Cosmographia 9789004057678, 9004057676

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BERNARDUS SILVESTRIS

COSMOGRAPHIA EDITED WITH INTRODUCTION

AND NOTES

BY

PETER DRONKE

LEIDEN

E.

J. BRILL r978

Go gle

LI

,r

vF CJJ. IF l ,NI

ISBN Copyright 1978 by E.

90 04

05767 6

J. Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or translated in any form, by print, photo print, microfilm, microfiche or any other means without written permission from the publisher PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS

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CONTENTS Preface

. . .

VII

Introduction

I

Bernardus Silvestris, his works and his influence The sources of the Cosmographia . . . . . The Cosmographia: meaning and structure . . . . The Cosmographia: language and style . . . . . . Manuscripts of the Cosmographiaand principles of this edition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The background of the Cosmographia: some testimonies BERNARDI

SILVESTRIS

Textual notes

COSMOGRAPHIA

1

16 29 51 64

. 70 93

.

. . .

Explanatory notes Bibliography . . . .

. . 163 .

.

.

1 75

Index nominum et verborum .

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PREFACE The last few years have seen the publication both of a fine English translation of Bernard Silvestris' Cosmographia, by Winthrop Wetherbee (1973), and of an important study devoted to Bernard, by Brian Stock (1972). The renewed interest in Bernard's cosmological epic is clear; yet for a text readers have still had to resort to the old edition of Barach and Wrobel (1876), the faults and frequent unintelligibility of which have become legendary. It has long been known to scholars working on the twelfth century that in 1937 Andre Vernet completed, in typescript, a dissertation on Bernard which included a full-scale critical edition of the Cosmographia. The eight-page published synopsis of this dissertation (Positions des theses, Ecole Nationale des Chartes, 1937), which is all that has been printed, indicates that the appearance of this larger edition will be a major event. The present edition is of a very different, and more limited, scope. Over a dozen years I have read Bernard's text, both in the Bodleian Library and in photographs at home, in an Oxford manuscript, Laud misc. 515, copied shortly after 1200, which in general offers an excellent text. Where its readings are faulty or dubious, I have controlled them with the help of seven other manuscripts, in Paris, London and Cambridge. So what I have attempted here is not a critical text, but a lucid and readable text of one good manuscript, with a minimum of correction. I hope that, even when the critical edition appears, such a text will not lose all its value. The introduction, notes, and index of names and words are on a modest scale; nonetheless, I have tried to set out some new suggestions about Bernard's literary background, his style and his thought, and to indicate some guidelines for a fuller interpretation of the Cosmographia. But a detailed commentary on the poem still needs to be written, and much work on the whole canon of Bernard's writings remains to be

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PREFACE

done. This twelfth-century poet, philosopher and scholar continues to set a challenge which is also a delight, rewarding and exhilarating to those who meet it.

P.D.

Cambridge, October 1977

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INTRODUCTION BERNARDUS SILVESTRIS, HIS WORKS AND HIS INFLUENCE

Very little of what has been affirmed about Bernardus Silvestris* and his writings has passed entirely without challenge. The older opinion, which identified him with Bernard of Chartres (who is attested as a teacher at Chartres from 1114, and as chancellor there in 1124), has long been rejected. All that we know of the Silvestrian's activities links him with the city of Tours. It was at Tours that he taught both letter-writing and poetic composition to Matthew of Vendt>me, one of his more notable pupils, who later borrowed from him freely but also acknowledged him loyally. 1 Bernard's only certain link with Chartres lies in his dedication of his greatest work, the Cosmographia, to the brilliant teacher and philosopher Thierry, who became chancellor of Chartres in 1141. The wording of the dedication shows that Bernard regarded Thierry as a friend, and (we may say, allowing for certain deferential turns of phrase that were customary in dedications) an intellectual equal. One other piece of evidence concerning • 'Bernardus Silvestris' (not 'Silvester') would seem to be the most widely accepted form of the poet's name. It is this form that occurs (in the manuscripts I have seen) in his own dedication of the Cosmographia, and in the works of Matthew of V end6me and Gervase of Melkley whenever they mention him. For convenience I use the anglicized form 'Bernard' in the discussion below. In least in the manuscripts on which the the Experimentarius-at printed text is based-'Bernardus' alternates with 'Bernardinus', 'Silvester' with 'Silvestris', and in the vernacular Henri d'Andeli, writing c. 1242, calls the poet 'Bernardin li Sauvages' (La bataille des VI I Arts, 328). 1 Cf. Epistule (ed. Wattenbach) III 69-72: Me docuit dictare decus Turonense magistri Silvestris, studii gemma, scolaris honor. Dictando didici quid scribat amicus amico, Subiectus domino, mancipioque potens. Cf. also Ars versificatOYia (ed. Faral, Arts) pp. 174, 176. I

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the Cosmographia is of outstanding interest: where Bernard slips into his poem a playfully extravagant compliment to Pope Eugene III (1145-53), the manuscript on which the present edition is principally based has a marginal gloss, explaining: This Eugene was the Pope in whose presence this book was recited in Gaul, and it won his benevolent approval. 2

Even this testimony has been questioned 3-but, as the manuscript which affirms it is quite early and in general trustworthy, I see no serious reason to doubt it. If correct, it means that the Cosmographia was complete in 1147-8, when Eugene travelled in France; at all events it must be placed within his pontificate. The Cosmographia, the summit of Bernard's poetic achievement, can hardly belong to the beginnings of his career. It seems sensible to assume that Bernard was already teaching in the 1130s, possibly even in the 1120s, and that some of his less mature works-in particular the commentary on the Aeneid-belong to this earlier phase and arose out of his early teaching preoccupations. According to Vernet in the published summary of his dissertation on Bernard, he will have taught Matthew of VendOme, at Saint-Martin (the foundation at Tours which was directly subject to the King of France), between113oand1140.'Vernet goes on to suggest that Bernard must have died c. 1160, and latest before 1178, since in the years 1178-84 Bernard's nephew, Gerbert Bonceau, disposed of Bernard's house in Tours, which the poet had bequeathed to him. This nephew Gerbert was the son of the poet's sister, Almodis, who had married into a well-known Tourangeau family. One other work of Bernard's is today universally accepted as authentic: the poem Mathematicus. 5 Like the Cosmographia, 1

L fol. 188v: Iste Eugenius fuit papa in cuius presencia liber iste fuit recitatus in Gallia, et captat eius benivolentiam. 3 Stock p. r r n. r. On the erroneous claim (loc. cit.) that the manuscript L 'was written after 1250', see below p. 66. ' Vernet, Positions p. 168. 5 Ed. B. Haureau (1895); a less reliable text in P.L. 171, 1365-80.

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this poem (nearly goo lines, in elegiac couplets) contains an original imaginative exploration of the problems of destiny and necessity. It too shows Bernard at the height of his artistic powers and of his command of ancient Roman literature; its composition cannot be too far in time from that of the Cosmographia. 6 Where some fifty manuscripts of the Cosmographia are known, seventeen have hitherto been signalled of the M athematicus :7 both poems, that is, enjoyed a wide influence and continued to be copied into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. With the other works attributed to Bernard, various doubts have been raised. While, before further detailed research is undertaken, none can be called Bernard's with as great a certainty as the Cosmog,aphia or the Mathematicus, I have not seen any convincing reason for denying Bernard the authorship of the commentary on the Aeneid that is ascribed to him in one, admittedly late, manuscript, as well as in a second manuscript, of uncertain date, which today is lost. 8 Clearly such a commentary is so different in character from Bernard's two major poetic works that it would be foolish to hope for verbal parallels that might clinch the matter. If Bernard wrote the Aeneid commentary, then it is also certain that he wrote two other commentaries. First, the incomplete one on Martianus Capella which was discovered and printed in extract by Edouard Jeauneau 9-for in this In 1159 John of Salisbury, Polycraticus III 8 (ed. Webb I 194) wrote: quidam temporis nostri scriptor egregius, infidelium tamen verbis, eleganter expressit: Ridiculos hominum versat sors ceca labores; secula nostra iocus ludibriumque deis. The couplet cited (which Webb could not identify) is in fact Mathematicus 175-6 (ed. Haureau p. 19), and gives us a terminus ante quem for Bernard's poem. 7 On the MSS of the Cosmographia, see below pp. 64ff.; Vernet, 'Auxerre' pp. 254-5, lists sixteen MSS of the Mathematicus, a seventeenth (Erfurt, Ampl. Oct. 15) is signalled in Walther 17506. 8 Cf. Dronke, Fabula p. 180 n. I. 9 Jeauneau, 'Note' pp. 28-48. 8

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commentary the author makes at least two explicit references to the Aeneid one as an earlier work of his. Moreover, he several times mentions in the Martianus commentary that he had also written one on Plato's Timaeus. 10 This commentary has not yet been found-or, more probably, has not yet been identified among the many that survive anonymously in manuscripts. The only serious objection to Bernard's having written the Martianus commentary, made by Stock and reiterated by the recent editors of the Aeneid commentary-that 'Bernard did not defend the ridiculous thesis that waters exist above the firmament' 11-seems to me to be based on a misunderstanding. On this point the position of the author of the Martianus commentary is closest to that of Thierry of Chartres in his Expositio in Hexameron. That is, he does not seek a confrontation with authority, like William of Conches, by arguing that waters above the firmament cannot be true; instead, like Thierry, he seeks some way of interpreting the biblical statement which is not irrational or scientifically absurd. He does not accept a physical impossibility naively, nor does he deny the biblical statement outright: he 'explains' .12 10

Ibid. p. 30. Stock pp. 36-37 n. 42; J. W. Jones and E. F. Jones, The Commentary p. x. Stock's other objection (p. 36) is in fact a nonsequitur: when Jeauneau had pointed out that the author of the Martianus commentary 'refers to Orleans as a familiar place', Stock rejoins: '(Bernard) never taught at Orleans'. 12 Si ergo his aquis vaporatis ille superiores rariores sunt, cur non ab igne et aere perhenniter sustentarentur, cum hee corpulentiores a solo aere suspendantur? Nam et densas nubes et ingentia draconum vel avium corpora ab aere sustentari manifestum est. Preterea, aer clausus in vesica circumstantem pellem vesice undique suspendit, licet ea sit levior, et etiam quantamcumque molem sustinere poterit quamdiu ibi clausus tenebitur. Sic interior ignis et aeris globus in ilia aquarum clausus corpulentia nequaquan1 sua levitate eas suspendere impeditur, nee usquam labi aqua circumfusa poterit donec ei ignis vel aer in aliquam partem cedat, quoniam locum unius corporis nullatenus alterum occupare potest nisi illo prius cedente. U ndique vero aer et ignis, ne devolare queant, circumstantibus aquis comprimuntur et undique super11

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Here the intellectual bond with Thierry-which we might indeed expect in the light of the Cosmographia dedicationis evident. The other important didactic work that has generally been attributed to Bernard is the Experimentarius. 18 This work as it survives (in some twenty manuscripts),1 4 however, and as it has been edited, consists of a gallimaufry of several treatises, some of them fragmentary, and the difficult question, what constitutes the original Experimentari1.ts, remains to be clarified. 15 This clarification may also affect the dating of the Experimentarius, which, if one part of the text as printed should belong to the original, would have to be as late as the 1160s and hence well after the Cosmographia. 16 In the meantime, as I argued in Fabula, 17 it seems reasonable to take the theoretical introduction (Qui celum et terram . . . fidelis ex arabico in latinum interpres, ed. Brini Savorelli pp. 312-17) as Bernard's work: it shows some of his distinctive motifs and his keen yet also ironic penetration in treating problems of destiny. Again, in the absence of contrary evidence, I suggest we must accept the explicit assertion in this introduction that for the body of the work (whatever its original extent) Bernard was the translator, the 'faithful interpreter from Arabic into Latin'. That Bernard needed some help with his Arabic is likely enough; that his helper was Hermann of Carinthia-the positas habent aquas. Quod si aque ille glaciali constrictione quasi in cristallum indurate sunt, quanto magis solide tanto magis inclusum aerem et ignem cohibent ne aliquo abcedant, et tanto fortius ab eis sustentantur; immo nee eas sustentari necesse est, que iam fluide non sunt. (Jeauneau, 'Note' pp. 45-46) 13 Ed. M. Brini Savorelli, Rivista critica di storia delta filosofia XIV (1959) 283-342. 14 Brini Savorelli (ed. cit. p. 304 n. 3) notes nineteen MSS; I have seen another (Solothurn S 474) described in A. Schonherr, Die mittelalterlichen H andschriften der Z entralbibliothek Solothurn (Solothurn 1964) p. 71. 15 Cf. now C. S. F. Burnett, 'What is the Experimentarius of Bernard us Silvestris ?', Archives d' histoire doctrinale et litteraire du Moyen Age XLIV (1978) 79-125. 18 See the sensible comments of Wetherbee, p. 135 n. 86. 11 Fabula pp. 139ff.

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remarkable cosmologist and translator who., like Bernard, had links with Chartres and dedicated a work to Thierryis an attractive conjecture., but cannot., in our present state of knowledge., be more. Other testimonies show that Bernard wrote a treatise on verse composition-an ars poetica., and on letter-writingdictamen., whether these formed part of a single, more comprehensive rhetorical treatise or were two separate works. Much has been written in the search for these, 18 but they have not yet., in my view, been successfully identified. Faral, finally, tentatively attributed to Bernard two shorter poems, De gemellis and De pau,pere ingrato. 19 More recently, these have been categorically called Bernard's by Brini Savorelli. They are not, however, 'poemetti allegorici', as she claims :20 they are based, like the Mathematicus, on juridical 'enigmata' -the first, like Bernard's longer poem, on a pseudo-Quintilian Declamatio, the second., on a Senecan Controversia. Moreover, the second is found alongside the Mathematicus and Cosmographia in three manuscripts (Auxerre 243, Paris B.N. lat. 6415, and Vatican Reg. lat. 370); the two latter also contain De gemellis; in each case the shorter poems are copied in immediate proximity to Bernard's major poems. In addition, in the Auxerre and Paris manuscripts De paupere ingrato is immediately preceded by a brief poem about the nature of love, 21 and immediately followed by still another poem based on a juridical enigma, this time from the Declamationes of Calpurnius Flaccus. 22 Thus I would see this small group of poems as interrelated in three ways: in their themes, in their occurrences together in certain manuscripts., and in their occur18

Cf. Faral, 'Manuscrit' pp. 80-88; H.-J. Grabener (ed.), Gervais von Melkley pp. xxv-xxvii; Brini Savorelli, 'Dictamen' pp. 182-200. 19 'Manuscrit' pp. 79-80; the best edition of De gemellis is that of J. Werner, Beitrage pp. 55-58; the best of De paupere ingrato is that of Vernet, 'Auxerre' pp. 256-7. 2 0 'Dictamen' p. 182. 21 'Esse quidem dicam rem prosperitatis amorem', ed. Vernet, 'Auxerre' p. 256. 22 'Protrahit in vicium levitas sexun1 muliebrem', ed. ibid. pp. 258-9.

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rences alongside Bernard's known major poems. I believe we can safely call them 'school of Bernard', or 'school of Tours', but see no decisive grounds for ascribing them to Bernard himself. If they should be Bernard's, we could imagine them as relatively early work: the three 'enigmata' would then be preliminary sketches, as it were, for the M athematicus. If they are 'school of Tours', this concept demands some elucidation, to try and shed new light on Bernard's own literary situation. It is most likely that Bernard was, or began to be, a magister at Tours in the period when the finest poet of the previous generation, Hildebert, came to be archbishop there. Hildebert was already nearing seventy when he arrived in Tours in 1125; he died there in 1133.23 I would suggest that he exercised a formative influence on Bernard's development as a poet in those years. More than any other poet of his age, Hildebert had shown an effortless mastery of the language and themes of ancient Roman poetry; he had composed a number of elegant classicizing poems which, though on a smaller scale than the Mathematicus, often also played with paradox and enigma. 24 He was the only earlier medieval poet in whose work the personified goddess Natura tended to be more than a rhetorical flourish, carrying for Hildebert, as later for Bernard, the sense of both a creatrix in the macrocosm and an inner law in the microcosm. 25 Finally, Hildebert was one of the two 'modern' poets who before Bernard had revived the Boethian form of the prosimetrum, the longer composition in which prose and verse parts alternate. His Liber de querimonia et conflictu carnis et animae 28 is in many ways different from the Cosmographia: the poetry is brief er and often only incidental, there is no cosmic theme. And yet Hildebert used this form, like Boethius and Martianus Capella before him, to mount a discussion in which 23

Cf. von Moos pp. 14-15.

24

E.g. Carmina minora (ed. Scott) 23, 48, Suppl. 3. Compare, for instance, Testimonies 12a-b below; cf. also M. R. Lida de Malkiel, 'La dama . .. ', Romance Philology XXVIII (1974-5) 267-324. II P.L. 171, 989-1004. 16

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allegorical figures bear part of the argument. And Hildebert's discussion is on a theme central to the Cosmog,aphia: the tension between a dualistic view of reality and an ultimate affirmation-despite all the force of dualism-of the value of the physical world. It is perhaps no accident that Hildebert's Libe, immediately follows the text of Bernard's Cosmog,aphia and M athematicus in one of the manuscripts (D-see below, p. 66) used in the preparation of this edition. One other 'modern' poet had composed a p,osimetrum with allegorical figures and a philosophical theme: Adelard of Bath, in his De eodem et diverso, though this contains only two brief poetic interludes. 27 This work was probably also known to Bernard. Adelard too had studied at Tours in the early years of the twelfth century-Tours is indeed the setting of his De eodem. Though still a young man (iuvenis) at Tours, Adelard had already visited Salerno and Magna Graecia, and must by then have been a scholar of some standing. If De eodem was written c. 1116, 28 and if Bernard, coming from an established Tourangeau family, began his own studies in Tours, it is altogether possible that he had personal links with his older contemporary Adelard at that time. Behind Adelard and Hildebert loomed, at least in revered memory, the renowned eleventh-century teacher of Tours, Berengarius (t 1088), the first in this period of those medieval intellectuals who, professionally engaged in teaching grammar, rhetoric and dialectic, extended their range from these to make an original contribution to metaphysical speculation. Berengarius' chief contribution, the treatise De sacra cena,29 had been severely attacked and officially condemned by the Church. Nonetheless, Hildebert was so passionately devoted to the memory of Berengarius, who had most probably taught him at Tours, that he not only commemorated Berengarius' death in one of the most splendid medieval Latin elegies, but, shortly 27

Ed. H. Willner (1903). C. H. Haskins, Studies p. 21 ; the somewhat earlier dating indicated by F. Bliemetzrieder, Adelhard pp. 23ff., seems less convincing. 21 Ed. W. H. Beekenkamp (1941). 28

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before his own death in 1133, as archbishop of Tours, Hildebert arranged a solemn translation of Berengarius' remains and a magnificent new burial for them, and instituted an annual liturgical memorial service in honour of this teacher, who elsewhere was despised as a heretic-a service that continued to be celebrated at Tours right up to the eighteenth century. 00 Bernard Silvestris will have witnessed the first ceremonies in Berengarius' honour. The important point is that Tours had attracted, and was conscious of having done so, a line of scholars who were outstanding as rhetoricians and humanists but also as speculative minds. The influence of Bernard's teaching can be seen in terms of continuing this tradition. While the most explicit testimonies come from a poet-rhetorician, Matthew of Vendf>me, and later from a poetic theorist, Gervase of Melkley, 31 the indirect evidence enables us to look further. One major writer who shows clear signs of Bernard's influence is Peter of Blois. In one of his letters Peter refers to his sojourn at Tours (possibly in the late 1150s) as the time and place in which he composed versus et ludicra ;32 one of these compositions, Peter's intellectually dazzling love-lyric A globo veteri, adapts the language of the opening of the Cosmographia, a clear and witty echo of his master's tones: A globo veteri cum rerum faciem traxissent superi, mundique seriem prudens explicuit et texuit Natura, iam preconceperat quod fuerat factura.

Que causas machine mundane suscitans, de nostra virgine iam dudum cogitans, plus hanc excoluit ...

33

Cf. von Moos p. 15. See the numerous references to Bernard in the Ars poetica (ed. Grabener), Index nominum, p. 251. 32 Ep. 12, P.L. 207, 39B. 33 For the attribution of this song ( = CaYmina BuYana 67, ed. Hilka-Schumann) to Peter of Blois, see Dronke, 'Blois' pp. 219-20. 30

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So, too, with Matthew of Vend6me, it is not only a matter of tributes and citations, it is the distinctive language of Bernard which he at times catches and imitates. Munari has recently shown this in some detail in the apparatus of his fine edition of Matthew's poem on a locus amoenus.34 Yet perhaps even more significant than Munari's parallels is the fact that certain words and word-forms which are not so far recorded in any Latin dictionary-purga, mentaster-appear to be first found in Bernard and then recur in Matthew's poem. 35 Similarly certain very rare forms-amigdaleus, feniculus-pass straight from the Cosmographia into this piece by Matthew. 38 But perhaps it is the intellectual debts in this first postBernardian generation that show the poet's influence most impressively. It is not known whether Alan of Lille actually studied with Bernard at Tours, though this is altogether possible. 37 Alan does not, to my knowledge, mention Bernard in any of his writings; yet neither of Alan's two major poetic works-the De planctu N aturae and A nticlaudianus-is conceivable without the pervasive inspiration of Bernard in language, dramatis personae, and conceptions. In the fourth major cosmological epic of the century, John of Hauvilla's Architrenius, completed probably in 1184, Bernard's influence is also perceptible, though to a more limited extent. The pseudo-Hermetic treatise Liber de sex principiis (s. Xll 2} is filled with the language and notions of the Cosmographia,38 34

Studi medievali 3a serie XVII (1976) 299-305. See the explanatory notes on Cosm. iii 373 and iii 412 below. 38 A migdaleus: Cosm. iii 300, Matthew 99; feniculus: Cosm. iii 385, Matthew 17. 37 Cf. M.-Th. d'Alverny (ed.), Alain de Lille, pp. 20-21. 38 While Silverstein, 'Cosmogony' p. 96 and passim, was originally convinced that the Liber was a source for Bernard, in his edition of the Libera decade later (Archives XXII 236-7) he confessed his uncertainty about the question of priority. In my view, the longer passage in the Liber (sects. 32-38, p. 250) which is largely verbally identical with moments in Cosm. iv, is so illogical a collage, with so little relevance to the sentences immediately preceding and following in the Liber itself (i.e. to sects. 31 and 39), that the plagiarism of the compiler of the Liber admits of little doubt. 36

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as are at least two other cosmological works composed in the decades after Bernard's: the poem De mundi philosophia, by one Milo, who may have been one of Bernard's pupils, 39 and the anonymous prose Cosmographia in a Munich manuscript (Clm 331), which Grabmann first signalled and ascribed to the circle of William of Conches. 40 While older scholars also claimed to see traces of Bernard in the M icrocosmus of Godfrey of Saint-Victor, this has been challenged-I think rightlyby Delhaye ;41 I would add a similar caution regarding the often-repeated assertion that the Cosmographia influenced Hildegard of Bingen. To return to Bernard's poetic influence: Curtius suggested it for the debate-poem Altercatio Ganimedis et Helene. He had in mind particularly the poet's allusions to genitrix Natura clothing Hyle with manifold shapes, while another goddess, Providentia, stands behind her. 42 Yet it is worth recalling also that the elegant and witty treatment of the Ganymede motif had already been known at Tours through a poem of Hildebert's. 43 Recently a German scholar, Lenzen, pointed out numerous correspondences of phrasing between the Altercatio and the De planctu N aturae, and concluded that the lyrical debate was indebted to Alan's poem. 44 Yet Alan himself had written one such altercatio-a debate-poem defending the love of girls against that of married women: Vix nodosum valeo.45 It is in the same strophic form as Ganymede and Helen, The beautifully sustained vision of N oys, time and eternity in Cosm. iv has been reduced to a mere collection of striking phrases, in the work of an author who is not so much a cosmographer as an intellectual magpie. 39 See Dronke, Fabula pp. 88-94, 160-1. 40 Grabmann, Handschriftliche Forschungen (1935). 41 Le Microcosmos pp. 144-9. 42 Curtius, Europiiische Literatur p. 126 n. 1 ; the best text of the Altercatio is now that of Lenzen, Liebesdichtung pp. 125-54. 3 ' Carmina minora (ed. Scott) 48 ~ compare Cosm. iii 453-4. " Lenzen, Liebesdichtung pp. 113-16. H Ed. P. Leyser, Historia poetarum et poematum medii aevi (Halle 1721) pp. 1092-5; on the attribution, see M.-Th. d'Alverny, A lain de Lille pp. 42-44. .

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and uses the same range of grammatical play and word-play. It is tempting to think of Vix nodosum valeo and Ganymede and Helen as a diptych, a pair of poems by Alan himself, poems that had been encouraged by an intellectual milieu which valued verbal virtuosity and did not shy away from risque themes, especially if they had a halo of the ancient world about them. Bernard Silvestris played a formative role, both as poet and teacher, in such a milieu at Tours. The much-discussed sexual passages in the Cosmographia will be seen in a truer perspective if we bear in mind the range of sexual allusion in Hildebert's poetry, and remember that among Bernard's pupils Matthew of Vendf>me wrote a sensual fabliau, Milo, 46 in an imaginary Byzantine setting, and Alan-a devoted Bernardian, even if he did not study at Tours-wrote Vix nodosum valeo. One late manuscript containing this last poem-Auxerre 243, copied in a Cistercian foundation in Paris in 1358 47-is an eloquent epitome of Bernard's influence. It begins with the Cosmographia and Mathematicus, and goes on to three of the pieces I called 'school of Tours' above; these are followed by a group of five love-songs by Peter of Blois, 48 all filled with names from the ancient world, then by John of Hauvilla's Architrenius and by no fewer than six pieces connected with Alan of Lille, including a complete text of the De planctu Naturae. The first wider success of the Cosmographia appears to have been in England, in the later twelfth century. Giraldus Cambrensis produces a poem of some 260 lines, in couplets, De mundi creatione, which is little more than a plagiarism, a cento based on the Cosmographia.49 By the time Alexander Neckam (1157-1217) came to write his prose compilation De naturis 48

Ed. M. Abraham (1931~ Cf. Vernet, 'Auxerrc' pp. 25Iff.; Vernet does not, however, identify Peter of Blois as the author of the love-songs, or suggest the links with Bernard that are proposed here. 48 On the authorship, see Dronke, 'Blois' pp. 215-33. 49 Ed. J. S. Brewer, Opera I (Rolls Series 1861) I 341-9. 41

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rerum, 50 Bernard had already become a 'classic': Alexander cites verses from the Cosmographia (e.g. in I 49, II 129, 140, 157), naming Bernard when he cites him. The only other 'modern classic' poet whom he cites in this way is-Hildebert. The Latin authors who quote or adapt passages from the Cosmographia in the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries are numerous-valuable information about this can be found 51 in Manitius and Faral. Manitius also lists a number of libraries that had a copy of the work. One manuscript was owned by the thirteenth-century French love-poet and scholar Richard de Fourniva1; 52 another, in the fifteenth century, by Nicolas of Cusa. 53 That copies of the Cosmographia must also have existed in Spanish libraries is attested, first of all, by the extensive plagiarisms from it (as well as from Alan's De planctu and Anticlaudianus) by a fourteenth-century Spanish author, Peter of Compostela. 54 Peter's derivative De consolatione rationis had long been erroneously placed in the early twelfth century, and has even been often suggested as a source for Bernard and Alan. Again, the allusions to Bernard's writings in medieval Toledo-one almost certainly to the Cosmographia, another more vague 55-suggest that a systematic search for Spanish manuscripts would not be unrewarding. Bernard's influence on vernacular poets would demandand richly repay-extended study; it can be mentioned only Ed. T. Wright (Rolls Series 1863). Manitius, Geschichte III 207; Faral, 'Manuscrit' pp. 71ff. The parallels noted by Munari in his edition of Marcus Valerius' Bucolica (pp. 28-29) do not seem to me close enough to suggest a direct debt to Bernard. 52 Biblionomia 107: Bernardi Silvestris liber qui dicitur Chosmographus, megachosmum videlicet et mychrochosmum describens, in uno volumine cuius signum est littera M. (L. Delisle, Le cabinet des manuscrits II 531) 53 Vernet, Positions p. I 72. 54 Cf. M. Gonzalez-Haba, La obra De consolatione rationis de Petrus Compostellanus (Miinchen 1975) pp. 9-64, esp. p. 15. I briefly showed some of Peter's plagiarisms from the De planctu in Speculum XLIV (1969) 124. 56 Cf. J. Millas Vallicrosa, Las traducciones pp. 17, 222. 50

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in passing here. Two themes especially in the Cosmographia find their echo in vernacular poetry: Bernard's imaginative enquiry into the problem of destiny, and his celebration of creativity and sexuality as divine manifestations in the universe. For the first theme, von den Steinen indicated some suggestive parallels with the presentation of destiny in works by two major German poets of the generation after Bernard: Hartmann von Aue's Gregorius, and Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival. 66 It will be for medieval Germanists to ascertain whether there is any possibility of an influence here. In the thirteenth century, it is Natura and the divinely ordained perpetuation of the species, making it immortal through ceaseless procreation, that become central concerns in Jean de Meun's part of the Roman de la Rose. 57 In the fourteenth, Boccaccio copied out the Cosmographia in his own hand in the Florentine manuscript Laurenziana XXXIII 31.68 In his Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante, Boccaccio explicitly cites the Cosmographia to expound the relations between macrocosm and microcosm, and almost immediately afterwards, as Padoan, the recent editor of the Esposizioni, shows, Boccaccio's account of the nature of man, using allegorizations of the Aeneid, strongly suggests that he knew Bernard's Aeneid commentary as well (or else a closely similar commentary, if such a one should exist). 69 Boccaccio's poetic use of the Cosmographia can be glimpsed, for instance, in his hymn to cosmic love (Filostrato III 74-79), in which Boethian and possibly Lucretian aspects blend with the powers that Bernard attributes to his theophanies-Noys, Urania, 60 Natura and Physis. Finally, Chaucer's knowledge of the Cosmographia is not simply by way of Boccaccio but is firsthand, as can be seen from his adaptation of Cosmographia iii 33ff. in The Man of Law's Tale (190-203). Like Bernard, 'Bernard Silvestre' pp. 380££. Cf. esp. A. M. F. Gunn, The Mir,-or of Love (Lubbock, Texas 1952). 68 See F. Munari, 'Mediaevalia I-II' p. 279 n. 3. 69 G. Padoan (ed.), Esposizioni II (ii) 30-31, 35-36 (pp. 134-5), and Padoan's notes ad loc., pp. 809-10. 88 Cf. Dronke, 'Amor' pp. 417-20. 66 67

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Chaucer was deeply concerned with what 'in sterres ... was writen' about human affairs, with how human actions are determined and how this determinism leaves room for the affirmation of freedom. While he cites Bernard on only one such occasion, Chaucer returns to these questions time and again in his poetry. 61 How pervasively he and Boccaccio were affected by the Cosmographia cannot be decided here. Even if it should prove that their debt was less than Jean de Meun's (as indeed it is less apparent in their works than in the Roman de la Rose), we can say that in their twelfth-century predecessor Boccaccio and Chaucer found again some of their own imaginative and intellectual surmises. 61

Cf. Dronke, 'Chaucer' pp. 154-63.

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Very little of the Cosmographia can be accounted for in terms of Bernard's sources. He is a creative artist, not a compiler. Admittedly, both in his prose and verse, many passages are didactic rather than poetic (and with any poetic achievement on a larger scale it is salutary to remember Dryden's and Johnson's remarks about Paradise Lost: even 'Milton has some flats among his elevations'; 'in a great work there is a vicissitude of luminous and opaque parts') .1 Yet even in the most deliberately didactic portions of the Cosmographia, Bernard's method is individual, his choices unpredictable. At the same time it is not hard to see, from the text of the Cosmographia itself, that Bernard's reading was wide and deep. One can draw up a formidable list of authors whose works he certainly knew, and suggest many others-including· some rarities-whom he may have read. Silverstein, and more recently Stock and Wetherbee, have enriched our knowledge considerably in this, with many learned suggestions. 2 I shall not attempt a new or exhaustive repertorium fontium for Bernard here; rather, I should like to focus on the qualitative questions, at least to raise them succinctly. Which authors influenced Bernard most deeply ? How did he read them and use them? Are there some whose works we can say he knew indirectly rather than at firsthand? And what is the relative • The observations in this section are complemented and at least briefly supported by the selection of testimonies printed below, pp. 70-91. The editions of the ancient and medieval authors referred to are listed in the Bibliography, pp. 175-8. 1 Samuel Johnson (also citing Dryden), 'John Milton', Lives of the English Poets I 110 (ed. L. Archer-Hind, Everyman's Library, London 1925). 2 Silverstein, 'Cosmogony'; Stock, Myth and Science, passim; Wetherbee, The Cosmographia-not only in the section on sources (pp. 29-34) but especially in the notes to the poem (pp. 144-64).

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influence of antiqui and moderni on Bernard's style, thought and fantasy? Probably the most far-reaching influences on the Cosmographia are three: Plato's Timaeus, with Calcidius' commentary; the Hermetic dialogue Asclepius; and Martianus Capella's Marriage of Philology and Mercury (De nuptiis). And here the qualitative distinctions must begin. The two dialogues, Timaeus and Asclepius, gave Bernard important elements for his own mythopoeic world-picture; they provided imaginative sustenance. But I would suggest that Bernard read Calcidius' commentary in a more critical spirit than he read the Latin version of Plato: it was a source for further information, certainly, but not an unquestioned authority as imposing as Plato or 'Hermes'. In particular, the heroine of Bernard's epic, Silva, cannot be seen entirely in terms of Calcidius' chapter Desilva: she has become a creation of Bernard's, with a life of her own, in many ways far from Calcidius' concept. Martianus Capella, I would add, was read by Bernard less seriously again than Calcidius. Here was a source of fabulation, of exotic terms and poetic lore about gods and spirits, planets and personifications. Outwardly it was, like Bernard's work, a prosimetrumthough with a very different proportion of prose to verse, and only fitfully informed by a poetic impulse. But Bernard was discerning in matters of intellectual content: there is no reason to think that the substance of the De nuptiis mattered to him in the way the Timaeus and Asclepius did. The other truly far-reaching influences on Bernard's vision of the universe seem to me to stem from authors nearer in time to the poet. Like Wetherbee, I believe that a decisive impulse came from John Scotus Eriugena's Periphyseonwhether Bernard knew a redaction of the ninth-century original, or the abridged adaptation, Clavis Physicae, made by Honorius in the early twelfth. 8 Thierry of Chartres, the first recipient of Bernard's poem, was likewise influential through his cosmological speculations, whether Bernard knew these already in the written form of Thierry's Expositio in H exameron, Ed. P. Lucentini (1974). On the transmission physeon, see also Lucentini, 'La nuova edizione'. 3

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or more informally, through conversations with Thierry. (It is hard to imagine that the contacts between two such teachers will have been by way of writing only-after all, the distance between Tours and Chartres is not far over a hundred kilometers). Bernard is likewise affected by the thought of his older contemporaries Adelard of Bath and William of Conches, 4 both of whom he probably knew personally too. While evidence for his friendship with Hermann of Carinthia is not nearly as strong as older scholars assumed, it seems that Bernard knew at least a little of the astronomy and astrology of Abu Ma