avtoris vita. Fabellae aesopicae plvres quadringentis [The life of the Phrygian Aesop, the famous author of fables. Above four hundred aesopic fables]. In their extended editions these collections contained in the first case almost 400 and in the second case more than 500 fables in Latin prose.11 As an epoch the Renaissance—the long Renaissance—was distinguished not only by a humanist interest in the languages and literatures of antiquity. The Renaissance was also a period of religious turbulence, church schism, and confessional struggles.12 Even if Martin Luther in many respects was influenced by medieval thought—this being, of course, a controversial issue within Luther scholarship13—the Lutheran Reformation formed a component of European Renaissance culture.14 “The Italian project,” William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden argue in an analysis of Jacob Burckhardt’s Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860), “was incomplete in subjectivizing only the state. The Reformation, subjectivizing the church as well, in this regard completes the Renaissance.”15 In sixteenth-century Germany, the Aesopic fable, interestingly enough, came to hold an important position at the intersection of humanism and reformation. In the several school regulations outlined by Philipp Melanchthon, the fable’s status as school genre was clearly lent authority.16 When in 1545 Melanchthon’s colleague and friend Joachim Camerarius reworked his bulky fable collection into a more handy Latin school edition, Melanchthon wrote an epistola dedicatoria praising the linguistic and moral qualities of Aesop’s fables.17 No less a supporter of the fable was Luther himself, who emphasized the genre’s capacity for the moral edification of the masses. In parallel with his work on translating the Old Testament, Luther, who was then at Fort Coburg waiting for the 1530

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Diet at Augsburg to come to an end, initiated an Aesopic project: a fable collection in the German tongue.18 He finished 13 fables and—of greater importance—wrote a preface to his planned fable book. Both the fables and the foreword, the latter a veritable apology for the usefulness of the Aesopic genre, were printed posthumously in 1557 in the Jena edition of Luther’s work.19 Luther’s uncompleted fable project was taken up by some of his adherents. During the sixteenth century, three Lutheran collections of Aesopic fables were published in German. The first collection, Etliche fabel Esopi verteutscht by Erasmus Alberus, appeared in Hagenau in 1534, the second one, Burkard Waldis’s Esopus/ Gantz New gemacht, in Frankfurt am Main in 1548, and the third collection, Hundert Fabeln aus Esopo by Nathan Chytraeus, in Rostock in 1571.20 At the time of the publication of their collections, Erasmus Alberus as well as Burkard Waldis, both of them former Wittenberg students, served as Protestant preachers, whereas Nathan Chytraeus, the younger brother of the influential Lutheran theologian David Chytraeus, was a Latin professor at the Protestant university of Rostock.21 All of these three fable collections were composed with a clear confessional ambition, using the Aesopic genre in order to promote not only a general ethics of virtue but also some distinct Lutheran standpoints: the theory of the three estates installed by God (ecclesia, politia, oeconomia), the tenet of social hierarchy (Obrigkeit/Untertan), and the principle of patriarchy (pater familias), among others.22 If the fable collections by Alberus, Waldis, and Chytraeus were designed as deliberate instruments for disseminating the Lutheran confession, the elements of Greek and Roman mythology characteristic of the Aesopic genre must have posed a palpable problem. In Der große Katechismus [The Large Catechism] (1529), one might recall, Luther describes in his commentary on the first commandment, “Du solt nicht andere Gotter haben” (“Thou shalt have no other gods before Me”),23 how the heathens so yhr datum auff gewalt und hyrschafft stelleten, wurffen yhren Juppiter zum höhisten Gott auff, die andern so nach reichtumb, glück odder nach lust und guten tagen stunden, Herculem, Mercurium, Venerem odder andere, die schwangere frawen Dianam odder Lucinam und so fort, machet yhm yderman zum Gott, dazu yhn sein hertz trug.24 [who put their trust in power and dominion elevated Jupiter as the supreme god; the others, who were bent upon riches, happiness, or pleasure, and a life of ease, Hercules, Mercury, Venus, or others; women with child, Diana

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Reconfigurations of Mythology in Collections of Aesopic Fables or Lucina, and so on; thus every one made that his god to which his heart was inclined . . . .]25

This behaviour Luther strongly condemns as “Abgötterey” [idolatry].26 Since Luther did not advocate the medieval method of allegorical reinterpretation of ancient mythology,27 the pagan gods—this seems to be a reasonable assumption—ought to have been consistently eliminated in the Lutheranized fable collections. That is, however, not the case. In fact, the role played by mythological gods in the Aesopic tradition is handled in a number of varying and partly inconsistent ways in these three German fable collections. To start with, it should be pointed out that the collections are rather dissimilar in several respects. This diversity is expressed in, among other things, the number of fables, the length of the fable, the choice between prose fable and verse fable, the set of paratexts, etc.28 My aim here is not, though, to make a comparison of the three collections but rather, on the basis of their joint Lutheran tendency, to construct a unified survey of their dealings with, and reconfigurations of, ancient mythology. As an overall pattern, the fables in the collections are not surprisingly simultaneously demythologized and Christianised. This dual transformation, however, is carried out by means of a spectrum of what I consider to be structural strategies, bringing some additional functions to the fore as well. The first and most simple strategy is a strategy of selection. From the Latin source texts—in Alberus’s and Waldis’s case primarily Fabvlarvm qvae hoc libro continentur interpretes, atque authores sunt hi by Martin Dorpius, and in the case of Chytraeus at least partly Camerarius’s Historia vitae fortvnaeqve Aesopi—those fables that lack mythological elements are chosen.29 In Chytraeus’s Hundert Fabeln aus Esopo one does not find, for instance, the fable of the “Invidus” [The Envious] that relates how Jupiter sends Apollo on a mission to the earth in order to investigate the wishes of man, which was included in Camerarius’s larger collection as well as in his school edition.30 Having school-boys encountering mythological gods in fables rendered in Latin was far less risky than reproducing the same stories for an audience reading them in the vernacular. The second strategy is a strategy of substitution: mythological gods in the fables are replaced by the Christian God in the corresponding positions. In its classical versions, the fable about the peacock and the nightingale tells us how the peacock asks the goddess Juno for a voice as beautiful as the nightingale’s.31 In Alberus’s version of the fable, “Von einer Nachtgall/ vnd Pfawen,” the peacock appeals to the Christian God (“Ein Pfaw für Gott haben geklagt”), clearly depicted as a heavenly father (“Darauff sagt Gott der Herr zu jhm”).32

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The strategies of selection and substitution execute in a rather straightforward way a demythologization and a Christianisation of the Aesopic fables. These strategies, however, are not realized in full within the collections, but are supplemented by others. A third structural strategy is the strategy of retention: mythological gods and demigods are maintained as characters in the fables. In some of the most popular Aesopic narratives the pagan divinities seem to play a role so crucial that they can be neither eliminated nor substituted by the Christian God. The fable about Jupiter and the frogs, to mention one of the most obvious examples, is included in all three Lutheran collections.33 When the frogs ask Jupiter for a king and he drops down a wooden log to them, the frogs are at first frightened. But once they discover their new king’s immobility they scorn him and request a better ruler. Jupiter then allots them a stork as king, who at once starts to feast on his frog subjects. The inclusion of this fable in the collections and the maintenance of Jupiter as its main character provide evidence of both how central the story about the frogs and their monarch was in the fable tradition during the sixteenth century—Luther in his writings frequently uses it as an exemplum34—and how profoundly the gods of Greek and Roman mythology permeate the Aesopic genre. Apparently it would have been out of the question to replace Jupiter with the Christian God in this particular case, for both narratological and theological reasons. An omnipotent god was needed for the plot to function, but the somewhat tricksy role this god had to play, first giving the frogs a complete washout as ruler and then inflicting on them a deadly foe, appeared irreconcilable with the God of Christianity. In order to reduce the clash between Aesopic narratives featuring pagan gods (a result of the strategy of retention) on the one hand, and the Christian understanding of life on the other, the fable collections make different interpretative moves, many of them well known from earlier stages of myth criticism.35 One move is based on increasing the distance between the two positions, considering the mythological gods as creatures of a prehistoric era, belonging now to a purely fictitious universe. In Waldis’s version of the fable about the farmer and his greedy hopes, where Demeter/Ceres plays a prominent role, the opening lines state: “DJe Leut erstmals viel Götter hetten ‫ ۄ‬Dauon viel schreiben die Poeten/ ‫ ۄ‬Vnder den war ein die Ceres hieß” [In a remote past people had many gods, the poets write a lot about that; amongst them was one called Ceres].36 Conversely, another move consists of decreasing the distance, bringing out correspondences between pagan mythology and Biblical tales and notions. One such harmonizing operation is the treatment of Zeus/Jupiter in

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monotheistic terms as a counterpart to the Christian God. In his version of the etiological fable about the snail and its house, Chytraeus, departing from original mythological conceptions,37 describes Jupiter as the sole and omnipotent creator of all living beings: “ALs Jupiter im anfang der welt/ alle thier geschaffen hette” etc.38 With the aim of more solidly neutralizing what seems to be an inescapable strategy of retention, Alberus, Waldis, and Chytraeus make use of a fourth structural strategy. References to the Christian God are inserted in positions where no corresponding pagan gods appear in the source texts. This strategy of counterbalance is, in fact, the basic method of Christianising the Aesopic genre in these collections. The strategy is applied in the morals as well as in the narratives. Evidently, reminders of the existence of the Christian God are appropriate almost anywhere in the collected fable texts, and irrespective of whether any mythological god has recently been made mention of. A typical example can be found in the first lines of the moral in Waldis’s version of the fable about the frog trying to blow himself up to the size of an ox, an undertaking that ends with the frog bursting. The moral starts: “Ein jeder hat von Gott sein gab ‫ ۄ‬Daran er ein benügen hab” [Everyone has received his gift from God and should be content with it].39 Very often, references to the Christian God are made directly in the dialogue of the narrative. In one of Waldis’s fables the wolf says he prefers to “essen was der lieb Gott geit” [eat what my dear God gives], in another the donkey expresses his gratitude for not being an army horse, “Bin wol zu fried in meinem beruff ‫ ۄ‬Vnd das mich Gott ein Esel schuff” [I am indeed satisfied with my task and with God’s making me a donkey], and in a third fable the frog greets every creature he meets with a “Gott grüß euch lieben freundt” [May God be with you dear friend].40 In this way the Aesopic animal world is injected to its very core with Christianity as an antidote to heathenism, a feature that of course simultaneously intensifies the anthropomorphism of the genre. Often enough the strategy of retention and the strategy of counterbalance are combined in one and the same fable, producing obviously syncretistic effects. When a mythological divinity acts as a character in the narrative, the Christian God is usually summoned in the moral. Under the heading “Ein Holtzhawer vnd Mercurius” Chytraeus tells us the fable of the woodcutter, who loses his axe but thanks to his honesty receives both a golden and a silver axe as gifts from Mercury. In the moral, or epimythion, the heathen narrative is corrected by a Christian interpretation, stating that “Recht vnd gleich/ wirt mit Gottes segen reich” [With God’s blessing the honest and humble becomes rich].41 In some fables the pagan god himself is given the honour of referring to the Christian God. When the camel begs

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Jupiter for horns, then—Waldis’s fable “Vom Camelthier” reports—“lacht der Jupiter ‫ ۄ‬Vnd sprach/ wie gar nerrisch ist der ‫ ۄ‬Er leßt jm nicht an dem benügen ‫ ۄ‬Welchs jm Gott vnd Natur zufügen” [laughed Jupiter and said how foolish is anyone who is not satisfied with what he was given by God and nature].42 The co-operation of demythologization and Christianisation in these fables does not, in contrast to the earlier cases we considered, operate with a structural elimination of mythological elements in favour of the Christian discourse. Instead, the collaboration is founded on functional hierarchisation, ascribing to the Christian faith a higher, if not to say absolute, truth value. More surprising, perhaps, is the fifth strategy, since it consists of inserting gods from Greek and Roman mythology in positions where they are not found in the Aesopic source texts. This structural strategy of addition has its roots in an explicitly negative estimation of the pagan gods. One of the functions associated with this strategy is the use of mythological gods and demigods as deterrent exempla. In the long introductory part of the fable about the widow and her sleepy maids, “Von eim alten Weib/ vnd jhren Mägden,” Alberus discusses the widely spread habit of visiting prostitutes, and then writes: Den Jupiter die Heyden han Vor zeiten für ein solchen man Gehalten/ als der Ehebruch treib Auff erden mit eins andren Weib.43 [A long time ago the heathens regarded Jupiter as such a man, since he commited adultery on earth with other men’s women.]

Jupiter is here exposed as a representative of the violation of the sixth commandment, a moral transgression strongly criticized in Alberus’s fable as a deed “[d]es Teuffels,” of the devil.44 In some of the fables the strategy of addition and the negative estimation of the pagan gods are made use of for clearly confessional purposes, in some cases for outright confessional attacks. This is one of the most significant reconfiguring features of the three Lutheran fable collections examined here. Alberus’s version of the fable about the man making friends with a satyr, “Vom Waldtgott vnd eim Bawern,” stands out as a chief example. The long introduction opens with a general description of heathen polytheism: MAN find geschrieben/ wie da sey Vorzeiten groß abgötterey/

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Reconfigurations of Mythology in Collections of Aesopic Fables Gewest/ zu einer jeden nott Erwelet war ein eigen Gott.45 [One finds written that once upon a time there was a lot of idolatry. For each kind of distress a particular god was chosen.]

Alberus then enumerates a great many mythological divinities and explains how these “bey uns,” in our times, have been replaced by the saints. Neptune has been substituted by “Sanct Niclaus,” Mars by “Sanct Jörgen,” Pallas Athena by “Sanct Catharein,” Plutus by “S. Erasmum” and “S. Anna,” and so forth. In this way, Alberus argues, the Pope and the Church of Rome have distorted the Christian faith: “Solchs hat der grosse falsch Prophet ‫ ۄ‬Der Bapst/ der Endchrist vns gelert/ ‫ ۄ‬Vnd Gott dem Herrn sein wort verkert” [Such things the great deceitful prophet, the pope, the antichrist, has taught us, and perverted the word of God].46 By establishing this correspondence between the worship of pagan gods and the Roman Catholic cult of saints Alberus utilizes ancient mythology as a tool for Lutheran confessionalisation, a process that— according to church historians such as Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard—followed the Reformation and aimed at religious monopolisation and the installation of social discipline.47 All imaginable propaganda vehicles were mobilized in order to discredit the rival confession. In placing pagan divinities and Catholic saints on an equal footing, Alberus in fact repeats a pattern predominant in myth criticism of the earliest Christian church, which not only dismissed heathen polytheism as idolatry, but treated the belief in mythological gods and different forms of heresy (manichaeism, arianism, nestorianism, etc.) alike. For the men behind the Lutheran fable collections of the sixteenth century, the doctrines of Roman Catholicism were—to borrow an image often used by the Church Fathers to illustrate the threats of heathen mythology—as dangerous as the Sirens’ song, against which Odysseus defended himself by being tied to the ship’s mast, read as a symbol of the true Christian faith.48 In the Lutheranized fable collections published in the German vernacular by Erasmus Alberus, Burkard Waldis, and Nathan Chytraeus the ambiguity of classical mythology is not—as in so many other Renaissance texts—reconstructed and reinforced, but rather, to summarize my argument, reduced and simplified, due to their confessional agenda and their aim of appealing to broad audiences.

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Notes 1

Cf. Ésope. Fables. Texte établi et traduit, ed. & trans. Émile Chambry (Paris: Société d’Édition “Les belles Lettres,” 1927), for instance 103 (No. 234), 116 (No. 262), 128 (No. 291). 2 Cf. Ibid., for instance 36 (No. 76), 34 (No. 72), 73 (No. 166), 112 (No. 253). 3 Babrius and Phaedrus, ed. and trans. B. E. Perry (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 189—369 (not counting prologues and epilogues). Cf. also Eberhard Oberg, Phaedrus-Kommentar (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2000), 24–26. 4 Ibid., 156–57 (No. 119). 5 Cf. for instance Klaus Grubmüller, Meister Esopus: Untersuchungen zu Geschichte und Funktion der Fabel im Mittelalter (Munich: Artemis, 1977), 87– 97. 6 Cf. for instance Walter Pangritz, Das Tier in der Bibel (Munich: Reinhardt, 1963), especially 102–19; Nigel Harris, “Tiersymbolik IV: In der Geschichte des Christentums,” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. Gerhard Müller (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1977–2004), vol. 33 (2002), 542–47. 7 Harry C. Schnur, preface “Die Fabel im Mittelalter” to Lateinische Fabeln des Mittelalters (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1978), 12–13. 8 Cf. for instance Jean-Théobald Welter, L’exemplum dans la littérature religieuse et didactique du moyen âge (Paris: Occitania, 1927), especially chapter “II. Période d’epanouissement de l’exemplum dans la littérature religieuse, morale et didactique du XIIIe et XIVe siècle,” 63–375. 9 Cf. for instance the different contributions in Zu Begriff und Problem der Renaissance, ed. August Buck (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969); William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). 10 Cf. for instance Thomas Elyot, The boke named the Gouernour (London, 1531), 30r–31r; Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities. Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 110. 11 Cf. the following editions: Martin Dorpius, Fabvlarvm qvae hoc libro continentur interpretes, atque authores sunt hi. Guilielmus Goudanus. Hadrianus Barlandus. Erasmus Roterodamus. Aulus Gellius. Laurentius Valla. Angelus Politianus. Petrus Crinitus. Ioannes Antonius Campanus. Plinius Secundus Nouocomensis. Nicolaus Gerbelius Phorcensis. Laurentius Abstemius. Rimicius iam denuo additus. Aesopi uita ex Max. Planude excerpta, & aucta. Indicem fabularum in uestibulo reperis (Strasbourg, 1523); Joachim Camerarius, Historia vitae fortvnaeqve Aesopi, cvm fabvlis illivs pluribus quingentis, & alijs quibusdam narrationibus, compositis studio & diligentia Ioachimi Camerarii Pab. Quibus additæ fuere & Liuianæ duæ, et Gellianæ ac aliorum aliquot. His accessit interpretatio græcorum & aliorum etiam quorundam multò quàm ante uberior. Et indices duo, ipsi quoque accuratius quàm prius editi (Leipzig, 1544). 12 For an overview, cf. for instance Barbara B. Diefendorf, “Wars of Religion,” in Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, vol. 6, ed. Paul F. Grendler (New York: Scribner, 1999), 295–99.

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Cf. for instance Heiko A. Oberman, The Reformation: Roots and Ramifications, trans. Andrew Colin Gow (Edinburgh: Clark, 1994), chap. 3 “Martin Luther: Between the Middle Ages and Modern Times,” 53–75. 14 Cf. for instance Lewis W. Spitz, “Humanism and the Protestant Reformation,” in Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy, vol. 3, Humanism and the Disciplines, ed. Albert Rabil, Jr. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988). 15 Kerrigan and Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance, 34. 16 Cf. for instance Philipp Melanchthon, Unterricht der Visitatorn an die Pfarhern ym Kurfurstenthum zu Sachssen (Wittenberg, 1528), L4v–M1r. 17 Philipp Melanchthon, “Philippvs Melanchthon Christophoro Cziglero, viri clarissimi D. Bernhardi Czigleri Doctoris Theologiae, filio,” in Joachim Camerarius, Fabellae aesopicae qvaedam notiores, et in scolis vsitatae, partim excerptae de priori editione, partim nvnc primvm compositae, ad usum studiorum puerilium. A Ioachimo Camer. Pab. Cum epistola Philippi Melanchthonis de utilitate huiusmodi scriptorum (Leipzig, 1545), A2r–A6v. 18 Cf. for instance Reinhard Dithmar, introduction to Martin Luthers Fabeln und Sprichwörter, 2nd rev. ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995), 13–18. 19 The text versions of 1557 are reprinted in Martin Luther, D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 50 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1914), 452–60. 20 Erasmus Alberus, Etliche fabel Esopi verteutscht vnnd ynn Rheymen bracht durch Erasmum Alberum. Sampt anderen newen Fabeln fast nutzbarlich vnd lustig zu lesen (Hagenau, 1534); Burkard Waldis, Esopus/ Gantz New gemacht/ und in Reimen gefaßt. Mit sampt Hundert Newer Fabeln/ vormals im Druck nicht gesehen/ noch außgangen/ durch Burcardum Waldis (Frankfurt am Main, 1548); Nathan Chytraeus, Hundert Fabeln aus Esopo/ etliche von D. Martin Luther vnd herren Mathesio/ etliche von andern verdeudschet. Sampt einer schönen Vorrede D. Mart. Luth. von rechtem nutz vnd brauch desselben buchs/ iederman wes standes er auch ist/ lustig vnd dienlich zu lesen. Jtem ein schöne Historia woher die Edelleut vnd Bawren jhren vrsprung haben (Rostock, 1571). The fable collections of Alberus and Waldis have been published in critical editions, from which I quote below: Erasmus Alberus, Die Fabeln: Die erweiterte Ausgabe von 1550 mit Kommentar sowie die Erstfassung von 1534, ed. Wolfgang Harms and Herfried Vögel (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997); Burkard Waldis, Esopus: 400 Fabeln und Erzählungen nach der Erstausgabe von 1548, vol. 1, Text, ed. Ludger Lieb, Jan Mohr, and Herfried Vögel (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011). Chytraeus’s Hundert Fabeln aus Esopo, which has been paid far less scholarly attention, will be quoted from the 1571 edition. 21 For further biographical information cf. Ute Mennecke-Haustein, “Alberus, Erasmus,” in Literaturlexikon: Autoren und Werke deutscher Sprache, ed. Walther Killy (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, 1988–93), vol. 1 (1988); Idem., “Waldis, Burkhard,” in Killy, Literaturlexikon, vol. 12 (1992); Hermann Wiegand, “Chytraeus, Nathan,” in Killy, Literaturlexikon, vol. 2 (1989). 22 Concerning the confessional bias of the collections cf. Wolfgang Harms and Herfried Vögel, introduction to Die Fabeln, by Erasmus Alberus, 9–13; Waldis,

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Esopus: 400 Fabeln und Erzählungen, 9; Ernst Heinrich Rehermann and Ines Köhler-Zülch, “Aspekte der Gesellschafts- und Kirchenkritik in den Fabeln von Martin Luther, Nathanael Chytraeus und Burkhard Waldis,” in Die Fabel: Theorie, Geschichte und Rezeption einer Gattung, ed. Peter Hasubek (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1982). Concerning the Lutheran standpoints here mentioned, cf. for instance Reinhard Schwarz, “Luthers Lehre von den drei Ständen und die drei Dimensionen der Ethik,” Lutherjahrbuch: Organ der internationalen Lutherforschung 45 (1978); Eilert Herms, “Obrigkeit,” in Müller, Theologische Realenzyklopädie, vol. 24 (1994), especially 727–29; Gotthardt Frühsorge, “Luthers Kleiner Katechismus und die ‘Hausväterliteratur’: Zur Traditionsbildung lutherischer Lehre vom ‘Haus’ in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Pastoraltheologie: Monatsschrift für Wissenschaft und Praxis in Kirche und Gesellschaft 73, no. 9 (1984). 23 Martin Luther, D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 30, part I (Weimar: Böhlau, 1910), 132 (henceforth abbreviated WA 30:I). Concordia Triglotta: Die symbolischen Bücher der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche, deutsch—lateinisch—englisch, ed. and trans. Friedrich Bente and W. H. T. Dau (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1921), 581. 24 WA 30:I, 135. 25 Concordia Triglotta, 585. 26 WA 30:I, 135. 27 Cf. for instance Jean Seznec, La Survivance des dieux antiques: Essai sur le rôle de la tradition mythologique dans l’humanisme et dans l’art de la renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1940), especially 78–87. 28 Alberus’s first edition contains only 17 fables; his 1550 edition, which is used as source text in this paper, has been enlarged to 49 fables, all in verse and some of them of more than 300 lines in length. Waldis’s collection is arranged in four books, each of which accommodates 100 verse fables, varying in length from 20 lines to some 200 lines. Chytraeus’s Hundert Fabeln aus Esopo presents 100 fables, as indicated by the title, all of them in prose and, compared to Alberus’s and Waldis’s verse fables, of moderate length. As far as the paratexts are concerned, a prose version of the Aesop biography is included in Alberus’s 1550 edition (but not in his 1534 edition) and a versified version in Waldis’s 1548 edition, whereas Chytraeus’s 1571 collection was edited without the biography (Alberus’s prose version was, however, added by Chytraeus in the second edition 1574). Of significance is, furthermore, the fact that Chytraeus in his 1571 collection reprinted the preface Luther had written for his planned fable book, “Vorrede D. Martin Luthers,” a text that was never published within the lifetime of either Alberus or Waldis. 29 Concerning the Latin source texts, which in the case of Chytraeus’s Hundert Fabeln aus Esopo has not yet been fully investigated, cf. for instance Harms and Vögel, introduction to Die Fabeln, by Erasmus Alberus, 10, 12; Ludger Lieb, Erzählen an den Grenzen der Fabel: Studien zum Esopus des Burkard Waldis (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996), 33–42; Ernst Heinrich Rehermann, “Chytraeus, Nathan,” in Enzyklopädie des Märchens: Handwörterbuch zur

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historischen und vergleichenden Erzählforschung, vol. 3, ed. Kurt Ranke (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1979), 26–28. 30 Camerarius, Historia vitae fortvnaeqve Aesopi, 227; idem., Fabellae aesopicae qvaedam notiores, 61. 31 Cf. Dorpius’s version in Alberus, Die Fabeln, 342. 32 Ibid., 149 (No. 31). 33 Ibid., 49–51 (No. 5, “Von den Fröschen/ vnd jhrem Könige”); Waldis, Esopus: 400 Fabeln und Erzählungen, 37–39 (I:17, “Von Fröschen vnnd jhrem König”); Chytraeus, Hundert Fabeln aus Esopo, E3r–E3v (No. 25, “Die Frösch vnd Jupiter”). 34 Cf. Gerd Dicke & Klaus Grubmüller, Die Fabeln des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit: Ein Katalog der deutschen Versionen und ihrer lateinischen Entsprechungen (Munich: Fink, 1987), 179. 35 Cf. for instance Joachim Knape and Dieter Wuttke, “Mythos und Kunst,” in Müller, Theologische Realenzyklopädie, vol. 23 (1993), 665–78. 36 Waldis, Esopus: 400 Fabeln und Erzählungen, 179 (II:33). 37 Cf. for instance Heinrich Dörrie, “Gottesvorstellung,” in Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, vol. 12, ed. Theodor Klauser (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1983), 150– 54. 38 Chytraeus, Hundert Fabeln aus Esopo, J3r (No. 71). 39 Waldis, Esopus: 400 Fabeln und Erzählungen, 54 (I:31). 40 Ibid., 80 (I:56), 100 (I:77), 115 (I:91). 41 Chytraeus, Hundert Fabeln aus Esopo, J6r (No. 74). 42 Waldis, Esopus: 400 Fabeln und Erzählungen, 117 (I:93). 43 Alberus, Die Fabeln, 177 (No. 39). 44 Ibid., 177. 45 Ibid., 119 (No. 23). 46 Ibid., 119–21. 47 Cf. especially Wolfgang Reinhard, “Zwang zur Konfessionalisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 10 (1983); Heinz Schilling, “Die Konfessionalisierung von Kirche, Staat und Gesellschaft—Profil, Leistung, Defizite und Perspektiven eines geschichtwissenschaftlichen Paradigmas,” in Die katholische Konfessionalisierung, ed. Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1995). 48 Cf. for instance Hugo Rahner, Griechische Mythen in christlicher Deutung (Zürich: Rhein-Verlag, 1945), 445–86.

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Bente, Friedrich, and W. H. T. Dau, ed. and trans. Concordia Triglotta: Die symbolischen Bücher der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche, deutsch— lateinisch—englisch. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1921. Buck, August, ed. Zu Begriff und Problem der Renaissance. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969. Camerarius, Joachim. Historia vitae fortvnaeqve Aesopi, cvm fabvlis illivs pluribus quingentis, & alijs quibusdam narrationibus, compositis studio & diligentia Ioachimi Camerarii Pab. Quibus additæ fuere & Liuianæ duæ, et Gellianæ ac aliorum aliquot. His accessit interpretatio græcorum & aliorum etiam quorundam multò quàm ante uberior. Et indices duo, ipsi quoque accuratius quàm prius editi. Leipzig, 1544. —. Fabellae aesopicae qvaedam notiores, et in scolis vsitatae, partim excerptae de priori editione, partim nvnc primvm compositae, ad usum studiorum puerilium. A Ioachimo Camer. Pab. Cum epistola Philippi Melanchthonis de utilitate huiusmodi scriptorum. Leipzig, 1545 Chambry, Émile, ed. and transl. Ésope: Fables: Texte établi et traduit. Paris: Société d’Édition “Les belles Lettres,” 1927. Chytraeus, Nathan. Hundert Fabeln aus Esopo/ etliche von D. Martin Luther vnd herren Mathesio/ etliche von andern verdeudschet. Sampt einer schönen Vorrede D. Mart. Luth. von rechtem nutz vnd brauch desselben buchs/ iederman wes standes er auch ist/ lustig vnd dienlich zu lesen. Jtem ein schöne Historia woher die Edelleut vnd Bawren jhren vrsprung haben. Rostock, 1571. Dicke, Gerd, and Klaus Grubmüller. Die Fabeln des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit: Ein Katalog der deutschen Versionen und ihrer lateinischen Entsprechungen. Munich: Fink, 1987. Diefendorf, Barbara B. “Wars of Religion.” In Encyclopedia of the Renaissance. Vol. 6. Edited by Paul F. Grendler, 295–99. New York: Scribner, 1999. Dithmar, Reinhard. Introduction to Martin Luthers Fabeln und Sprichwörter. 2nd rev. ed., 12–22. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995. Dorpius, Martin. Fabvlarvm qvae hoc libro continentur interpretes, atque authores sunt hi. Guilielmus Goudanus. Hadrianus Barlandus. Erasmus Roterodamus. Aulus Gellius. Laurentius Valla. Angelus Politianus. Petrus Crinitus. Ioannes Antonius Campanus. Plinius Secundus Nouocomensis. Nicolaus Gerbelius Phorcensis. Laurentius Abstemius. Rimicius iam denuo additus. Aesopi uita ex Max. Planude excerpta, & aucta. Indicem fabularum in uestibulo reperis. Strasbourg, 1523. Dörrie, Heinrich. “Gottesvorstellung.” In Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum. Vol. 12. Edited by Theodor Klauser, 81–154. Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1983. Elyot, Thomas. The boke named the Gouernour. London, 1531. Frühsorge, Gotthardt. “Luthers Kleiner Katechismus und die ‘Hausväterliteratur’: Zur Traditionsbildung lutherischer Lehre vom ‘Haus’ in der Frühen Neuzeit.” Pastoraltheologie: Monatsschrift für Wissenschaft und Praxis in Kirche und Gesellschaft 73, no. 9 (1984): 380–93. Grafton, Anthony, and Lisa Jardine. From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.

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Grubmüller, Klaus. Meister Esopus: Untersuchungen zu Geschichte und Funktion der Fabel im Mittelalter. Munich: Artemis, 1977. Harris, Nigel. “Tiersymbolik IV: In der Geschichte des Christentums.” In Müller, Theologische Realenzyklopädie, vol. 33. 2002, 542–53. Herms, Eilert. “Obrigkeit.” In Müller, Theologische Realenzyklopädie, vol. 24. 1994, 723–59. Kerrigan, William, and Gordon Braden. The Idea of the Renaissance. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Killy, Walther, ed. Literaturlexikon: Autoren und Werke deutscher Sprache. 15 vols. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, 1988–93. Knape, Joachim, and Dieter Wuttke. “Mythos und Kunst.” In Müller, Theologische Realenzyklopädie, vol. 23. 1994, 665–78. Lieb, Ludger. Erzählen an den Grenzen der Fabel: Studien zum Esopus des Burkard Waldis. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996. Luther, Martin. D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 30, part I. Weimar: Böhlau, 1910. —. D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 50. Weimar: Böhlau, 1914. Melanchthon, Philipp. Unterricht der Visitatorn an die Pfarhern ym Kurfurstenthum zu Sachssen. Wittenberg, 1528. —. “Philippvs Melanchthon Christophoro Cziglero, viri clarissimi D. Bernhardi Czigleri Doctoris Theologiae, filio.” In Joachim Camerarius, Fabellae aesopicae qvaedam notiores, et in scolis vsitatae, partim excerptae de priori editione, partim nvnc primvm compositae, ad usum studiorum puerilium. A Ioachimo Camer. Pab. Cum epistola Philippi Melanchthonis de utilitate huiusmodi scriptorum, A2r–A6v. Leipzig, 1545. Mennecke-Haustein, Ute. “Alberus, Erasmus.” In Killy, Literaturlexikon: Autoren und Werke deutscher Sprache, vol. 1. 1988, 92–94. —. “Waldis, Burkhard.” In Killy, Literaturlexikon, vol. 12. 1992, 113–14. Müller, Gerhard, ed. Theologische Realenzyklopädie. 36 vols. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1977–2004. Oberg, Eberhard. Phaedrus-Kommentar. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2000. Oberman, Heiko A. The Reformation: Roots and Ramifications. Translated by Andrew Colin Gow. Edinburgh: Clark, 1994. Pangritz, Walter. Das Tier in der Bibel. Munich: Reinhardt, 1963. Perry, B. E., ed. and transl. Babrius and Phaedrus. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. Rahner, Hugo. Griechische Mythen in christlicher Deutung. Zürich: Rhein-Verlag, 1945. Rehermann, Ernst Heinrich. “Chytraeus, Nathan.” In Enzyklopädie des Märchens: Handwörterbuch zur historischen und vergleichenden Erzählforschung. Vol. 3. Edited by Kurt Ranke, 25–29. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1979. Rehermann, Ernst Heinrich, and Ines Köhler-Zülch. “Aspekte der Gesellschaftsund Kirchenkritik in den Fabeln von Martin Luther, Nathanael Chytraeus und Burkhard Waldis.” In Die Fabel: Theorie, Geschichte und Rezeption einer Gattung, edited by Peter Hasubek, 27–42. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1982.

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Reinhard, Wolfgang. “Zwang zur Konfessionalisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters.” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 10 (1983): 257–77. Schilling, Heinz. “Die Konfessionalisierung von Kirche, Staat und Gesellschaft— Profil, Leistung, Defizite und Perspektiven eines geschichtwissenschaftlichen Paradigmas.” In Die katholische Konfessionalisierung. Edited by Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling, 1–49. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1995. Schnur, Harry C. Preface “Die Fabel im Mittelalter” to Lateinische Fabeln des Mittelalters, 7–24. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1978. Schwarz, Reinhard. “Luthers Lehre von den drei Ständen und die drei Dimensionen der Ethik.” Lutherjahrbuch: Organ der internationalen Lutherforschung 45 (1978): 15–34. Seznec, Jean. La Survivance des dieux antiques: Essai sur le rôle de la tradition mythologique dans l’humanisme et dans l’art de la renaissance. London: Warburg Institute, 1940. Spitz, Lewis W. “Humanism and the Protestant Reformation.” In Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy. Vol. 3, Humanism and the Disciplines. Edited by Albert Rabil, Jr., 380–411. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. Waldis, Burkard. Esopus/ Gantz New gemacht/ und in Reimen gefaßt. Mit sampt Hundert Newer Fabeln/ vormals im Druck nicht gesehen/ noch außgangen/ durch Burcardum Waldis. Frankfurt am Main, 1548. —. Esopus: 400 Fabeln und Erzählungen nach der Erstausgabe von 1548. Vol. 1, Text. Edited by Ludger Lieb, Jan Mohr, and Herfried Vögel. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011. Welter, Jean-Théobald. L’exemplum dans la littérature religieuse et didactique du moyen âge. Paris: Occitania, 1927. Wiegand, Hermann. “Chytraeus, Nathan.” In Killy, Literaturlexikon, vol. 2. 1989, 417–18.

CONTRIBUTORS

Unn Irene Aasdalen is director of Nansen Academy, the Norwegian Humanistic Academy at Lillehammer. She is a funding member of Nordic Network for Renaissance Studies, NNRS, and currently chairs the network. Her main research is done in the field of Renaissance philosophy, and she has published articles mainly on Ficino, Pico and Machiavelli. She recently published a book in Norwegian on love-treatises in the Italian Renaissance: Den gjenfødte Eros (Oslo, Scandinavian Academic Publishing: 2013). Her PhD from the University of London (2008) was in intellectual history, and bore the title “Climbing Diotima’s Ladder. Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Lorenzo de’ Medici, Their Neoplatonic Commentaries in Italian.” Kjerstin Aukrust is lecturer in French Literature at the University of Oslo. She received her PhD in 2008 on a dissertation about the macabre in French baroque poetry. Her publications include “The Image(s) of the tragic in Les Tragiques by Agrippa d’Aubigné” in Fortune and Fatality: Performing the Tragic in Early Modern France (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), Corps sanglants, souffrants et macabres (co-edited with C. Bouteille-Meister, Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2010), and “Le spectacle de la corruption chez Jean-Baptiste Chassignet,” forthcoming in Etudes de Lettres (eds. A. Paschoud and F. Lestringant). Gro Bjørnerud Mo is professor of French Literature at the University of Oslo. She received her PhD in 1999 from the University of Oslo on a dissertation on the poetry of François de Malherbe (1555–1628). Her publications include articles and essays on French literature from the 16th, 17th and 20th centuries focusing mainly on the relationship between literature, history and politics. Mo is currently developing a project on dream theory in the Renaissance and on traces of this theory in both modernist literature and medical research. Hans Henrik Brummer, Director at the Zorn Collections 1972–1989, of Prince Eugen’s Waldemarsudde 1989–2006, and director general of Swedish National Museum 2000–2002. Since 1989 working member of The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities and

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Contributors

honorary member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts since 2005. He received his PhD from Stockholm University in 1970 with the dissertation The Statue Court in the Vatican Belvedere. He has written several articles on Roman topics, on Queen Christina’s art collection, and on the editio princeps of Leanardo da Vinci’s Treatise on Painting (1993). He has also written books on the Swedish artists Anders Zorn (1975, 1982, 1989, 1994), Ernst Josephson (1991, 2001), Prince Eugen (1998), and on the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin (1993). Anja Burghardt has a research project on the role and function of the speaker in Polish Travel literature (Institute of Slavonic Studies at Salzburg University, funded by the Austrian Science Fund, FWF). Having studied philosophy (with Ancient philosophy as the core area) and Slavonic Studies in Hamburg and London, she received her PhD with a thesis on the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva in 2009 (Salzburg University). Apart from this book she published articles on Russian and Polish poetry. Her main areas of research also include the history of Polish literature, the notion of self, and photography. Nadia Cannata is professor of Italian Linguistics and Philology at Rome University La Sapienza. She received her D.Phil. in 1991 from the University of Oxford. She has published extensively on various aspects of Renaissance culture: language and linguistic theory, the relationship between artistic theories and linguistics, the iconography of the Segnatura, Neo-Latin poetry collections. She is currently working on several projects regarding the relationship between orality and written culture and is preparing a book on Protoromace inscriptions in Rome. Anna Carlstedt is currently research fellow at Ersta Sköndal University College in Stockholm (Department of Civil Society Studies). She is also affiliated to Université Paris IV, Sorbonne. She received her PhD from Stockholm University in 2005 on a dissertation about the poetic qualities of the work of Michel de Nostredame. Her scholarly work includes three books on early modern France, published by Gidlunds. Carlstedt is currently working on the project “A discourse of tolerance,” investigating early modern writing in transition and how poets in France were contributing to precursory attempts of “monitory democracy” in the shadow of religious war.

Allusions and Reflections

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Theresa Chevrolet is currently Chargée de cours of the Departments of French Language and Literature at the University of Geneva and the University of Bern. Her thesis, entitled L’Idée de Fable, Théories de la fiction poétique à la Renaissance, was presented in 1995 at the University of Geneva where she obtained her PhD degree. The dissertation was published by the Editions Droz in Geneva in 1997. Teresa Chevrolet is a specialist on poetology and rhetorics in French and Italian Renaissance and Classicist literature. Sophie Chiari is professor of English Literature at Blaise Pascal University, Clermont-Ferrand (CERHAC, UMR 5037, CNRS). She specializes in early modern studies and in literary translation. She is the author of L’image du labyrinthe à la Renaissance (Champion, 2010) and Renaissance Tales of Desire (CSP, 2009; revised and augmented edition, 2012). Her latest publications include Transmission and Transgression: Cultural Challenges in Early Modern England, co-edited with Hélène Palma (Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2014) and The Circulation of Knowledge in Early Modern English Literature (Ashgate, 2015). Adeline Desbois-Ientile is a PhD candidate at the University of ParisSorbonne where she is carrying out her research on French Renaissance literature under the supervision of Professor Mireille Huchon. Her research focuses on Lemaire de Belges’s rewriting of the mythical story of the French Trojan origins in “Les Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye” (1511–1513) and on the impact the book had on redefining the relationships between mythology and history. She has already published various articles on Lemaire de Belges. Sara Ehrling is senior lecturer in Latin at Gothenburg University, Sweden. She received her PhD in 2011 on a dissertation about late antique Latin cento poetry: De inconexis continuum: A Study of the Late Antique Latin Wedding Centos. Ehrling is, together with Britt-Marie Karlsson, currently working on a project about Hélisenne de Crenne’s translation of the first four books of Virgil’s Aeneid. Roy Eriksen, professor in English Renaissance Studies, University of Agder, received a PhD from University of Oslo (1984) on Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (B) in intellectual and poetic context. He is author of The Forme of Faustus Fortunes (1987), The Building in the text: From Alberti to Shakespeare and Milton (2001), and L’Edificio testuale (2014). Edited volumes are e.g. Form and the Arts (2003), Ashes to Ashes (2006) and

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Imitation, Representation and Printing (2009). He currently writes books on Christopher Marlowe and Alberti and Urbanism. Giovanni Ferroni is post-doc fellow of Italian Literature at Padua University. He received his PhD in 2010 from Padua University on a dissertation about pastoral poetry in lyric collections (“canzonieri”) of the Italian Cinquecento (published by Edizioni dell’Orso in 2012). Other publications include articles on various aspects of vernacular and Latin literature of Renaissance Italy. Ferroni is currently working on the critical edition of Marco Antonio Flaminio’s De rebus divinis carmina and on a project on the exegesis of Torquato Tasso’s Rime. Carin Franzén is professor of Language and Culture at Linköping University. She has published various articles on early modern women writers, most recently: “The Division of Love and Feminine Desire,” Pangs of Love and Longing: Configuration of Desire in Premodern Literature, Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2013; “Christine de Pizan’s Appropriation of the Courtly Tradition,” Narrations genrées. Ecrivaines dans l’histoire européenne jusqu’au début du XXe siècle, Peeters Publishers 2014. Franzén is currently working on a project on configurations of desire in the writings of French Moralists. Stina Hansson is professor emerita of comparative literature at the University of Gothenburg. She received her PhD in 1975 on a dissertation on the Swedish 17th-century poet Lars Johansson Lucidor. Her major fields of research have been 17th- and 18th-century literature, and she has published several books about letter writing manuals, translations into Swedish, literature and nationalism, devotional literature, and marriage poetry. Britt-Marie Karlsson is senior lecturer and researcher at the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Gothenburg. She received her PhD degree in Romance Languages at the same university in 1999 on a dissertation on the role of antithesis in Marguerite de Navarre’s French Renaissance novella collection, the Heptameron. Karlsson’s current research continues to focus on French 16th-century literature, in particular on women’s writing and texts published under female names or pseudonyms. She has more recently published several studies on the work of Hélisenne de Crenne.

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Klaus Kipf is staff member at the department of German Studies at Munich University. He received his PhD in 2006 from ErlangenNuremburg University on a dissertation about collections of short prose narrations in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Publications include articles on German and Latin literature from the 12th to the 17th century, covering topics like literary humour, history of literary genres and historical semantics. He is currently working on a book-length study about authorship in Early Medieval literature. Sofie Kluge is associate professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern Denmark. She received her PhD in 2007 from the University of Copenhagen on a dissertation about the Spanish Baroque drama. Her publications include three monographs on various aspects of Baroque literature and its reception, most recently Diglossia. The Early Modern Reinvention of Mythological Discourse (Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 2014), as well as a number of articles on 17th-century Spanish, Italian, and English literature. Kluge is currently working on a project on the late 16th- and 17th-century staging of history. Merit Laine is curator of textiles at the Swedish Royal Collections, and associate professor of Art History. Her publications include “En Minerva för vår Nord.” Lovisa Ulrika som samlare, uppdragsgivare och byggherre, Uppsala University 1998, and Gustaf Lundberg 1695–1786. En porträttmålare och hans tid (with Carolina Brown-Ahlund and a contribution by Carl Barkman), Nationalmuseum, Stockholm 2006. Merit Laine is researching the tapestries in the Royal Collections with focus on their function in court culture. The article “A Moveable Gallery: The Battles of Charles XI Tapestries in Paris and Stockholm” will appear in The Gallery of Charles XI at the Royal Palace of Stockholm—In Perspective, red. Linda Hinners, publishedby the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities. François Laroque is professor emeritus of English literature at Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris. He is the author of Shakespeare’s Festive World, Cambridge, CUP (1991), of Court, Crowd and Playhouse (London, Thames and Hudson, 1996), and the editor of several volumes issued by Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris. He has also published several editions and translations of Marlowe, Shakespeare and their contemporaries as in his recent two-volume anthology of non-Shakespearean drama (1490– 1642), Théâtre Élisabéthain, Paris, Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), 2009.

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Angela Locatelli is professor of English Literature and director of the PhD Program in “Euro-American Literatures” at the University of Bergamo, Italy; and adjunct professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. She was awarded two short-term Fellowships in 1999 and 2008 at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. Locatelli’s main research interests are literary and cultural theory. She has edited ten volumes on the epistemology of literature (The Knowledge of Literature/La conoscenza della Letteratura, 2002–2011, www.sestanteedizioni.it), and she has written extensively on Shakespeare and Renaissance culture and literature. Her publications also include a book on the “stream of consciousness” novel, and several articles on Modernist and Postmodern fiction. Matthew Lynch is teaching fellow at Indiana University Bloomington. He is currently working on a dissertation about the influence of Old English manuscripts on Renaissance literature and culture. Publications include an article on the erotic elegies of John Donne and Propertius (Renaissance Papers 2006) and “Islands,” a forthcoming pedagogical article about drawing literary settings, which will appear in The Pocket Instructor: Literature (Princeton UP). Clementina Marsico is researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies of Innsbruck. She received her PhD in 2012 from Florence University with a joint diploma from Paris-Sorbonne, on a dissertation about Lorenzo Valla’s Elegantie lingue latine. Publications include articles on several aspects of the Italian Renaissance. In 2009 appeared the critical edition of Valla’s Emendationes against the Doctrinale of Alexander of Villedieu. A book on the Elegantie was published in 2013. Marsico is currently working on the critical edition of the Elegantie and on Latin grammars of the Vernaculars. Olivier Millet is professor of French Literature, Renaissance and Humanism at the Université Paris-Sorbonne. He received his PhD in 1990 from Sorbonne University (Paris 4) on a dissertation about John Calvin and Renaissance rhetoric. Publications include books and articles on John Calvin, Montaigne, and text editions. Main research themes are literature and religion (Bible), Renaissance rhetoric, French poetry and theater. Millet directs the new edition of Du Bellay’s complete works (volume IV in preparation) and is currently working on a book about the idea of revival at the Renaissance.

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John Nassichuk is associate professor in the Department of French Studies at the University of Western Ontario. His research is in the area of French and Neo-Latin literature of the Renaissance period, with particular attention to the multiple relationships between Italian Quattrocento humanism—especially that of Naples—and Northern Renaissance culture. He also maintains an interest in Biblical paraphrases and adaptations, both in Latin and the vernacular languages. Andrea Polegato is currently Lecturer in Italian at University of North Texas—Denton and A.B.D. in Renaissance Italian Literature from Indiana University—Bloomington. His dissertation is about Niccolò Machiavelli’s political language in his early writings (administrative and diplomatic letters, 1498–1503). Publications include articles on Machiavelli, Pietro Aretino, and the Italian filmmaker Ermanno Olmi. Polegato has also a strong interest in comparative studies. At Indiana University, he taught an upper-level interdisciplinary course investigating the concept of war in Renaissance Italy, modern Europe, and ancient China. Hans Jürgen Scheuer is Professor of German Literature of the late medieval and early modern Period at Humboldt-University, Berlin. His research interests cover a wide range of topics from ancient and medieval to modern literature. They are focused on the history of imagination, exemplary forms of religious communication, the intersection of political and theological thought in medieval epics, and the return of premodern thinking in modern works of art. His publications on modern literature include his dissertation on Goethe’s manierist poetics (Manier und Urphänomen, 1996). He is currently doing research on the dynamics of allegorical moralization in medieval mythography and predramatic theater. Ronny F. Schulz, M.A. Studies of German and Romance languages and literatures and Philosophy at the Technische Universität Berlin and the Humboldt University of Berlin (2000–2009). Assistant lecturer at the universities of Erfurt, Potsdam and Technische Universität Berlin (2009– 2013). Univ. assistant at the University of Erfurt from 2013–2014. 2014– Univ. assistant at the Kiel University. Main fields of research: perception of otherness in medieval and early modern literature, literary aesthetics, text/image relations, art in literature, history of language (German), style and text sorts in early modern German.

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Erland Sellberg is professor of History of Ideas at Stockholm University and visiting professor at Södertörn University, where he directs a research project on early-modern academic culture. He received his PhD from Gothenburg University in 1979 on a dissertation about Ramism and its impact on politics and education, a problem that he also has written about in separate articles. Furthermore, he has published studies on different aspects of early modern time like humanism, rhetoric, political culture, and in particular Lutheran scholasticism and the impact of the church on the state-building process. Per Sivefors is reader in English at Linnaeus University. He received his PhD in 2004 on the dissertation The Delegitimised Vernacular: Language Politics, Poetics and the Plays of Christopher Marlowe. His research interests include early modern dream narratives, urbanism and masculinity, and he has published articles on Elizabethan authors such as Thomas Nashe and John Lyly. He is the editor of Urban Encounters: Experience and Representation in the Early Modern City (Fabrizio Serra, 2013). Erik Zillén is associate professor of Comparative and Swedish Literature at Lund University. He received his PhD in 2001on a dissertation about the poetics of play in the works of Gustaf Fröding, a renowned Swedish fin de siècle poet. Presently, Zillén is completing a monograph on the history of fable in early modern Sweden. In a number of articles, published in Swedish, English, German, as well as Polish, he has examined questions concerning, among other things, the intercultural reception, the didactic uses, and the human/animal nexus of the Aesopic genre.