Love after Death: Concepts of Posthumous Love in Medieval and Early Modern Europe 9783050065298, 9783050062723

Table of contents :
Content
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Love After Death. A Sketch
Some Ancient Posthumous Lovers
Posthumous Love as Culture. Outline of a Medieval Moral Pattern
Posthumous Love in Judaism
“That You Be Brought Near.” Union beyond the Grave in the Arabic Literary Tradition
Eros and Eschatology. Phantasms of Postmortal Love in Petrarch
Love after Death in Garcilaso de la Vega
Burying Romeo and Juliet: Love after Death in the English Renaissance
Notes on Contributors
Table of figures
Index of names

Citation preview

Love after Death

WeltLiteraturen World Literatures Band 4 Schriftenreihe der Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule für literaturwissenschaftliche Studien

Herausgegeben von Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Stefan Keppler-Tasaki und Joachim Küpper Wissenschaftlicher Beirat Nicholas Boyle (University of Cambridge), Elisabeth Bronfen (Universität Zürich), Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford University), Renate Lachmann (Universität Konstanz), Kenichi Mishima (Osaka University), Glenn W. Most (Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa/ University of Chicago), Jean-Marie Schaeffer (EHESS Paris), Janet A. Walker (Rutgers University), David Wellbery (University of Chicago), Christopher Young (University of Cambridge)

Bernhard Jussen and Ramie Targoff (Eds.)

Love after Death Concepts of Posthumous Love in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

ISBN 978-3-05-006272-3 eISBN (PDF) 978-3-05-006529-8 eISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-038002-6 ISSN 2198-9370 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/München/Boston Coverabbildung: unter Verwendung von Typus orbis terrarum (Weltkarte des Abraham Ortelius). Kupferstich, koloriert, 1571. akg-images. English copyediting: Ginger A. Diekmann and Niamh Warde Typesetting: Christoph Bramann Druck und Bindung: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Gedruckt auf säurefreiem Papier Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Content

Acknowledgements .....................................................................................................

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Bernhard Jussen and Ramie Targoff Introduction: Love after Death. A Sketch ....................................................................

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Glenn W. Most Some Ancient Posthumous Lovers .............................................................................. 17 Bernhard Jussen Posthumous Love as Culture. Outline of a Medieval Moral Pattern ............................ 27 David Nirenberg Posthumous Love in Judaism ....................................................................................... 55 Beatrice Gruendler “That You Be Brought Near.” Union beyond the Grave in the Arabic Literary Tradition ......................................................................................................... 71 Gerhard Regn Eros and Eschatology. Phantasms of Postmortal Love in Petrarch .............................. 97 Joachim Küpper Love after Death in Garcilaso de la Vega .................................................................... 111 Ramie Targoff Burying Romeo and Juliet. Love after Death in the English Renaissance ................... 147 Notes on Contributors ................................................................................................. 167 Table of figures ............................................................................................................ 171 Index of names ............................................................................................................ 173

Acknowledgements

This collection of essays is the result of an interdisciplinary conference held jointly at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the Freie Universität Berlin in November, 2011; we are very grateful to both institutions for their immense generosity in hosting, and sponsoring, this event. Professor Joachim Küpper, one of the two hosts of the conference, generously proposed that we submit the book to his new series WeltLiteraturen / World Literatures published by De Gruyter, and has shepherded the volume through the various stages of production. Ginger A. Diekmann and Niamh Warde have done an excellent job copy-editing the essays, and Christoph Bramann has served as our excellent administrator and typesetter. We also thank Dr. Katja Leuchtenberger from the Akademie Verlag and Stella Diedrich from De Gruyter, who helped to complete the volume with competence and abundance of patience. We wish to thank each of the people mentioned above, as well as the many others too numerous to name who helped to bring this project to light. Frankfurt am Main / Waltham (MA), August 2014, Bernhard Jussen and Ramie Targoff

BERNHARD JUSSEN AND RAMIE TARGOFF

Introduction: Love After Death. A Sketch

This book explores a question that has haunted husbands and wives and lovers over the millennia of recorded history: namely, what kind of afterlife they might expect for their earthly love once one or both of them have died. The book’s historical focus is inevitably somewhat narrow: it is interested primarily in the evolution of ideas about posthumous love within medieval and early modern Europe. But as the range of essays in this volume suggests, we have included multiple religions and cultures in order to understand how expectations about the afterlife differed across, and even within, individual traditions. To give a broad view of the range of possibilities, we begin with four resonant examples.

Chelsea, 1532: A heavenly ménage à trois In the sanctuary of Chelsea Old Church in London stands the monument that Thomas More erected in 1532, in anticipation of his death several years later. The funerary epitaph, which More had composed for himself, is followed by a second epitaph dedicated to More’s first wife, Jane, whose remains he transferred to Chelsea some twenty years after her death in order that she might lie with him and his second wife, Alice. More had understood the epitaph as the equivalent of a short poem, as evinced by its inclusion within his 1518 collection Epigrammata.1 In 1534, the year in which More’s political troubles began, Desiderius Erasmus published in a collection of letters, “in which,” as the title declares, “nothing is not new and recent,” More’s own epitaph (Tabula affixa ad sepulcrum Thomae Mori) followed by the epitaph that More had composed for Jane (epitaphium inibi fixum).2 1

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Thomas More, Epigrammata clarissimi disertissimique viri Thomae Mori Britanni (Basel: Johannes Froben, 1518), 270–271; published as no. 278 in the critical edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 3.2, Latin Poems, ed. Clarence H. Miller, Leicester Bradner, Charles A. Lynch, and R. P. Oliver (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976). The letters are published in Des. Erasmi Roterodami liber cum primis pius, de praeparatione ad mortem, nunc primum & conscriptus & aeditus. Accedunt aliquiot epistolae seriis de rebus, in qui-

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4 Dear Jane, the little wife of Thomas More, Lies here. I dedicate this tomb to her, To Alice, and to myself. The first, the bride Of my green years, gave me this gift: a boy And three girls call me their father. The second Is as devoted to these stepchildren as few Mothers ever were devoted to their own— A rare and glorious tribute to her love. Jane lived with me and Alice lives with me In such a way that I cannot be sure Which one of them was or is more dear to me. O we could have lived together, the three of us, So well, if fate and our religion had Allowed us. But now I pray that we be joined Here in this tomb and there in heaven. So Will death bestow on us what life could not.3

The domestic arrangement More never enjoyed during his life on earth is alluringly held out as a possibility for the world to come. Only death could provide a dwelling place for More, Alice, and Jane together, creating a ménage à trois not permitted in the mortal realm by “fate and religion.” Far from severing earthly bonds—in the words of sixteenth-century English liturgy, “till death us depart”4—death becomes the vehicle for intensifying More’s marital pleasures. The particular fantasy that More gives voice to—a posthumous life with not one, but two brides—may not have been his alone: it may lie behind at least some of the medieval and early modern tombs that portray a husband flanked by multiple wives, or— extremely rarely—a wife flanked by multiple husbands.5 Of course, such fantasies are

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bus item nihil est non novum ac recens, ed. Desiderius Erasmus (Basel: 1534), 81–167; the two epitaphs are on pp. 109–111. “Chara Thomae iacet hic Iohanna uxorcula Mori / Qui tumulum Aliciae hunc destino, quique mihi. / Una mihi dedit hoc coniuncta virentibus annis, / Me vocet ut puer et trina puella patrem. / Altera privignis (quae gloria rara novercae est) / Tam pia quam gnatis vix fuit ulla suis. / Altera sic mecum vixit, sic altera vivit, / Charior incertum est, haec sit an haec fuerit. / 0 simulo iuncti poteramus vivere nos tres / Quam bene, si fatum relligioque sinant. / At societ tumulus, societ nos obsecro coelum. / Sic mors, non potuit quod dare vita, dabit.” Translation by Joseph R. Berrigan, printed in Moreana 50 (June 1976): 33–36. See chapter 2 below. To mention one of these very rare cases: after requesting that she be buried in her parish church at East Greenstead, Sussex, the testament of Lady Katherine Grey (d. 1505) continued: “And I will mine executors do make a tomb over me with a stone and therein to be set pictures of my two husbands after their honor and my picture in a winding sheet between them both, with two scutcheons of their arms and mine jointly together at every end of the same stone, with a scripture thereto accordingly. And a plate to be set in the wall over my tomb and therein mine arms and such scripture as to mine executors and friends seem best and convenient to be made, shewing what I was”; cited in Barbara J. Harris, “The Fabric of Piety: Aristocratic Women and Care of the Dead, 1450–1550,” Journal of British Studies 48 (April 2009): 308–335; here: 323.

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Figure 1: Epitaph of Jane Colt (d. 1511), first wife of Thomas More, beneath More’s own epitaph, the sanctuary (south wall) of Chelsea Old Church, London.

Figure 2: Page of the original publication, Basel, 1518.

not often voiced in such explicit terms, and so we cannot establish with any certainty to what extent burials that involved multiple spouses were intended to be anything more than a memorial recognition of the different marriages. But what we can establish with certainty is that individual couples—one husband, one wife—very often express on their tombs the desire for posthumous intimacy.

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The desire for posthumous intimacy is one answer to the question of how early modern Christians imagined the heavenly future of earthly love. For Thomas More, the afterlife offered the hope of erotic continuity: the love that he expressed for both Jane and Alice will, as he describes it, seamlessly cross the grave. What it means to have two wives with him in the afterlife is, of course, not specified, and his explicit separation of their bodies in the tomb versus their souls in heaven suggests that he is not imagining—at least not here—a reunion of their resurrected flesh. But whatever the fantasy entails, it is a fantasy in which human love is not transferred onto more appropriate heavenly objects once the mortal world is left behind. This fantasy is not, in other words, an arrangement in which love of the spouse is replaced with love of God, whereby the Neoplatonic scala, or ladder, leads the earthly husband or wife from love of the particular and earthly to love of the spiritual and divine. To be sure, love of the divine was by no means excluded from the hopes that Thomas More, a man of extreme religious piety, no doubt felt; but it played no role in his expectations for posthumous love.

Thérouanne, around 1300: Erotic reunion in heaven Around the year 1300, probably somewhere in the diocese of Thérouanne in northern France, a seemingly eccentric artist experimented with a visual representation of a quite conventional fantasy of intimate reunion in the hereafter: the reunion of the bridegroom Christ with his bride. The bride was traditionally identified with the Church, but from the twelfth century on was also linked to both Mary and the individual soul.6 The material context of the tiny drawing by the artist was a very small devotional manuscript (118 x 84 mm) aimed at stimulating a wealthy woman to meditation and contemplation. The book is filled with a unique and completely unconventional series of images. However, despite its idiosyncrasies, it serves as a good example of the mystic female spirituality widely spread in Flanders and the Rhine Valley at the time. The double-page devoted to the reunion of Christ and the Church in heaven combines the two notions of our theme: on the one hand, love after death as the suffering and longing of a bereaved spouse, and on the other hand, the meeting of lovers in the hereafter. In dozens of medieval manuscripts, we find a turtledove sitting alone on a dead branch secluded from fertility and pleasure, her beak wide open to lament the loss of her mate for the rest of her life. Turtledoves, as most readers no doubt knew, cannot sing: lament is their nature. In this diptych of text and image, the artist of the Rothschild Canticles transformed the figure of widowhood from one of chaste, painful posthumous love to one of pleasing erotic anticipation. 6

Jeffrey Hamburger’s extensive study and contextualization of the manuscript are the basis of the following paragraph; see Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland circa 1300 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990).

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Figure 3: The Rothschild Canticles, New Haven, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Ms. 404, 72v–73r. Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee (Song of Songs 4,7). Thy lips drop as the honeycomb (Sg. 4,11) and the smell of thine is better than all spices (Sg. 4,10). For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone (Sg. 2,11); the flowers appear on the earth (Sg. 2,12), the vines with the tender grape give a good smell (Sg. 2,13), and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land (Sg. 2,11), et cetera.

Et cetera, and so on—the female reader was expected to know that the text on the left side was a patchwork of phrases from the Song of Songs that devout ladies used to sing as an antiphon for the feast of the Assumption. She was expected to know the last phrase of this antiphon, referred to with et cetera: “Rise up, my love, and come away (Sg. 2,10), come with me from Lebanon, come, thou shalt be crowned” (Sg. 4,8). And to know phrases of the antiphon sung in church but skipped in this manuscript, such as “the time of the singing of birds is come” (Sg. 4,12). In the end, the poetic conversation turns to the bride’s body: How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights! This thy stature is like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters of grapes.

The image shows what the text omits: the coronation of the bride, the tender embrace (“his left hand under my head,” Sg. 8,3), the transformation of the turtledove from a suffering “winter” bird focused on the mortal world to a joyful “spring” bird with expectations for the hereafter. Against all traditional interpretations heretofore, the turtledove is seated on a green branch, seemingly already in a state of pleasure following a long winter of suffering, still visible in the bottom right corner.

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Orvieto, 1500: Luca Signorelli’s blissful couples In 1499, the city of Orvieto commissioned Luca Signorelli to complete an unfinished Last Judgment fresco in the vault of the Nuova Cappella in Orvieto. The already existing pieces of the fresco were Fra Angelico’s, who had been commissioned half a century earlier for the same job, but had resigned very quickly and left most of the work unfinished. A year later, in 1500, Signorelli was commissioned to expand the theme of the vault on the chapel’s walls.7 Much about the relation of the two artists’ works is unclear, but it seems that Signorelli both finished Fra Angelico’s Last Judgment in the vault according to the latter’s plans, and painted an impressive new series of four Last Judgment scenes just below the vault on the chapel’s walls. Although Fra Angelico’s concept of the Last Judgment was in line with the approved narrative patterns of the theme, the concept for the wall frescoes that Signorelli submitted to the city council and later executed in the church breaks away in important ways from traditional representational schemes. His Last Judgment in Orvieto puts a strong focus on the beauty of the resurrected bodies and reinterprets the bodily state of the blessed entering heaven. These bodies are, for Signorelli, strong naked figures, both male and female; all reference to their prior social status, and even to prior physical features such as tonsure and age, have been eliminated. The blessed resurrect with perfect, flawless bodies, as Christ has promised: “The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up” (Matt. 11:5). These muscular, naked beauties in Signorelli’s two scenes show the blessed—the resurrection on the south wall, and the first moment of grace before entering heaven on the north wall—behaving in a manner conspicuously different from the figures in traditional versions of the Last Judgment, including even those that survive from Fra Angelico. The simultaneously untainted and erotic figures communicate with one another from the very first moment that their bones are re-clothed in flesh. In the center of the resurrection scene, a man rips a woman out of the earth as both gaze at each other. Right behind them a male and a female figure seem to communicate intimately through their gestures, while several groups of men, sometimes joined by a woman, are depicted in tender embraces and silent communication. The depiction of the blessed in their first experience of grace that shows the blessed being crowned and directed to paradise is framed on both sides by a man and a woman in an apparently deep conversation, not even noticing their coronation. Once again, there are no hints with respect to their social

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On the problems of interpretation, see Creighton E. Gilbert, How Fra Angelico and Signorelli Saw the End of the World (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003).

Introduction: Love After Death. A Sketch

Figure 4: Luca Signorelli, The Last Judgment, Orvieto, Capella Nuova, 1499–1503.

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rank or to whether they knew each other in the earthly world. The striking point of these frescoes is that the “resurrection of the flesh”—a dogmatic cornerstone for more than a millennium—was receiving a new interpretation. Signorelli’s frescoes, commissioned in 1500, not only introduced erotic fantasies into our vision of the hereafter, but also stripped all ties of these beautiful, naked, Christ-like thirty-three-year-olds to their former lives. Nothing remains of the individuals’ past lives on earth; they have become heavenly, perfected creatures.

Paris, 1578: Ronsard’s advice for Hélène In one of his most celebrated sonnets from Les Amours, the sixteenth-century poet Pierre de Ronsard, already in his fifties, urged his very young beloved Hélène de Surgère, a lady-in-waiting at the court of Queen Catherine de’ Medici (d. 1589), to enjoy the fruits of their love: Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle, Assise auprès du feu, dévidant et filant, Direz, chantant mes vers, en vous émerveillant: Ronsard me célébrait du temps que j’étais belle. Lors, vous n’aurez servante oyant telle nouvelle, Déjà sous le labeur à demi sommeillant, Qui au bruit de mon nom ne s’aille réveillant, Bénissant votre nom de louange immortelle. Je serai sous la terre et fantôme sans os: Par les ombres myrteux je prendrai mon repos: Vous serez au foyer une vieille accroupie, Regrettant mon amour et votre fier dédain. Vivez, si m’en croyez, n’attendez à demain: Cueillez dès aujourd’hui les roses de la vie. [When you are very old, at evening, by the fire, spinning wool by candlelight and winding it in skeins, you will say in wonderment as you recite my lines: “Ronsard admired me in the days when I was fair.” Then not one of your servants dozing gently there hearing my name’s cadence break through your low repines but will start into wakefulness out of her dreams and bless your name—immortalised by my desire. I’ll be underneath the ground, and a boneless shade taking my long rest in the scented myrtle-glade, and you’ll be an old woman, nodding towards life’s close, regretting my love, and regretting your disdain. Heed me, and live for now: this time won’t come again. Come, pluck now—today—life’s so quickly-fading rose.]8

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In this poem, Ronsard revives the classical genre of carpe diem, introduced by Horace in Book 1 of the Odes, 8in which the Latin poet cautions his mistress (or possibly his slave) Leuconoe not to waste her time worrying about when they might meet their ends. “Carpe diem,” Horace urges, “harvest the day, and leave as little as possible for tomorrow.”9 Behind both the classical model and its Renaissance formulation is the idea that love cannot be deferred: however strong the bonds that tie lovers together, they are ultimately no more durable than the petals of a rose. In Ronsard’s poem, the poet imagines a time when he will be dead—his body below ground, his spirit wandering, like the shades of classical lovers, in the Elysian fields— and Hélène will be very old, long past the time of being either loved or lovable. She will sit by the fire spinning her wool, and remember with pain the love that she scorned. Hélène will occupy, in effect, the position of the widow mourning her husband, but without either the satisfaction of having shared his life or the expectation of a future together. Instead, she will feel only regret, a regret that is entirely conditioned by the complete lack of further opportunity before her. (This bleak prospect is what the seventeenth-century English poet Andrew Marvell, in a similar carpe diem spirit, describes as “deserts of vast eternity.”)10 The urgency of Ronsard’s poem builds precisely on the tension between the abundance of time in the future, when there will be nothing to look forward to, and the exigencies of the current moment. “N’attendez à demain,” he warns, “cueillez dès aujourd’hui les roses de la vie.” In response to our initial question of whether (and how) people imagined an afterlife for earthly love, Ronsard gives us a strong, unequivocal “No.” Or rather, it is not entirely unequivocal, for this “No” is tempered by the idea that love might have a literary afterlife through the vehicle of the poem. For what will endure is not the love between Ronsard and Hélène—there is no fantasy here of the kind proposed in More’s epitaph— but rather its traces in and through the sonnet: “Bénissant votre nom de louange immortelle.” Death will triumph over love, but art will triumph over death. This idea is, in effect, the legacy of so many of the works discussed in the chapters that follow: the recording in poems and stories and paintings and plays of loves that were lived and that survive after death by virtue of the artifacts themselves. These four examples—the Rothschild Canticles’ mystical union from around 1300; Luca Signorelli’s Last Judgment in Orvieto from around 1500; Thomas More’s epitaph for his first spouse from the 1530s; and Ronsard’s sonnet from the 1570s—present four

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Originally published in Pierre de Ronsard, Les amours: Le Second Livre des Sonnets pour Hélène, no. 24 (1578). Translation by Andrew Weir in his book Tide and Undertow: A Book of Translations (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1975). From Horace Odes I: Carpe Diem, ed., trans., and commentary by David West (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1995). Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”: “But at my back I always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; / And yonder all before us lie / Deserts of vast eternity.”

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very different understandings of what might await spouses or lovers after death. They range from absolute continuity to absolute rupture, from human companionship to the company of the divine. But behind each of these examples is an attempt to explain something left largely unexplained and unexplored by Christian theologians: the question of whether we will retain our emotional attachments to the people we loved on earth when we find ourselves in the afterlife.

The holy texts: “As the angels of God in heaven” Christian theologians found very few passages in their holy texts that helped explain how earthly bonds between loved ones would be received in heaven. The most explicit answer—and the most relevant for our purposes—is in Jesus’s response to the Sadduccees’ question of what would become of a woman who had married seven brothers successively. As Matthew relates it, the Sadduccees, who did not believe in the resurrection of the flesh, approached Jesus with this challenge: “Now there were with us seven brethren, and the first, when he had married a wife, deceased, and, having no issue, left his wife unto his brother. Likewise the second also, and the third, unto the seventh.”11 If all seven brothers and the single woman meet in the resurrection, whose wife, they taunted, would she be? Jesus’s reply was quoted or paraphrased again and again by theologians: “For in the resurrection, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.” In other words, there would be no reunions between married couples or lovers or sexualized bodies like those depicted in Luca Signorelli’s fresco; there would be no erotic scenes like the one found in the Rothschild Canticles, nor ménages à trois as in More’s wishful thinking. Instead, heaven would consist only of human bodies transformed into ethereal, spiritual creatures like “the angels of God.” Among the very few other useful phrases that theologians could find in their holy texts was Christ’s promise to the penitent thief on the cross: “Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise” (Lk 23:43). Yet, as a reassurance for intimate or even erotic possibilities, paradise fared little better here than in Jesus’s answer to the Sadduccees. Christ’s vision of paradise, it seems, excludes human companionship.

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Matthew 22:25–30: “in resurrectione enim neque nubent neque nubentur sed sunt sicut angeli Dei in caelo” (Vulgate); English translation from The Bible: Authorized King James Version (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). All references to the Bible, unless otherwise noted, are to this translation.

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Widows and widowers: “Till death us depart” Love after death remains a matter of pure imagination so long as it is about life in the hereafter. Yet, though each of the four examples discussed above involves this kind of imagination, there was a second notion of love after death that was discussed at length by theologians, and that played a more active part in medieval and early modern culture: namely, the love of a bereaved husband or wife for a deceased spouse. How, then, did Christianity conceive of the lingering emotional ties, and obligations, of widowhood? Neither the Bible nor the patristic or medieval traditions specified the boundaries for marital union as exclusively mortal. On the contrary, far from being a bond that ends with the death of one of the spouses, the idea of widowhood claimed just the opposite. The husband’s death does not set his wife free, but instead establishes as her primary occupation for the rest of her life the mourning and commemoration of her deceased husband. (To a certain extent, the same can be said of a widower.) Throughout the whole of the Middle Ages, theologians refused to acknowledge that most widows and widowers remarried—that, in reality, fate made marriage a much more transitory state than it is today, and that many surviving spouses did not opt to spend their remaining years commemorating the deceased. Remarriage simply did not exist in either the theologians’ social schemes or canon law (see Bernhard Jussen’ contribution, in this volume). It is important to note that the idea of widowhood—a social status completely defined by mourning and commemorating the deceased spouse—was an invention of Christianity from around the time of 400 CE, a product of early Christian authors’ and churchmen’s deep hostility toward the strength of kinship bonds and the concomitant care of agnatic ancestors as well as the Church’s fervent fight for the indissolubility of the marital bond. No previous Mediterranean culture—Roman, Greek, or Jewish—had a comparable concept of widowhood. In ancient Greek and Latin, there was no specific word to denote a bereaved wife: the Latin vidua and the Greek chära each referred only to a woman who lived for whatever reason without a man. A vidua or chära could have been a spinster, a divorced woman, or a bereaved wife. Only in the early Middle Ages did the term vidua become narrower and usually refer to a bereaved wife, a relicta who performed the social state of widowhood. In the Roman world, a bereaved wife was required only to set the tombstone for her husband: after this act, neither law nor custom had any further interest in how she felt or behaved with respect to the deceased. She did not, in other words, play any role in the care of the dead—this task was consigned to the deceased person’s successor as the head of the family (the new holder of the patria potestas). The Christian concept of the indissoluble marital bond with its strong normative expectation of marital commemoration resulted to no small degree from the Church’s rejection of the cult of ancestors. In Christianity, preserving the memory of the dead was no longer the duty of the male members of the kin group and no longer

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focused on the notion of ancestors; this function instead moved to the parish and the surviving spouse. Thus, the Christian culture of commemoration assigned a completely new role to spousal love, or at least spousal duty, after death.12 Given this history, the commonly known liturgical formula “till death us depart” seems to originate from a different tradition altogether. But although this formula, which dates back only to early-sixteenth-century England, might at first glance look like a license to remarry following the death of one’s spouse, it was in fact a stake in one of the few very serious fights that the Catholic Church fought over the centuries: the fight against abandonment or divorce. Once married, the Catholic Church understood the bond between spouses not only as lifelong, but also—because after the death of one spouse the surviving spouse was expected to preserve the other’s memory—as transcending even death. Thus the liturgical formula “till death us depart” was understood within the Catholic Church as consistent with Jesus’s answer to the Pharisees’ question, as related in Matthew 19, of whether it is “lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause,” to which Jesus replied, “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matt. 19:6).

The chapters The chapters that follow move from ancient Greece and Rome to late-sixteenth-century Protestant England. They are by no means intended to be exhaustive, but instead are meant to convey the extraordinary range of positions taken on posthumous love within the Western tradition. In the first contribution “Some Ancient Posthumous Lovers,” Glenn Most analyzes the role of posthumous love within pagan classical antiquity, arguing that it was largely absent from the earliest periods of ancient Greek culture, and only surfaced in Latin literature in a particularly striking and influential way. This chapter helps us to see how fundamentally incompatible the topic of posthumous love was with these ancient cultures, and considers why this might have been the case. In Bernhard Jussen’s contribution “Posthumous Love as Culture. Outline of a Medieval Moral Pattern,” a long view through the Latin Christian tradition from the church fathers to around 1500, the author shows that the notion of posthumous love revealed a peculiarly strong pattern of Christian medieval Latin cultures. The chapter argues that the dominance or marginality of the notion of posthumous love in a society was dependent on the society’s kinship system. Western post-Roman societies (i.e., the medieval Latin cultures) radically broke with the ancient Mediterranean, strongly agnatic kinship system and brought the lifelong—and even posthumous—spousal bond into being as a new normative pattern. Paradigmatic was the late antique formation of a new 12

See the contribution of Bernhard Jussen in this volume, below the paragraph “The Transformation of Memorial” (p. 38).

Introduction: Love After Death. A Sketch

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social figure, a figure so self-evident today that its absence in the ancient Mediterranean world should be stressed and explained: the widow. The history of posthumous love as a broadly shared cultural pattern in Latin societies is mainly the history of the peculiar Christian notion of widowhood. In “Posthumous Love in Judaism,” David Nirenberg moves across many periods of Jewish history in order to survey some of the diverse ideas about marital bonds after death that Judaism produced. Drawing on biblical, Second Temple, rabbinic, philosophical, legal, Hassidic, and kabbalistic materials, this chapter shows that posthumous love not only was imaginable in Judaism, but that its imagining took place in manifold and often contradictory ways. Noting that attitudes about love that were urgent and widespread within one register of that culture took on very different—and often much attenuated—forms within another, it suggests that our sense of the shape and importance of such questions depends both on structures of source production and accidents of survival and on the nature of our own interests as historians (in this case, for example, the sources for the ancient and medieval beliefs of the “uneducated” come from the hands of redactors, “editors,” and systematizers with very different principles). The chapter concludes by asking to what extent the modern historical study of love in Judaism and Islam (both posthumous and “humous” love) has been shaped by Christian assumptions about the relative capacities for love of the three religions. In “‘That You Be Brought Near.’ Union beyond the Grave in the Arabic Literary Tradition,” our focus shifts to the Arabic tradition. Beatrice Gruendler argues in her contribution that in classical Arabic literature death is part of an uncompromising devotion to a unique beloved in the here and the hereafter, termed ʿUdhrī love. This tradition has a long history across many genres, and in particular surfaces in the manuals of secular love (from the ninth to the seventeenth centuries CE), which variously condemn or celebrate it. Initially the death of love was seen to defy a tribal code of morality or the doctrine of Islam, but its literary popularity overrode both reservations and even provided love as a cause of death with a (spurious) religious vindication. In this literary tradition, the afterlives of lovers are more often implied than described, unless their destinations were different, such as in interfaith couples, who may either meet in the hereafter through conversion or tragically miss each other. The rare depiction of posthumous secular love may be due to the fact that it was soon sublimated into cosmic Neoplatonic love and mystical (Ṣūfī) divine love, where the beloveds of classical literature or the Koran turned into hypostases of the divine. Gerhard Regn’s contribution “Eros and Eschatology. Phantasms of Postmortal Love in Petrarch,” looks at the tradition of love poetry in medieval and early Renaissance Italy. In the tradition of Provençal fin amors verse, the leading Italian poets of their time based love on the factual unattainability of the beloved, which is consequently perpetuated by her death. Only death enables love—in an utterly unromantic way—to manifest itself in the core of its essence. In the normative context of Christian culture, it is death that allows the lover to compensate for an unfulfilled earthly desire by means of an

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imaginary—but at the same time convincing—unification of the lovers. Petrarch (1304– 1374) gave this concept its most compelling poetical cast in the Canzoniere, which shaped European love poetry for centuries. Nonetheless, the bliss of Petrarch the lover is not of a substantial nature: the poet makes it quite clear to his reader that the expected posthumous harmony between himself and his beloved Laura is nothing else but a phantasm, or, in the context of Petrarch’s own ideas, a beautiful but vain poetical fiction. In “Love after Death in Garcilaso de la Vega,” Joachim Küpper begins by reviewing both the theological presupposition of the concept of life after death and Christian theology’s ambivalent position on love before turning to his primary subject: a detailed reading of the perhaps most important realization of the topos in Spanish literature, namely, Garcilaso de la Vega’s Egloga III. The eclogue seems to result in a highly sophisticated problematizing of the concept of “love after death” while underscoring the attractiveness of the concept as such. In essence, it thus negotiates the discrepancy between desire and the reality principle. In the concluding section, the chapter addresses the question of to what extent Garcilaso’s presentation of the basic concept might be representative of Spanish literary texts of that age. In “Burying Romeo and Juliet. Love after Death in the English Renaissance,” we turn from Catholic Europe to Protestant England to consider the impact of the Protestant Reformation on the question of love after death. In her contribution Ramie Targoff begins by tracing the ways in which Protestant theology fundamentally altered Catholic ideas about the possibility for some form of marital love to continue in the afterlife. For John Calvin in particular, human love must come to an end with the death of one or the other spouse in order to make way for the individual’s central posthumous bond with the divine. The primary focus of this chapter is to show the ways in which Shakespeare used his culture’s fundamental ambivalence about the afterlife of love to forge perhaps the single greatest literary work ever written on the subject: Romeo and Juliet. In this work he shaped a new mode of tragic power based precisely on negating the long history that this volume traces—the history, that is, of imagining love to have a future in heaven. For Shakespeare, unlike for the Italian authors from whom he took the story, the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet lies in the fact that their love is mortal.

GLENN W. MOST

Some Ancient Posthumous Lovers

What exactly would a posthumous love be? Doubtless, there will be many quite different conceptions of what such a thing might be. Here I understand it as the wish that love between two or more persons continue after death in such a way that the lovers can enjoy one another’s company not only for the brief time of their terrestrial existence but also afterwards for a much longer time in the afterworld. Put in these terms, this is certainly a rather bizarre notion. To try to understand it, we must first consider the general relation between reproduction and mortality. On a dispassionate view, these two phenomena are fundamentally interdependent: if there were no reproduction, then the inevitable effect of mortality would be the rapid and complete disappearance of the species in question; if there were no mortality, then the inevitable effect of reproduction would be an overpopulation of the species that would have dire consequences both for that species and for many or all others and for the natural environment as a whole. One could, of course, imagine a situation in which there were neither reproduction nor mortality—for example, that of the immortal Greek gods for the rest of the history of the world after their brief spate of adolescent sexual productivity during the period of the heroes. But if one introduces either one of these two phenomena on a long-term basis, then one must necessarily introduce the other as well. Together they preserve a necessary balance by securing the relative immortality of the species at the cost of the guaranteed mortality of the individual. So much is evident. But, if I may be permitted to quote Tina Turner, “What’s love got to do with it?” In biological terms, love is the trick that the species plays upon individuals in order to convince them to engage in sexual reproduction so that the species can be perpetuated. My presumptions are, first, that very few people decide to create children because they have become convinced that it is their duty to perpetuate the human species; second, that many people create children because they wish to have their own offspring for whom they can be parents; and, third, that most people create children not only because of their desire for children but also, and above all, because of their sexual desire for a partner. In other words, I presume that the motivation of doing what is best for the species has for most people only a very minor importance if any, that the motivation of having a family has a somewhat greater importance for many

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people, but that the motivation of satisfying love and sexual desire has much more importance for almost everyone. If this is so, then the passionate view (as opposed to the dispassionate one) would be that love focuses one individual’s attention upon another individual so that both individuals will go ahead and reproduce the species in such a way that that the species will continue to exist after both individuals have died. Thus, love and death are inextricably bound up with one another in a complicated and delicate interrelationship for which a number of different modalities have been explored in the literatures and cultures of the world. For example, Liebestod considers the variant in which the love of the two individuals is immediately and necessarily identified in its very essence with their death; while necrophilia and the study of classical antiquity are devoted to the love of those who are dead, the former to that of the fairly recent dead, the latter to that of the very ancient dead; and various forms of sadism and masochism doubtless make their own contribution to the understanding and enactment of this phenomenon. Of all the ways in which the various possible links between love and death have been explored, the notion of posthumous love is surely both one of the most widespread and one of the most bizarre. We may hazard the guess that far more people have actually experienced pre-posthumous love than its posthumous version; and that few if any of those who have really had an experience of posthumous love have been able to report reliably about it to the rest of us. So posthumous love is much more likely to be a fantasy of some sort than an authentic human experience—or perhaps it would be better to say that if it is an authentic human experience it is precisely because it is a fantasy. Posthumous love can easily be analyzed as an imagined projection onto the loving couple of the immortality that is in fact entirely denied to them and instead is reserved only for the species precisely by reason of their own love and then death. Seen in these terms, it can only be considered an objective impossibility and a subjective selfdeception: absurdly, but understandably (indeed perhaps rather charmingly), it does indeed posit death, but it attempts to transform it and thereby master it by redescribing it. Even to conceive the idea of posthumous love, in the sense of the hope that happy or unhappy lovers in this world will continue to love one another in another world after their death, as either a prolongation of their happiness or a compensation for their unhappiness, at least three other ideas must be presupposed: first, that an individual consciousness can in some way persist after the death of the body; second, that this individual consciousness can share, and can know with at least some degree of awareness that it shares, a mode of being in some kind of community together with at least one or a few other persons after their death; and, third, that this mode of being after death is a reward for virtuous behavior in this life, a punishment for vicious conduct here, or a compensation for sufferings or loss. Without the first premise, posthumous love has no interest because the lover is not aware that she or he is experiencing it after death; without the second one, it is not possible because the lover might persist in some way but,

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even if the beloved did too, the lover would not know this and be able to enjoy it; and without the third one, there would be no determinate semantic link between the erotic relationship experienced in this life and the one postulated in the next life (though what exactly that semantic link might be can certainly vary according to different conceptions).1 Since the end of classical antiquity, this strange and rather quaint notion seems to have become astonishingly widespread. But within pagan classical antiquity itself, it developed only very gradually. It seems to be largely absent from the earliest periods of ancient Greek culture, and it is only in Latin literature that it is manifested in a particularly striking and influential way. It is worth considering why this might the case. In early Greek literature there is almost no trace of such an idea. This is due to the general lack of belief in a substantial afterlife in most forms of ancient Greek religion.2 In the Homeric Nekyia—for example, Odysseus’s visit to the underworld in Book 11 of the Odyssey—the vast majority of the shades of the dead have no consciousness whatsoever on their own and almost no existence to speak of; most of them can only attain some degree of awareness if they manage to receive blood from living sacrifices—in other words, they continue to exist after their death, if at all, not as independent entities but only by virtue of their receiving funeral honors from the living and only insofar as they do so. A very few celebrated heroes retain some degree of a substantial identity and continue after their death to engage in the very same activities they were famous for when they were alive—as kings, or hunters, or warriors. There is no love whatsoever in Homer’s Hades: to be sure, the shades of dead heroines also exist there, as do those of dead male heroes, and there is not one of these heroines who is not famous for the kind of sexual activity in which she had engaged during her life, but there is no hint that she continues to engage in it after her death too.3 The heroine’s love during her life made her celebrated and secured for her some degree of recognizability even after her death, but after her death she loves no longer and is not together with her lovers. So, too, posthumous love is quite lacking in the love poetry of pagan Greek literature. Thus, Book 5 of the collection of Greek epigrams called the Palatine Anthology contains about 300 love poems: all of them celebrate the presence of love or mourn the absence of love in this life; not a single one expresses any desire for the continuation of 1

2

3

One further notion is not an indispensable premise for the concept of posthumous love but may well make it likelier: namely, that the lovers in question did not have children (and perhaps therefore were less likely to have been married). For married couples can hope to live on in their children and further descendants. Those who die childless can only hope for posthumous love. Perhaps posthumous love is a compensation for childlessness—or the expression of a love so complete that any children arising out of it would have been superfluous. The classic (though in many regards quite outdated) study of this general question is Erwin Rohde, Psyche: Seelencult und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der Griechen (Freiburg: J.C.B. Mohr, 1894). For a more recent synthesis, see Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 190208. See, e.g., Od., 11.26070.

Glenn W. Most

20

love after death. Again, in the first century BCE, Parthenius of Nicaea wrote a collection of 36 love stories in prose transmitted under the title of Erotika Pathemata (Erotic Sufferings or Erotic Passions): not even one alludes to any desire for posthumous love or even mentions it as a fact. In classical Greek literature, there is indeed a very strong link between love and death, but it is of a nature entirely different from the kind of connection presupposed by the notion of posthumous love. For the pagan Greeks, the inevitability of death is a very good reason to engage in love making and other forms of sensual pleasure in the here and now: given that no form of continuation of love after death is even contemplated, mortality is a constant menace that suggests the advisability of engaging in sex and other agreeable activities during this life, when alone they are possible; it does not provide any degree of consolation by pointing to any kind of continuation of them in another life. That is to say, the certainty of mortality leads pagan poets to the conclusion, Carpe diem. Sappho, for instance, can claim that someone who is involved in poetry can look forward to some kind of immortality (for great poetry will be remembered by the living in future generations), while anyone who has no share in poetry will be anonymous and insubstantial after death;4 but, love poet though she is and obsessed though she is by sexual desire, she nowhere even hints that being involved in sexuality or erotic desire can itself lead to immortality or that lovers can remain engaged together with one another in any way at all after their death. One of the very few exceptions to this tendency in classical Greek literature is found in Euripides’s Alcestis.5 Here Admetus mourns in conventional if quite passionate terms his dead wife, who alone was willing to die in his stead. But then, addressing her, he adds, Wait for me, then, in that place, till I die, and make ready the room where you will live with me, for I shall have them bury me in the same chest as you, and lay me at your side, so that my heart shall be against your heart, and never, even in death 6 shall I go from you.

Such a wish is indeed quite extraordinary in the context of Greek literature. To be sure, its anomalous quality is mitigated, though only to a certain extent, by various features: Admetus and Alcestis are both great figures of heroic legend and it is uncertain to what degree the desires and possibilities attributed to them in this play are to be thought of as having been widely distributed among ordinary Greeks; moreover, Admetus is shown 4

5

6

Sappho, Fr. 55 L-P. Presumably Sappho is referring less to the immortality conferred upon the poet(ess) by composing memorable verse than to the immortality conferred upon the persons celebrated in memorable verse—that is, not so much to the subjects of poetry as to its objects. Euripides, Euripides I: Alcestis, Medea, The Children of Heracles, Hippolytus (The Complete Greek Tragedies), ed. and trans. David Grene, Richmond Lattimore, Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013), 31, lines 34368. Euripides, Alcestis 36368.

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here as being feminized by his suffering and giving way to passionate and irrational laments that a “true” man would be too ashamed to express or even feel; he himself says that he would rather bring Alcestis back alive from the underworld, as Orpheus did with Eurydice,7 than continue together with her after death, so that such a continuation is for him only a second-best option, not what he would most desire; he seems to be thinking in terms more of the continuing proximity of their (dead) bodies than of that of their (living) souls; he seems to be satisfied, as a further option, by the prospect of having a statue of Alcestis made with which he can sleep at night in their nuptial bed;8 and, above all, at the end of the play, a satisfactory (and thoroughly unanticipated) conclusion is provided by Heracles’s wrestling successfully with death and thereby succeeding in restoring the living Alcestis to the upper world (rather than securing a continuing love for the married couple in the afterworld). Nonetheless Admetus’s wish remains an odd and quite remarkable exception within classical Greek literature, which in general is convinced that there is no love in any afterlife and that therefore we should make the best we can of this life here on earth. Much of what survives from Latin poetry shares this same conviction; the view that we should love now while we still can because we can be sure that we shall not be able to do so later has been given memorable expression by Latin lyric poets like Catullus and Horace9 and is also found not infrequently in the Roman love elegists.10 Nor, given the evident and profound continuities between the cultures of Greece and Rome, particularly among the elite, is this at all surprising. But what is surprising is that, by contrast, posthumous love becomes a strikingly prominent theme in certain classical Latin poets of the first century BCE—including some of the very same ones who deny its existence elsewhere—and from here it goes on to exert a considerable influence in many later literatures. For example, the love elegies of Tibullus give recurrent expression to a fascination with the poet’s own death and its hoped-for effect upon his beloved;11 and he envisions an underworld in which there is a special area reserved for dead lovers who continue to engage in precisely the same amatory activities that they had enjoyed during their lives in this world.12 So, too, in the case of Tibullus’s colleague in the genre of love elegy, Propertius: we find the same obsession with his own death as seen, he hopes, from the perspective of his grieving beloved,13 and the same confidence that a continuation of their love after his death will provide some degree of solace—though Propertius, with a characteristic nervous swerve, starts to worry that his Cynthia might turn out to be unfaithful after he dies, and so concludes that the best thing would be to 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Euripides, Alcestis 35762. Euripides, Alcestis 34852. E.g., Catullus 5; Horace, Car. 1.9, 1.11. E.g., Tibullus 1.1.6970; Propertius 2.15.2324. E.g., Tibullus 1.1.5768. Tibullus 1.3.4966. Propertius 2.13.1736.

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make love with her right here and now.14 Nor is this conception confined to the fervid world of Roman love elegy. Virgil’s depiction of Aeneas’s journey to the underworld in Book 6 of the Aeneid, his counterpart and contrast to Homer’s Nekyia, includes his visit to a special zone reserved for those who have died for love and who continue to feel its pangs even after their death, consoled only by the loving presence together with them of those they had loved so intensely during their lives.15 A significant role in this development seems to have been played by the figure of Orpheus, the mythic poet who was able by the magic of his verse to move animals and even stones, and who, after his beloved Eurydice died, descended to the underworld and managed to persuade the gods of the dead to allow him to bring her back to life. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for example, their paradigmatic love story ends happily in Hades: after Orpheus has failed in his attempt to bring her back to life and has himself died by being torn to pieces by infuriated Maenads, the two lovers find one another once again in the underworld and continue forever to spend their time together and to fulfill their desire for one another.16 The crucial version of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice is the one found in Book 4 of Virgil’s Georgics: whether or not this was Virgil’s creation or was indebted to some degree to earlier Greek versions now lost, it was certainly Virgil who determined its shape for Western literature.17 But in fact in Virgil’s version Orpheus and Eurydice are not posthumous lovers in the sense discussed here. For what Virgil’s Orpheus wants is that Eurydice return to life and love him as a living person in this world, not as a dead lover with him in the next one; the reason he goes to the underworld, still living, is so that he can restore her, living once more, to the upper world; and while Virgil makes it quite clear that Eurydice in the underworld is dead, he makes it thoroughly unclear whether in fact she still loves Orpheus or not—the only time that Virgil attributes any degree of consciousness to her or assigns her a speech occurs in the moment after Orpheus mistakenly looks back upon her and she is torn away from him forever.18 Above all, the Virgilian Orpheus fails altogether in his endeavor: neither does he manage to bring Eurydice back to the world above so that he can live with her in loving happiness there again, nor does he end up spending his afterlife in the underworld together with her in loving happiness forever. Indeed, the whole point of Virgil’s story of Orpheus is that the sublime and inspired lover-poet fails, whereas the boring, banal, practical Aristaeus succeeds. Ovid clearly refers in his own version of the story to Virgil’s account in the Georgics;19 and yet, though he is writing only a few decades

14 15 16 17 18 19

Propertius 1.19. Virgil, Aeneid 6.44076. Ovid, Metamorphoses 11.6166. Virgil, Georgics 4.453527. Virgil, Georgics 4.49498. Ovid, Metamorphoses 11.66 is a clear reference to Virgil’s already canonical version.

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after the publication of the Georgics, he already feels it necessary to add a consolatory supplement to the older poet’s version, one that supplies a posthumous love entirely at odds with its own spirit. Orpheus never did become a posthumous lover for Virgil, who in his Georgics carefully suppresses any detail that might suggest such an interpretation of the myth. And yet the figure of Orpheus may have played a significant role in this development in Latin poetry. For, beside the high literary vision of the insubstantial, empty afterlife propagated by Homer and most of the rest of classical Greek literature, there was also another vision of the world beyond that was characteristic of the mystery religions of Orpheus, Dionysus, and Eleusis.20 These promised a better afterlife but they reserved it entirely for their initiates—an afterlife based partly upon a mystic wisdom taught in rites from which most people were excluded, partly upon specific practices in the conduct of life in this world. And in the course of the centuries, the mystery religions gradually developed the three premises identified above as indispensable for any conception of posthumous love: first, they promised the continuity of individual consciousness after death for their adepts (whereas noninitiates would drink of the water of Lethe and forget everything); second, they held out the hope for a continuing conscious community of the dead person with some of the other dead (the other mystic initiates); and, third, they interpreted the specific form of existence in the afterlife as a compensation, reward, or punishment for what the person in question had done during his or her life on earth. At first these promises were directed only at a small number of initiates, and their fulfillment was based above all on mystic instruction. But with time, more and more people came to share these hopes, and to think that a better lot in the afterlife could be earned in other ways too. Is it possible that a development of this sort eventually came to transfer the model of mystic salvation out of the mysteries in which it had originated and to apply it to the personal experience of erotic love too? Might some Greeks who had loved very intensely during their lives have seized upon the themes of initiation, dedication, and salvation that had their original home in the mystery religions (after all, such ideas had already exerted an influence upon the conception of Eros in archaic and classical times) and have aspired to achieve after death a similarly privileged destiny on the basis of their passion rather than their purity? And once a few people had begun, how were others to be prevented from following their example? It must be acknowledged at once that there is little or no Greek evidence at all to support such a historical hypothesis. But might the loss of much of the Greek religion and literature of the Hellenistic period conceal from us most traces of such a conception in Greek culture, which then came to be reflected in Latin poetry and associated more or less closely with the beguiling figure of the legendary Greek bard and shaman Orpheus? After all, already in Euripides’s Alcestis, Orpheus 20

See, at least, Burkert, Greek Religion, 276304, and Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); and Fritz Graf and Sarah Iles Johnston, Ritual Texts for the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013).

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is invoked in the context of a lover’s mourning and desire for some form of continuity with his dead beloved—although we must not forget that in that play the figure of Orpheus is in fact put into the starkest contrast with the very possibility of posthumous love (though of course this does not mean that he might not have been associated with it more closely later). Perhaps, though, we should prefer to direct our attention to an alternative explanatory path. Might not this Roman phenomenon instead be due to a more authentically indigenous development, one that was at least to a certain extent independent of Greek models; or might it not at most have been a largely native Italian interpretation and enthusiastic appropriation of a more tenuous Greek phenomenon? Might it not after all have been shaped fundamentally by local beliefs, for example Etruscan ones? Indeed, it is difficult for anyone who has seen Etruscan funerary sarcophagi, on which the dead couple are frequently portrayed reclining embraced and enjoying the pleasures of the symposium—and presumably not in this world but in the next one—to suppose that the idea of posthumous love was entirely alien to Etruscan culture. In any case it is striking that there is Roman evidence for such an idea, and even in thoroughly nonpoetic texts, and ones composed earlier than by the poets of the late first century BCE mentioned earlier. For example, according to Plutarch, the early first century BCE dictator Sulla recounted in his memoirs that towards the end of his life, after his wife Metella had died, he once had a dream in which he saw his dead son inviting him to leave behind his worries and instead to go to live together with him and her in the peace and quiet of death.21 And among funerary inscriptions, references to love continuing in some way even after death are not infrequent in Roman epitaphs, even in nonpoetic ones; they are much less common in Greek epitaphs.22 Given the complexity of the phenomenon and the sparsity of the surviving evidence, we cannot tell for sure which of these two hypotheses is more likely to be right; but surely we should feel a certain skepticism with regard to the tacit but seemingly strong presumption among many classicists that the Romans invented nothing and that everything of interest in Roman culture derived ultimately from Roman (mis-) understandings of Greek culture. I conclude with the most grim and splendid case of posthumous love from antiquity, a poem by the Latin elegist Propertius.23 While he is sleeping, Propertius is visited during the night by a dream vision of his ex-lover, Cynthia, whom he had abandoned and who had later died. She bends over the head of his bed, a macabre cadaver, partly consumed by fire, her bones rattling in her brittle hands. The waters of Lethe have worn away her lips, and yet she has forgotten nothing: she launches into a withering invective

21 22 23

Plutarch, Life of Sulla 37.13. Richmond Lattimore, Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1962), 5859, 6263, 2035, 24750, 26465. Propertius 4.7.

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against Propertius because of his faithlessness to her.24 She tells him that there are two areas set aside in the underworld, one for those distinguished by virtue in their lives, the other for those remarkable for their vice, and that the denizens of these two zones continue in the underworld both to engage in, and to remember, the very same activities that they had practiced during their lives.25 And she concludes with a stern warning to Propertius in which the poet’s own rather saccharine ideal of posthumous love is not only taken to its logical extreme but is also made concretely and materially corporeal with a savagely deconstructive irony: nunc te possideant aliae: mox sola tenebo. 26 mecum eris, et mixtis ossibus ossa teram. [Now other girls may possess you: soon enough I alone will hold you. 27 You will be with me, and I shall grind your bones mixed with mine.]

24 25 26 27

Propertius 4.7.116. Propertius 4.7.5570. Propertius 4.7.9394. My translation.

BERNHARD JUSSEN

Posthumous Love as Culture. Outline of a Medieval Moral Pattern

In his famous in morte poems for the deceased Laura, Petrarch anticipated encountering his beloved in the afterlife, where their love would be realized in a manner it never was on earth. These famous poems are an instructive starting point for this chapter on the notion of posthumous love as a cultural phenomenon, given that they have been intensely commented on by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian Neoplatonic philosophers. Interested in the transcendence of love and in the ways in which earthly attachments could ultimately ascend to become heavenly ones, these philosophers commented on the poems in the manner they were accustomed to from theological exegeses of the Bible. In many commentaries, Petrarch’s text is presented on just a tiny part of the page, surrounded by a much longer sentence-by-sentence, if not word-by-word, philosophical comment (fig. 5). There was apparently no doubt among Italian philosophers about the importance of Petrarch’s fantasies, no doubt about posthumous love as a meaningful belief, attitude, and behavior—be it of a loving bereaved person for the deceased or of two lovers reunited in the hereafter. In her article “Passion. Petrarch to Wyatt,” Ramie Targoff taught us that this self-evident relevance of Petrarchan fantasies in Italian philosophy was—at least in comparison with Renaissance England—an astonishing, culture-specific attitude. The commentaries on Petrarch’s poems are just one of many examples of how “the Italian tendency to take love lyric seriously,” as Targoff summarized, “to treat it as part of an important intellectual and philosophical development, manifests itself throughout the period.” Yet, in sharp contrast to Italy, neither the first English translator of Petrarch’s sonnets, Thomas Wyatt, nor the English imitators of Petrarch in general had any interest in these in morte fantasies. The concept of love after death—which Italian Philosophers had treated very earnestly—had no place in sixteenth-century Reformation England.1

1

The reception of Petrarch’s in morte poems by Italian philosophers and their non-reception in Renaissance England is discussed in Ramie Targoff, “Passion. Petrarch to Wyatt,” in Cultural Reformations. Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, Oxford 21st Century Approaches to

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Figure 5: A typical page from one of many philosophical commentaries on Petrarch’s in morte poems, modeled on the practice used for commenting on the Bible; Francesco Petrarca, Rime (Venice: Bartholomaeus de Zanis, 1497), 63.

This lack of interest can be plausibly explained by the fundamental change of attitude toward the dead in the wake of the Reformation. The Reformation fundamentally altered the status of the dead, excluding them from the community of the living and transforming them from persons into pure material, into decomposing corpses.2 There were good reasons to rethink the imaginary of the hereafter and the plausibility of posthumous love.3 However, it might also be worthwhile explaining why the reasonableness of posthumous love was so self-evident not only in pre-Reformation Italy, but—as will be shown here—also generally in post-Roman Latin Europe. The notion and even the very existence of posthumous love between an amorous couple, married or not, are first of

2

3

Literature, eds. Brian Cummings and James Simpson (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 609–634; Fig. 5 is taken from this article. On the exclusion of the dead from the community of the living referred to in Targoff, “Passion,” 630, see Craig M. Koslofsky, “‘Pest’ ‘Gift’ ‘Ketzerei.’ Konkurrierende Konzepte von Gemeinschaft und die Verlegung der Friedhöfe,” in Kulturelle Reformation. Sinnformationen im Umbruch 14001600, eds. Bernhard Jussen and Craig M. Koslofsky (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), 193208; Craig M. Koslofsky, The Reformation of the Dead. Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany, 14501700 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). On the presence of the dead among the living in the Middle Ages, see Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Die Gegenwart der Toten,” in Death in the Middle Ages, Mediaevalia Lovaniensia Series 1, Studia 9, eds. H. Braet and W. Verbeke (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1983.), 1977; Patrick J. Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). With respect to the changing notion of the hereafter, see the series of examples in the introduction, pp. 3–14; and especially Ramie Targoff, Posthumous Love. Eros and the Afterlife in Renaissance England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

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all a product of culture. The chapters in this book, although they only shed light on a limited set of cultures and times, indicate that an elaborate cultural conceptualization of posthumous love, as we find it in Latin Europe before the Reformation, is fairly rare. In fact, as this chapter points out, it seems to be a peculiar pattern of Latin Christian culture. The dominance or marginality of the concept “posthumous love” or “love after death” is dependent on a society’s kinship system; more precisely, on the position of the conjugal couple in relation to kin groups and the role of ancestors. When, during the fifth century, the ancient Mediterranean Roman world faded away in the Latin West, those western post-Roman cultures that constructed themselves within the framework of the Roman church (paradigmatically the culture we call “Frankish”) radically broke with the ancient Roman tradition of strong ancestral orientation. Instead, (1) they fostered the lifelong, even posthumous spousal bond as a new normative pattern; (2) they abandoned the cult of ancestors that we know from the Roman world as well as many other cultures; and (3) they completely reorganized the memorial system. The new notion of kinship, marriage, and the relationship to the dead was shaped from around 400 by the key patristic figures (and propagated aggressively especially by Jerome) and was common cultural knowledge and social practice from the sixth century onward. Throughout the Middle Ages, marital posthumous love was a central normative issue and one of the most significant peculiarities of the post-Roman Latin kinship system.4 Paradigmatic for this transformation is the emergence of a new social figure in the fifth century, a figure so self-evident today that its absence in the ancient Mediterranean world has to be stressed and explained: the widow. The history of posthumous love as a cultural phenomenon (as opposed to its anthropological or psychological aspects of whatever kind), as a pattern in normative as well as poetic discourses, and in metaphors as well as in habits, is condensed in the history of the Christian estate of widowhood. Throughout the whole of the Middle Ages, theologians and preachers refused to acknowledge that most widows and widowers remarried, that fate made marriage at that time a transitory state, and that many surviving spouses did not opt to spend their remaining years commemorating the deceased. Remarriage simply did not exist, neither in the preachers’ or theologians’ social schemes and sermons, nor in canon law.5 Apparently, this inconsistency between religious conceptions and people’s practices was not a major cultural problem. But here and there we can observe the inconsistency popping 4

5

For a survey on the macro-historical changes of kinship between Roman and post-Roman western societies, see Bernhard Jussen, “Erbe und Verwandtschaft. Kulturen der Übertragung im Mittelalter,” in Erbe. Übertragungskonzepte zwischen Natur und Kultur, eds. Stefan Willer, Sigrid Weigel, and Bernhard Jussen (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013), 736. On the normative figure of the widow, see Bernhard Jussen, Der Name der Witwe. Erkundungen zur Semantik der mittelalterlichen Bußkultur (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000); English summary: Bernhard Jussen, “‘VirginsWidowsSpouses.’ On the Language of Moral Distinction as Applied to Women and Men in the Middle Ages,” The History of the Family 7, no. 1 (2002): 1332.

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up: the most widely spread tale of the Middle Ages, for instance, the tale of the Faithless Matron of Ephesus, was exactly about the conceptual trouble between the norm of widowhood and the rationality of remarriage. The first part of this chapter will outline a macro perspective on this fundamental shift, while the second part will focus on some cultural figurations—situations and metaphoric or narrative figures that are significant for posthumous love as a specific cultural pattern in the Latin West.

Macro Perspectives Till Death Do Us Part: The Modern Formula At the first instance, a very well-known liturgical phrase might come to mind, one that counteracts the thesis of posthumous love as a dominant occidental matrix: the formula till death do us part used in the marriage ceremony. Yet, when Petrarch wrote his in morte poems, and when philosophers since the 1420s commented extensively on his love poetry in the same manner as they commented on the Bible, this liturgical formula did not yet exist. It came into being only in early modern England and is best discussed as part of the reformatory transformations. It first appeared shortly before the Reformation and seems to have remained for centuries a peculiarity of the English church. From the eleventh century, the cathedral of Salisbury had established a special form of the Roman rite, the so-called Sarum use, which was first a local peculiarity, but around 1500 spread all over England. We find the formula for the first time in the Sarum Manual of 1508: a vernacular phrase—til death vs depart—in a Latin liturgy book. The phrase seems to have remained for centuries an idiosyncrasy of the English church. It entered the Book of Common Prayer in 1549 and only in 1661 was it turned into the well-known formula till death do us part. Thus, when Thomas Wyatt, the first English translator of Petrarch’s sonnets, traveled to Italy in 1527, the formula was a recent invention on the island. The Italian philosophers of the sixteenth century, who continued to publish numerous philosophical comments on the Petrarchan poems, were hardly familiar with the phrase. And in Germany we do not find the formula prior to the nineteenth century.6 Some earlier creations of comparable phrases show that the interest in ritualizing this phrase was not to shake off a deceased spouse but to incorporate the rejection of divorce into the wedding ceremony. In the droll story “Divorce Conversation” (“Eheschei6

For the history of the prayer book, see Charles C. Hefling and Cynthia L. Shattuck, eds., The Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer. A Worldwide Survey (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

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dungsgespräch”) by the middle-high German poet Der Stricker (thirteenth c.), a wife responds to her husband’s varied scheduling for divorce with the phrase: You will never leave me death will depart me from you.

Dune kumest niemer von mir der tot scheide mich von dir).7

The focus is clearly on the impossibility of divorce. Luther’s phrasing in his Traubüchlein of 1529 only expresses the aspect of indissolubility and does not bear any hint regarding a separation of the lovers at the moment of death.8 The ritual starts with the expression of consent: Hans, will you take Greten as conjugal consort? Says: Yes

Hans, willst du Greten zum ehelichen Gemahl haben? Dicat: Ja

The formula is immediately followed by Matthew 19:6: What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.

These two examples may suffice to show that the new formula was just one more variant to express the church’s centuries-old fight for the indissolubility of Christian marriage. When the official German Catholic Liturgy dropped the formula in 1992,9 the intention was hardly to extend marital faithfulness beyond death, but to acknowledge contemporary divorce rates or to avoid the mention of death on the couple’s wedding day. No matter how attitudes toward the dead may have changed in the Reformation period—from deceased personae still present among the living with their own rights, to decomposing corpses with no rights whatsoever—the new formula was not a result of these new notions but of the almost millennium-old fight for lifelong marriage.10 In order to reveal posthumous love as a peculiar and fundamental pattern of Latin Europe, deeply embedded in its religious and social structures, I will first sketch some ancient Roman and Greek examples so as to highlight the contrast.

Posthumous Indifference: The Ancient Mediterranean Menexenus: The Personnel of Funeral Eulogies In his dialogue Menexenus, Plato has Menexenus invite Socrates to recount an exemplary speech for funerals. Socrates claims to have learned the speech he delivers from the philosopher Aspasia and sums up the proper form of a funeral oration in one sentence: 7

8 9

10

Der Stricker, ed. Otfrid Ehrismann, Erzählungen, Fabeln, Reden. Mittelhochdeutsch/Neuhochdeutsch (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1992), vv. 9192; where not otherwise indicated, all translations into English are by the author Martin Luther, Ein Traubüchlein für die einfältigen Pfarrherrn, Weimarer Ausgabe 30.3 (Weimar, 1910), 7480. Angelus Häussling, Martin Klockener, and Burkhard Neunheuser, “Der Gottesdienst der Kirche. Texte, Quellen, Studien (Literaturbericht),” Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft 40 (1998):58169, here 62. See fn. 4 and 5.

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The speech required is one which will adequately eulogize the dead and give kindly exhortation to the living, appealing to their children and their brethren to copy the virtues of these heroes, and to their fathers and mothers and any still surviving ancestors offering consolation.11

At the end of the exemplary funeral speech, the surviving mourners are addressed once again: “o ye children and parents of the fallen,” “sons and fathers,” “fathers or mothers.” From today’s point of view, these lists are astonishing. What about the widow? Wouldn’t she be the first to be addressed today? Socrates’s omission of the widow in the list of bereaved to be consoled is symptomatic for the ancient Mediterranean— Romans as well as Greeks. Neither the Roman nor the Greek societies had structured the relationship between a bereaved wife and her deceased husband. Commissioning the tombstone and mourning for a fixed period—these were the last acts of normative interest of a husband or wife for a deceased spouse. Whatever posthumous relationship a bereaved person may have cultivated toward his or her deceased spouse was not a matter of ius or mos. The tombstone in figure 6 from the time of the emperor Tiberius (AD 1437) is exemplary for the last grip of ius and mos on a surviving wife. TI(berio) IVLIO AVG(usti) L(iberto) HILARO / NAVARCHO TIBERIANO / CLAUDIA BASILEA / VIRO SUO

Claudia Basileia for her husband Hilarius, Tiberian squadron commander and a freedman of Emperor Tiberius Julius.

What Roman society (or at least its aristocrats) was obsessed with was a different relationship: that between the living (men) and their deceased (male) ancestors. Agnates were obliged to perform the required rituals of ancestral worship. Ancestors’ effigies were carried along with the funeral procession (pompa funebris) and installed in the family atrium.12 In short, the ancient Mediterranean societies—Roman as well as Greek—never gave structure to the posthumous relationship between spouses. If there were any norms at all, they concerned quite the opposite of posthumous love—the question of remarriage. Emperor Augustus promulgated marriage laws in the years 18 BC and AD 9 obliging persons of marriageable age to marry, imposing deadlines for remarriage, and removing various hindrances to persons who wished to marry. He thus forced patres familias to consent to marriages of which they perhaps disapproved and possibly also to provide a dowry. Augustus also forbade patrons to compel their freed slaves not to marry—a practice that had previously guaranteed such patrons access to their freedmen’s inheritances.13 Will clauses such as “if she does not marry” 11 12

13

Plato, Menexenus 236e and 247c249c. See Egon Flaig, “Die Pompa Funebris. Adlige Konkurrenz und annalistische Erinnerung in der Römischen Republik,” in Memoria als Kultur, Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte 121, ed. Otto Gerhard Oexle (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995), 115148; Wilhelm Kierdorf, “Totenehrung im republikanischen Rom,” in Tod und Jenseits im Altertum, Bochumer Altertumswissenschaftliche Colloquien 6, eds. Gerhard Binder and Bernd Effe (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1991), 7187. Angelika Mette-Dittmann, Die Ehegesetze des Augustus. Eine Untersuchung im Rahmen der Gesellschaftspolitik des Princeps, Historia Einzelschriften 67 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1991), 133138.

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were declared to be invalid.14 The main instrument of this imperial kinship policy was the disadvantage it created under inheritance law for the unmarried and the childless. Although the laws appear to make some distinction between the unmarried, on the one hand, and the widowed, on the other, some of the surviving texts are fragmentary, so that just those provisions relating specifically to widows cannot be made out.15

Figure 6: A marble tombstone from the time of Emperor Tiberius (AD 1437); today in the Vatican, site of the find unknown. The ancient Roman tombstones that have survived show that it was common for a surviving wife to commission the tombstone for her deceased husband. In contrast to later Christian cultures, however, beyond the commissioning of the tombstone, a bereaved wife’s relationship to her deceased husband was structured neither by ius nor mos.16

All in all, it is possible to reconstruct these laws, however, because they were subsequently hotly debated and repeatedly commented on by Roman jurists, as well as being updated and modified by successive emperors.17 But we lack evidence regarding their practical effects.18 Nonetheless, while the Christians were increasingly developing a positive identity for widowhood, the legal discourses ranging from Augustus to the

14 15 16

17 18

This provision was first documented by Ulpian, but it is likely to already have been part of the Augustan legislation; for these laws, see ibid.. Riccardo Astolfi, La Lex Iulia et Papia, 2nd ed. (Padua: CEDAM, 1986), 30 and 3134; MetteDittmann, Ehegesetze, 153 for the widowed and 151161 for the legal disadvantages. Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, vol. 6.2, Inscriptiones urbis Romae latinae, eds. Eugen Bormann, Wilhelm Henzen, and Christian Hülsen (Berlin, 1882), no. 8927; Hermann Dessau, Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae, 3 vols. (18921916; repr. Berlin: Weidmann, 1962), no. 2823; illustration in Arthur E. Gordon, Album of Dated Latin Inscriptions. part 1, Rome and the Neighborhood, Augustus to Nerva (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1958), plate 36 C, pp. 8485. See Susan Treggiari, Roman Marriage. Iusti Coniuges from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1991), 7780. Ibid., 80.

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great jurists of the third century embodied a contrasting conception that was familiar to contemporaries and present in many testimonies. The Augustan legislation is unlikely to have clashed with the prevalent moral attitudes of the time.19 Vidua and Chera: Semantics and Social Classification The ancient Mediterranean did not even have a term for the posthumous spousal relationship. Neither Latin nor Greek had a word for what we call “widow” or “widower.” The Latin term vidua, usually translated as “widow,” and the Greek equivalent chera were used for a semantic field that differed significantly from today’s use. The term vidua (or chera) referred to any female who lived alone.20 Even if these women may have been surviving wives, a translation of vidua as “widow” whitewashes what deserves to be stressed: the Romans and Greeks subsumed the surviving wife under the category of the solitary female. The ancient languages did not classify different sorts of solitariness by means of different terms (as in English the terms spinster, divorcée, widow), they were all just labeled vidua. The specification of widowhood required an entire phrase: “vidua, whose husband had died.” The Romans were focused on agnates and did not provide for a significant role for the conjugal couple; they did not need a term for the conjugal survivor. This changed radically from the end of the fourth century onward with the growing influence of Christian intellectual discussions and moral attitudes. The intellectual and political leaders of the Christians—first and foremost, Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine—began to conceive of the surviving wife as a specific “sort” of person (genus, species), as a specific social estate (ordo, professio). They transformed the term vidua, to draw on Tertullian, into a “name,” a nomen viduitatis.21 The “name” vidua stood for one of these new “sorts” of person or “estates” that the early Christians had invented. Within just a few generations, the old Roman social estates (plebs, equestrians, senators) faded away and new Christian classifications completely redefined society: The “name” or “type” or “sort” vidua made its career in companionship with the new “sorts” of ecclesiastical office holders (labeled “clerics,” clerus), persons without an ecclesiastical office (labeled “lay persons,” laici), men and women adopting the new lifestyle of celibaterian communities (labeled “monks,” monachi, or “virgins,” virgines, i.e., nuns), and, finally, the “sort” that decided to marry (labeled coniugati). But in contrast to the other lifestyles of clerics, monks, or nuns, which people entered into intentionally, undergoing an ecclesiastical ritual with legal consequences and no way back, the attribu19 20 21

This passage is taken from Jussen, Der Name der Witwe. See Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1982), 2060, s.v. “viduus.” Tertullian, Ad uxorem 1.8, CCSL 1.1, ed. Emil Kroymann (Turnhout: Brepols, 1954), 373394, here 382: Nam de uiduitatis honoribus apud deum uno dicto eius per prophetam expeditum: ›iuste facite uiduae et pupillo, et uenite disputemus, dicit dominus‹. Duo ista nomina . . . suscipit tueri pater omnium.

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tion “widow” was defined only by a behavior, by the appropriation of a mode of life. It took possession of a biological fate and intervened in fundamental and literally everyday social events: death, loss, mourning, social replacement. On the one hand, this normative grip on a central, omnipresent social moment came to nothing with respect to what most bereaved spouses did, for the majority remarried. But if, on the other hand, we ask about the moral patterns that structured moral thinking, or if we consider the organization of the memory of the dead, then we come across the figure of the widow frequently. This inconsistency right at the moment of death between the common practice of remarriage and the normative construction of a life in faithful love (in illius amore et caritate perseverat) and desire (ipsum desiderat et ipsum sperat) for the deceased makes the widow a core figure for understanding the notion of posthumous love.22 Roars of Laughter: What Petronius’s Ephesian Matron was Good For The old Roman concept of a bereaved spouse was the cultural environment of the firstcentury author Petronius when in his famous Satyricon he had his fictive narrator Encolpius recount the tale of the “Matron of Ephesus,” who first extravagantly mourned her deceased husband and then quickly changed her mind as soon as the first stranger passed by. The tale’s very long life with numerous translations and fundamental transformations over the centuries, as well as its enormous dissemination throughout Europe, especially in the era of early print, make the Ephesian widow a paradigmatic narrative material for studying notions of posthumous love throughout centuries of different Latin cultures. What was the young bereaved lady’s disconsolate lamentation about? What was the sense of her desire to live as an “included” (inclusa) in the mausoleum with her deceased husband, what the meaning of her immediate readiness to “perform nuptials” (nuptias fecerunt) on the sarcophagus with the first stranger who dropped in, and what about her resoluteness in saving the stranger’s life by taking her husband out of the tomb and attaching him to the cross? All these narrative aspects of Petronius’s tale were, at the time, good for nothing more than fun: Encolpius’s audience “received this tale with roars of laughter,” only the girl Tryphaena “blushed not a little” before she went on spooning with her neighbor.23 In Petronius’s times there was no moral framework for the tale’s protagonist, the bereaved wife, after a limited period of mourning. It was a funny tale that played with gender stereotypes; it did not at all touch on the social fundaments of society—the organization of memory for the dead or other needs of kin groups. 22

23

The Latin quotes are from the Physiologus’s description of the ecclesia on earth as a widow longing for her spouse Christ—deceased on the cross—in the hereafter; see the full citation below in fn 33. I follow the Firebaugh translation (Petronius Arbiter, The Satyricon of Petronius, ed. Charles Whibley, trans. W. C. Firebaugh [New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927]).

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Petronius’s readers were far from in a position to listen to the tale like the many listeners of the same narrative material all through the Middle Ages, for whom the concept of marital posthumous love, of a life in faithful memory and mourning for the deceased, was the tale’s self-evident background. Already in the fifth- and seventh-century versions, the tale had undergone a number of significant changes. The mausoleum had become a grave, the thief was not crucified but hanged, and, most importantly, the sex scene in the tomb—“they performed nuptials” (nuptias fecerunt) or “copulating with her” (cum illa coiens)—had been eliminated.24 Instead of the sex scene in the tomb, we find henceforth in the vast majority of versions a marriage deal. Half a millennium after Petronius, the cultural conditions had changed so dramatically that the Petronian tale could only be told with fundamental alterations. The protagonist of the tale, the bereaved wife, had become a key figure for moral order and for the memory of the dead, not least a key metaphor for the church on earth—the widow ecclesia awaiting heavenly reunion with her crucified groom.25 Once posthumous love—as the constitutive attribute of the new social estate of widowhood—had emerged to be an omnipresent cultural pattern for normalizing surviving wives’ and husbands’ modes of life and for metaphorically grasping the church on earth, the Petronian tale was obsolete. It survived for a whole millennium only in heavily moralized versions, crafted into a wide range of literary forms. In the most successful rendering of this narrative tradition, a Latin version of the Seven Sages of Rome, disseminated widely from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, the soldier leaves the woman not after copulation but after a conversation on the rightful or wrongful behavior of a surviving wife. Then he notices the theft, comes back, laments fearfully, and the woman binds her rescuing advice to the question: “Would it please you to take me as your wife?” At first glance, it would seem that the narrative’s attraction has been sacrificed with this exchange. Yet, as will be discussed below, during the medieval centuries, remarriage was a “scandalon,” it was identical with hanging the deceased husband from the gallows—a symbol for a death without memory.26

Posthumous Love: The Latin West The Rise of the Conjugal Couple For scholars, posthumous love as a cultural pattern of the Medieval West was hardly visible before the fundamental reinterpretation of premodern kinship in the realm of the Latin church, which was initiated by Jack Goody’s ground-breaking study The Devel-

24 25 26

See below, fn. 52 and 53. See, as an early example, the phrase from the Physiologus quoted on p. 40. See p. 47–54.

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opment of the Family and Marriage in Europe, published in 1983.27 Over the last thirty years, historians—with decisive help from the field of anthropology—have substantially reformulated the history of kinship in the Latin West from the earliest new postRoman societies of the sixth century right through the premodern centuries up to the eve of modernity in the eighteenth century. According to the new interpretation, we see a vast trend from strong, agnatic kin groups with weak conjugal couples in the ancient Roman Mediterranean world to weak, cognatic (or bilateral) kin groups with strong conjugal couples in post-Roman Latin Europe. The new profile, which maintains its imprint till the present day, emerged with the implementation of the Rome-oriented version of Christianity between the fifth and the ninth centuries.28 Within a few centuries, all repair mechanisms of biological contingency, for instance with respect to the absence of sons, grosso modo disappeared: divorce, polygyny, concubinage, adoption. At the same time, a comprehensive system of marriage prohibitions was established that enforced exogamous marriages. Although remarriage after a spouse’s death was not prohibited, the religious system disparaged it hugely and rewarded only permanent widowhood. The architects of these post-Roman societies were obsessed with the protection of the conjugal couple (“what God has joined together, let no one separate,” Mk 10:9; Mt 19:6). The patriarchal kinship structures of the ancient Mediterranean gave way to a pervasive bilateralism around the indissoluble couple and led to a devaluation of kinship as the main structuring institution of society. This new centrality of the couple at the expense of the kin group has characterized Western European kinship since the end of late antique Roman culture in the West. The shift of focus from agnates and ancestors to the conjugal couple transposed the surviving spouse and her (or his) relationship to the deceased from the margins of the normative system to its center. It is this shift that brought the figure of the widow onto the historical stage and made her a point of reference for social classification, metaphors, iconography, and narrative material. She was defined exclusively by lifelong 27

28

Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983); in principle, similar: Jack Goody, The European Family: An HistoricoAnthropological Essay, Making of Europe series (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2000); Goody’s interpretations were rejected quickly and unanimously; he saw behind all these phenomena an allembracing strategy on the part of the church to accumulate wealth; but his observations—the disappearance of all institutions to produce heirs and the broad transformation from an agnatic to a bilateral system—have in large part withstood empirical examination. See Jussen, “Erbe und Verwandtschaft”; currently the main fields of discussion are (1) European polygyny and the emergence of lineages in early modern Europe; see, e.g., for polygyny, Jan Rüdiger, “Married Couples in the Middle Ages? The Case of the Devil’s Advocate,” in Law and Marriage in Medieval and Early Modern Times. Proceedings of the Eighth Carlsberg Academy Conference on Medieval Legal History, eds. Per Andersen et al. (Copenhagen: Djoef, 2012), 83109; and for the formation of lineages, David Warren Sabean and Simon Teuscher, “Kinship in Europe. A New Approach to Long-Term Development,” in Kinship in Europe. Approaches to Long-Term Development (1300–1900), eds. David Warren Sabean, Simon Teuscher, and Jon Mathieu (New York: Berghahn, 2007), 132.

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posthumous love: lifelong faithful mourning and longing for the deceased spouse.29 The ecclesiastical architects of post-Roman societies interpreted the bereaved spouse’s mourning no longer as a transitory state, rather transformed it into a lifelong social quality. The rapid establishment of this new professio or ordo of mourners in the Latin West, just when the Roman political apparatus (and with it the legal institute of the pater familias) was fading away, also marked the demise of another pillar of Roman culture: the ancestors. The new figure of the widow and her lifelong commemoration of the deceased spouse evinces the ascent of the conjugal couple and the decline of agnates and ancestors.30 The Transformation of Memory—From Pater to Vidua, from Kin to Professionals With the rise of the indissoluble conjugal couple and the concept of its even deathtranscending bond, the shape of memorial culture changed. The contrast between the Roman cult of ancestors and Medieval memorial culture could not have been greater. Memorial duties in Roman society resided with the pater familias. This key institution of Roman society had silently faded out of our sources when Christian authors from the fifth century onward began presenting the newly invented social estate of widowhood— vidua—as the responsible party for memorial duties within the family (bereaved men were also conceived as vidua). But this new social figure of the vidua by no means inherited the duties of the Roman pater familias: (1) While the pater familias had been responsible for the memory of the ancestors, the widow was only expected to commemorate her deceased husband. Marital love, not descent, was the core issue. (2) Once the widow died herself, she took her memorial duties along with her into the grave; no one within the family was defined by mos or ius as her substitute. Familial memory was markedly unlasting, bound to the lifetime of the surviving partner. (3) The concept of the vidua as a figure in service of the deceased partner was a concept of the sermon, not of the law. If a woman (or a man) declined to appropriate this role model and remarried instead, there was no alternative solution for the memory of the dead within the family. These three aspects make apparent how radical was the break of the memorial system: Latin Christian societies no longer based their memorial system on kin and family. The memorial system’s stable ground was the parish and subsidiarily the monastery. Families or spouses could invest in the memory of their deceased relatives, and often they did, but there was never a legal or customary investment in enforcing or guaranteeing familial memory. If a family neglected to remember its dead, nothing happened. In terms of institutional history, memory for the dead became the task of religious specialists, and their category was no longer “ancestor,” but “parishioner” or “church member.”

29 30

See the examples on pp. 39–54 See Jussen, “Erbe und Verwandschaft” and Sabean and Teuscher, “Kinship in Europe.”

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Cultural Figurations Some narrative and iconographic models can highlight how the concept of widowhood laid the ground for the strong normative concept of posthumous love in the post-Roman Latin West.

Lifelong Presence—Desire and Representation “until death take me . . .” Throughout the entire Middle Ages and well into the period of the confessional conflicts, the normative construction of bereaved spouses’ posthumous love for their deceased beloved was condensed in a stable and omnipresent exemplum from nature: the turtledove. Latin versions of the late antique Physiologus, a moralizing treatise on the physical nature and figurative meaning (natura et figura) of the animals, were on the reading lists for beginners in Latin classes. These texts and their later derivates (bestiaries and aviaries) usually included a chapter on the turtledove. This chapter presented the turtledove as the paradigmatic model or typus in nature normalizing the behavior of bereaved women (and—as was sometimes expressly mentioned—bereaved men).31 The most widespread version of the Physiologus described the natura of the turtledove as follows: There is a bird called turtledove, about which it is written: The voice of the turtle is heard in our land [Sg. 2.12]. The Physiologus says about the turtledove that she very much loves her husband, that she lives chaste with him and only keeps faith with him. If it happens that her husband is caught by the hawk or the bird-catcher, she unites with no other man but is always desiring him and is every moment longing for him. And in this representation of the husband and this desire for him she remains till death.32

This is—in a very unpoetic manner—the motive of posthumous love: the bereaved bird desires and commemorates the deceased and longs for him all her life. The students learned the following “meaning” of this “nature”: Listen, all you souls of the faithful, what a great chastity we find in this little bird. You, who bear the turtledove in your heart, let us imitate her chastity. Such is the holy church, who, after

31 32

See, e.g., fn. 33 and fig. 7. Text from version B, the most widespread of the Physiologus Latinus, ed. F. J. Carmody (Paris: Droz, 1939), chap. 28, pp. 4849: Est uolatile quod dicitur turtur; scriptum est de ea: Uox turturis audita est in terra. Physiologus de turture dicit ualde uirum suum diligere, et caste cum illo uiuere, et ipsi soli fidem seruare; ita ut si quando euenerit ut masculus eius aut ab accipitre aut ab aucupe capiatur, haec alteri masculo se non iungit, sed ipsum semper desiderat et ipsum per singula momenta sperat et ipsius recordatione et desiderio usque ad mortem persuerat.

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Bernhard Jussen she saw her spouse hanging on the cross, resurrecting the third day and ascending to heaven, does not unite with another man but desires him, longs for him, and remains in love with him until death.33

This was what beginners read in Latin classes.34 What defines the prototypical widow, the church on earth, is lifelong (usque ad mortem) calling to mind (recordatio) of the beloved deceased, longing (sperare), desiring (desiderare, desiderium), and loving (amor et caritas) only him. Around the year 1100, reworkings of the Physiologus were disseminated that contained more comprehensive knowledge about the natura and figura of beasts. They also implemented elaborate pictorial programs. All of these texts offered in a systematic way a normative model that has been used with less structure, but still plentifully and quasi automatically, by medieval authors. An example from a fourteenth-century Lorrainese manuscript of Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’Amour (fig. 7) may stand here for a widely spread visual pattern: The turtledove, sitting on a dead branch and exclaiming lament toward heaven, figures as an exemplum for the faithful lovers. The most successful medieval transformation of Petronius’s Ephesian Matron, a Latin version composed in the thirteenth century, used the image of the turtledove to dramatize the Matron’s fraud: the matron not only vows to God (votum deo vovit) that she will now live as a recluse at her husband’s grave; as if this point needed special emphasis, the tale includes a second narrative device whereby the woman expressly enters the social estate of widowhood: “From now on I will live as a turtledove.” This was unmistakably recognizable at the time. At her husband’s grave, the female protagonist of the story declares the exemplum from nature to be the model for her own life— only to negotiate a new marriage a few lines further down, then to dig out, brutally maltreat, and finally hang the deceased.35 We can find hundreds of situations throughout the Middle Ages in which the turtledove is used as a normative pattern.

33

34

35

Ibid., 50: Audite itaque, omnes animae fidelium, quanta castitas in modica auicula inuenitur. quicumque tamen personam turturis in uultu animae portatis, huius castitatem imitemini. Talis est enim sancta ecclesia, quae postquam uidit uirum suum crucifixum, et die tertia resurrexisse et in caelos ascendisse, alio uiro non coniungitur sed ipsum desiderat et ipsum sperat, et in illius amore et caritate usque ad mortem perseuerat. On the presence of the Physiologus in medieval schools and libraries, see the chapter “Zu den Wirkungsbereichen des lateinischen Physiologus” in Nikolaus Henkel, Studien zum Physiologus im Mittelalter (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976), 5359; other examples can be found in Beda Venerabilis, In Cantica Canticorum 1.1.9, ed. D. Hurst (Turnhout: Brepols, 1983), 202: Turturis fertur haec esse natura ut si iugalis sui fuerit solatio deserta nulli ulterius alteri copuletur; and in Angelomus of Luxeuil (mid-ninth c.), In Cantica Canticorum Praefatio, Patrologia Latina, vol. 115 (Paris: Migne), 551: et velut turtur singularis cujus natura est, ut physici ferunt, si semel conjugem casu perdiderit, alium non requirere, sed castimoniam servans vidua quodammodo permanere, solitarius ingemiscens, atque poenitens. See below, p. 49 (A Dangerous Death).

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William Shakespeare could rely for his comedies on the turtledove as a common place for spousal faith in Elizabethan England, for example when he had one of the merry wives of Windsor say: “Well, I will find you twenty lascivious turtles ere one chaste man.”36

Figure 7: Richard de Fournival, Bestiare d’Amour, MS Douce 308, fol. 102, Bodleian Library, Oxford: The turtledove’s natura figures as role model, as figura, for the faithful lovers. After the spouse’s death, the bird sits on a dead branch lamenting.

But what was all this faithfulness good for? Sermons and theological tractates, edifying literature like the Physiologus or the later bestiaries, collections of exempla, and the post-Roman versions of the Ephesian widow all through the centuries unanimously may have made clear how a bereaved person was expected to behave for the rest of her (and sometimes his) lifetime. But hardly anything was said about what she (or he) was supposed to be waiting for. In the majority of texts, posthumous marital faith and love were only discussed until the surviving spouse’s own death. The turtledove as killjoy in Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules (second half of the fourteenth century) may suffice here as a famous example: Laughter arose from all the birds of noble kind; and straightway the seed-eating fowl chose the faithful turtle-dove, and called her to them, and prayed her to speak the sober truth about this matter, and asked her counsel. And she answered that she would fully show her mind. “Nay, God forbid a lover should change!” said the turtle-dove, and grew all red with shame. “Though 36

William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor 2.1, v. 70–71, The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Stephen J. Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 1247.

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his lady may be cold for evermore, let him serve her ever until he die. In truth I praise not the goose’s counsel, for even if my lady died I would have no other mate, I would be hers until death take me.” “By my hat, well jested!” said the duck. “That men should love forever, without cause! Who can find reason or wit there?” 37

In Chaucer’s text, the faithful killjoy appears as a relic from a moral universe that was still well known but already an easy object of mockery: “By my hat, well jested!” Chaucer offers one of the few elaborate examples of a male survivor who claims and fulfills the normative model: “His lady may be cold for evermore, let him serve her ever until he die.” The conversation is not interested in what happens beyond death: “I would be hers until death take me.” Albrecht of Eyb (d. 1475) in his Mirror of Morals (Spiegel der Sitten) deployed a long list of famous historical exempla for this norm of posthumous love. Just one example may suffice here: Valeria, a Roman, who was asked why she did not take another man, answered: “My husband still lives in me and is always present.”38

The example of Valeria is typical for Albrecht’s manner of moral narration, where not a single example points to an expectation regarding the hereafter.

Eternal Absence—A Mansio Amoena, Crowds of Women, a Different Husband The stereotypical repetition among medieval authors writing about the expected behavior of bereaved spouses contrasts with the fuzzy image the same authors produce with respect to eschatological expectations. A few varying answers can be found, but the authors invested little energy in harmonizing or even communicating them. For the listeners of the preachers and the storytellers, it must have been difficult to understand what exactly lifelong service to the deceased and the lifelong mental representation of the dead was good for.

37

38

Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Parliament of Fowls,” in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1988), 383394, here p. 393, lines 575589: The laughter aros of gentil foules alle, / And right anon the sed-foul chosen hadde / The turtle trewe, and gonne hire to hem calle, / And preyeden hire to seyn the sothe sadde / Of this matere, and axede what she radde. / And she answerde that pleynly hire entente / She wolde shewe, and sothly what she mente. / “Nay, God forbede a lovere shulde chaunge!” / The turtle seyde, and wex for shame al red, / “Though that his lady everemore be straunge, / Yit lat hym serve hire ever, til he be ded. / Forsothe, I preyse nat the goses red; / ‘For, though she deyede, I wolde non other make; / I wol ben hires, til that the deth me take.’” / “Wel bourded," quod the doke, "by myn hat!” Translation from eChaucer, http://machias.edu/faculty/necastro/chaucer/index.html. Albrecht von Eyb, Spiegel der Sitten, ed. G. Klecha (Berlin: Schmidt, 1989), 468: Valeria auch ain Roemerin ward gefraget warumb sy kainen andern man nehmen wolt / die antwurt / meyn man lebt mir noch / und ist alltzeit gegenwertig.

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Whereas the majority of texts—like Chaucer’s turtledove and Albrecht’s Valeria— remain silent, some texts do talk about a widow’s expectations in the hereafter. These texts are astonishing in several respects: (1) They describe scenarios that cannot be developed for more than a few sentences without getting into substantial logical trouble; (2) they hardly ever project an eschatological spousal reunion as we find it later, for example, in Thomas More’s Epitaph for his first wife (fig. 1); and even if they do, (3) they project a union not with the deceased husband but with Christ. There is only one sermonic or parenetic situation that unfolds a more coherent eschatological projection: when the ecclesia is conceived of as widow and the crucified Christ as the deceased spouse. A Crowd of Women in White—Sixtyfold Reward The moral satire The Devil’s Net (Des Teufels Netz), written in the first half of the fifteenth century, is symptomatic for the pattern: Ain wittwe sol sin küsch und rain Wan si sol niemer sin allain; Got sol si in irem herzen han, Darzuo iren elichen man, Der sol ir wesen als ob er leb Und all stund in irem herzen sweb. Ach, der rain wittwelih stuol Macht ir in himelrich ain pfuol, Da ir woniung ist gemeret, All himelsch her si eret.39

A widow should be chaste and pure And she shall never be alone God shall be in her heart Together with her husband He shall be for her as if he lives And all time hover in her heart Alas, the pure widow’s chair Will prepare for her a space in heaven Where her residence is enlarged All heavenly troops honour her.

Abstinence, the deceased husband and God for all time in her heart, the deceased as literally present: this is what defines the posthumous relationship as long as the widow is alive. The aspect of a final reunion is missing. Instead of a reunion with her husband, the chaste lady can expect a nice eternal residence; here it is called a pfuol, in other texts a mansio. We know from other narratives and images about the population of this pleasing residence: masses of women, all once widows. It may suffice to quote a vision from the life of the Viennese beguine Agnes Blannbekin (d. 1315): A certain devout person talked to me in a similar fashion. She was carried away in a vision to a lovely dwelling where there was a large group of women in white garments. And one of them said that all were once widows. That person also was a widow. 40

The visionary widow asked for permission to stay, but was rejected and sent back to finish her suffering on earth. After all, she had already seen what she obviously desired

39 40

Des Teufels Netz, ed. K. A. Barack (Stuttgart, 1863), v. 6925–6934, S. 219. See chap. 139, “Regarding Certain Widows,” in Agnes Blannbekin, Viennese Beguine: Life and Revelations, ed. Ulrike Wiethaus (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2002), 101.

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as reward for her suffering: Eternal union not with the deceased beloved but with a crowd of ladies in white, all widows, in a delightful place. The idea was common from the fifth century onward. The widowed aspirants for reward in the hereafter not only knew about the many mansions in heaven (cf. the oftquoted John 14:2: “In my Father's house are many mansions”), but also that these mansions were awarded according to the merit of the different “grades” or “sorts” of people. They knew that their delightful residence was not as delightful as the mansio of the virgins but was still nicer than the place for the married people. Jerome’s writings were the reference point for this stereotypical concept. In his furious “hand to hand combat” (presso gradu pugno) with Jovinian—the first to prominently deny the relationship between merit on earth and heavenly reward—Jerome had defended against this “new dogma against nature” (novum dogma contra naturam) the classification of justified people in the three “grades” (gradus) by associating the social scheme of virgins, widows, and spouses with the biblical parable of thirty-, sixty-, and hundredfold reward in the hereafter.41 Behind his argument stood the image of a just God. The just God was the decisive criterion for the classification of people into “grades,” and this image came to determine religious practice in the West for many centuries, before it developed more and more cracks from Saint Bernard’s times onward.42 “God,” to speak with Jerome against Jovinian, “is not so unjust that he forgets deeds and repays unequal efforts with the same reward.”43 Arguments like this were endlessly repeated. A look at the Mirror of Virgins (Speculum virginum), a twelfth-century didactic text for religious females widely spread well into the sixteenth century, may serve as an example.44 In the fictitious dialogue between a teacher and a female pupil, the teacher, Peregrinus, assigns to his pupil the following task: “Tell me whether different jobs receive the same payment,” and the lady answers: “This would indeed be close to an injustice. Without a doubt, God, the judge [deus iudex], justly gives back to each individual according to his works.” The teacher turns the answer into the usual formula: “As they deserve, then, the widows will be preferred to the marrieds, the virgins to the widows, so that each one receives their reward according 41

42 43 44

Mark 4:20: “And these are they which are sown on good ground; such as hear the word, and receive it, and bring forth fruit, some thirtyfold, some sixty, and some an hundred” (King James Version); Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum I.41, Patrologia Latina, vol. 23 (Paris: Migne), 282 (novum dogma contra naturam religio nostra prodiderit); and Jerome, Ep. 49.2, CSEL 54, ed. Isidor Hilberg (Vienna: Tempsky, 1910), 352 (dum contra Iouinianum presso gradu pugno). For the decomposition of the semantics of the just God, see Jussen, “VirginsWidowsSpouses”; and Jussen, Der Name der Witwe. Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum II.23, 333: non est injustus Deus, ut obliviscatur operis ejus, et dispar meritum aequali mercede compenset. Critical edition: Jutta Seyfarth, ed., Speculum virginum, Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio mediaeualis 5 (Turnhoult: Brepols, 1990); and with a long introduction: Jutta Seyfarth, ed., Speculum virginumJungfrauenspiegel, Fontes Christiani 30, LatinGerman, 4 vols (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2001).

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to the measure of their works.” The classification of the Christians, who can expect heaven, into Virgins, Widows, and Marrieds according to their different reward in heaven was one of the most prominent rhetorical formulas for God’s justice. No one has ever discussed how the distinction between the marrieds and the widows was expected to be made. In theory—which is of course no category for sermons—every lifelong conjugal couple one day produces a vidua.45 The Speculum virginum was conceived as a textimage composition, and one image was dedicated to the different “grades” of people and their respective rewards in heaven (fig. 8). As in Agnes Blannbekin’s vision, we see the blessed clustered according to their “grade”: in the image they are grouped around their thirty-, sixty-, or hundredfold harvest.

Figure 8: The three residences in heaven are expressed with the different eternal harvests of the three estates according to their merits on earth; Speculum virginum, MS W 276a, Historical Archives, Cologne; mid-twelfth century, probably from the Augustinian Sisters monastery in Andernach (Rhine valley, close to Bonn).

45

Seyfarth, Speculum virginum 7.799, 218: P.: Sed dic mihi. Numquid labor diuersus pari stabit corona. T.: Hoc iniusticie quidem proximum. Equidem deus iudex iustus redit unicuique secundum suum laborem. P: Merito igitur uidue uel continentes coniugatis, uirgines preferuntur uiduis, ut iuxta mensuram laborum merces singulorum proficiat.

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Longing for Reunion—The Widow Ecclesia Other texts sound as if they propagate entering into in a second, transcendent marriage with the heavenly bridegroom Christ, as Origen (and many others after him) put it: they remain widows until they have advanced to the stage of being joined to the heavenly bridegroom, which was, of course, meant as a fleshless (extra desideria carnalia) pleasure.46 Apparently, no one feared that a union with the heavenly groom Christ could be read as a case of digamia, of successive polygamy. Although the idea of digamia was discussed here and there, it was not relevant in this case. Neither was discussed what happened on the resurrection of the deceased husband. The metaphor was spelled out only as far as it was useful. In his famous Epitaphium of Paula, Jerome described a faithful widow who first desired to die with her deceased husband (which was an expected performance in Roman society), then left her family (which was not at all expected in Roman society), and finally met Christ at her deathbed. Christ addressed her quoting the Song of Songs (2:11f.): “Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone . . .” At this point, Christ stopped in the middle of the sentence, and the dying Paula completed the verse: “. . . The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come.” The next line, which would have been central for medieval authors, was not yet important for our informant Jerome: “and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land” (2:13).47 The imagery of the church as widow—of her loss, tears, and longing, of her beauty, desire, and the final reunion—seems to have been generated already by the very earliest influential authors—Origen and Jerome, Augustine and Ambrose: ideo ecclesia uidua, quasi absente sponso, absente uiro. ueniet ille, qui illam modo protegit, non uisus, sed desideratus.48 The groom is absent, the relationship is defined by desire (desideratus), the perspective is reunion and beauty—“her hope lies on the heavenly spouse, who transforms her from a dark person to a beauty (fecit de fusca pulchram).”49 The reunion of the bridegroom Christ with his bride ecclesia (or Mary) was a quite conventional fantasy. With the double page in the “Rothschild Canticles” devoted to the 46

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Origen-Rufinus, De Principiis; Origenes. Vier Bücher von den Prinzipien, Texte zur Forschung 24, LatinGreekGerman, eds. Herwig Görgemanns and Heinrich Karpp (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1976), book IV, 2,11, S. 710: viduae vero permanent ex eo quod nondum profecerunt in hoc, ut caelesti sponso iungerentur . . . quae per haec aedificatae extra corporis curam et extra desideria carnalia esse coeperunt. See Giselle de Nie, “‘Consciousness Fecund through God’: From Male Fighter to Spiritual BrideMother in Late Antique Female Sanctity,” in Sanctity and Motherhood. Essays on Holy Mothers in the Middle Ages, ed. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker (New York: Garland, 1995), 101161, here 135136. Augustinus, Enarrationes in Psalmum 144, Patrologia Latina, vol. 37 (Paris: Migne), 1897. Cassiodor, Expositio Psalmi 131, Patrologia Latina, vol. 70 (Paris: Migne), 0946: Vidua tamen dicitur, quia praesidio destituta saeculari, spem suam in caelesti sponso reposuit, qui eam fecit de fusca pulchram, de erronea rectam, de crudeli piam, de caduca firmissimam.

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reunion of the widow church with Christ and discussed in the introduction to this volume (fig. 3),50 an eccentric experiment survived—a completely unconventional textimage diptych and a rare erotic interpretation. The artist combined the two notions of our theme: the conventional love after death as the suffering and longing of a bereaved spouse is still visible in the bottom-left corner, but the hardly ever developed imagination, the reunion of the lovers in the hereafter (“the time of the singing of birds is come,” Song of Songs 2:12) is the diptych’s main theme. The poetic conversation between the two lovers is a patchwork of quotes from the Song of Songs that the artist assumed a devout woman would know by heart, which allowed him to skip some phrases, either referring to them with the term et cetera, or transposing them into a part of the image. In the end, the conversation turns to the bride’s body: “How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights! This thy stature is like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters of grapes,” reads the text, and the image shows what the text omits: the coronation of the bride, the tender embrace (“his left hand under my head,” Song of Songs 8:3), the transformation of the turtledove from a suffering “winter” bird into a joyful “spring” bird. Against all traditional interpretations heretofore, the turtledove is seated on a green branch, seemingly already in a state of pleasure following a long winter of suffering, still visible in the bottom-right corner. The Rothschild Canticles’ eccentric invention—the transformation of an iconography of chaste suffering into an iconography of a joyful, erotic vision—only worked on the stable ground of a long tradition; but the way the artist made himself stand out might also be taken as one among many pre-Reformation tessellae indicating a shift from a theological to a more poetic notion of the hereafter—as we see it in Petrarch (see the contribution of Gerhard Regn), Shakespeare (see the contribution of Ramie Targoff), Luca Signorelli (fig. 4), Thomas More (fig. 1 and 2), and Pierre de Ronsard (introduction). The following example reads like a fight between two very different attitudes toward the role of the deceased.

“Her Arse on the Ground”—The Dilemma Redefined To come back to the Ephesian Matron: A fourteenth-century manuscript at Corpus Christi College in Oxford relates a short version of the Ephesian Widow that may serve here as a useful reminder of the narrative material: That one should not trust a woman. A woman who had lost her husband went to his mausoleum to pass the days of mourning. As it so happened, a soldier was charged with guarding a crucified man nearby, so his kin [sui] would not steal his corpse. When the soldier grew tired after a long stint of guard duty, he went to the woman, drank, and after copulation left her [et cum illa coiens discessit]. When he did 50

See pp. 68 in the introduction; for further scrutiny, see the extensive study by Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland circa 1300 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990).

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Bernhard Jussen that for the third time the crucified body was stolen. The soldier, who was overcome with an enormous fear, lamented and suffered inconsolably. The woman comforted him, retrieved her husband from the grave, and placed him on the cross. And so the crime of the theft remained secret.51

This is the plot known from Petronius. So after more than a millennium we find some evidence of an interest in resurrecting the Petronian version. The fourteenth-century writer of this dry and boring rendering clearly had modeled his narration on a version from antiquity. “And after copulating with her, he went away”—the antique sex scene is back, as are the mausoleum and the crucifixion of the delinquent. Yet, it is hard to find any other medieval or Renaissance text modeled similarly faithfully on Petronius. Especially between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, heavily moralized and elaborated versions of the Petronian tale were very popular and widely disseminated, mainly in early prints.52 In all of these versions, the mausoleum was a grave, the thief did not end on the cross but at the gallows, and, of course, the sex scene—“they performed nuptials” (nuptias fecerunt) or “copulating with her” (cum illa coiens)—had been transformed into a marriage deal. For literary scholars, the replacement of the tale’s central scene has been of little interest. The tale is always interpreted in the framework of medieval misogyny and stereotypes of the lecherous female. But for a social historian, these changings mirror cultural frictions in an enlightening way. The tale had become a common place to spell out fundamental inconsistencies in the social order—between memory of the dead, marriage, and kinship—by pushing the frictions into the most extreme narrative scenarios.53 All occidental “Faithless Matron” narratives are based on two first-century versions: on the tale in Petronius’s Satyricon and on a tale in the Latin version of Aesop’s fables, 51

52

53

This version is given in a footnote to a nineteenth-century edition of Latin fable authors: Léopold Hervieux, Les fabulistes latins 2, (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1894), 258 (MS 86, Corpus Christi College, Oxford): Quod nulla fides habenda est in muliere. Femina que amisit virum suum, contulit se ad mausoleum eius, ut lugubres ageret dies. Contigit autem vt cuidam crucifixo custos constituatur Miles, ne a suis furtim aufer(e)retur. Cumque siti fatigatus fuisset, accessit ad Mulierem et bibit, et cum illa coiens discessit. Cumque hec tercio fecisset, crucifixi corpus subtrahitur. Tunc Miles, ingenti timore percussus, plangit et inconsolabiliter dolet. Tunc Mulier, ad eum consolandi gratia accedens, maritum de sepulto leuauit et in cruce suspendit, et sic furtiuum celatur scelus. For the European history of this narrative material, see the introduction in Detlef Roth, “Historia Septem Sapientium.” Überlieferung und textgeschichtliche Edition, 2 vols, MTU 126 and 127 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004); and Ralf-Henning Steinmetz, Exempel und Auslegung. Studien zu den “Sieben weisen Meistern,” Scrinium Friburgense 14 (Freiburg, Switzerland: Universitätsverlag, 2000), 117. The late medieval career of this Latin version in comparison with its French model is analyzed in Bernhard Jussen, “Zwischen Lignage und Stand. Arbeit am Schema der ‘Treulosen Matrone’ in den ‘Sieben weisen Meistern,’” in Text und Kontext. Fallstudien und theoretische Begründungen einer kulturwissenschaftlich angeleiteten Mediävistik, ed. Jan-Dirk Müller, Schriften des Historischen Kollegs-Kolloquien 64 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2007), 2136.

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that is, from Phaedrus’s fable collection, which was standard reading in medieval schools. In the Middle Ages, this narrative material was crafted into a wide range of literary forms—novellas, fables, exempla, and, especially, story cycles. In the thirteenth century, the tale found its way into the Seven Sages of Rome, a cycle of fourteen stories bound together by a framing narrative. The first versions are old French texts from the thirteenth century. In the early fourteenth century, one of these French cycles served as a basis for a Latin narrative written in southern Germany. This Latin text made a triumphal march through Europe, became the most common adaptation of the material, and was translated into practically all European languages. Based on the number of print editions available at the time, the German-language versions of this Latin text alone constituted the most widely available late medieval narrative prose.54 Churching a Tale All the Old French versions have the same final scene: The hanged man has been stolen, and the guard asks the widow for her advice. After they negotiate a marriage deal, the woman provides him with her famous counsel. They proceed to “hang” her recently interred husband, yet when the woman demands that the knight marry her as her reward, he refuses and berates her. Depending on the version, the woman is either speechless, ashamed, despondent, or fearful. The narratives end with the following remark: “Thus she sat between two chairs” (Or est ele cheoiste entre deus selles), more precisely, as one manuscript relates, “her arse on the ground” (son cul a terre). This is how the story ends.55 Why between two chairs? In the Latin versions derived from the French one, the woman still ends up on the ground, but not “between two chairs”: The knight does not berate the woman, who expects to be married, rather “he drew his sword and, with one stroke, cut off her head.”56 Between two chairs in the French model, beheaded in the Latin adaptation: reading the narratives with this outcome in mind, one finds a lot of systematic differences between the French and the Latin texts that lay the groundwork for this final scene. A Dangerous Death In the Latin versions, the death scene at the start of the narrative has been greatly expanded. As in all other versions, the husband dies, but this narrative adds a significant 54 55

56

See Roth, “Historia.” Roman de sept sages, version A (Les Sept Sages de Rome. Roman en prose de XIIIc siècle [Nancy: Centre de Recherches et d’Applications Linguistiques, 1981], no. 030, p. 51); for a critical edition of just the tale of the faithless matron, see Hans R. Runte, “Variant Widows. On Editing and Reading Vidua,” in Medieval Codicology, Iconography, Literature, and Translation. Studies for Keith Val Sinclair, eds. P. R. Monks and D. D. R. Owen (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 240247, here 247. Roth, “Historia,” groups 1 and 2, no. 27, p. 430; cf. group 3, no. 27, p. 538; and group 4, no. 27, p. 648.

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detail: the dying man calls for a priest “. . . so he can bring the body of the Lord.” But his request is in vain, for he “. . . dies before the priest arrives.”57 The drama of this death would have been perfectly clear to a contemporary audience, since the husband dies without receiving the final sacraments, without the viaticum. This represents a dangerous situation that, within the world of the Christian sermon, evokes the central (and indeed only) duty of the surviving wife: to do service for the deceased’s soul, to preserve in love the memory of her dead husband for the salvation of his and her souls. Already here at the tale’s beginning we learn that this is a tale about the duties of a Christian vidua. The bereaved wife binds herself with a vow, a votum, to God (deo vovit) that she will now live as a recluse: “From now on I will live as a turtledove.” The votum as an opener to what will happen is as unmistakable as the reference to the turtledove. Her lifestyle has already become famous when the stranger arrives. He knows about this “holy woman” (mulier sancta): “I know and have heard from others that you are a holy woman.” The vow can be found in all the Latin texts, whereas in the most widely spread French version, the widow does not take a vow.58 From a Noble Family to a Seductive Body The French version speaks of the bereaved’s lignage, that is, the relatives from the woman’s side of the family (A013: ses lignages vint à li; K3721: a li en venoit son lignage). They reprimand her (A013: qui moult la blamerent) and describe her conduct as imprudent (K3722: vous n’iestes mie sage; M14: a grant folie), state that she is “still a child” (K15), that she is “young, beautiful and of grant lignage” (A37.017), and for this reason will “marry rich” (K3723) and “better than before.” The new husband will be chosen by the lignage: “We will marry you more aristocratically (M15: vous remarrierons plus noblement).” This dialogue presents the young widow as part of a lignage that reclaims her as a disposable asset after her husband’s death, an argument repeated in the dialogue between the widow and the guard when the latter visits her at the grave. Also the family line of her deceased husband figures in the French versions as a clan that acts jointly and takes care of its members. The French versions mention, often in a number of passages, that the hanged man’s lignage saves him from the gallows (A37.028: car ses lignages l’emporta and A37.030: que ses lignages l’en ot porté; version K3834: ses lignages l’en a porté; version H: emblé du gibet par ses parens).59 One 57 58

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Roth, “Historia,” groups1 and 2, no. 2, p. 421; group 3, no. 2, p. 537; group 4, no. 2, p. 644. In version A, Centre de Recherches, Les Sept Sages de Rome:: “dit”; in version M, Runte, “Variant Widows”: “dist”; in some versions, the widow swears: see version K3718, Le Roman des Sept Sages de Rome. A Critical Edition of the Two Verse Redactions of a Twelfth-Century Romance, Edward C. Armstrong Monographs on Medieval Literature 4, ed. Mary B. Speer (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1989), 113237: “jure”; version C890, 239289: “jure”; version H, Deux rédactions du Roman des Sept Sages de Rome, Société des anciens textes Français 4, ed. Gaston Paris (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1876), 36: “jura”; and version D, idem, 151: “avoit voué.” Version H, Paris, Deux rédactions, 38.

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version provides an explanation for the family’s interest: the hanged man is a dishonor to the lignage (verse version C1023f: et l’en a porté son lignage / car il lor poiuse dou hontage).60 Whoever wrote the Latin versions of the narrative had this text before him—and eliminated all references to the two lignages. The Latin text narrates the theft in passive voice: “When the guard returned, he saw that the thief had been stolen.” And the guard does not praise the widow’s noble descent but admires her seductive build: “You are well built (formosa),” or: “endowed with all the delights of female nature.”61 From Craziness to Exaggeration The widow’s relatives in the French version of the story (her lignage) describe her loyalty to her husband as “crazy” (fole), since he is nothing more than a “corpse” (corps) and her loyalty does it and the dead man’s soul little good. The widow’s relatives in the Latin story—in a fuzzy way called amici—formulate their criticism differently: “Oh, dearest mistress, what good does it do his soul for you to stay in this place. It would be better for you to go home and give generous alms for his soul than to pine here.” A few manuscripts strike the phrase “for you.”62 The relatives in the Latin version in their weighing of the benefits (“what good does it do his soul”) are not, as in the French version, opposed to commemorating the dead per se. Instead of excessive mourning at the grave, the widow’s family demands a return to a well-regulated ritual for commemorating the dead. The relatives propose doing what can be found in every textbook on medieval life: giving “generous alms for his soul” or making “alms and prayers.”63 Hans von Bühel’s fifteenth-century rhymed version of the story contains this injunction in customary form: “Give alms to appease many poor monks” (Gebt Almosen, damit ihr viele arme Mönche stillet).64 From Corpse to Soul The French texts repeatedly insist on the deceased being a corpse (li cors) that cannot be helped by the living (A36.018: Puis que cist est mort n’i a nul recovrier; H: l’en ne peult le mort recouvrer) and that the widow’s behavior is completely futile.65 Later on, the stranger echoes this argument. 66 In another version, he says, “One can do nothing 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

Verse version C, Speer, “Le Roman des Sept Sages de Rome,” 264. Roth, “Historia,” groups 1 and 2, no. 11; see the variants in Roth, p. 424. Roth, “Historia,” group 1, no. 4, p. 422; in group 2 (idem), “for you” is often deleted. Roth, “Historia,” group 4, no. 4, p. 644; in group 3, no. 11, p. 537, the guard says: elemosinas dare, orare et cetera facere. Hans von Bühel, Dyocletianus Leben, ed. Adelbert Keller (Quedlinburg, 1841), line 6674. Version H, Paris, Deux rédactions, 37. Version A, Centre de Recherches, Les Sept Sages de Rome, no. 33a, p. 47: l’ame n’i auroit ja preu, ainz en seroit trop pire . . . puisque cist est morz n’i a nul recovrier; from the stranger’s mouth,

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for your dead husband, it doesn’t help him at all.”67 These views are not presented as problematic in the story: mourning and remaining faithful to a corpse (the word corps is used consistently) are of no use either to the corpse or to the dead man’s soul. In these thirteenth- and fourteenth-century French tales, we find a very unmedieval attitude toward the dead. All such references to the dead as corpses have been eliminated from the Latin text. The protagonists always talk of the “soul” of the deceased and continue to describe him as “your husband” (pro anima mariti) or “your man” (viri tui).68 From a Good Catch to a Bad Match The dialogue that follows contains a number of details, all of which point in the same direction, and all of which have been deleted from the Latin versions. The new man is introduced in the first sentence as a good catch, with “wonderful land” (Un autre chevalier avoit en ceste vile, qui avoit merveilleuse terre), and later he is described as a “rich man.”69 In two versions (K3775, C981), the woman knows him (“I am Gerard, son of Guyon”). In one version one finds: “She was his neighbor, but not his cousin” (C3767: elle estoit sa voisine, mais n’estait pas sa cousine); this reveals the writer’s awareness of the marriage bans and demonstrates the permissibility of the impending union. The Latin versions invert this characterization of the guard into quite the opposite, making a bad match out of a good catch. The Latin versions have inverted the social status of the expected second husband, transforming him from a rich knight with “wonderful” or “great” land into a poor marital prospect. Although the terminology stems from the language of Christian charity, the argument is obvious: “It is such a great humiliation (humilitas) on your part that you want to descend so deeply (tam basse descendere) and take such a poor knight as a husband.” Other versions use “benefaction” (benignitas) instead of “humiliation.”70 This inversion of the social transaction, which now becomes a deep descent, or basse descendere, precludes any honorable interpretation of the widow’s change of heart, which is already a violation of her vow. From Personal Dilemma to Clear Illegitimacy The aggrieved wife in the French version ultimately accepts and saves her new husband’s life by treating her deceased spouse in the way her lineage and the stranger had

67 68 69 70

idem, no. 37.024, p. 49: “You’re crazy (fole) to stay here and devote yourself to a corpse (de cet cors garder). It will never return to life.” Version H, Paris, Deux rédactions, 38. Roth, “Historia,” group 1, no. 11, p. 424 (mariti tui); group 2, idem; and group 3, no. 11, p. 537 (viri tui). Version A, Centre de Recherches, Les Sept Sages de Rome, no. 37.001, p. 48. Roth, “Historia,” group 1, no. 18, p. 426; benignitas instead of humilitas in idem, group 2, no. 18, p. 426; idem, group 3, no. 19, p. 538: reputo magnam humilitatem tam pauperem militem accipere in virum; idem, group 4, no. 18, p. 647: si in tantum velletis vos humiliare.

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recommended: as a corpse for whom nothing more can be done. And yet: her new husband suddenly does an about-face and accuses her of forgetting the deceased (A38.026: Tost avez vous oublié celui). The basis for this accusation can only be seen in a widow’s core task—memoria of the dead. The story presents the surviving widow as a problematic link between two lignages, caught between contradicting interests. Memoria is only in the interests of one family line and opposes the interests of the widow’s family. Thus, after the new husband’s change of perspective (from the marriage-market perspective to the perspective of the male lignage), the widow remains in the awkward position expressed in the last sentence: “Thus she sits between two chairs, her arse on the ground” (Or est ele cheoiste entre deux selles, son cul a terre). The tale is built on the idea that married couples constitute the interface between the interests of the two kin groups. The husband’s death causes a problem for the survivor, since both lignages harbor contradictory expectations of the surviving widow. Whereas the deceased’s relatives invest in safeguarding the memoria of their family member (in practice performed by the parish and monasteries, but in sermons and prose by the widow), the woman’s lignage is concerned with retrieving and redeploying its capital, especially since the woman is still young. The Old French narratives develop the three characters—the grieving widow, the hanged man, and the guard—from the viewpoint of family relations—marriage, kin groups, remarriage, and memory. The author of the Latin version—we may be allowed to imagine a male author from an ecclesiastical context—retained almost none of this. He transformed an unsolvable dilemma into a clear message of good and bad: in the death and burial scene, the surviving wife formally moves from the state of marriage to that of widowhood or, in the framework of ecclesiastical social conceptions, from the ordo or genus of marrieds to the ordo or genus of widows. No viaticum, the turtledove, the recluse, the vow to live as deo devota, the fame as a holy woman: the female protagonist is bound for the rest of the story; her second marriage is explicitly illegitimate. Thus, when she demands of the soldier to fulfill his promise and marry her “under the eyes of the church” (in facie ecclesiae), the soldier recompenses her for saving his life somewhat differently: “He drew his sword and, with one stroke, cut off her head.”71 The Latin versions usually add a moral to the end of the story which instructs readers how it is to be read. The moral interprets the deed as a conflict between the living and the dead: “It is the vanitas of the world—the carnal desires—that prevent those living in the future from remembering the poor man.” Both groups of texts are concerned with love after death, but in very different ways. In the French versions, the surviving wife as interface between two lineages is caught between two contrasting expectations—lifelong love for the spouse here, the marriage market there. The Latin texts center on the conflict between the interests of the dead and those of the living. The widow is a kind of institutionalized interface between the living and the dead. Her dead husband is dependent on memoria, and—based on the 71

Roth, “Historia,” groups 1 and 2, no. 27, p. 430; cf. group 3, no. 27, p. 538; and group 4, no. 27, p. 648.

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church’s conception of social estates—it is clearly the widow who must commemorate him. In the social conceptions of the medieval church, the surviving widow’s right to liberate herself from remaining in love with her dead husband was nonexistent. Remarriage was conceived as voluptas, vanitas, digamia. The widow’s head had to be cut off with the sword of castitas and largitas. The French refrains from passing judgment; the Latin texts do so massively.

The Lady Doth Protest Too Much, Methinks In sum: The three examples reveal in different ways the notion of posthumous love as a pattern right at the center of cultural order. In sermon and theology, it appears to have been a straightforward idea, an integral part of social classification and of the hierarchy of holiness on earth; there was apparently not much need to think about its coherence with respect to the moment of reunion in the hereafter. The most dominant institution in the Medieval Latin West, the church, was conceived mainly with the metaphor of the bereaved spouse, longing for and finally achieving reunion in heaven. This dominant metaphor alone would be enough to stress the singular importance of the notion “posthumous love” in the Latin West. The novels discussed here, on the other hand, carry the normative friction to extremes and give us an idea of the friction’s presence in social discourses beyond preaching. The tension between infinite love and second marriage was real and present; the second marriage was not only a problem for preachers, the norm of posthumous faithful love was at all times quotable and unambiguous. When Hamlet’s player queen, to conclude with a very famous case, is confronted with the option of remarriage by her fading husband, she strongly insists on her faithfulness in the straightforward way of the sermons: “In second husband let me be accurst! / None wed the second but who kill’d the first.” As if to recall the atrocity of the Ephesian matron, she equates remarriage with killing a dead person: “A second time I kill my husband dead / When second husband kisses me in bed.” Then again she evokes the clear and simple norm: “If, once a widow, ever I be wife!” Hamlet’s mother Gertrude, much more notorious in world literature for remarrying too quickly than the Ephesian widow, was listening in the audience to the dialogue and cut straight to the chase: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”72

72

William Shakespeare, Hamlet 3.2, v. 210, The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Stephen J. Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 1713.

DAVID NIRENBERG

Posthumous Love in Judaism  *

This chapter responds to the stimulus of an editorial invitation, and to a claim that invitation contained: “The idea of ... marital faith after death is hardly imaginable in kinbased societies and in religious cultures that award the care of ancestors (as Jewish, Islamic, or ancient Roman cultures do or did) to offspring rather than to spouses.” Who could fail to be intrigued by such a declaration of limits on the possibilities of love? I know too little about love, and nothing of the posthumous kind. Yet out of desire to accept this invitation I have convinced myself that my ignorance can prove a virtue: that the discovery of the “imaginable” might be aided by uncertainty about what that imagining should look like. I have therefore undertaken a rash exploration of the vast ocean of premodern Jewish thinking about posthumous love. The goal of this exploration is not simply to determine whether love after death was or was not imaginable in Judaism. It is also to apply the by now well-known epistemological principle that the difference between the familiar and the unimaginable is not innocent. It is rather “theory laden,” the product of the habits with which we think ourselves in the world. Among those habits, limitations on the imagining of love are among the most venerable. What can the study of those limitations teach us about the ways in which the many sectarian communities that constitute Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have come to imagine their differences? The charge is already large, but at the risk of incurring a condemnation even more severe, I’d like to begin by stressing that at least in its more general form, the topic of posthumous love has a dauntingly long history. In Die Fackel im Ohr, the second volume of his autobiography, Elias Canetti writes of how, while attending school in Weimar Germany, he discovered what would become his life’s work. Reading the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, he was struck by how the hero, confronted by the death of his friend Enkidu, refuses to accept the finality of loss and attempts instead to conquer the

 *

My thanks to Galit Hasan-Rokem, Eva Haverkamp, Hindy Najman, Isabel and Ricardo Nirenberg, Uri Shachar, and Sofía Torallas Tovar, all of them evidence for the existence of a loving collective intellect, in this world if not in the next.

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underworld. It is here, says Canetti, that he first encountered what he calls the “universal” phenomenon that would consume his attention for the rest of his intellectual life: the human desire that our love should overcome our mortality. Canetti does not speak here of nuptial love, not only because at that age, so he claims, he still did not think of women in this way, but also because the epic did not do so. A decade later, however, he could have read a still older myth—from ca. 2000 BC, perhaps the oldest of which we have written record—recovered by Samuel Noah Kramer from the shards of Sumer and published by the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute in 1934. I mean, of course, the story of the goddess Inanna’s voyage to the underworld, relevant to our topic not only because it is the goddess of love who attempts to force her way into death’s domains, but also because of what happens upon her return to the world of the living. As she proceeds through her cities in search of a soul to take her place in the underworld (a condition of her release), she is met by those who have maintained themselves in mourning throughout her absence. All of these she refuses to send to the realm of death. But when she reaches her husband Dumuzi, he is sitting on his throne as if he had forgotten her, as if his love for her had ceased with her death. Moved to anger, she “fastened on Dumuzi the eye of death,” and loosed the underworld’s demons upon him. Later, after Dumuzi’s grieving sister Geshtinanna offers herself up in his place, an agreement is reached similar to those we know from the myths of love and fertility of other lands, in which the two will spend alternate halves of the year in the underworld. It would be easy enough to find examples of the expectation that matrimonial relations should survive death in other ancient cultures. Plutarch, for example, collected several versions of the Egyptian myth of Osiris and his sister-wife Isis, who herself collected the dispersed fragments of her husband’s body after he had been slain and hacked to pieces by his brother Seth. She reassembled them all (except the penis, which had been eaten by an Oxyrhynchus fish; this she fashioned anew out of gold), and resuscitated him long enough to conceive the son (Horus) who would avenge his father. Such primordial couples occupy a prominent place in many theogonies, as Mircea Eliade pointed out long ago. Some of these couplings were happy ones, others not. But in either case, they were often happy or unhappy in ways that straddle the boundaries between the quick and the dead.1 Gods did not have a monopoly on an emotional afterlife. The human “family romance” was also sometimes imagined—at least in the cases of those heroic houses at

1

Plutarch Isis and Osiris 353–354, 358 A. See also Jean Hani, La religion égyptienne dans la pensée de Plutarque (Paris: Belles lettres, 1976), 323; and Christiane Desroches Noblecourt, La femme au temps des Pharaons (Paris: Stock, 1987), 21ff. For a long list of primordial couples, see Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1958), 410–436.

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the foundation of society—to persist in the underworld. Aeschylus gives us a chilling example in the Agamemnon, when he has Clytaemnestra tell the chorus that it is not their business who will mourn the murdered monarch: This is no concern of yours. The hand that bore and cut him down will hand him down to Mother Earth. This house will never mourn for him. Only our daughter Iphigeneia, by all rights, will rush to meet him first at the churning straits, the ferry over tears— she’ll fling her arms around her father, pierce him with her love. (1578–1587)

Myself, I find few things more frightening than the idea that our loved ones will remember in the afterlife the ways in which we have hurt them in this one. Virgil’s Aeneid provides some comfort, however slight. For although Dido’s enmity toward Aeneas persists in the underworld—“At length she flung away from him and fled, / His enemy still, into the shadowy grove” (VI.634–635)—it also appears that the dead can forgive each other. In life Dido had broken the vow of perpetual chastity she had made to her dead husband—“The vow I took to the ashes of Sychaeus was not kept” (IV.778). But it is nevertheless in his company that Aeneas finds her in “the shadowy grove, / Where he whose bride she once had been, Sychaeus, / Joined in her sorrows and returned her love” (VI.635–636). Of course it would be wrong to leap from Aeschylus’s play or Virgil’s poem to the argument that Athenians in the fifth century BC or Romans at the beginning of the first century AD understood relations of love and hate to persist in the afterlife. (Just how wrong can be seen from Glenn Most’s contribution to this volume.) These texts do not claim to establish normative parameters of belief. At most we can say that Virgil (for example) hints at the existence of a strand of the Roman imagination that thought of widowhood unto death as a virtue, and of marital love as continuing into the hereafter. We could thicken that strand by pointing to other writers, such as Tacitus in his Germania, who proposed strict (i.e., lifelong, rather than serial) monogamy as an ideal.2 But no amount of thickening will yield what we call dogma. We might think that it would be very different with Judaism, which is, after all, a religion with a well-defined body of scripture and of law. Yet that scripture, at least when read without the benefit of elaborated exegesis, is notoriously terse on questions 2

Tacitus Germania 19 (p. 73): “Indeed those states are still better in which only virgins marry and the hope and prayer of a wife are accomplished once and for all. Thus they receive one husband as they have received one body and one life, that there may be no further thought on the matter, no continuing desire, that they may esteem not their husbands, so to speak, but the state of marriage.” There are, of course, plenty of burlesques of this ideal, e.g., the Widow of Ephesus in Petronius’s Satyricon.

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about—even the existence of!—“the world to come” (olam ha-ba). The resurrection of the dead, for example, is mentioned more or less unambiguously only rarely in Hebrew scripture itself (notably in Daniel 12.2, “Many of those that sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some to eternal life, others to reproaches, to everlasting abhorrence,” and 12.13, “you shall rest and rise to your destiny at the end of days”). It is therefore not surprising that there was little agreement on such questions in the world of Second Temple Judaism. Josephus, for example, tells us of three groups competing for authority in the century leading up to the Jewish wars: Pharisees, Essenes, and Sadducees. Adherents of this last group, he says, deny the resurrection altogether, and “take away the belief of the immortal duration of the soul, and the punishments and rewards in Hades.”3 Given that the afterlife was a major point of disagreement between the Sadducees and the Pharisees, and that this disagreement endured for some two centuries (from the Hasmoneans until the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD), we might expect it to have left traces in the textual remains of the period. In fact, I know of no Second Temple source that addresses our question, or gives any detail at all about the nature of human– human relations (as opposed to human–God relations) in the afterlife.4 This does not mean that such questions were not asked: on the contrary, we can be almost certain that they were, if we look beyond the documents preserved by Jewish communities, to those that we know as Christian. All three synoptic gospels, for example, represent the Sadducees as very concerned with the question of posthumous love, precisely as a way of ridiculing belief in resurrection. Let me just quote, as probably the earliest version, that of Mark 12:18–27: Then the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. “Teacher,” they said, “Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and have children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first one married and died without leaving any children. The second one married the widow, but he also died, leaving no child. It was the same with the third. In fact, none of the seven left any children. Last of all, the woman died too. At the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?” Jesus replied, “Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God? When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. Now about the dead rising—have you not read in the book of Moses, in the account of the bush, how God said to him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. You are badly mistaken!” (Cf. Luke 20:27–40; Matthew 22:23–33) 3 4

Josephus, Jewish Wars, bk. ii. chap. 8, sec. 14. E.g., in the seventh vision of Ezra in the chapters of 2 Esdra known as 4 Ezra, or the “Jewish apocalypse of Ezra.” The silence is all the more remarkable given the increasing importance of the afterlife in discussions of justice and theodicy identified by Shannon Burkes in God, Self, and Death: The Shape of Religious Transformation in the Second Temple Period (Leiden: Brill, 2003). Texts like Wisdom of Solomon 3.13 (“Blessed the sterile woman if she is blameless ... for she will have fruit at the visitation of souls”) suggest that lurking beneath this silence is a world of thought relevant to our subject. (Cf. Burkes, God, Self, and Death, 173.)

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The passage is striking, not only because it makes clear that the early Jesus had a very different position on posthumous love than the medieval one, but also because it suggests that already in the Second Temple period the question of postmortem monogamy was well established as something of a staging ground for debates about resurrection and human relations in the world to come. All the more extraordinary that these questions never, so far as my limited knowledge extends (and that is a severe restriction), rise to the surface of the texts that have been transmitted to us from any of several scriptural communities of Late Antiquity that we today call Jewish. The Talmud does contain traces of these questions, preserved primarily in material we call aggadic rather than halakhic, that is, in homiletic stories rather than in law or legal argument. Consider, for example, this story about Rabbi Hanina Ben Dosa and his unnamed wife. Rabbi Hanina is in some ways a “Jesus figure,” a wonder worker whose suffering sustains the world. As Tractate Ta'anith of the Babylonian Talmud has it, “Every day a Heavenly Voice is heard declaring, The whole world draws its sustenance because [of the merit] of Hanina my son, and Hanina my son suffices himself with a kab of carobs from one Sabbath eve to another.” Hanina’s poverty is an ontological virtue, but it is also a social embarrassment, particularly for his wife. “Every Friday his wife would light the oven and throw twigs into it so as not to be put to shame. She had a bad neighbor who said, I know that these people have nothing, what then is the meaning of all this [smoke]? She went and knocked at the door.... A miracle happened and [her neighbor] saw the oven filled with loaves of bread and the kneading trough full of dough....” But it is the next miracle that concerns us more: Once his wife said to him: How long shall we go on suffering so much: He replied: What shall we do? Pray that something may be given to you, [she replied]. He prayed, and there emerged the figure of a hand reaching out to him a leg of a golden table. Thereupon he saw in a dream that the pious would one day eat at a three-legged golden table but he would eat at a two-legged table. Her husband said to her: Are you content that everybody shall eat at a perfect table and we at an imperfect table? She replied: What then shall we do?—Pray that the leg should be taken away from you, [she replied]. He prayed and it was taken away. A Tanna taught: The latter miracle was greater than the former; for there is a tradition that a thing may be given but once; it is never taken away again. (BT Ta'anith 24b–25a)

From our point of view there is a great deal of interest in this passage: the hint (to put it in Christian terms) that we should not look for our treasure in this life but in the next; the implication that the righteous in the world to come live (or at least dine) in the same marital company as they did in this one; and the assumption that the same sociology of neighborliness (“keeping up with the Joneses”) that governs our world applies as well in the world to come. But note that the sages do not draw conclusions about the afterlife from the story; rather, they use it to make a point about the irrevocability of gifts human and divine.

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In this sense the Talmud is representative of the vast corpus of rabbinic material surviving from roughly 100 AD to 1000 AD. I have managed to find midrashim, like this one dating to the eighth century, that suggest descriptions of marital life in the world to come: All the orifices [of the body] will spew out milk and honey, as well as an aromatic scent, like the scent of Lebanon, as it is said: “Milk and honey are under your tongue, and the scent of your robes is like the scent of Lebanon” (Song of Songs 4.11). And “like seed” which will never cease [to flow from the bodies of the righteous] in the world to come, as it is said: “He provides as much for His loved ones while they sleep” (Ps. 127.2), and friends are none other than women, as it is said: “Why should my beloved be in my house?” (Jer. 11.15). Each righteous person will draw near his wife in the world to come and they will not conceive and they will not give birth and they will not die, as it is said: “they shall not toil for no purpose” (Is. 65.23).... and they will come to the world to come with their wives and children. 5

But these stories are rarely treated by their transmitters as conveying literal information about the world to come. On the contrary, they are almost always contained within a framework (often provided by the ancient rabbinic editor of the material) discouraging or even negating any such conclusion. Thus, when the great Saadia ben Joseph Gaon (Gaon is the title accorded the head of the Talmudic academy) took up questions of the resurrection in The Book of Beliefs and Opinions—a work often called “the first systematic presentation of Judaism,” written in Arabic, and completed in 933—he brought up specific questions that were presumably familiar to his contemporaries as staging grounds for objections to the doctrine of resurrection: “But suppose a lion were to eat a man, and then the lion would drown and a fish would eat him up, and then the fish would be caught and a man would eat him, and then the man would be burned and turn into ashes. Whence would the creator restore the first man?” In this case, Saadia was willing to provide an answer to the question: matter is never completely annihilated, and since God has promised man resurrection, he preserves the necessary parts.6 But when it came to love, he was more discreet. The question was, “In the case in which those to be resurrected were married while they were alive in this world, will each man’s wife return to him because of the fact that she had formerly lived with him, or does death dissolve all marital ties?” Saadia in his answer pointed out that the Talmud, responding to a question about religious rituals in the afterlife, had deferred the question to that future itself: “inasmuch as our teacher Moses will be with them [in the world to come], it is not necessary to rack our brains about the matter.” All the more so, 5

6

Midrash Alpha-Betot, Batei Midrashot, II, ed. S. A. Wertheimer (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Ḳuk, 1980), 458, cited by Charles Mopsik, Sex of the Soul: Vicissitudes of Sexual Difference in Kabbalah (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2005), 72. Saadia Gaon, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions [Kitab al amanat wa’l-i`tiqadat], trans. Samuel Rosenblatt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1948), 278. Similar questions asked later by medieval Christians have enjoyed renewed attention in works such as Carolyn Bynum’s Fragmentation and Redemption.

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said Saadia, in the case of marriage. “Our minds,” he explained, “are capable only of grasping our present state. As for what is forbidden or permitted in a situation that has no parallel at all in our earthly existence, such as whether or not marriage bonds will be abrogated for those who are resurrected, we need not concern ourselves therewith, since there will be available in the beyond prophets and prophetic inspiration and divine guidance.” It seems that the question of posthumous love here has achieved a limit status something akin to mystery: concerning a great many, but imprudent to speculate upon.7 Some two centuries later an even starker silence was maintained by an even greater systematizer: Moses ben Maimon, known as Maimonides or the Rambam. Maimonides is often considered the founder of Jewish “dogma.” He articulated, for example, the thirteen “principles of faith” that every Jew must believe in order to be counted among the Jews and have a portion in the world to come.8 Maimonides included belief in the resurrection of the dead among these thirteen (although he himself was repeatedly accused of denying it). And he was very well aware that there were many questions and many stories about the life of the resurrected. In his late “Epistle on the Resurrection” (1191) he called these “homilies and curious tales, of the sort that women tell one another in their condolence calls.” These tales he resolutely refused to address, on two principled grounds. First, the resurrection itself is a miraculous event. As such it answers to no necessity other than God’s promise, and cannot usefully be reasoned about. All our questions will be answered, but only in the event. In the meantime, it is as useless to speculate about (for example) whether we will or will not be resurrected in our burial shrouds, as it would be to ask why, in the miracle before Pharaoh, Aaron and Moses’ staff turned into a serpent rather than a lion. Maimonides’ second reason for silence was that, according to him, the resurrection of the dead is not the end-stage of salvation history. The resurrection will take place in this world, and the resurrected will live embodied in this world, albeit in the Messianic Era. Our true and final goal, however, is the world to come, and in that world, according to Maimonides, there will be only disembodied intellect. Digestive organs, limbs, genitals: all will be superfluous, and equally superfluous all questions about them, including those pertaining to the loves of the body.9 7

8

9

Saadia Gaon, Book of Beliefs and Opinions, 282 [Kitab al amanat wa’l-i`tiqadat, 231], citing BT Nidda 70b: “When they will be resurrected we will go into the matter. Others say: When our master Moses will come with them.” Cf. Maimonides, “Essay on resurrection,” Epistles, 321. The principles are given in the Commentary on the Mishnah, Tractate Sanhedrin, chap. 10. See Sara Stroumsa, Maimonides in His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker, on the relationship between Maimonides’ dogmatic reformulation of Judaism and broad trends in Islamic thought, particularly the “fundamentalism” of Ibn Tummart (ca. 1080–1130) and his followers, the almuwahhidun (Almohads), “proclaimers of God’s One-ness.” Maimonides, “Epistle on the Resurrection,” in The Epistles of Maimonides: Crisis and Leadership, trans. A. S. Halkin (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985). On the Epistle, see the scholarship collected by Joel L. Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s

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Maimonides’ example permits us perhaps to say something about why an idea, such as that of posthumous love, may be widely dispersed within a culture and yet leave few textual traces within it for the future. That such ideas were widely dispersed in Maimonides’ world is certain. He himself tells us as much in a letter to a merchant who had written to Maimonides, describing himself as an am ha-aretz, an uneducated person who knows no Hebrew, and asking the sage about his views on the resurrection. Maimonides’ reply may strike us as surprisingly gentle, even resigned. Do not consider yourself an ignoramus, he writes, but our beloved pupil, as is anyone who desires to study even one verse or single law. As for the next world: It will not be detrimental to your religion to believe that the inhabitants of the world to come are bodies, until you clearly understand their existence. Even if you think that they eat, drink, and procreate in the upper heaven or in Gan Eden, as it was said—there is no harm in that. There are worse things regarding which people are ignorant, without their ignorance being detrimental to them. (Epistles, 414)

Maimonides was the champion of a philosophical Judaism for whom the anthropomorphization of God—indeed the attribution of any material attributes to him—ranked among the grossest errors. How then to explain his apparent tolerance for the anthropomorphization of the world to come, and the materialization of its “rewards”? Maimonides’ own answer to this question appears in his commentary on Helek, the Mishnaic chapter from BT Sanhedrin, chapter 10. That paragraph runs: “All Jews have a share in the world to come, as it is said, ‘Your people also shall be all righteous, they shall inherit the land forever; the branch of my planting; the work of my hands wherein I glory’ (Is. 60.21). But these have no share in the world to come: one who says that the resurrection of the dead is not taught in the Torah....” “I must speak now,” writes Maimonides, “of the great fundamental principles of our faith.” He then describes five groups of confused believers whose misunderstandings are so widespread as to make it “almost impossible to find anyone whose opinion is uncontaminated by error.”10 All five groups he describes—including the ones that believe “that a man will live after his death and return to his family and dear ones and ... never die again”—are confused about the ultimate good, mistaking the means for the end in itself. Maimonides offers his readers an analogy for this confusion: Think of a child who is bribed with things “that a child loves in a childish way” in order to get him to do what he does not otherwise want to do, as when a teacher says, “Read, and I will give you some nuts or figs, I will give you a bit of honey.” God’s scriptures offer humanity instruction in much the same way, tempting them toward their ultimate ends by means appropriate to the stage of development at which they find themselves. If at first one toils for the

10

Greatest Minds (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 584, n. 37; and Sara Stroumsa, On the Beginnings of the Maimonidean Controversy in the East: Yosef ibn Shim`on’s Silencing Epistle Concerning the Resurrection of the Dead [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Makhon Ben-Zvi, 1999). Maimonides, commentary on Helek (Sanhedrin, chap. 10), trans. by Arnold J. Wolf in “Maimonides on Immortality and the Principles of Judaism,” Judaism 15 (1966): 95–101, 211–216, 337–342.

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sweet, later one will toil for the pleasure of reading: “A man ought always to labor in the Torah, even if not for its own sake. For doing it not for its own sake, he may come to do it for its own sake” (BT Pesahim 50b). According to Maimonides, passages that suggest bodily pleasures in the afterlife are the seducing sweet, to be left behind as soon as one acquires the habits and capabilities for more substantial spiritual nourishment. In this they are like anthropomorphic descriptions of God, a device by which scripture accommodates itself to the varying capabilities of the faithful. Elsewhere (in the Guide of the Perplexed), Maimonides will famously adapt a curious Arabic word to describe this accommodation: Talaṭṭuf, roughly translated (in Maimonides’ usage) as “shrewdness in the service of loving kindness.”11 In the commentary on Helek (as in the Guide, for that matter), this doctrine of accommodation allows him to articulate a vision of religious learning in which it is the scholar’s obligation to strive always to move from serving for the promise of reward to serving purely for the love of God.12 He characterizes this movement also as a hermeneutic one, from the literal meaning of “fantastic and irrational” texts about God and the world to come, to their “exceedingly profound truths,” their “hidden,” “real inner meaning.” Ultimately those capable of such movement will leave behind the possibility of any question about embodied life in the world to come. For the rest, such questions will remain acceptable, even necessary, for belief. If I’ve spent so much space on Maimonides, it is not only because his systematization of Jewish beliefs in works like the Commentary on the Mishnah and the Mishneh Torah came to stand for whatever we might call dogma in Judaism, but also because his philosophical critique of some of those beliefs in works like the Guide and the commentary on Helek helps to explain why questions, such as those concerning posthumous love, that are urgent and widespread within one register of a culture can take very different—in this case much attenuated—form within another. Our sense of the shape and importance of such questions will therefore very much depend both on structures of source production and accidents of survival (in this case, for example, our sources for the ancient and medieval beliefs of the “uneducated” come from the hands of redactors, “editors,” and systematizers with very different principles), and on the nature of our own interests, which compel, to some extent, our attention in particular directions. On questions of love and the afterlife, questions that are themselves deeply implicated in the processes by which the many forms of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have differ-

11

12

Rémi Brague, “La Ruse Divine (Talaṭṭuf): Quelques Textes Nouveaux,” in Adaptations and Innovations: Studies on the Interaction between Jewish and Islamic Thought and Literature, ed. Y. Tzvi Langermann and Josef Stern (Paris: Peeters, 2007), 17–26. Quoting Sifrei on Deuteronomy 11.13: “Should you be tempted to say ‘I will study Torah in order to become rich, or in order to be called Rabbi, or in order to receive a reward in the world to come,’ Scripture says ‘to love the lord your God’: whatever you do, it is only out of love.” Compare Matthew 23.

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entiated themselves from one another over time, those interests and that attention are not independent or innocent of our preconceptions about what those differences are. It is important to notice that, if we shift our focus from one register of a culture to another, or from one type of source to another, our sense of those differences—including those involving posthumous love—may also shift a great deal. We might, conversely, deliberately deploy such shifts to challenge our preconceptions about these differences. Gershom Scholem achieved this goal when he shifted his attention to kabbalistic mystical and Messianic strands of medieval and early modern Judaism that had been more or less ignored by the late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historians of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah). Scholem in fact set out on this exploration with the explicit intention of “rediscovering” a Judaism different from what he took to be the alienated one of Enlightenment and assimilationist modernity. One of the many differences he discovered has to do with our question of love after death. This is not the place to attempt an explanation of kabbalistic understandings of God, except to say that these made room for feminine and masculine attributes (sefirot) within the Godhead.13 Already the medieval kabbalists of the Castilian and the Catalan schools attributed to the divine itself a history of separation and reunification, of alienation, yearning, and recuperation, and often understood that history in terms of analogies drawn from human spheres of love and the erotic.14 In Iggeret ha-Qodesh (The Holy Letter), for example, the great Rabbi Moses ben Nachman (Nachmanides) or one of his students undertook to show how knowledge of and union with God is achieved through “proper sexual intercourse.” The project was explicitly posed as a philosophical polemic: “The matter is not as Rabbi Moses of blessed memory said in his Guide of the Perplexed. He was incorrect in praising Aristotle for stating that the sense of touch is shameful for us. Heaven forbid! The matter is not like the Greek said.”15

13 14

15

On kabbalistic terminology on the Godhead, the foundational work is Gershom Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah (New York: Schocken, 1991). As Scholem put it in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, rev. ed. (New York: Schocken, 1946), 225: “It is well known that those deepest regions of human existence which are bound up with the sexual life play an important part in the history of mysticism.” The phenomenon has become even better known since he wrote those words, thanks to the work of scholars like Charles Mopsik (e.g., Lettre sur la santeté – Le secret de la relation entre l’homme et la femme dans la cabala [Lagrasse: Verdier, 1986]; Sex of the Soul [see note 6]); Moshe Idel (e.g., Kabbalah and Eros [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009]; “Sexual Metaphors in Praxis and the Kabbalah,” in The Jewish Family, ed. David Kraemer [New York: Oxford University Press, 1989], 197–225); and Elliot Wolfson (e.g., Circle in the Square: Studies in the Use of Gender in Kabbalistic Symbolism [Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995]; and “Woman: The Feminine as Other in Theosophic Kabbalah. Some Philosophical Observations on the Divine Androgyne,” in The Other in Jewish Thought and History: Constructions of Jewish Identity and Culture, ed. Laurence J. Silberstein and Robert L. Cohn [New York: New York University Press, 1994]). The Holy Letter: A Study in Jewish Sexual Morality, trans. Seymour J. Cohen (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1993), 72–73.

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Texts like the Iggeret ha-Qodesh make clear that we should speak of more than one stream of “philosophical Judaism” (the Kabbalah is in fact often understood in neoPlatonic terms), and that in some of these streams marital intercourse remained a powerful way to imagine the overcoming of the gap between God and creation: so powerful, in fact, that soul and body, God and matter, might even become one flesh in nuptial union. In this sense, we should perhaps draw a (not very straight) line from treatises like the Iggeret ha-Qodesh to the Shnei Luḥot ha-Brit (two tablets of the covenant) of the early seventeenth-century kabbalist R. Isaiah ben Abraham ha-Levi Horowitz (also known by acronym as the ShlaH, R. Horowitz served among other things as the head of the rabbinical court of Frankfurt until the Fettmilch massacres and the expulsion of the Jews from that city). “In one respect,” wrote Horowitz, “the body and the soul are both equal: i.e., both are spiritual, as was the first man before the fall and as he will be in the future.... Even earthly matter becomes spiritual again and both will have the same value. This is the goal: [that the body and the soul] are eternal....”16 The possibilities for posthumous love are obviously very different in this cosmos of kabbalistic neo-Platonism than they were in that of Maimonidean Aristotelianism. Indeed the kabbalists’ theories of the transmigration of souls—theories that make room for the soul’s repeated movement across the temporalities of being in Paradise, earthly life, and the world to come—undercut the very distinction between “humous” and “posthumous” love. Many kabbalists believed that souls are paired in Paradise before their incarnation; that once incarnate they can alienate themselves from this destined love through sin; that reincarnation provides the opportunity for atonement and recuperation; and that this reincarnation can take place across genders, with, for example, a male soul being punished for homosexuality by incarnation into a female body. In such a cosmos, love affairs take place across multiple bodies, genders, and generations.17 Consider the case of the great Rabbi Joseph Karo (1488–1575), whose Shulḥan `Aruch remains a standard compilation of rabbinic law. In his Maggid Mesharim, the rabbi provides a mystical explanation (revealed by his spirit guide) for his wife’s infertility.18 Her soul, he explains, was that of a great male sage who had been miserly in sharing his money and his knowledge. As punishment, that soul had been reincarnated in the body of a woman who would marry a sage (that is, Karo himself) who would be generous with his learning.19 Later, Karo’s wife was impregnated by sparks from a fe16 17

18 19

Shnei Luḥot ha-Brit, vol. 1, fol. 20a, marginal note 25. Tr. Mopsik, p. 72. For an excellent introduction to kabbalistic ideas about reincarnation and spirit possession, see Jeffrey H. Chajes, Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). On Karo, see R. J. Z. Werblowsky, Joseph Karo, Lawyer and Mystic (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1977). Although these ideas are best known from their development in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century kabbalistic schools of teachers like Isaac Luria, Ḥayyim Vital, and Joseph Karo, they have much earlier antecedents. See, for example, the suggestions of Ezra of Girona, circa 1225, about the spir-

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male soul, and she then became fertile. This is not the place to discuss how sparks of soul work, or how one body-soul pairing can be temporarily impregnated by a righteous soul (`ibbur) or possessed by an evil one (dibbuk). It is simply worth noting that according to many kabbalistic schools, most famously in those of Rabbi Ḥayyim Vital and his students, multiple souls and spirits could coexist within one body, so that although marital union was monogamous in a carnal sense, it might not necessarily be so in a spiritual one. Within such a system it was not even easy to know what soul a child was conceived from: that of the mother, or that of a migratory “temporary resident” such as an `ibbur. My goal in these brief excursions through the writings of Maimonides and those (very different) of the kabbalists is not coverage but confusion: a dizzying glimpse of the many possibilities for posthumous love within a religious culture capable of simultaneously containing multiple visions of the cosmos. I have not yet begun to exhaust those visions: on the contrary, I have come across yet other types of sources that suggest whole worlds largely inaccessible to me. It is clear, for example, that within the specific local context of the Rhineland, the martyrdoms of Jews during the First and Second Crusades precipitated new crystallizations of love both marital and fraternal. What visions of companionship in eternity animated the martyrs as they slit their children’s throats, their spouses’, their siblings’, their companions’, and their own? The chronicles and poems (piyyutim) of lamentation tell us little, although occasionally we hear a faint echo of an animating hope, as in this account from the Chronicle of Solomon bar Simson: that same day... the enemies of the Lord came to a certain village, and in the evening the Jews there also truly sanctified God’s Name. Bridegrooms and beautiful brides, old men and old women, boys and girls—they all extended their necks and slaughtered one another, giving up their lives in sanctification of God’s Name in the ponds around the village. When the enemy approached the village, some of the pious men ascended the tower and cast themselves into the Rhine River, which flowed around the village, and perished by drowning. Only two young men were not able to die by drowning: Samuel, the bridegroom, son of Gedaliah, and Yehiel, son of Samuel. They were “pleasant in their lives,” greatly loving each other, “and in their death they were not divided.” When they resolved to cast themselves into the water, they kissed each other, and held each other, and embraced each other around their shoulders, and wept to each other, saying: “Woe for our partnership, for we were not given the privilege of seeing it produce offspring, and we have not attained old age. Nevertheless, let us now fall into the hand of the Lord, Who is God, Trustworthy and Merciful King. It is better for us to die here for His Great Name and walk with the righteous in the Garden of Eden than to fall into the hands of these impure uncircumcised ones and be forcibly defiled by them with their evil water”…. Fulfilling the Biblical verse “and in their death they were not divided.”20

20

itual reasons for infertility, discussed in Scholem, Major Trends, 227, citing Ezra’s Commentary on the Aggadot, partially printed in Liqquṭei Shechechah u-Feah (Ferrara, 1556), folio 14b. Trans. Shlomo Eidelberg, The Jews and the Crusaders (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), 51, with the exception of the word in italics. Eidelberg’s translation was based on Abraham Habermann’s edition, with the erroneous reading ‫( לבחרותנו‬p. 45). Eva Haverkamp

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It may well be that, among the many consequences of these traumatic events for the Jewish cultures of German-speaking lands, was a local revalorization of the power of earthly loves to endure across the bounds of death. But again, in order to reconstruct such a revalorization we would need to recuperate traces that lie scattered across diverse and often contradictory strands of Jewish culture. In this case, for example, we might look to local interpretations of Jewish law on the remarriage of widows. The Talmud itself contains diverse opinions on the question of whether or not a widow or widower should remarry. Arguments in favor of remarriage as an ideal could draw on diverse texts. My favorite is BT Baba Bathra 3b–4a, which recounts how Herod’s wife, the Hasmonean princess Mariamne (her name is not stipulated in the text), threw herself from a tower when she learned of her husband’s low lineage, namely, that he had been a slave. The text continues, “He preserved her body in honey for seven years. Some say that he had intercourse with her, others that he did not. According to those who say that he had intercourse with her, his reason for embalming her was to gratify his desires. According to those who say that he did not have intercourse with her, his reason was that people might say that he had married a king’s daughter.” Josephus had earlier related how, after Mariamne’s death, Herod tried in hunting and banqueting to forget his loss, but failed and fell ill in Samaria, where he had made Mariamne his wife. But in the Talmud, Herod became a type for necrophilia, for love that clings too long to its object—a derangement that the Talmud elsewhere calls a “deed of Herod” (Sanhedrin 66b)—and a proof text for legal arguments about the desirability of remarriage.21 Yet the Talmud also contains material that suggests the virtues of widowhood as monument to a righteous spouse. According to BT Bava Metsia 84b, whenever the widow of the pious Rabbi Elazar ben Shimon was approached with an offer of marriage, she would respond with a pithy proverb: “Where the master of the house once hung his weapon, should the simple shepherd now hang his pack?” The rabbis of the Rhineland seem to have reinterpreted such Talmudic passages, applying them in new ways to the questions of their own day. For example, when the

21

(pp. 412–415) found the manuscript to read ‫חברותינול‬, “our friendship, partnership,” which she translated as “woe for our spouses.” It could also, however, refer to the homosocial relationship between the two men, in which case the implication seems to be that their friendship will be fulfilled among the righteous in the world to come. “They were not divided” is a quote from Samuel II 1.23. (“Let us now fall” is also a citation, echoing David’s words to the prophet Gad.) There may also be an echo here of an ancient midrash on Lamentations, in which the two children of the high priest Zadok, enslaved, separated, and carried off after the fall of Jerusalem, are eventually forced together by their owners to breed. Recognizing each other by a birthmark, they “embraced each other and kissed each other until their souls departed.” Midrash 'Eikha Rabba I.16, ed. Shlomo Buber (Vilna: Romm, 1899) 42b; cf. BT Giṭṭin 58a. See Michael Fishbane, The Kiss of God: Spiritual and Mystical Death in Judaism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 84. Josephus on Herod’s sorrow: Ant. xv. 7, § 7. The Mariamne tower in Jerusalem, built by Herod, was presumably named after her. On BT Baba Bathra 3b–4a, see S. Geiger, “Oẓar Neḥmad,” iii. 1.

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Sefer Ḥasidim (Book of the Pious, twelfth to thirteenth centuries) emphasizes the virtues of remarriage as emphatically as possible, it tells a story in which a widow professes the willingness to martyr her own children rather than discourage a new husband from his pious matrimonial purpose by the obligation to maintain them. More practical approaches to questions of a new husband’s responsibility for the maintenance of children from a spouse’s previous marriages of course abound in the legal literature of medieval Ashkenaz (the Sefer Ḥasidim is not a legal text). What is interesting, for our purposes, about this rather horrifying limit case is that it hints at the new centrality of martyrdom in thinking about the “time-boundedness” of matrimony. And yet this centrality does not produce dogma. Indeed the Sefer Ḥasidim itself deploys martyrdom to make the opposite point as well, emphasizing the eternal marital commitments of the most pious: in memory of the righteous, the widow of a martyr should not remarry.22 In still other genres we can even find hints that the monogamous prerogatives of martyrs could be broadened into a spousal ideal for the righteous. An early modern (1602) collection of tales called the Maysebuch (or Maassebuch) tells the story of the pious Rabbi Josse the Galilean, visited by the angel of death, who warns him of his impending demise. The rabbi negotiates for enough time to tell his wife the news, but she is so upset by it that he promises to return every Sabbath and festival evening to say the kiddush for her as he has always done. He keeps his promise for some time, until some people walking by the widow’s windows hear a man’s voice saying kiddush and accuse her of keeping a man in the house. The rabbi reappears in order to accompany his wife before the rabbinical court, where he defends her honor and announces to the terrified court that henceforth they shall never see him or his wife again in this world. The good wife, who has been sadly mourning all these years, now dies of melancholy, presumably (the point is not made explicit) following her husband into the world to come.23 Stories like these often have a Talmudic “source,” in this case BT Ketuboth 103a. Ketuboth is ostensibly a treatise on marriage, but here the occasion is a commentary on 22

23

These texts from the Sefer Ḥasidim are discussed, and much additional bibliography provided, in Susanne Borchers, Jüdisches Frauenleben im Mittelalter: Die Texte des Sefer Chasidim (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1998), 63–67. The story of the widow willing to martyr her children is at Pl. 173a/BIII,680b. The Sefer also gives the example of a man who refuses the exhortation to remarry out of his love for his deceased wife, by whom he had a son and a daughter. Both children then died (that their death was a punishment for his excessive mourning is not stated), leaving him childless. The moral: it would have been better had he remarried and had more children. My thanks to Eva Haverkamp for bringing these and the following sources to my attention. I consulted Ludwig Strauss, Geschichtenbuch aus dem jüdisch-deutschen Maaßebuch ausgewählt und übertragen (Berlin: Schocken, 1934), 69–73. But see esp. Ma’aseh Book: Book of Jewish Tales and Legends, ed. Moses Gaster (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1934/1981). A more recent German translation also exists: Das Ma’assebuch: Altjiddische Erzählkunst, ed. Ulf Diederichs (Munich: dtv, 2004). On the redaction history of the tales, see in addition to the above, Jakob Meitlis, Das Ma’assebuch: Seine Entstehung und Quellengeschichte (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1933).

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the death of the great late-second-century Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi (also called Judah the Prince, or as here, simply Rabbi), traditionally considered the redactor of the Mishnah. “Rabbi said on his death bed: ‘The light shall continue to burn in its usual place, the table shall be laid in its usual place [and my bed] shall be spread in its usual place.’ What is the reason?—He used to come home again at twilight every Sabbath Eve. On a certain Sabbath Eve a neighbor came to the door speaking aloud, when his handmaid whispered, ‘Be quiet, for Rabbi is sitting there.’ As soon as he heard this he came no more, in order that no reflection might be cast on the earlier saints.” Comparing the Maysebuch’s version with that of Ketuboth, it is evident just how much both the marital and the otherworldly implications have been expanded. But the cultural work through which this expansion was achieved, and the nature of that expansion’s extension into other registers of Ashkenazic culture: of these scarcely a trace remains in the sources. I hope that this accumulation of anecdotes has convinced you that posthumous love was not only imaginable in Judaism, but that its imagining took place in manifold and often contradictory ways in diverse corners of a complex culture. Some of these corners have received the attention of historians, others have been more or less ignored: a choice that is often the result of what preconceived notion of “Judaism” we begin looking with. It is worth stressing that this a priori commitment is itself often the product of an underlying polemic within and across religions. For example, the rationalist “Judaism” emphasized by enlightened Western European Jews was very much developed with an eye on the Christianity of their neighbors; just as Scholem’s turn to the Kabbalah was, on the other hand, very much a rebellion against what he considered the “Protestantized” Judaism of modern German Jews. And of course the ways in which Christian scholars and philosophers studied these questions were very much informed by their starting assumption that Judaism was a religion incapable of love. Hegel, writing of Abraham in “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate,” can serve as a representative example: “His Ideal subjugated the world to him, gave him as much as he needed, and put him in security against the rest. Love alone was beyond his power....”24 All of this means that, in asking questions about Jewish love, whether in this world or the one to come, we must be willing to strip ourselves of a great deal of what we think we know. The same is true in asking questions about Islam, for here too, the

24

Hegel’s thinking about the Jewish incapacity for love is structurally central to his history of Spirit. “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate” was an early salvo in that history, first published by Herman Nohl in Hegels theologische Jugendschriften (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1907), and translated into English by T. J. Knox in Early Theological Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948; reprint Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971). See pp. 185–187, also 194, 196, 199, 202, and passim. Readers interested in exploring the further significance of Jewish lovelessness in Hegel’s thought can turn to Joseph Cohen, Le Spectre Juif de Hegel (Paris: Galilée, 2005).

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Christian West has too often asked its questions with an eye toward proving that—to quote August Wilhelm von Schlegel—Islam was too “cruel” to know anything of love.25 T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) provides a charming account of such stripping in his Seven Pillars of Wisdom, when he describes himself bathing blissfully in Wadi Rumm: a grey-bearded, ragged man with a hewn face of great power and weariness, came slowly along the path till opposite the spring: and there he let himself down with a sigh upon my clothes spread out over a rock beside the path... He heard me and leaned forward, peering with rheumy eyes... After a long stare, he seemed content, and closed his eyes groaning, “The love is from God; and of God; and towards God.” His low-spoken words were caught by some trick distinctly in my water pool. They stopped me suddenly. I had believed Semites unable to use love as a link between themselves and God.26

This is not the place to embark upon an exploration of posthumous love in Islam. Yet even for this essay on Judaism, Lawrence’s experience provides a fitting conclusion. I say this not only because he attributes the failures of love he had previously imagined to “Semites” without specification. The general point is more important: his revelation offers us a reminder, in a key resonant with current concerns about the legacies of “Orientalism,” that our beliefs about love and our politics of difference have a long history of intimate embrace.27

25

26 27

August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Observations sur la langue et la littérature provençales (Paris: Librairie grecque-latine-allemande, 1818), 67–69. For more on this aspect of European thought about Islam, see my “Islam and the West: Two Dialectical Fantasies,” Journal of Religion in Europe 1 (2008): 1–33. T. E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (New York: Penguin, 1926/1985), 364– 366. For a more general approach to this embrace, see my article “The Politics of Love and its Enemies,” Critical Inquiry 33 (Spring 2007): 573–605. For a survey of Islamic views on the afterlife, see Jane Idleman Smith and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), Appendix B, “The Special Case of Women and Children in the Afterlife,” 157–182. For an interesting subcase focused on martyrdom and posthumous love, see Maher Jarrar, “Martyrdom of Passionate Lovers: Holy War as a Sacred Wedding,” in Myths, Historical Archetypes, and Symbolic Figures in Arabic Literature: Toward a New Hermeneutic Approach, Proceedings of the International Symposium in Beirut, 1996 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1999), 87–107.

BEATRICE GRUENDLER

“That You Be Brought Near.” Union beyond the Grave in the Arabic Literary Tradition

Tales of love to the grave belong to the earliest layer of Arabic popular literature. The surviving tenth-century Catalogue of books available in manuscript lists several pages of titles with the names of lovers who go to their deaths (including both fictional and fictionalized historical characters).1 Thereafter these stories serve as prime material for a classical Arabic genre on the subject of love.2 According to the concept of love developed in this literature (which is not unanimous as to whether the act of falling in love is accidental or voluntary), once passionate love has taken hold of the individual, it leads through well-recognized stages of emaciation, raving, fainting, and sleeplessness, and ultimately to death. This does not apply to all forms of love, but only to the passionate type (ʿishq) between lovers of the same or different sexes. This essay addresses the question as to whether death through love is also a path towards reunion beyond. To preempt the conclusion: though death is made the place of reencounter in many stories, the depiction of this posthumous love surprisingly receives scant elaboration. More often it remains implicit.

Death as a Key Element Whenever love and death are discussed in the Arabic literary context, shahāda (not quite accurately translatable as “martyrdom”) is an immediate third element. The application of the concept has been discussed elsewhere and need not be repeated here,3 but once the connection was made, all those who died of love were labeled shuhadāʾ (mar1 2

3

Ibn al-Nadīm, al-Fihrist [The Catalogue], ed. Ayman Fuʾād Sayyid (London: Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, 2009), 2:327331 (sec. 8.1). For a general survey, see Anita Lois Giffen, The Theory of Profane Love among the Arabs: The Development of the Genre (New York: New York University Press, 1971); and Stefan Leder, Ibn al-Ǧauzī und seine Kompilation wider die Leidenschaft: der Traditionalist in gelehrter Überlieferung und originärer Lehre (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1984), 5761. See Friederike Pannewick, ed., Martyrdom in Literature: Visions of Death and Meaningful Suffering in Europe and the Middle East from Antiquity to Modernity (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2004).

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tyrs, sing. shahīd), and entire books were devoted to recounting their stories. Here, however, I will focus on death, the second key element in the classical Arabic love tradition. In this long and rich tradition, extending from the ninth to the seventeenth centuries AD, dying itself is seen as a virtuous act and an ordeal that conveys a saintly status. It is the mark of the lovers’ faithfulness,4 discretion,5 and piety in resisting illicit consummation of earthly love. Death is a proof of love’s purity and is its “ornament” (zayn alʿāshiqīn). This is also why such stories are reported, for instance, in the manual Malady of Love (Iʿitlāl al-qulūb) by the early theologian al-Kharāʾiṭī (d. 938) in the context of agony, virtue, and mercy.6 What is relevant here is the kind of death a surviving partner chooses as a way to join the deceased beloved (unless the lovers’ death occurs simultaneously in a double suicide). This death is a lover’s refusal to live without a soul mate who is not reachable in this world. The dying can simply be willed (as distinct from suicide with a weapon)7 or can be triggered by a verbal or physical remnant of the beloved. Beyond the lover’s volition to die, death is also the consequence of the involuntary and forceful trial that love poses and can be a welcome relief from its hardships. Already in this world, love is an emotion that is larger than life and shatters man-made conventions that suffocate it; it triumphs over earthly existence by rejecting it and truly flourishes only in the hereafter. The exclusive lifelong love of another person, named ʿUdhrī love in the Arabic tradition (after the Bedouin tribe of ʿUdhra who first became famous for it), is otherworldly even prior to death, which is its essential ingredient. Death thus marks true love, as in the last words of an ʿUdhrī youth:

4

5

6

7

Paradise is promised by the Prophet to a widow refusing to remarry; see al-Kharāʾiṭī, Iʿtilāl alqulūb, ed. Gharīd al-Shaykh (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2001), 192:510 and 1116; alternatively, al-Kharāʾiṭī, Iʿtilāl al-qulūb, ed. Ḥamdī al-Dimirdāsh (Mecca: Maktabat Nizār Muṣṭafā alBāz, 2000). Dying lovers express hope for paradise as a reward for keeping their secret; see ibid., 95:56 and 273:6. Al-Kharāʾiṭī belongs to the theological, as opposed to the belletristic branch of love-manual writers. For a discussion of his book and selected translations, see Beatrice Gruendler, “‘Pardon Those Who Love Passionately’: A Theologian’s Endorsement of Shahādat al-ʿIshq,” in Pannewick, Martyrdom in Literature, 189236. Later representatives of this branch are the Ḥanbalite theologians Ibn alJawzī (d. 1200) and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1350). A parallel from German romanticism would be Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea, in whose final scene the Amazon queen, who has killed her beloved Achilles, wills herself to death: “Denn jetzt steig ich in meinen Busen nieder, / Gleich einem Schacht, und grabe, kalt wie Erz, / Mir ein vernichtendes Gefühl hervor . . .”

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Wondrous is not the death of lovers from desire but their survival.

‫ح‬ ‫جيب‬ َ ‫ولكن بَقاءُ العاش‬ ُ ‫قني َع‬

‫ح‬ ‫ني يف اهلوى‬ َ ّ‫موت املب‬ ُ ‫ب‬ ٌ ‫وما َع َج‬

wa-mā ʿajabun mawtu l-muḥibbīna fī l-hawā wa-lākin baqāʾu l-ʿāshiqīna ʿajību.8

The great poet al-Mutanabbī (d. 965) put it even more poignantly: I blamed those in love until I tasted it and wondered how he who does not love can die.

‫ح‬ ‫عش ُق‬ َ َ‫ميوت من ال ي‬ ُ ‫بت كيف‬ ُ ‫فعج‬ َ

wa-ʿadhaltu ahla l-ʿishqi ḥattā dhuqtuhū fa-ʿajibtu kayfa yamūtu man lā yaʿshaqu.9

‫لت أهل العح ح‬ َ ّ ‫شق‬ ُ‫حّت ذُقتُه‬ َ ُ ‫وع َذ‬

But in poetry not every death is the same. Before physical death, the lover suffers metaphorical death (and resurrection) by the beloved’s glance or beauty.10

Is There Love after Death? In the Arabic literary heritage, love has indeed several transcendental dimensions. In Neoplatonist thought, love holds the cosmos together. All lesser forms of love (there are three altogether: that of the rational, the irascible, and the concupiscent soul, respectively) are reflections of, and a bridge to, the highest form. The same is the case with beauty. In Islamic mystical (Ṣūfī) thought (earliest representatives are al-Daylamī, d. 1001, and al-Sarrāj, d. 1106), the beloved is the divine, the love pure, and the yearning eternal. Nonetheless, this love takes on the vocabulary and symptoms of the secular love tradition and reinterprets them. Divine love even uses human props, such as the youth

8 9

10

Al-Kharāʾiṭī, Iʿtilāl al-qulūb, 322. Cited in Ibn Abī Ḥajala, Dīwān al-ṣabāba, ed. Muḥammad Zaghlūl Salām (Alexandria: Manshaʾat al-Maʿārif, 1987), and in the abridged version, Ibn Abī Ḥajala, Dīwān al-ṣabāba (Beirut: Maktabat al-Hilāl, 1999), 26. For the entire poem, see al-Mutanabbī, Dīwān Abī l-Ṭayyib al-Mutanabbī bisharḥ Abī l-Baqāʾ al-ʿUkbarī, ed. M. al-Saqqā, I. al-Abyārī, and ʿA. Shalabī (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1936), 2:323 (no. 154:5). The poetic Dīwān’s commentator (probably not al-ʿUkbarī, but his student ʿAlī b. ʿAdlān al-Mawṣilī, d. 1268) cites the earlier al-Wāḥidī (d. 1075): “Some people assert that this verse is inverted and implies, ‘How does he who loves not die?’ meaning that because of its force love necessitates death... [The poet] aggrandizes the matter of love, rendering it extremely hard, and says: ‘How can there be death for him who does not love?’ To wit, he who does not love needs not to die, because he does not suffer that which necessitates death. Passion alone necessitates it” (my translation). See, e.g., al-Kharāʾiṭī, Iʿtilāl al-qulūb, 195197, translated in Gruendler, “‘Pardon Those,’” 220222.

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Shams al-Tibrīzī for the mystic Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (Mawlānā, d. 1273) and the girl Niẓām for the theosophist-mystic Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240). But even between mortals, pure love places lovers above human judgment and makes them worthy objects of God’s mercy.11 Within the love-book tradition, this question receives attention from those theologians who are concerned with the moral status of excessive secular love and its consequences for the lover’s faith and salvation.12 In some accounts, the passionate secular love between humans (ʿishq) occasionally transforms into a paradisiacal love under the eye of God. Exactly how the lovers (or the authors of the books about them) fathom the afterlife is rarely drawn out in detail. I will trace, story by story, the few scattered glimpses of their imaginings that these books offer so as to unveil what is mostly an unspoken posthumous love. The examples derive from the afore-mentioned Malady of the Hearts (Iʿtilāl al-qulūb, abbreviated hereafter IQ), by the theologian al-Kharāʾiṭī, and the Collection on Passionate Love (Dīwān alṣabāba, abbreviated hereafter DṢ), by the Mamluk-era theologian-littérateur Ibn Abī Ḥajala (d. 1375), and are limited to cases in which the protagonists either die jointly or one immediately after the other.

Synopsis of stories of shared death in IQ and DṢ:

13

Page

Type of posthumous meeting

Literary devices/ narrative props

Description of the love

IQ 78–79 213–214

• A Nakhaʿite girl asks her lover to join her in the hereafter. • She gains saintly status and asks God to bring him to her. • They meet twice, as ascetics in this world and in paradise.

His dream of her after her death.

Her love beatifies her. She appears “in the most beautiful likeness.” He asks: “Is that what you have become because of this love?” Story ends with union in God.

IQ 184–186 216–218

• She wills herself to death after hearing of his. • They are buried together by the story’s narrator.

His poetry that reaches her.

--

IQ 186 218

• Caliph Yazīd II dies after the death of his favorite slave girl Ḥabāba.

Poetry by her maid -describing the void she has left.

11 12 13

Gruendler, “‘Pardon Those,’” 20410 and 226. See note 6. The citations in the following synopsis are taken from the translation in Gruendler, “‘Pardon Those’” (relevant page numbers follow those of the original Arabic in the left column).

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IQ 186–187 218–219

• A “last visit” is metaphorical: namely, her seeing his picture. • They are buried together by their fathers.

His portrait triggers her death. He died knowing she could hear his words (not quoted).

Burial epitaph: “What a beautiful grave that rests next to a beloved grave / What a visit that occurs by unforeseen decree.”

IQ 190 219

• A woman joins her male beloved in the tomb.

Her poetic exhortation of her soul to die.

She trusts that he would have given himself to save her in the reverse case.

IQ 191–192 219

• The young widow Umayma joins her husband in the tomb.

His poetry to her while She remains faithful to him. She speaks true alive: “If I die, raid each day and night with about her imminent death. memory of me.”

IQ 195–197 220–222

• The slave girl Ẓalūm dies of grief over the loss of her master, general Muḥammad b. Ḥumayd al-Ṭūsī.

Exchange of billets douces. Poetry set to music.

She dies after him. Bystanders comment: “She has spoken true,” i.e., about her love for him.

IQ 198 222

• ʿAfrāʾ dies upon al-Ḥārith’s death from lovesickness.

He asks her for a note. Her fragrance on the note brings on his death.

He threatens to die if no note comes, then an arriving note eases his death. Before dying she makes God the witness of her love.

IQ 198–199 222–223

• Having accidentally killed his With his poetry he Shaybānī love, a Tamīmī Bed- admonishes himself to ouin commits suicide. die.

The love he feels is “harder than death.”

IQ 205 225–226

• A suiciding lute player is joined by her lover, a fellow slave. • Common burial by their master. • Removal of wine out of piety.

His verse describes her drowning as posthumously precipitating his own.

His verse: “Death is the ornament of lovers.”

IQ 231 226

• Only one buried lover.

Poem by Ibn alLove was the cause of Muʿtazz (d. 296/908) death. personifying the lover’s tomb; it calls for mercy for the deceased.

IQ 259 226–227

• Queen Umm al-Banīn dies -above the place where her lover Waḍḍāḥ has been interred alive.

Lifelong love since their youth. He becomes mad from the love.

Beatrice Gruendler

76 IQ 323 229–230

• A Medinan aristocrat dies following his slave girl after one happy year with her.

--

--

DṢ 305 App. 2

• Both a Christian girl and a Muslim youth convert to each other’s religion.

They tragically miss each other even in the hereafter.

He commits apostasy for love and posthumous reunion.

DṢ 306-307 App. 3

• A Christian girl converts to the religion of her Muslim beloved.

She is pardoned. God His portrait eases her reunites the lovers in paradeath. She writes her last poetry on the wall dise. of her cloister cell. The narrator’s dream of her.

In the selected stories, couples most often simply join each other in death, the survivor refusing a life without the deceased partner. This is true for the ʿUdhrī Bedouin lovers (IQ 184–186/216–218) and for the Tamīmī Bedouin who follows his Shaybānī lover whom he had mistakenly killed (IQ 198–199/222–223). The urban girl ʿAfrāʾ follows al-Ḥārith into death (IQ 198/222). An unnamed woman dies over the tomb of her beloved (IQ 190/219), and a young widow, Umayma, succumbs above the tomb of her husband (IQ 191–192/219). A Medinan aristocrat dies following the death of his slave girl (IQ 323/229–230), and Caliph Yazīd II (r. 720–724) follows his favorite, Ḥabāba, into death (IQ 186/218). Queen Umm al-Banīn (ahistorically) collapses dead above the place where her lover, the poet Waḍḍāḥ (d. ca. 712), had been interred alive (IQ 259– 260/226–227).14 Death of love makes no distinction between genders or social classes. The spectrum comprises Bedouins and city dwellers, free individuals and slaves, commoners and aristocrats, marital and nonmarital love, and even one extramarital affair. But the lovers’ encounter itself is simply death, and what follows beyond the grave is left to the reader’s imagination. In the case of some lovers, their reunion in death is acknowledged by their survivors with a side-by-side burial, indicating that the lovers are deserving of each other, even if only posthumously. This occurs with the ʿUdhrī lovers, who are buried by the story’s narrator (IQ 184–186/216–218). The urban lovers Kāmil and Asmāʾ are likewise buried together—in this case by their remorseful fathers, who had forbidden a union in life— with a poetic epitaph about “the most beautiful encounter” (IQ 186–187/218–219). The bodies of a pandore player and her fellow slave, who had drowned themselves, are recovered from the river and buried by their master, the composer Isḥāq al-Mawṣilī (d. 850), who also has all wine removed out of respect for their self-sacrifice (IQ 205/225– 226). The eyewitnesses to these fatal events honor the memory and virtuous conduct of

14

Queen ʿĀtika bt. Yazīd (d. ca. 747), called Umm al-Banīn (Mother of Sons), was married to Caliph ʿAbdalmalik but appears here as the wife of his son Walīd (r. 705715).

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lovers whom they misunderstood or falsely accused of sin. These are redeemed in death by the chorus, and the otherworldliness of their love is recognized, although their posthumous fate is again not further described. In such literature, narrative devices play an important role. One of them is to invoke love as a cause of death without calling it suicide. This occurs, for example, when the Tamīmī Bedouin cuts his jugular with an arrow, thereby sharing the manner of dying of his lover, whom he had tragically shot, mistaking her for a pursuing enemy. In other cases, narrative props ease the death of a lover after long suffering. These may be a poem (one’s own, or verses of the beloved recalled by the lover from memory or heard from a bystander), a letter, a painted portrait, or the fragrance of the beloved. Some tales dispense with such aids altogether, and the surviving lover’s grief is enough to take him or her below the earth. The dream is the device used for the actual depiction of the afterlife.15 The sinlessness, or at least the pardonable status of death through love, is invoked repeatedly: before she dies, the urban girl ʿAfrāʾ implores God to be witness to her pure love (IQ 198/222). The earth itself is personified and given a voice to pronounce mercy over the tomb of a lover (IQ 231/226). Posthumous love itself remains elusive in most places. It finds some description in the tale whose protagonists renounce the world (IQ 78–79/213–214): the Nakhaʿite girl’s embracement of asceticism and dying as a renunciant enables her to seek posthumous union with her beloved. He had refused to meet her while alive, fearing to succumb to sin, her father having forbidden their marriage. After her death she appears beatified to her lover in a dream: through her ordeal, which she bore steadfastly, her sins have been erased,16 and her ability to speak to God shows her to have been rewarded as a true believer with paradise (jannat al-khuld).17 She is now one of the muqarrabūn, literally “those brought near [to God].”18 The heavenly reunion for which she has 15

16 17

18

This device flourished in the crusader period (twelfth to thirteenth centuries) in a type of story in which a warrior going to jihād is promised paradise and a wedding with a heavenly virgin; Maher Jarrar, “The Martyrdom of Passionate Lovers: Holy War as a Sacred Wedding,” in Myths, Historical Archetypes, and Symbolic Figures in Arabic Literature: Towards a New Hermeneutic Approach, ed. Angelika Neuwirth et al., Beiruter Texte und Studien 64 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1999), 87107, esp. 97. On worldly trials distinguishing the pious from sinners, see John Nawas, “Trial,” in Encyclopedia of the Qurʾān, ed. Jane D. MacAuliffe (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 5:362363. According to Sunni exegesis, believers are allowed to see God on the Day of Resurrection: “That day faces will be resplendent / Looking toward their Lord” (wujūhun yawmaʾidhin nāḍira/ilā rabbihā nāẓira) (Qurʾān 75:2223, translated by John Arberry, The Koran Interpreted [London: Allen and Unwin, 1955]), though there is dispute among theologians about the physical vs. figurative nature of seeing; cf. Daniel Gimaret, “Ruʾyat Allāh,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., eds. P. J. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 8:649. E.g., Qurʾān 56:1026; see Leah Kinberg, “Paradise,” in MacAuliffe, Encyclopedia of the Qurʾān, 4:1220, esp. 15b and 16b.

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asked is usually granted only to married spouses, and the couple had been denied a licit union in life; God is expected to bring them together in death as man and wife, overturning the parental refusal.19 Even more elaboration is found in two stories of lovers from different faiths. Interconfessional lovers face the greatest obstacle: they need to convert at death’s door in order to come together in one hereafter. The Qurʾān states explicitly that paradise is reserved for Muslims.20 Thus interconfessional lovers would be parted forever. There are few such love stories, but two appear in the fourteenth-century Dīwān al-ṣabāba. These interfaith lovers forswear their own religion in order to join their beloved in his or her hereafter. Death is their only way to meet and becomes a vantage point from which the afterlife is seen. Therefore these stories throw light on the tacit assumptions made in the other tales. One Muslim lover imagines the afterlife with his Christian beloved and is willing to brave the consequences of apostasy for the sake of reunion. He states: “So I fear I may die in Islam and not meet her” (DṢ 305). The Christian girl finds the same solution: “I want to meet him in the next world, I therefore attest that there is no God but God . . .” As they are tragically unaware of each others’ actions, they miss each other even in paradise (DṢ 305). The narrator comments on the man’s double predicament; for the heavy price he paid, he still failed to find his beloved because of their opposite conversions. In the second tale, a Christian girl’s conversion to Islam is followed by the eternal reunion of the lovers in Muslim heaven under the eye of God (DṢ 306–307). Dying she hopes: “Perhaps the Maker [of my spirit] will join [us] in the gardens of eternity.” This story fulfills what still lies in the future in the renunciant’s tale. Pardoned and brought close to God, “neighbor to a Single, Sole, and Steadfast One,” she has been rewarded with union, inhabiting the “gardens of eternity” with her sweetheart. What these stories lay open is what others silently imply: paradisiacal union is the unspoken destination of those going to their death for love.

Reticence in the Depiction of the Afterlife One receives the impression that in the rich Arabic literature dealing with love and death there is a hesitancy to depict the afterlife. Indeed, death from love posed two challenges. When the concept first emerged in the Bedouin society of the Umayyad period (late seventh and early eighth centuries AD), it responded to a strict tribal morality in 19

20

E.g., Qurʾān 2:25, 13:23, 36:56, 40:8, 43:70, and 44:54; see Louis Gardet, “Djanna,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1957), 2:447452, esp. 447b; and Harald Motzki, “Marriage and Divorce,” in MacAuliffe, Encyclopedia of the Qurʾān, 3:276281, esp. 277a. Qurʾān 2:112 and Kinberg, “Paradise,” 17a.

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which love matches had no place, and the deaths of young lovers (some of whom are historical characters) who were denied marriage reflected a social protest. In the literary afterlife of these figures, beginning with the early Abbasid period (mid-eighth to tenth centuries), when Bedouin love stories gained popularity, excessive love and selfsacrifice for another human being was equally antinomian because it blasphemously competed with devotion to God. Theologians had to grapple with this phenomenon, whose grasp on the literary imaginaire was too powerful to ignore, and they gradually accepted certain variants, namely faithful, virtuous (nonadulterous) love. In addition to the fame of the stories, a concomitant spurious Prophetic tradition (ḥadīth) promising martyrdom to dead lovers made this position defensible. Moreover, earthly and divine love became amalgamated: in the poetry of the Egyptian mystic Ibn al-Fāriḍ (d. 1235) and the afore-mentioned Andalusian theosophist Ibn ʿArabī, beloveds of Umayyad times, such as Laylā, Buthayna, Lubnā, and ʿAzza (and later additions modeled upon them, such as Zulaykha, known in the Bible as Potiphar’s wife), turned into hypostases of the divine. Blasphemy had metamorphosed into apotheosis. The posthumous union of lovers was now translated into the unio mystica between the believer and God, divulging which would have been equally unacceptable in the view of the mystics. Indeed it cost one of them, al-Ḥallāj (d. 922), his life, as he is said to have been killed for “divulging the secret.”

Appendix: Translations

21

Note to the reader: Early Arabic prose narratives (akhbār, sing. khabar) such as those following below are typically introduced by chains of transmitters (isnād) in reverse chronological succession, beginning with the latest and ending with the earliest transmitter, who is sometimes an eyewitness and narrates in the first person. These survive from the earlier oral method of transmission and have been retained in written composition as source references and stylistic devices.

1. [Lovers Renounce the World] Who in his passion refrained from committing sin and observed God Most High in search of rich reward Al-Mubarrad (d. 286/899)—Ibn Abī Kāmil—Isḥāq b. Ibrāhīm (d. 235/850)—Rajāʾ b. ʿAmr al-Nakhaʿī:22 21

For translations of the other stories discussed, see note 10. The following translations are reprinted from Gruendler, “‘Pardon Those,’” 213233, by kind permission of the Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, Wiesbaden, and the series editors Verena Klemm and Friederike Pannewick.

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There was in Kūfa a young man with handsome face who struggled with his faith and belonged to the renunciants. Living in the vicinity of people from Nakhaʿ, he looked at one of their young women, desired her, and lost his mind over her. She experienced the same. He sent to ask her father for her hand, but the father informed him that she had been promised to a paternal cousin. When the pangs of love they suffered grew unbearable the young woman sent [a note] to the young man saying, “I have heard about the strength of your love for me, and my trial through you and my love for you have become unbearable. If you wish I will visit you, and if you wish I will arrange for you to come to my house.” “Neither of these two things,” he said to the messenger, “Indeed I fear, if I should disobey my Lord, the chastisement of a dreadful day.23 I fear a fire whose blaze does not subside and whose flame does not die.” When the messenger left and delivered the young man’s words to her, she said, “In spite of all this, I see him renounce [his love for me] for fear of God. By God, no one deserves this more than another. Him—the believers all share!” Thereupon she turned her back on this world, cast off her ties to it, donned a hair shirt, and devoted her life to God. In time she wasted away and became thin out of love and grief over the young man until she died of passion and was buried. The young man used to visit her grave, weep, and pray for her. One day, slumber overcame him there, and he saw her appear in his sleep in the most beautiful likeness. “How are you,” he said, “and what has become of you after me?” She said: What excellent love, O beloved, is yours— a love that guides towards the good!24

‫ح‬ ‫وإحسان‬ ‫يقود إىل خ ٍري‬ ُ ‫ُحبًّا‬

niʿma l-maḥabbatu yā ḥabībī ḥubbuka ḥubban yaqūdu ilā khayrin wa-iḥsāni

‫ح‬ ‫ك‬ َ ُّ‫عم املَبّةُ يا حبييب ُحب‬ َ ‫ن‬

“Is what you have become because of this [love]?”25 She said: 22

23 24

25

The account exists in two slightly different versions. The IQ version (a) is reproduced by Ibn alJawzī, Dhamm al-hawā, eds. Muṣṭafā ʿAbdalwaḥīd and M. al-Ghazālī (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub alḤadītha, 1962), 263264; Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Rawḍat al-muḥibbīn wa-zahrat al-mushtāqīn, ed. Muḥyī al-Dīn Dīb Mastū (Damascus: Dār Ibn Kathīr, 1997), 372373; and Mughulṭāy alḤanafī al-Ḥikrī, ʿAlā al-Dīn b. Qilīj (d. 1361), al-Wāḍiḥ al-mubīn fī man ustushida min almuḥibbīn (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Intishār al-ʿArabī, 1997), 191193. The second version (b) appears in al-Sarraj al-Qāriʾ, Abū Muḥammad Jaʿfar b. Aḥmad (d. 1106), Maṣāriʿ al-ushshāq (Istanbul: Maṭbaʿat al-Jawāʾib, 1884), 102103; and Ibn al-Jawzī, Dhamm al-hawā, 262263. For the differences in detail, see the following notes to the translation. Qurʾān 6:15. The basīṭ meter is corrupt in al-Kharāʾiṭī’s version. Cf. the restored basīṭ meter in Ibn al-Jawzī’s version: niʿma l-maḥabbatu yā suʾlī maḥabbatukum / ḥubbun yajurru ilā khayrin wa-iḥsāni (What an excellent love, O my desire, is yours—a love that attracts towards the good!). ʿAlā dhālika mā ṣirti? The edition by al-Dimirdāsh (note 4) has the variant ʿalā dhālika ilāma ṣirti? In version (b) by al-Sarrāj and Ibn al-Jawzī, which does not describe her beatified appearance, the young man merely asks ilā mā ṣirti (Where have you gone?).

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[A love that guides] towards comfort and life unending in the garden of eternity, a kingdom unfading.

‫يف جنّ حة اخل ح‬ ‫ليس بالفاين‬ ٌ ‫لد ُم‬ ُ َ َ ‫لك‬

ٍ ‫إىل نَعي ٍم‬ ُ‫وعيش ال زو َال لَه‬

ilā naʿīmin wa-ʿayshin lā zawāla lahū fī jannati l-khuldi mulkun laysa bi-l-fānī

“Remember me there,” he said, “for I will not forget you.” “Nor will I, by God, forget you. I have asked mine and your Lord that you be brought near [me]. Help me with this by struggling for the faith.” Then she turned away. “When will I see you?” “Soon, you will come and see us.” The young man lived a mere seven nights after the vision before he passed away (IQ 78–79).

2. [A Common Burial] Keeping the Promise and Preserving Affection Abū l-Faḍl [al-ʿAbbās b. al-Faḍl] al-Rabaʿī—al-ʿAbbās b. al-Faraj al-Riyāshī (d. 257/870)—al-Aṣmaʿī (d.c. 213/828)—Abū ʿAmr b. al-ʿAlāʾ (d. 144/771 or 147/774)—a man from Tamīm [first person narrator]: I went out in search for a lost herd animal, and while I roamed the terrain of the Banū ʿUdhra, calling my animal, I chanced upon an isolated tent.26 At the tent’s lower edge there lay an unconscious young man; at his head sat an old woman showing traces of former beauty, who gazed at him absentmindedly. I greeted her, she returned the greeting, and I asked her about my lost animal, but she knew nothing. “Old woman,” I said to her, “who is this man?” “My son,” she answered. “Would you like a reward that costs you no effort?” “By God I like reward, even if it costs me.” “This son of mine desperately loves his paternal cousin. He had become attached to her when they both were young. As he grew up, she was kept out of his sight and he almost went mad. Then he asked her father for her hand, but the father refused to marry her with him, and another proposed to her and her father gave her to him in marriage. Thereafter [my son’s] body faded, his complexion turned yellow, and his mind wandered. Then, five days ago, she was led to her husband as a bride, but he would neither eat nor drink and faded out of consciousness, as you see. If only you would dismount and put the fear of God into him.”

26

Emending ataytu muʿtazalun ʿani l-buyūti to muʿtazalan. In the edition of al-Dimirdāsh (note 4), 2:193, the passage is marred by dittography. The variant in Ibn al-Jawzī, Dhamm al-hawā, 504–505 has idhā bi-baytin muʿtazilin ʿani l-buyūt.

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The narrator continued: I dismounted and did not spare a single exhortation with him until I came to “They are the capricious beauties, the companions of Joseph, those who betray promises. [The poet] Kuthayyir ʿAzza (d. 105/725) said about them: Is meeting ʿAzza anything but meeting a capricious beauty? And is meeting a capricious beauty anything but an excuse from meeting?

The narrator continued: He lifted his head, his eyes red as if angry. “Kuthayyir ʿAzza!” he exclaimed. “Kuthayyir was a fool, and I am a fool.27 But I am like [Jamīl] the brother of Tamīm who says: Love does not hurt as long as it is shown, but what the heart conceals does hurt. May God damn desperate love— how it goaded me like a captive with shackled hands!

I said to him, “From our prophet Muḥammad derive the words, ‘Whenever someone among you is struck by misfortune, he shall remember his misfortune of [losing] me.’” The young man recited: Why has the beautiful one not graced my sickbed? Does the beautiful one hold back or does she forsake me? I have lost you among them and been tried by passion— to lose a friend, O my hope, is difficult. Know that I was not kept waiting by anyone but you. I am surrounded by many of my kin. Were you the one sick, I would fly to you, no threat could deter me.

The narrator continued: then he sighed deeply, fell silent, and died. The old woman wept. “His soul, by God, has left him,” she said, and I felt like I had never felt before. When she realized what had befallen me she said, “Do not be frightened young man. My child has died, by God, at his appointed time and found rest from his torments and agonies.” Then she added, “Would you like to make your good deed perfect?” “Name whatever you like.” “Go to those tents and announce his death to them so they may help me bury him, for I am by myself.” The narrator continued: I mounted my steed towards the tents and suddenly found myself before the most beautiful woman I had ever laid eyes upon, her hair loose, as a recent bride. “May you chew stones!” she said, “whose death are you announcing?”28 27 28

Ibn al-Jawzī, Dhamm al-hawā, 504–506 has inna Kuthayyiran rajulun māʾiqun wa-ana rajulun wāmiq, “Kuthayyir is a fool, but I am a man in love.” Cf. the variant in Ibn Qutayba (d. 889), ʿUyūn al-akhbār, ed. Mufīd M. Qumayḥa (Beirut: Dār alKutub al-ʿIlmiyya, [1985]), 4:124–127, bi-fīka l-kathkāthu, bi-fīka l-ḥajar “May you have dust, may you have a stone in your mouth!”

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“The death of So-and-so.” “Oh, did he die?” “Yes, by God, he died.” “Did you hear any of his words?” “No, by God, only some poetry.” “What is it?” I recited to her his verses: Why has the beautiful one not graced my sickbed? Does the beautiful one hold back or does she forsake me?...

She broke out in tears and recited: I was kept from visiting you, desire of mine, by unjust jealous crowds. They divulged the misfortune that you know and blamed us—no one saw clear. As you are dwelling in a tomb today, 29 and the turn of all humankind are tombs, May this world not last for me another moment’s gasp, nor for them, nor shall they prosper!

She sighed deeply and fell unconscious. The women came out to her from the tents, she struggled for a while and died. By God, I did not leave the tribe before I had buried both of them together (IQ 184–186).

3. [A Caliph Follows His Slave-Girl into Death] ʿAlī b. al-Aʿrābī—ʿAlī b. ʿUmrūs:30 One day after the death of Ḥabāba whom he passionately loved, [Caliph] Yazīd b. ʿAbdalmalik (r. 101–105/720–724) entered her storerooms and cabinets and roamed about in them. He was accompanied by one of her maidservants who recited the proverbial verse: It is grief enough for the demented, stricken lover to see the quarters of [the woman] he deeply loved abandoned, void.

He let out a cry, collapsed unconscious, and did not regain his senses until part of the night had elapsed. He did not stop weeping during the rest of the night, and on the sec29 30

When reading dūr instead of dawr the verse changes to “and the houses of all humankind are tombs.” Emendation of ʿAlī b. Ghumrūsh, who also appears within the same isnād in al-Kharāʾiṭī, Iʿtilāl, 99, 149, 278, 336, and Ibn al-Jawzī, Dhamm al-hawā, 659.

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ond day, after having remained alone in his room in tears, they came and found him dead (IQ 186).31

4. [A Portrait Brings Death] ʿAlī b. al-Aʿrābī—[al-Mufaḍḍal] al-Ḍabbī (d.c. 163/780): Kāmil b. al-Waḍīn was passionately in love with his paternal cousin Asmāʾ bt. ʿAbdallāh b. Hishām. Passion had such hold on him that he turned into the likeness of a worn water-skin. His father complained to her father of what had befallen his son, and [the girl’s father] ordered [Kāmil] to be brought to his own house so he could marry his daughter with him. Meanwhile, Kāmil, knew nothing of this. “Can Asmāʾ hear my words?” he asked.32 “Yes,” was the answer, and he sighed deeply and expired where he stood. “He died from the agony of grief,” [Asmāʾ] was told. “By God,” she said, “I will die from the same. I would have been able to visit him, but ugly words of suspicion prevented me.” She fell ill, and when her sickness worsened, she said to the woman who most pitied her, “Paint his likeness for me, for I want to pay him a visit before I die.” The woman did so, and when the picture arrived, Asmāʾ pressed it to her heart, sighed, and expired. The young man’s father asked her father to bury her next to the grave of his son. So her father did and inscribed above their tombs: My life I pledge for both of them: they have not been allowed to taste their love in life before tombs covered them. They spent a little while not visiting each other, but when misfortune fell they were brought close by a mutual visit: What a beautiful grave that rests next to a beloved grave! What a visit that occurs by unforeseen decree! (IQ 186–187)

5. [A Call to Die] Al-Ḥasan b. Ayyūb al-Ziyādī—Aḥmad b. Ismāʿīl al-Muzanī [first person narrator]: I heard a woman say: 31 32

For a story about Ḥabāba’s influence on his political (in)action, see al-Kharāʾiṭī, Iʿtilāl, 278. Later versions (Ibn al-Jawzī, Dhamm al-hawā, 509–510; Mughulṭāy, al-Wāḍiḥ al-mubīn, 330; Ibn Abī Ḥajala, Dīwān al-ṣabāba, 316) add that Kāmil learns at this point that he is about to marry her, but his health has worsened beyond recovery, and he dies. Pseudo-Ibn Qayyim has the marriage concluded before Kāmil is carried, dying, to Asmāʾs house; cf. Pseudo-Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Akhbār al-nisāʾ, ed. Nizār Riḍā (Beirut: Dār Maktabat al-Ḥayāt, 1979) 57, trans. Dieter Bellman, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya: Über die Frauen. Liebeshistorien und Liebeserfahrung aus dem arabischen Mittelalter (München: Beck, 1986), 69–71.

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Grief enough it is that I spend morning and night in sadness for a tomb whose inhabitant knows not. O soul, tear over him the shirt of your life! O soul, do not hold back with life! He would not have refused to give his soul to save me if I had been the one inside the tomb.

She did not cease to visit his grave and mourn him with these verses till she died (IQ 190).

6. [A Young Widow Grieves Herself to Death] Abū l-Faḍl [al-ʿAbbās b. al-Faḍl] al-Rabaʿī—Muḥammad b. ʿUbaydallāh al-ʿUtbī (d. 228/842) —anonymous [first person narrator]: In Uqḥuwāna I saw a woman who had collapsed over a grave. She said: O tomb, if you let me intercede for him only once and brought him out from the darkness of vault and tomb, So I could see whether the dust has altered his face, whether the worms of the vault have ravaged those cheeks.

“Who is the owner of this grave to you?” I asked. “A cousin of mine who married me when we were happy and guileless in the prime of youth. He had only just begun to feel forever thirsty for me, and I never to have enough of him, when last year the Sulaym raided us. No one but I and he were in the encampment, so he went out to defend it, saying: Let the Zubayd announce my death, O wife of mine, ere I complain of jousting and attacking, when the steeds attack! If I die, raid each day and night with memory of me, and do not, Umayma, forget my friendship.

By God, he did not fight long before he was killed.” “How old was he?” “I am a year older than him, and I am in my teens. By God let me not smell the air of this world beyond this day.” I thought she was jesting, and when I woke up [the next day], I saw a funeral procession and inquired about her. “This is the woman,” I was told, “who spoke to you yesterday about her husband at his tomb. By God she kept her faith to him and spoke true about herself” (IQ 191–192).

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7. [A Slave-Girl Follows a General into Death] ʿAlī b. Zayd al-Ḥarrānī— Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm b. Marzūq al-Raqqī—Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Baṣrī— Aḥmad b. ʿUthmān al-Raqqī—a descendant of Ḥumayd al-Ṭūsī: Muḥammad b. Ḥumayd al-Ṭūsī (d. 214/829)33 passionately loved a slave-girl by the name of Ẓalūm. He was completely infatuated with her and she felt the same for him. One day, as he sat in his reception hall that had been carpeted with brocade, with singers and slave-girls at his feet—except for Ẓalūm—one of his slave-girls suddenly sent him an etrog stuffed with musk and amber. When it was placed into his hand, he smelt it, drank a pint, thought of Ẓalūm, and called out “Take it to Ẓalūm!” When [the messenger] handed her the etrog and delivered the letter, she wept bitterly until everyone present felt for her. “We have not seen anyone behave more strangely than you,” they said, “he sends you a greeting and you cry.” “I will sing a tune for you, so you will know the cause of my tears.” She broke into song: His loved ones presented him an etrog, and he wept and feared the augury of flying birds. He dreaded fickleness and separation, for they are two nuances that conceal the opposite of what they show.

When the servant returned, Muḥammad asked, “What has delayed you?” The messenger informed him that [Ẓalūm] had left her quarters, but he had kept inquiring about her until he located her whereabouts. This enraged Muḥammad and he wrote to her: You forsook the promise of a man who kept his promise to you in your absence. Amazing, his keeping of it and your forsaking it! You turned from him, and he has no recourse but to await the hour of your return. If you kill him, if you take his life, you do so 34 by the beauty of your face, not the beauty of your actions.

He sent the note to her through the messenger and instructed him not to accept any answer from her. When the messenger handed her the note, she perused it and wept until all those present at the gathering felt for her. Then she said to the servant, “Listen to a tune of mine and learn it by heart,” and broke into song: Will my eye ever find an intercessor with sleep? My heart is troubled with sickness. 33

34

His father, general Ḥumayd al-Ṭūsī (d. 210/825) won al-Maʾmūn the victory over Ibrāhīm b. alMahdī. The transmitter of the khabar may have been one of Muḥammad’s three brothers, Abū Nahshal, Abū Jaʿfar, and Abū Muslim, or their descendants. The verses are attributed variously to Abū ʿUyayna al-Muhallabī (fl. 136–158/754–775) or his son Ibn Abī ʿUyayna (d. before 170/786).

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You do not see me withhold tears from you, 35 no, by the spirit of the beloved, I have tears no more. My heart is stricken with sadness from you, my insides have grown [all too] familiar with moaning. O Muhammad, there is no false invention in affection, 36 all that I suffer truly is new.

She did not stop repeating the verses to him until he knew them by heart and departed. “Tell me everything about her that you saw,” his master demanded, so [the servant] told her story and intoned the verses and Muḥammad wept. “By God, she has spoken true,” he said, “there is no false invention in an affection for one like her.” He called for a sheet and wrote to her to come see him. On the bottom of the note he wrote: You lodged a sorrow in my heart that has destroyed patience with sorrow, until relief descends. If you have doubted in what I feel: the fire of love that has been hidden between my sides is my argument. Ẓalūm: ask my body about love for you, and it will inform you 37 that I am wasting away, raving, and [....].

The narrator continued: when she read the note, she jumped from her seat, hurried to his quarters, and said, “I am a slave and not in command of myself. If you are in need of me, go ahead and buy me so I may obey you.” She was bought for him and stayed with him for a while as the most cherished of his slave-girls and the highest one in rank. 38 Then the known events regarding him came to pass in the battle of al-Bābak. When the news of his death on the battlefield reached her, she mourned him deeply and performed his eulogy. Some of her verse is: The remains of Muḥammad b. Ḥumayd have decayed. The blood of noble deeds was spilled when his blood was spilled. I saw him sitting up against his sword-belt like the full moon when darkness clears from its face In a garden whose borders were overgrown with blossoms, which I knew, upon awakening, to be his favors.

35 36 37 38

Var. Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Rawḍa, 274–275, “by the right (ḥaqq) of the beloved.” Var. ibid., “but the departure (hajr) of him who loves is new.” The rhyme word kamajun (or kahajun, ed. al-Dimirdāsh, p. 196) might be a corruption of kamidun “distraught.” The version in Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Rawḍa lacks this poem. Muḥammad had been sent to fight against Bābak, the leader of the religious and social (neoMazdakite) Khurramite movement (201–223/816–838) and was killed; Bābak would only be vanquished under al-Muʿtaṣim by general al-Afshīn in 222/837. Muḥammad was eulogized by Abū Tammām and al-Buḥturī.

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I said, while tears of sorrow and sadness bathed my cheeks, ‘Have you not died, O brother of my soul, a while ago?’ ‘He does not die,’ he said to me, ‘whose nobility dies not.’

She did not cease to weep and to mourn him until she died. Al-Kharāʾiṭī: The poetry is by Abū Tammām (IQ 195–197).40

8. [A Fragrance Brings Death] On Taking One’s Own Life [Leaving behind] One’s Beloved ʿAlī b. al-ʿArābī—ʿAlī b. Tamīm al-Khuzāʿī—al-Sarī b. al-Muṭṭalib: Al-Ḥārith b. al-Shadīd was infatuated with ʿAfrāʾ bt. Aḥmar and remained ailing part of his life. She returned his love. When matters worsened he wrote to her: For a while I bore the secret of your love, though my sides are the truest witness [of my love] to you. Death it is, if no note reaches me from you to take within my heart the place of visitors to my sickbed.

She wrote to him: You have been spared that which you fear, obtained your wish, and gained your desire in spite of those begrudging it. By God, were it not for evil suspicions about me that one talks about, I would not have shunned visits to sickbeds.

As the note arrived, he placed it on his face, and when he smelt the fragrance of her hand—for she was the woman with the choicest perfume of her time—he let out a deep sigh that took with it his soul. “What harm would it have done you,” ʿAfrāʾ was told, “if you had eased his heart and revived him with a visit?” “What prevented me,” she said, “was your saying, ‘ʿAfrāʾ pines for al-Ḥārith.’ By God I will take my own life after him, so no one knows about my [feelings] but God, exalted is He.” And thus she did (IQ 198).

9. [One Arrow Kills Two Lovers] [Abū l-Faḍl] al-ʿAbbās b. al-Faḍl [al-Rabaʿī]—Isḥāq b. Ibrāhīm [al-Mawṣilī] (d. 235/850)—Abū Miskīn: 39 40

Dīwān: “joy.” Abū Tammām, Dīwān, ed. Muḥammad ʿAbduh ʿAzzām (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, rpt 1976), 4: no. 204, verses 1, 3-6.

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The camel mare of a young man from Tamīm lost its way and he went forth to the territory of Shaybān, calling out for her. Thus employed he suddenly saw a woman as beautiful as the sun and felt an agonizing passion for her. He went home to his people, but she had robbed his mind. He could not restrain himself from returning to their territory, and when the night was calm he said [to himself], “Perhaps I can soothe some of the pain I feel with a look at her.” He found her sitting within the round of her sleeping brothers. “O joy of my eye,” he said “passion has robbed my mind and troubled my life.” “Continue along your path lest I wake my brothers and they kill you,” she said. “Death means less to me than what I suffer.” “Can anything be harder than death?” “Yes,” he said, “the love I have for you.” “What then is your wish?” “Permit me to place your hand on my heart, and you have God’s promise that I will go back.” Thus she did and he withdrew. The following night he returned and found her in the same position and she repeated her former words. “Permit me to drink from your lips and to depart,” he said. When she thus did, it was as if her heart caught fire. She began to meet him night after night, and her tribe and her brothers became aware of it. “How come this dog lingers in these mountains, intruding upon us?” they said and lay in ambush for him that very night. She sent word to him saying, “People are after you, watch out and beware of dropping your guard.” Then the skies opened up with rain, which prevented them from pursuing him. Later the clouds lifted and the moon rose. The girl perfumed herself and let her hair down. She was pleased with herself and wished that he might see her thus. So she said to a companion whom she had told about her affair, “O So-and-so, help me to go to him.” They went out in search of him, while he remained in the mountains fearing pursuit, as she had warned him. He saw two figures moving in the moonlight and did not doubt that they belonged to his pursuers. He took out an arrow and did not miss the heart of his friend. She fell on her face, drenched in her own blood, and died in convulsions. He stood stunned, staring at her, and composed: The raven croaked that which I hated. Destiny cannot be undone. You weep, though you have killed her. Show patience then or take your life!

Then he gathered his arrows and began to pierce his jugular veins until he had killed himself (IQ 198–199).

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10. [Two Musicians Drown Themselves] Muḥammad b. Jaʿfar al-Dūlābī—Alī b. ʿĪsā—ʿAbdarraḥmān b. Isḥāq [al-Qāḍī (fl. 224– 228/839–843), first person narrator]:41 I was travelling downstream from Samarra in the company of Isḥāq b. Ibrāhīm alMawṣilī (d. 235/850), and when we reached a place called al-ʿAlth, Isḥāq called for food and we ate. He had two young slave-girls brought from the ship that carried the women, a lutist and a bandore player. A screen was raised42 and the bandore player sang: Oh, how I pity those who love I see no helper for them. How they are shunned, kept at a distance, beaten, yet they still endure.

“What do they do,” the lutist asked her, “if they do not endure?” “This is what they do,” the tambourine player said, as she tore the curtain, threw herself into the Tigris and drowned. Behind Isḥāq stood a youth with the most handsome face. When he saw what the slavegirl had done he said: You, beyond death, are the one who drowned me, 43 if only you knew! There is no good in us living after you, for death is the ornament of lovers.

and thereupon plunged in behind her and drowned. This was difficult to bear for Isḥāq, he removed the date wine and gave the order to search for them and retrieve [their bodies], and they were pulled from the water and buried (IQ 205).

41

42

43

Belonging to the aṣḥāb al-raʾy, he was first judge in al-Raqqa and (after 224) al-Sharqiyya, before al-Maʾmūn appointed him judge of Western Baghdād (Madīnat al-Manṣūr). Al-Wāthiq removed him in 228; Wakīʿ, Muḥammad. b. Khalaf b. Ḥayyān (d. 918), Akhbār al-quḍāh, ed. ʿAbdalʿazīz M. al-Marāghī (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Istiqāma, 1947-50) 3:282–283, 290, 324, 326. Emending maddat sitārahū to muddat sitāratun following the parallel in Dhamm al-hawā (573– 574). Cf. also al-Washshāʾ, Abū l-Ṭayyib Muḥammad b. Isḥāq (d. 936), al-Muwashshā, ed. Rudolph Ernst Brünnow (Leiden: Brill, 1886), 62–63 and ed. Karam al-Bustānī (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1965), 94–95, “a screen was erected before him” (nuṣiba sitāruhū). Bellmann translates baʿda l-qaḍāʾ as “according to fate.”

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11. [A Tomb Speaks] Mercy upon Those Who Suffer Desire and Their Reunion Muḥammad b. al-Faḍl—ʿAbdallāh b. al-Muʿtazz [poet-prince] (d. 296/908): I passed a blooming grave in the midst of a garden upon it blossoms sprouted forth like cushions. ‘Whose grave is this?’ I asked and the ground answered me, ‘Have mercy upon it, ‘tis a lover’s grave’ (IQ 231).

12. [Adultery of a Queen] Lovers’ Schemes and How Spies Harmed Them Muḥammad [b. Yūsuf] b. al-Faryābī44—Isḥāq [b. al-Ṣayf]—Abū Mushir: Waḍḍāḥ al-Yaman and Umm al-Banīn grew up together when they were young, and he loved her and she him. He could not bear to be without her until, when she reached maturity, she was kept away from him, and a long trial ensued for both of them. Then al-Walīd b. ʿAbdalmalik (r. 86–96/705–715) performed the pilgrimage, and tidings reached him of Umm al-Banīn’s beauty and culture. He took her as his wife and brought her back with him to Syria. Waḍḍāḥ lost his mind over her and began to pine and waste away. When he could no longer bear the trial, he left for Syria and roamed daily around the castle of al-Walīd b. ʿAbdalmalik without finding a scheme, until one day he saw a Greek slave-girl and did not let go of her until he had become familiar with her. “Do you know Umm al-Banīn?” he asked. “You are asking about my lady,” she said. “She is my paternal cousin, and she would rejoice at my being here, if you were to tell her.” “I will tell her.” The slave-girl then went to inform Umm al-Banīn. “Woe to you,” Umm al-Banīn said, “might he still be alive?” “Yes.” “Say to him, ‘Stay where you are until my messenger finds you, for I will not leave the scheme to you.’” She found a way of smuggling him in inside a chest. He stayed with her for a while, and when she felt safe with him, she let him out to sit with her, and whenever she feared the eyes of spies she had him climb inside the chest. Then one day, al-Walīd b. ʿAbdalmalik received jewels as a present and said to one of his servants, “Take these gems and bring them to Umm al-Banīn and say to her, ‘They were given to the Commander of the Faithful, and he sends them to you.’” 44

He taught al-Kharāʾiṭī’s teacher ʿAbbās b. ʿAbdallāh al-Tarqufī (d. 267/880).

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The servant entered without requesting permission, while Waḍḍāḥ was with Umm alBanīn, and he saw him without her noticing it. Waḍḍāḥ aimed for the chest and climbed inside it. The servant delivered the message to her. “Give me one of these precious stones,” he said to her. “Damn you,” she said, “what would you do with this?” He left, filled with hatred for her and went to al-Walīd to inform him and describe to him the box he had seen Waḍḍāḥ enter. “You lie, damn you!” al-Walīd said to him. Then he rose swiftly and entered upon Umm al-Banīn while she was still in the room, filled with chests. He approached and sat down on the very cask the servant had described to him. “Umm al-Banīn,” he said to her, “give me one of these chests as a present.” “O Commander of the Faithful, they and I are yours.” “I desire none other than this one underneath me.” “O Commander of the Faithful, in this box are things that belong to women’s affairs.” “I desire no other.” “It is yours.” He had the chest carried off, and ordered two pages to dig a well. They dug, and when they reached water, al-Walīd placed his mouth onto the chest and said, “O box, we have heard something about you. If it is true we will bury you together with this news and efface your trace, and if it is a lie there is no harm in burying a wooden cask.” Then he ordered the cask to be thrown into the pit, the servant flung on top of it, and then he had them both covered with earth. The narrator continued: Umm al-Banīn was often found weeping at this spot, until one day, she was found there dead lying face down (IQ 259–260).

13. [An Aristocrat Follows His Slave-Girl into Death] Passion and Ways to Prevent It from [Becoming] Treachery Aḥmad b. Jaʿfar—Saʿīd b. Ghassān b. Mālik—Abū ʿAmr al-Ashtar—Abū Muṣʿab [Aḥmad b. Abī Bakr] al-Zuhrī (d. 242/856):45 A man from among the descendants of Saʿīd b. al-ʿĀṣ [b. Umayya]46 was passionately in love with a young slave-girl, who was a singer in Medina. He pined for her a long time without letting her know. Then he became restless with keeping his silence and waited for her one evening. As she came out [of her house], he said, “My father’s life for you! Will you sing this poetry for me?” “What is it?” 45 46

Student and transmitter from Mālik b. Anas and judge in Medina, who championed raʾy. Umayyad aristocrat and governor of Kūfa and Medina; d. 59/678–679. The man was perhaps his son Khālid; al-Iṣbahānī (d.c. 972), al-Aghānī, ed. Mufīd M. Qumayḥa (Beirut: Dār al-Thaqāfa, 1955, rpt 1981), 17:154.

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I love you with every limb of mine. Do you have knowledge of the [love] I bear you? Will you reward with double love its like? Noble is he who love with love rewards.

“Yes,” she answered, “and I will also sing: To him who loves us, double love shall be. The virtue of him who brings it to light cannot be repaid. If [the love] I bear you were to be visible, 47 it would fill the earth with all its regions, and Ḥijāz.

The narrator continued: news reached ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, who was the governor of Medina (r. 87-93/706-12), and he purchased her for a high price and gave her to the nobleman. She stayed with him one year and then passed away. For one month he survived her and then died of grief. Abū l-Sāʾib al-Makhzūmī: He is the lord of the martyrs of love (sayyid shuhadāʾ alhawā), come let us slaughter seventy fattened camel mares upon his grave like the prophet honored Ḥamza, the lord of the martyrs (sayyid al-shuhadāʾ), with seventy recitations of “God is great”(IQ 323).48

14. [Opposite Conversions] Conclusion [of the book] mentioning those who died of their love and went to their Lord, small and great, rich and poor, and their different kinds and varying quests Abū l-Faraj b. al-Jawzī—our shaykh Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. ʿAbdallāh (the narrator): A man loved a Christian girl to the point that she robbed [him of] his sanity, and he was taken to hospital (bīmāristān). He had a friend who carried letters back and forth between them, and when the man’s situation worsened and death was upon him, he said to his friend: “The final moment is near and I have not met Soandso in this world, so I fear that I may die in Islam and not meet her.” So he converted to Christianity and died. His friend went to the Christian girl to find her ailing, and she said: “I have not met my friend in this world and I want to meet him in the next, I therefore attest that there is no God but God and Muḥammad is His servant and His prophet.” Then she died.

47

48

Possibly a misreading of the rasm of the more balanced “It would fill the earth with its regions of Syria and Ḥijāz” malaʾa...aqṭāra Shāmihā wa-l-Ḥijāzā, thus preserved in the parallels of al-Sarrāʾ, Maṣāriʿ, 68–69 and 419, and Ibn al-Jawzi, Dhamm al-hawā, 611–612). Maṣāriʿ (68–69 and 419) adds the comment of Abū Ḥāzim Salama b. Dīnār (d.c. 140/757), “He who attains this among those who love [each other chastely] in God is a saint” a-mā min muḥibbin fī llāhi yablughu hādhā waliyyun.

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[The narrator’s commentary:] I have heard nothing stranger49 than this tale and nothing more tremendous than this defeat. The Holy Scripture came first to her friend and erected between him and his female friend a wall with a [locked] gate, and he was put to trial with two ills, namely separation from his beloved and from his religion, and he met a bad end on both accounts. How could this not be so, for in his unprofitable commerce in love, he approached the place of perdition, and found himself on a collapsing overhang, ending with his apostasy and her Islam (DṢ 305; ed. Beirut, 260–261).

15. [A Christian Girl’s Conversion]

50

Al-Tamīmī’s [book] The Merger [of Spirits]—Abū Zayd the Grammarian—a traditionist (the narrator): In one of the settlements I entered a cloister in which, I had been told, one monk was knowledgeable about people’s stories and events. So I went to him and found him in a room dressed in Muslim garb. I inquired what had caused his [conversion to] Islam. He told me that there had been in this cloister a rich Christian girl from the tribe of Taghlib, and that she had passionately loved a Muslim youth. She offered him money and precious things but the youth rejected these. When her schemes failed she paid a painter one hundred dīnārs to paint for her a likeness of the youth as he looked [on a wall inside the cloister]. [The painter] did so, and she did not cease to visit the picture, kiss it to her heart’s delight, and then sit before it to weep. In the evenings she kissed it farewell and departed. She continued to do so for a while, then the young man died. She heard of this, and pain overcame her until she likewise fell ill. Thereupon she returned to the picture and did not stop kissing it over and over till evening came and spent the night next to it. In the morning we found her dead, her hand extended to the wall on which she had written: Death, take my spirit after its lord, take it to you, for it has perished together with its content [i.e., her beloved]. I have surrendered my spirit to the Merciful as a Muslim woman, and I have died the death of a beloved who disobeyed [my spirit]. Perhaps the Maker [of my spirit] will join [us] in the gardens of eternity on the Day of Judgment and the Day of Resurrection. The beloved has died, and [my spirit] has died after him in sorrow through a love that does not cease to give its lovers woe.

49 50

Aghrabu is emended from aʿdhabu (nothing sweeter) in the Beirut edition (see note 9). This account appears only in the Alexandria edition, 306:18336:21 (see note 9) and is missing in the Beirut edition, where a lacuna falls between the end of p. 261 and the beginning of p. 262.

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This [event] spread until it reached the Muslims, who carried her off, buried her at his side, and took her money. I was left grieving over what had become of her. Then I saw her in my sleep and addressed her, “Soandso, how did God treat you?” She answered: I have come to rest from what my hand committed, and I have become the neighbor of a Single, Sole, and Steadfast One. God has erased all my sins, and my heart is free of sadness and sorrow. When I came as a Muslim to the Merciful and said “You are not begotten nor do you beget,”51 He rewarded me and made me dwell in gardens till the end of time together with the one I love passionately.

So I knew that what she had gone to was better than that in which I lived, so I converted, and the cloister’s inmates converted together with me. She was the cause of this, God have mercy upon her (DṢ 306–307).

51

Qurʾān 112:3.

GERHARD REGN

Eros and Eschatology. Phantasms of Postmortal Love in Petrarch

“Utilis,” or useful, is what Petrarch considered Laura’s death to have been, because it had helped him—more quickly than would have been possible without that painful event—to free himself from the entanglements of an earthly love that stood in the way of the true aim of a Christian life, that of unconditionally loving God. This assessment of the death of his minne-lady is given by Petrarch in the Epistola posteritati, that unfinished letter to posterity which was meant to round off the collection of his “old-age” letters—the Seniles—with an autobiographical sketch.1 Petrarch includes no more precise chronological details in it of his liberation from the bonds of his love for Laura. It is merely about how, at the turning point of his fortieth year of life, the current practice of a sexuality qualified as obscene should be absolutely relegated to the past. This profession of Petrarch’s can definitely be considered plausible because there are no manifest facts to contradict it. On the one hand, the birth of his illegitimate daughter Francesca, shortly before this date, did not remain concealed from the public; on the other, the Laura love is, per definitionem, dissociated from sexuality: its distinguishing trait is precisely the unfulfillable character of the erotic desire. About the duration of the Laura love the Epistola posteritati makes no precise statement and, to be sure, this is with good reason: the autobiography that was to be placed at the end of the old-age letters was meant to convey a representatively conceived moral portrait of its author and, in this regard, the impression that even at an advanced age Petrarch had still not sufficiently oriented his life according to the requirements of a religiously founded gravitas senilis was to be obscured as far as possible. It is, however, precisely this impression that Petrarch conveys in other works in which the focus is less on the representative, and much more on the intimate self. Of particular importance in this respect is the Canzoniere. As a lyrical secretum curarum mearum, the 366 poems throw light on the problematic intimacy of the self, which the letter to posterity, aimed pointedly at a public

1

Francesco Petrarca, Posteritati/Ai posteri, ed. Pier Giorgio Ricci, in Francesco Petrarca, Prose, eds. Guido Martellotti et al. (Milan: Ricciardi, 1955), 29, here 4.

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governed by the rules of decorum, intended and had to keep under cover.2 This interaction of emotional semantics and lyrical chronology makes it clear that the demise of the minne-lady and the end of the passionate love in no way converge, rather separate very decisively. The culmination of the poet’s love for Laura is realized only after her death. First, let us consider the chronology of Petrarch’s lyric love story.3 In the Canzoniere Petrarch’s use of dating is unquestionably exceedingly precise. The innamoramento takes place on the morning of April 6, 1327, and Laura’s death corresponds symbolically with another April 6, that of the plague year 1348. After the death of the minne-lady, the love for her lasts another ten years. The Petrarch of the book of poems (who is to be considered as an autobiographical persona) is thus a man getting on in years, for whom, according to late medieval notions, the regulations of the gravitas senilis should actually apply, but who does not fulfill them. The semantics of love confirm this impression because for the period after the lady’s death an intensification of passion can actually be noted.4 The programmatic poem that opens the second section of the Canzoniere, following the news of Laura’s death, sets the scene: in it the lover emphasizes that he realizes that passionate love is bad for him, but that in spite of this insight he nevertheless clings to it: “veggio il meglio, et al peggior m’appiglio,” and so the long canzone “I’vo pensando, et nel penser m’assale” comes to an end (Canz. 264.136). Just as during the time when the minne-lady was still living, so too after her death does his love for her retain the complementary emotional structure that is characteristic of the Canzoniere as a whole. On the one hand, because the lady is unattainable, love is synonymous with suffering. Since the unattainableness is sealed by the finality of death, the suffering must also appear intensified beyond its previous extent. On the other hand, in order to be humanly bearable at all, there must be some kind of recurring compensation. After Laura’s death, this is effected by the imaginary encounters with the lady—encounters in which the illusion of phantasmic harmony prevails. Of particular importance here, in addition to the dream poems, is the sonnet “Levòmmi il mio penser in parte ov’era” 2

3

4

De secreto conflictu curarum mearum is the title Petrarch attributed to his book of moral selfinvestigation in the incipit of the text. Cf. Enrico Fenzi, “Introduzione,” in Francesco Petrarca, Secretum/Il mio segreto (Milan: Mursia, 1992), 8–9. Petrarch’s fictitious dialogue with Augustine is resumed by its author as a recollection of the scattered fragments of the poet’s soul (“sparsa anime fragmenta recolligam,” Secretum 3.103, in Francesco Petrarca, Secretum meum, LateinischDeutsch, eds. Gerhard Regn and Bernhard Huss [Mainz: Dieterich, 2004]); this is equivalent to the designation of the Canzoniere as a late collection of earlier “rime sparse” (Canz. 1.1), on which Petrarch bestowed the Latin title Rerum vulgarium fragmenta in the incipit of the autograph (Vat. lat. 3195). The Canzoniere is quoted following the Santagata edition: Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. Marco Santagata (Milan: Mondadori, 1996). On the chronological structure of the Canzoniere, cf. Marco Santagata, I frammenti dell’anima. Storia e racconto nel “Canzoniere” del Petrarca (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992), 321–328; and Giovanni Biancardi, “L’ipotesi di un ordinamento calendariale del Canzoniere petrarchesco,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 172 (1995): 1–55. Cf. Santagata, Frammenti, 307.

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(Canz. 302).5 This poem is remarkable insofar as it employs basic concepts of Christian belief to endow a desire that is contrary to religious ethics with the expectation of an ultimate satisfaction of which no further intensification is possible. Only in death can love be absolutely realized: what sounds like a prelude of romantic ideas is, on the contrary, an entirely unromantic reversion to specific medieval tendencies to hybridize the profane and the sacred.6 Here is the text: Levòmmi il mio penser in parte ov’era quella ch’io cerco, et non ritrovo, in terra: ivi, fra lor che ‘l terzo cielo serra, la rividi più bella et meno altera.

My thought lifted me up to where she was, The one I seek I cannot find on earth; The among those enclosed in the third sphere She looked more lovely, less proud then before.

Per man mi prese, et disse:—in questa spera sarai anchor meco, se ‘l desir non erra: i’ so’ colei che ti die’ tanta guerra, et compie’ mia giornata inanzi sera.

She took my hand and said: “Here in this sphere, desire unerring, you’ll be with me again. I am the one who made you fight so hard And who ended my day before night came.

Mio ben non cape in intelletto humano: te solo aspetto, et quel che tanto amasti e là giuso è rimaso, il mio bel velo.—

My bliss no human mind can comprehend; I only wait for you and what you loved so much, and is down there, my lovely veil.”

Deh, perché tacque et allargò la mano? Ch’al suon de’ detti sì pietosi et casti poco mancò ch’io non rimasi in cielo.

Ah, why did she stop speaking and drop my hand? For with the sound of words so kind and chaste I came quite close to never leaving Heaven!7

The sonnet describes how the lover, bereft by his lady’s death, is raised by means of his “penser” (1) to the “terzo cielo”—which designates the lovers’ sphere in heaven—and finds there the beloved he believed he had lost, although she is different and even better than he had ever encountered her on earth. Laura, who was always an incomparable beauty, is now even more beautiful: “più bella” (4); in addition, she is no longer his antagonist, as she was while she was alive (“colei che . . . die’ tanta guerra,” 7), but quite the reverse: his ally. She is “meno altera” (4), she extends her hand to her lover as a sign of amity, and she promises him that one day in the lovers’ sphere of paradise the two will come together in a lasting and perfect union: “in questa spera sarai anchor meco” (6). But this is not all: this union is (so to speak) the maximum fulfillment the 5

6 7

On the dream poems, cf. Oskar Büdel, “Parusia Redemptricis: Lauras Traumbesuche im Canzoniere,” in Petrarca 1304–1374. Beiträge zu Werk und Wirkung, ed. Fritz Schalk (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1975), 33–50; and Enrico Fenzi, “Dalla precarietà del sogno alle sublimazioni dell’intelletto (RVF 341–350),” in Il Canzoniere. Lettura micro e macrotestuale, ed. Michelangelo Picone (Ravenna: Longo, 2007), 733–755. Cf. Gerhard Regn, “Negotiating Religion and Art: Wagner, Petrarch, Dante,” in The Long Shadow of Political Theology, ed. Stephen G. Nichols, supplement, MLN 126, no. 4 (2011): 77–88. Translation by Mark Musa: Petrarch. Canzoniere. Translated with notes and commentary by Mark Musa; introduction by Mark Musa with Barbara Manfredi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 423.

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lover can wish for, the expression of the desire of the beloved herself: “te solo aspetto” (10), the minne-lady declares. What was originally an asymmetrical relationship has become symmetrical. The transition from asymmetry to symmetry is also marked in the poem itself by contrastive references to other texts in the Canzoniere. When our sonnet emphasizes that Laura actively grasps Petrarch’s hand, this refers to the poems of the in vita section that are devoted to Laura’s hand (Canz. 199 and 200). In these poems, her hand (as pars pro toto for her beautiful figure) is not charitable: on the contrary, it is offensive (“[o] bella man, che mi destringi ’l core,” Canz. 199.1). Furthermore, the hand here symbolizes a love relationship that frustrates the lover. What the desirous glance of the lover sees he may not touch; moreover, it even escapes the eye, since Laura, “con grave danno,” as Canz. 200.2 expresses it, slips on her glove and thus hides her physical charms from her lover. In “Levòmmi il mio penser,” by contrast, Laura does not refuse her hand, rather actively reaches with her own for the hand of her lover. In the cultural code of the time, touching the hand stands for the haptic sense, which, in the context of theoretical considerations of love (quite different from spiritual eye contact), is metonymic for physical union.8 Petrarch’s Renaissance exegetes never tired of alluding to the facts of the matter over and over again.9 It is therefore contact between the hands, referring to potential sexuality, that is meant to make heaven accessible to the lover, not only for a merely momentary sojourn but as a permanent dwelling place.10 In Laura’s view this then means: “Per man mi prese e disse:—in questa spera / sarai anchor meco, se ‘l desir non erra” (5–6). This suggests a certain piquancy in that the lovers’ sphere in heaven, within Christian culture from Paul’s Second Epistle to the Corinthians to Dante, was a place where love was a purely spiritual—and thus not a sensual or even a sexual— force. What Dante rejects at the beginning of the eighth canto of the Paradiso as an erroneous idea of the pagan world, namely that the heavenly sphere of Venus was tainted with the sensuality of “folle amore” (Par. 8.2), returns in Petrarch—not manifestly but covertly.11 The subliminal sensuality that pervades Petrarch’s heavenly contact with his minnelady rises to the surface when we consider our sonnet in connection with its most im8

The relevant point of reference is the (Neo)platonic hierarchy of the senses, which characterized touch (in contrast to the spirituality of seeing and hearing) as an utterly material sense. 9 Cf. Pietro Cresci, Il Petrarcha . . . con un discorso sopra la qualità del suo amore (Venice: Barezzo Barezzi 1592), 43: “& che il Petrarca desiderasse di soddisfare il senso del tatto, cavatelo dal sonetto che segue [i.e., “Anima bella,” Canz. 305)] . . . in quei verso (sic!): Con quella man, che tanto desiai.” The recourse to metonymy in order to express sexual desire is to be understood as a means of safeguarding social decorum. 10 The “unusual sensuousness” especially of the “physical contact in the ‘Per man mi prese’” has already been stressed by Paul R. Olson, “Two Sonnets of Heavenly Vision,” Italica 35 (1958): 156161, here 158. 11 Citations from the Divine Comedy are quoted from the following edition: Dante Alighieri, Commedia, ed. Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi, 3 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1991–1997).

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portant lyric intertext. “Levòmmi il penser” is easily recognizable as a reply to the last sonnet of the Vita nova, which also describes how Dante, or more exactly Dante’s sigh, is transported by his desire up into the heavenly spheres, where, in confirming his love beyond death, the spirit is allowed to see the deceased minne-lady Beatrice:12 Oltre la spera che più larga gira passa ‘l sospiro ch’esce del mio core: intelligenza nova, che l’Amore piangendo mette in lui, pur sù lo tira.

Beyond the sphere that circles most widely passes the sigh that issues from my heart: new intelligence, that Love weeping instills within it, drives it upwards.

Quand’elli è giunto là ove disira, vede una donna che riceve onore, e luce sì, che per lo suo splendore lo peregrino spirito la mira.

When it is near where it desires, it sees a lady, who receives honour, and is a light, that by its splendor the pilgrim spirit can gaze upon her.

Vedela tal, che quando ‘l mi ridice, io no llo ‘ntendo, sì parla sottile al cor dolente, che lo fa parlare.

Seeing her such, when it says so to me, I do not understand, it speaks so subtly to the grieving heart which makes it speak.

So io che parla di quella gentile, però che spesso ricorda Beatrice, 13 sì ch’io lo ‘ntendo ben, donne mie care.

I know it speaks of that gentle one, since it often mentions Beatrice, so that I know it truly, ladies dear to me.14

The last poem of the Vita nova uses the discourse schema of the vision: the lover is granted a view of his lady in the afterworld on the basis of a suggestive identification of poetic inspiration with visionary rapture.15 The motif of viewing appears three times as the central theme: “vede una donna” (6), “[v]edela tal” (9), and “la mira” (11). Structurally, the vision depicted by Dante corresponds more or less to what Augustine designated in his vision typology as visio spiritualis:16 The spirit perceives what is seen when it is released from the body: “corpus non est, et tamen aliquid est, iam recte spiritus dici12 13

14 15

16

V.n. 30. Cf. Olson, “Two Sonnets,” 156. The Vita nova is quoted on the basis of the text established by Guglielmo Gorni: Dante Alighieri, Vita nova, ed. Guglielmo Gorni (Turin: Einaudi, 1996). The same version can be found in Dante Alighieri, Opere, ed. Marco Santagata, Rime Vita nova, De Vulgari Eloquentia (Milan: Mondadori, 2011), 1:745–1063. Translation by Anthony S. Kline: La vita nuova/’The new Life’ of Dante Alighieri (online, 2002). URL: http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Italian/TheNewLifeIV.htm (07.07.2014). Starting with the first paragraph (“. . . pensando di lei, mi sopragiunse uno soave sonno, nel quale m’apparve una maravigliosa visione,” V.n. 1.15), throughout the Vita nova love triggers poetic imagination that in its turn is meant to assume the quality of visionary religious experience. Dante, whose purpose is to write a gospel of Beatrice (“Il Vangelo . . . di Beatrice,” cf. Guglielmo Gorni, “Saggio di lettura,” in Dante Alighieri, Vita nova, 276) envisions himself as a prophet in the guise of a poet. Cf. Augustine, De genesi ad litteram, book 12, especially 12.6.15– 12.11.22. Text according to Patrologia Latina 34, ed. J.P. Migne (Paris, 1845). On vision and visionary literature in the Middle Ages, cf. Peter Dinzelbacher, Vision und Visionsliteratur im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1981).

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tur” (Gn. litt. 12.7.16). Culturally, however, Dante’s vision is associated with medieval mysticism. One characteristic of the spiritual vision in its relation to mysticism is excessus mentis. The mystic is overcome by a raptus, with the effect that the mind seems to be freed of corporal bonds. It is “contra naturam elevatus.”17 Dante’s reversion to this concept is indicated above all by his demonstrative separation of body and mind. In fact it is not the lover in his personal integrity who reaches the heavenly spheres, but only the sigh that leaves the body of the lover: “Oltre la spera . . . / passa ‘l sospiro ch’esce del mio core” (1–2). Since the “sospiro” (2) is then described later on in the text as the “peregrino spirito” (8), the disjunction of body and mind is given even sharper contours. The vision is initiated by the force of suffering love. By means of personification, Dante emphasizes, however, in a manner typical of the Vita nova, that Amor acts as a being of its own who, as it were, exercises an external influence over the lover. In complete accord with what can be expected of a mystic vision, Dante stresses the immaterial and inexpressible dimensions. For one, the lady is seen as a being of pure light (“luce sì, che per lo suo splendore / lo peregrino spirito la mira,” 7–8), about whose physical features nothing is therefore indicated—not even her beauty is mentioned. Moreover, her heavenly appearance is beyond human comprehension, which is strictly limited to earthly materialism. The person of the lover, inextricably related to his material body, can therefore not understand what the “spirito” (8) reports about the content of his vision. He knows only that what he does not comprehend concerns Beatrice. Only against the background of the Dantean intertext does the different quality of Petrarch’s minne-vision acquire clear contours. At first glance, one might think that Petrarch, too, is alluding to the current schema of the vision with which Dante had worked (a schema that understood a vision as a spiritual occurrence independent of the body) because at the beginning of his sonnet it is the immaterial thought of the lover that allows the heavenly spheres to be disclosed to him. As in all medieval romance love lyrics, Petrarch’s “penser” (1) is a cipher for the minne-meditation that arises from the suffering of love18—the power of love that generates the vision.19 But on closer inspection, it becomes evident that it is not so simple, and that Petrarch does not appropriate Dante’s demonstrative disjunction of body and mind, which functions as a pointed signal of the visio spiritualis. Petrarch attempts to combine corporeality and visionary revelation. The “penser” (1) does not leave the body as the “spirito” does in Dante (“[o]ltre la spera,” 2); on the contrary, it transports the lover in all his personal integrity 17

18

19

Thus Thomas Aquinas following Petrus Lombardus. Cf. Kurt Ruh, Geschichte der abendländischen Mystik, vol. 3, Die Mystik der deutschen Predigerorden und ihre Grundlegung in der Hochscholastik (Munich: Beck, 1996), 151. On the medieval semantics of penser/pensoso, cf. the still fundamental study by Bernhard König, “Petrarcas Landschaften. Philologische Bemerkungen zu einer neuen Deutung,” Romanische Forschungen 92 (1980): 251–282. With reference to the intimate connection between poetic imagination and visionary mode in Petrarch, cf. Giovanna Crevatin, “‘Quid de nocte?’ Francesco Petrarca e il sogno del conquistatore,” Quaderni petrarcheschi 4 (1987): 139–166.

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into paradise, where he comes into contact with Laura: “Levòmmi il mio penser” (1)20— my thought raised me up into heaven. Thus, unlike Dante, Petrarch introduces the possibility that the lover’s view will not develop directly into the current form of the mystical-spiritual vision, the way it was evoked in the last sonnet of the Vita nova. Instead, Petrarch accentuates the dimension of a corporally restricted personality, differently from Dante, and in doing so aims at a reversal of effect: he proceeds to turn the spiritual vision into a physical one. This introduces the first of the three Augustinian vision forms that the church father always confronted with extreme distrust: the visio corporalis, which is so called because what is seen is perceived as physical (not merely spiritual): “Primum ergo appellemus corporale, quia per corpus percipitur et corporis sensibus exhibetur,” (Gn. litt. 12.7.16). Petrarch’s intention here is obvious. He would like to make the vision of the lady who was transported to the afterworld into a medium for a (compensatory) physical meeting with her, of the kind that was denied him during her lifetime. This is accomplished in two ways. First, he employs a rhetorical device to create the impression that he himself is present in paradise as a person. The “penser” (1) is simply an instrument of a visionary rapture, and it is in this framework that the whole person is transported to the afterworld and appears there as a perceiving and acting agent. To summarize the gist of our text: on earth, he says, I searched for Laura and did not find her, but in the third heaven I saw her again; there I conversed with her and also came into physical contact with her. In this way the difference between a spiritual and a corporal vision becomes blurred. But in order to achieve this effect, a second aspect is of even greater importance, and it concerns the precisely calculated employment of intertextuality. In a different mode from Dante’s, Petrarch’s vision does not lead into the fiery heaven of the Empyrean, which is, as it were, the ultimate location of paradise, but “only” to the third circle of the heavenly sphere of Venus. Thus Petrarch is naturally providing his contemporary readers with a clear and easily decipherable signal, because Petrarch’s imaginary rapture in the sphere of Venus evokes the vision of Paul, who reports in his Second Epistle to the Corinthians (2 Cor. 12:2–4) that he was transported into the third heaven. The apostle remarks there, among other matters and in the repetitive mode for intensifying meaning, that he was not able to say whether his raptus was physical or merely spiritual in nature: “scio hominem in Christo ante annos quattuordecim sive in corpore nescio sive extra corpus nescio Deus scit raptum eiusmodi usque ad tertium caelum.” Augustine, who characteristically develops his typology of the various types of visions from the commentary on the Pauline vision of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, moved this indecisiveness to the center of his considerations because he believed that in this way he could eliminate the precarious and problematic aspects of the Pauline account.21 Thus the indecisiveness functioned for him as an indicator that the apostle’s vision had been of a different and more elevated nature: neither a physical nor 20 21

Emphasis mine. Cf. Gn. litt. 12.1.1.

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a spiritual revelation, rather one that was purely intellectual.22 On closer consideration, Augustine’s interpretation of the quality of the apostle’s heavenly vision proves to be a rather sophistic denial of the problem raised by the Pauline text, and the great poets of the Italian Middle Ages were not willing to follow the Bishop of Hippo on this point. Dante—and not the Dante of the Vita nova, but he of the later Commedia— also referred to the Second Epistle to the Corinthians in order to establish a theological authorization for the journey to the afterworld. This occurs in the second canto of the Inferno, where the wanderer first doubts whether he has been chosen, as Paul the “Vas d’elezione” (Inf. 2.28) was, to whom access to paradise had been disclosed so that in this way he could strengthen men in their faith and show them the path to salvation. This doubt is not only overcome with the help of Virgil, who offers to be his guide through the three realms of the afterworld, but even more so by the narrative process of the story itself. When in earthly paradise at the summit of the mountain of purgatory the wanderer Dante gains an insight—by means of the spectacle of the allegorical procession of the church—into the arcana of belief and the history of salvation, Beatrice asks him to write, as Paul did, about what he has seen once he returns to earth and to proclaim salvation to wayward mankind: “. . . in pro del mondo che mal vive, / . . . quel che vedi, / ritornato di là, fa che tu scrive” (Purg. 32.103–105).The witnessing of what has been seen becomes the “poema sacro” (Par. 25.1) that the Commedia is intended to be, and in writing it down Dante fulfills his given task. In order to authorize his own experience of the afterworld, Dante recurs to the authority of Paul’s vision in the Second Corinthian Epistle, but he does so in such a way that the ambiguity of its status—“sive in corpore, sive extra corpus nescio”—is actually eliminated. What was merely a possibility with Paul is a narratively established fact with Dante. The Commedia recounts a story that its narrator presents as the truthful report of a visio corporalis. The entire narrative is designed to convey this impression, and the narrator, too, repeatedly affirms that he walked through the afterworld as a human being with a soul and body. And thus in the proem of the third cantica, at the beginning of the Paradiso, with respect to the Empyrean, he says: Nel ciel che più de la sua luce prende fu’io, e vidi cose che ridire né sa né può chi di là sù discende (Par. 1.4–6)

I have been in that heaven He makes most bright, And seen things neither mind can hold nor tongue Utter, when one descends from such great height23

The aspect of the spectacle—“vidi”—is bound in this exponential passage to the presence of the viewing person in the world being viewed, whereby Dante stresses the sig-

22 23

Cf. Gn. litt. 12.28.56 (“Intellectualem fuisse Apostoli visionem”). Translation by Anthony Esolen: Dante. Paradise, a new translation by Anthony Esolen (New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2004), p. 3.

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nificance of his statement with a strongly marked rejet. The message is clear, and it reads: I, the narrator Dante, did not just have a mental vision of paradise but was there myself. When Petrarch evokes the Pauline vision reported in the Second Corinthian Epistle in order to fashion his vision of Laura in paradise, he does it in such a manner that the allusion appears to be mediated by Dante’s “poema sacro” (Par. 25.1). As the connecting link, the Commedia can be useful here for the particular reason that unlike Paul, but exactly like Dante, Petrarch understands the minne-lady as the pivotal and central point of the afterworld vision.24 But this is not the decisive point. Dante is of special importance for Petrarch primarily for another reason. It is Dante who eliminates the ambiguous status of the Pauline vision and restricts it to a variant of the visio corporalis. The conjunction of vision and corporeality is central to Petrarch’s purpose of placing the heavenly meeting with Laura under an erotic sign, whose covert basis is sensual desire.25 It is not without a sense of paradox that the affirmative allusion to the Dante of the Commedia must serve as an excuse to make the essential difference to the Dante of the Vita nova apparent. Because in the lyrically centered work of Dante’s youth, we recall, the view of the minne-lady transported into the afterlife had been of a purely spiritual nature. And so it had to be, primarily because in the Vita nova posthumous love served towards a theologicalization of stilnovist poetry, in which radicalism and heresy went hand in hand.26 The early Vita nova is, unlike the later Commedia, a gospel of Beatrice.27 Beatrice is the Lady of Salvation, and not just metaphorically but in a completely literal and theological sense.28 The conceptual crux of the Vita nova is the intention to endow the minne-lady with a christological form. The young minne-poet wants in this way to respond to the drama of Christian culture, a drama in which the crucial point is the default of the Redeemer’s return. Beatrice functions in the Vita nova as a supplement for Christ because she provides a substitute for something that the world (still) lacks: the presence of the Savior. With Beatrice a new redeemer comes into the world, though like the Son of 24

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27 28

Nevertheless there remains a marked difference between the heavenly experience of the Commedia and our sonnet: Dante is guided to paradise by Beatrice as an elected one, whereas Petrarch, so to speak, elects himself: our sonnet suggests that it is the love for Laura (“il mio penser,” 1, emphasis mine) that has the power to open the gates of heaven for Petrarch in his personal integrity. In other words: the penser has the force to produce a corporal experience equivalent to that of the religious visio corporalis. There is only one single place in the voluminous Canzoniere where Petrarch, referring to the Provencal genre of alba, makes the covert sexual desire of the lover explicit: “Con lei foss’io . . . // sol una nocte, et mai non fosse l’alba” (Canz. 22.31–33). On the heretic quality of the Vita nova as compared to the Commedia, cf. Gerhard Regn, “Dantes Beatrice und die Poetik des Heils,” in Mythen Europas. Schlüsselfiguren der Imagination, eds. Almut Schneider and Michael Neumann (Regensburg: Pustet, 2005), 129–143. Cf. note 13. “[D]onna della salute,” V.n. 1.15.

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God she, too, must die in order to indicate the path to salvation, if not to all of mankind then at least to the soul of the lover.29 On this path the visionary transporting of the lover is a milestone. Beatrice reigns in the Empyrean (“riceve onore”; “[o]ltre la spera,” 6) as if she were the Redeemer himself ascended to heaven. Not without reason did Dante choose the same term for the two in the very last sentence of the Vita nova— “benedecta” / “benedictus”—thereby at the same time elevating the lady (and not God) to the lover’s ultimate aim of existence: E poi piaccia a colui che è sire de la cortesia che la mia anima sen possa gire a vedere la gloria della sua donna, cioè di quella benedecta Beatrice, la quale gloriosamente mira nella faccia di Colui ‘qui est per omnia secula benedictus. (V.n. 31.3)

And then may it be pleasing to Him who is the Lord of courtesy, that my soul might go to see the glory of its lady, that is of that blessed Beatrice, who gloriously gazes on the face of Him who is blessed throughout all the ages.30

Beatrice’s heavenly spirituality is expressed, as already mentioned, in her presence as a being of pure light that cannot be touched but only looked at, and whose radiance is beyond the comprehension of a human being in his corporeality. It is from exactly this account that Petrarch distances himself in his visionary poem. Laura is not a creature of light, she is merely beautiful, although more beautiful than during her lifetime (“più bella,” 4). That Dante omits the beauty motif from his characterization of Beatrice is mentioned only in passing. Furthermore, unlike Beatrice, Laura is not silent: in fact, she actually speaks, and her words, unlike those of Dante’s sigh, are understood by her lover. Finally, she is touchable, as she herself extends her hand to him: “Per man mi prese” (5). As in all visions, Petrarch’s is subject to temporal limitations: Laura soon falls silent, she withdraws her hand, and the lover must leave the heavenly realm.31 What remains with him, however, is the message that his minne-lady conveyed to him within the framework of the vision. And this message is so composed that outwardly Christian orthodoxy is not manifestly renounced, while secretly a longing is suggested that contradicts this orthodoxy.32 What Laura actually articulates is a double expectation. For one, she declares that her yearning is focused exclusively on the coming of the beloved: “te solo aspetto” (10). This is not only an outright reversal of the love relationship that existed when she was alive; it is also theologically disconcerting because the unconditional longing of the 29 30 31 32

The premonition of her death is combined with the signs of the crucifixion of Christ, e.g., an eclipse of the sun and an earthquake; cf. V.n. 14.5. Translation by Anthony S. Kline: La vita nuova/’The new Life’ of Dante Alighieri (online, 2002). URL: http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Italian/TheNewLifeIV.htm (07.07.2014). “Allargò la mano,” 12. In addition to this, Laura’s message for Petrarch contrasts bluntly with the order Beatrice conveys to Dante in the Commedia: Laura utters a promise of mere subjective relevance (“In questa spera / sarai ancor meco, se ‘l desir non erra,” 5–6), whereas Beatrice transmits an obligatory mandate, which is objectively directed to all of mankind.

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blessed should be for God, who alone through his presence in the visio beatifica is able to grant supreme happiness. This, however, is not what is meant here: instead, the impression is conveyed that when the lover is one day also admitted into heaven for good, he will assume the position for Laura that in Christian belief is reserved for God. This impression is affirmed by yet another aspect. When Laura proclaims that her good (“ben,” 9) cannot possibly be comprehended by human intellect, this is at first nothing but the completely natural declaration of a blessed soul. When immediately afterwards she states, however, that the expectation of the coming of her minne-singer is still unfulfilled, she is letting it be known between the lines that something is lacking in her happiness, namely the posthumous togetherness with the man whose love has remained constant since her death and which she now reciprocates. The nearness to God is subversively replaced by that of the beloved. Paradise in this poem becomes the place where lovers are united and not where the viewing of God creates blessed souls. This is, as noted, one aspect of Laura’s expectation. The other concerns the Christian dogma of the resurrection: The soul of the lady (theologically orthodox) expresses a yearning for her mortal remains, which she lost when she died: “aspetto . . . / . . . il mio bel velo” (11–12). The syntactical linking of the two expectations thus functions as an interpretive signal. It indicates that the resurrection of the body and the coming of the lover belong together. The resurrection was a controversial theological subject during Petrarch’s lifetime.33 It was initiated by several testimonies of Pope John XXII. In various sermons during the early 1330s, he developed the (pronouncedly anti-Platonic) idea that the blessed could not experience complete bliss right after their death, but only with the resurrection in the flesh. Only when the soul is united with the body does it achieve perfection, and only in this state of perfection can the aim of existence, the visio beatifica, be attained. The views of the pope were heatedly discussed, in fact, mainly with the recognized purpose of creating scandal, and this, not least, because of the negative political consequences involved. They placed John closer to the Cathars and thus provided more targets for the attacks of his embittered imperial opponent, Louis of Bavaria. Benedict XII, who succeeded John XXII, made an energetic attempt to settle the quarrel. He immediately rejected the theses of his predecessor with the argument that shortly before his death in 1334 John himself had corrected his controversial views in a draft for a papal bull. Petrarch, who was at that time staying in the papal city of Avignon and was a member of the court of Cardinal Giovanni Colonna (who had enjoyed a friendly relationship with the deceased pope), was, of course, familiar with this debate. In a letter to the cardinal dated 1337 (the subject is Familiares 2.12), several years after the controversy, he expresses a careful sympathy for the incriminated and, in the meantime, officially rejected theses of the former pope. Why? Because in them the negation of the Neoplatonic dualism of the body (provable using Augustinian arguments) became the 33

Cf. in detail Maria Cecilia Bertolani, Il corpo glorioso. Studi sui “Trionfi” del Petrarca (Rome: Carocci, 2001), 81–102.

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pivotal and central point for the attainment of posthumous perfection.34 The final aim of existence is the thus determined antidualistic integrity of the soul and body. In this sense, Petrarch’s narrator in the last of the six Triumphi, the Triumph of Eternity, remarks in view of Laura’s future resurrection: “ . . . ‘l ciel pur di vederla intera brama” (T.E. 138).35 In spite of this statement of principle, however, the Triumphi remain, with respect to the corporeality of the lady post resurrectionem, extremely reserved. What is stressed above all is the ethical dimension, and there is absolutely no mention of an intimate contact with the lover: Laura remains at a definite distance; she is exclusively an object of the vision. Our sonnet, on the other hand, paints a different picture. To be sure, at first one might consider the meeting with Laura in paradise as theologically inconspicuous. That, for instance, Laura’s beauty is more pronounced there than when she was on earth (“la rividi più bella,” 4) is a commonplace. And just as there exists an intensified relationship between the situation in vita and that of post mortem, there is also one between the situation post mortem and that post resurrectionem. For Petrarch this was a theologically well-authorized assumption.36 But as we have already seen from the start, what can be expected is linked to the less expected. The scene in paradise establishes the couple’s proximity, even in a physical form. This is conveyed by the motif of touch, whose metonymic allusive potential has already been mentioned. What contributes as well is the fashioning of the conversational situation. Here the impression of an intimate love confession is deliberately created. The reader has no choice but to assume that the purpose of paradise is to bring lovers together in their actual capacity of loving and in mutual agreement. But it is not only this: the scene just mentioned is structured (so to speak) as a figure for erotically encoded bliss, which the two lovers may expect to experience in an intensified form at the end of time. An important precondition is that physical desire be no longer burdened with guilt. In Petrarch’s Secretum, the figure of Augustine expressly rejects Franciscus’s love of Laura’s body as sinful.37 In our poem, Laura makes Petrarch’s fixation on the physical a central focus (“[q]uel che tanto amasti / . . . il mio bel velo,” 10–11), but she does so without the slightest hint of accusation. In this way a post resurrectionem constellation can be suggested in which eroticism is related to cor34

35

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Cf. ibid., 83 and 88–94. The official position as reaffirmed by Benedict XII claimed that the postmortal soul devoid of its body could already experience the full enjoyment of a visio beatifica. In accordance with orthodoxy, Petrarch cautiously attributed an active existence to the postmortal soul, whereas Pope John XXII had proclaimed that until resurrection the just would rest under the altar mentioned in the Apocalypse (Apoc. 6:9); cf. ibid., 82. Emphasis mine. The Triumphi are quoted from the edition of Vinicio Pacca, in Francesco Petrarca, Trionfi, Rime Estravaganti, Codice degli Abbozzi, eds. Vinicio Pacca and Laura Paolino (Milan: Mondadori, 1996), 3–626. Cf. Bertolani, Il corpo glorioso, 93, with reference to Augustine. Augustine argues against Franciscus that far from being an innocuous trampoline for Platonic elevation, love for the body implies “turpe . . . aliquid” and consequently leads to sin and corruption; cf. Secr. 3.27.

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poreality but is nevertheless free of any ethical blemish: what was continually denied the lover on earth is now promised him—under the conditions of postmortal intimacy— as lasting happiness after the end of time. A positive concept of the resurrected body is fundamental to Christian doctrine. What is, however, also theologically undisputed is that the resurrection may in no case bring about an erotic constellation of the resurrected souls. The theological authorities, especially Augustine, could rely on absolutely unambiguous passages in the Bible, such as Matthew 22:30, where Jesus proclaims to the Sadducees: “. . . in the resurrection men do not marry, nor are women married, rather, they are like angels in heaven.”38 In the Triumphi, Petrarch formed the postmortal relationship to Laura so that it was halfway in accord with Jesus’s word in the Gospel of Matthew. But in our sonnet, this is certainly not the case. The entire poem is composed so as to make paradise a place that does not, as would generally be expected, serve the divine spectacle of God, rather is completely fashioned to accommodate the encounter of the lovers and, particularly, their corporeality. Dante’s vision poem was a constitutive component of a lyrical minne-theology that attempted to transform worldly love into Christian caritas.39 The lady was therefore assigned the function of being a supplement for the Redeemer. It is in this regard that both her death and Dante’s posthumous love for her are part of her role. From a theological point of view, the lyric of the Vita nova is heretical in a frankly provocative way. This cannot be said of Petrarch, because he has a different concern. He recurs to the theological Christian concepts of the vision of paradise and the resurrection of the body with the intention of thus compensating for a deficit in the fulfilling of earthly needs.40 What was continually denied the lover during the lifetime of the lady is supposed to be possible post mortem. The meeting with Laura in paradise, which from the here and now of the vision is projected to the end of time, is pervaded by an eroticism whose sensual dimension is effective precisely because of the effort exerted to keep it concealed. In his sonnet Petrarch says things that he pretends he does not say. “Casti” (13), chaste, is what Laura’s words were, according to the speaker, but the poem in its entirety implies that what the lover declares outwardly as chaste he secretly associates with something quite different. This, however, is not a case of insincerity but of selfdeception, which, as the Augustine of the Secretum lets us know, is the greatest—and for salvation, the most dangerous—human weakness: “sed est . . . in animis hominum perversa quedam et pestilens libido se ipsos fallendi, quo nichil potest esse funestius in

38

39 40

“[I]n resurrectione enim neque nubent neque nubentur sed sunt sicut angeli Dei in caelo,” Biblia sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem, ed. Roger Gryson, 4th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994). Cf. Charles Singleton, Saggio sulla “Vita nova” (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1968), 77–108. In other words: Petrarch manipulates current theological positions for purely subjective aims, thus covertly subverting orthodoxy in his turn.

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vita” (Secr. 1.10).41 Self-deception is also, however, very closely associated with the status of the afterworld vision. Only to the visio intellectualis, according to the historical Augustine, can no deception be attributed (“intellectualis . . . visio non fallitur,” Gn. litt. 12.14.29), whereas this does not apply to other types of visions, especially when corporeality is concerned. Then visions that the visionary considers true are often nothing but illusions, phantasmata, about whose real nature the visionary deceives himself. In “Levòmmi il mio penser,” Petrarch uses the discourse pattern of a vision, which, on the one hand, accentuates the dimension of corporeality and, on the other, suggestively supplies what is seen with the index of reliability. In this way, the lover can fulfill a previously unrealized erotic desire. But the beginning of the sonnet already provides a signal that the visionary encounter with the beloved in paradise is not only of a compensatory nature: it is quite simply a phantasma of the loving poet, whom the death, and thus the definitive unattainableness of his lady, has driven to despair. The vision is not caused by an objective external inspiration that could be attributed to some higher power, but by the lover’s subjective emotional state. It is the sad mood—“penser” (1)—of the lover, who at the same time is a poet gifted with the powers of imagination, that generates the vision of heaven and that then also make it recognizable as a phantasma, although about its phantasmatic nature the speaker of the poem never renders an account. Thus, the statement in the Epistola posteritati that Laura’s death had been useful—“utilis” (Post. 4)—admittedly acquires a different and quite unexpected meaning: Laura’s death is advantageous because it creates phantasmata, which make possible what in the Petrarchan minne is actually impossible: the happiness of reciprocal eroticism.

41

On self-deception in Petrarch’s Canzoniere, cf. Gerhard Regn, “Poetica del differimento. Giovanni Colonna e l’architettura del Canzoniere,” in Letture petrarchesche, eds. Klaus W. Hempfer and Gerhard Regn (Florence: Le Lettere, 2007), 245279, here 266269.

JOACHIM KÜPPER

Love after Death in Garcilaso de la Vega For Bernhard König on the occasion for his 80th birthday

There is an essential prerequisite for a concept like “love after death” if we understand it as going beyond conventional mourning and ensuing phantasmagorical reencounters with a dead beloved, as stylized paradigmatically in the in morte section of Petrarch’s Canzoniere. The condition is that there is an individual life (as humans) after our physical death. This concept has been elaborated on systematically by only one of the major world-interpreting traditions commonly known as religions, namely Christianity.1 The resurrection of the flesh was dogmatized by the Second Ecumenical Council (Constantinople, 381 CE). The binding character of this somewhat remarkable assumption is a result of what made this heterodox sect of Judaism a religion of its own, namely the postulate that Jesus was not only the Messiah, but (a) God. This quality is “testified” to by his resurrection in the flesh, a feature then transposed, via analogiae, to all those whom he is said to have redeemed by his self-sacrifice, that is, all human beings. Until today, the corresponding phrase is one part of the creed that all Christian denominations share.2 Within the classical pagan tradition, the concept of a fleshly resurrection does 1

2

I would like to stress that my emphasis lies on “systematically.” As may be inferred from the chapters by David Nirenberg, Beatrice Gruendler, and Glenn Most, the concept of love after death is not completely absent from literary texts originating in pagan antiquity or within the two other Abrahamic religions. But, as may be seen, there it is much less prominent than in literary texts with a Christian background. I see two reasons of quite different nature for this; the first one is structural, the second related more to content. (Premodern) Christianity in general seems to have much stronger tendencies towards being systematic than comparable Mediterranean religions. There is one pope, one center, one bureaucratic apparatus controlling the church, for instance. I would speculate that this monolithical character of Christianity may be a conscious or unconscious reaction to the pluralizing, centrifugal tendencies implied in the somewhat paralogical idea of a triune deity. The second reason, the belief in resurrection, is explained below in more detail. As is well known from the theological controversies triggered by Dante’s sacro poema, it was, to my knowledge, never resolved to what extent the inmates of the netherworld have a body before Judgment Day and the preceding resurrection of the flesh. Dante avoids giving an explicit view on this point. At times, he speaks about the bodies of the dead as shadows; at others, he assigns to them a sort of pneumatic body (see Purg. 25.79108; Inf. 3.5860). On the other hand, if they did not have some kind of body, it would be hard to imagine that the inmates of hell feel the pain that is

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not exist, but the idea of life’s continuation in another world does. There is the reign of Hades as well as the Elysian Fields. The entire mythical complex encompasses, however, the crossing of the river Lethe, which symbolizes becoming oblivious to the preceding existence. There seems to have been only one major exception to this concept of the end of all previous desire after death. This exception is connected to Orpheus’s descent

meant to punish them. In accordance with the theologically somewhat questionable conception of the netherworld as a continuation of the “earthly world” (see Erich Auerbach’s still invaluable study Dante: Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961]; first published 1929 by De Gruyter, Berlin), Dante was able to become the creator of one of the most fascinating love-after-death stories. The narrative is so impressive because it presents, without any explicit restrictions, the resumption of a passion whose earthly first stage was ended by physical force: the story of Paolo and Francesca (Inf. 5). As for the official position of contemporary theology regarding the point, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica 1a, qq. 75 and 76, and 3a, suppl., q. 69, art. 1 and 2. In the passage mentioned first, Thomas develops his general view of the (human) soul’s nature and its relation to the body; in the supplementary chapters, he discusses what happens to the soul after death. His position may perhaps be summarized as follows: The human soul is immaterial and incorruptible. It is created by God on an individual basis. It is separated from the body at the moment of death. Not only after Judgment Day, but already in the period beforehand, it is rewarded or punished according to its actions and attitudes during life. This evaluation is specified by assigning a place to the souls. Virtuous souls are conceded a seat close to God (heaven), whereas the souls of unrepentant sinners are sent to a place far away from him (hell); there is a third, temporary place for those whose merits are not sufficient to go to heaven immediately (Aquinas does not use the term “purgatory,” though). As may be seen from my summary, the entire problem revolves around the question of place. Without such “places” in the transcendental worlds, that is, instantiations of the abstract concept of difference, the notion of eternal reward (consisting of being close to God and thus in a position that resumes the paradisiacal situation before the Fall) and punishment would lose its sense. If, however, there are specific places in the transcendental realms assigned to particular souls, an idea like the continuation of earthly individual relationships cannot be systematically excluded; it is evident, though, that within a theological frame any corporeal dimension of such relationships is ruled out. Thomas, however, does not present a rational solution to the conceptual imbroglio; he eventually refers to the entire problem as pertaining to the arcana Dei (see 3a, suppl., q. 69, art. 1; much material regarding the question may be found in Peter Dinzelbacher, “Il corpo nelle visioni dell’aldilà,” in I discorsi dei corpi = Discourses of the Body, Micrologus 1, ed. Véronique Pasche et al. [Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1993], 301326; the wording of Dinzelbacher’s essay is, at times, not entirely appropriate). One of the most intricate problems theology has to deal with in this entire context is the story of the Virgin Mary’s admission into heaven without experiencing a previous physical death—an idea that is the origin of some of the most impressive Renaissance and Baroque paintings. The story is intimately linked to the assumption that Mary was begotten in an immaculate fashion so that her body is free from original sin, which is necessary to assume the role of theotókos. In a way, the physical admission proves ad oculos that her body is “really” free from sin, so it is not easy to contest its orthodox character. If, however, bodies may in principle access paradise before Judgment Day, how can the idea of some kind of bodily existence post mortem be systematically excluded? The main strength of Christian belief, its narrativity, and its readiness to absorb and assimilate previous religious traditions, here, as in many other cases, becomes the gateway for heterodox ideas to enter the theological discourse.

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into Hades. Orpheus, however, was not a dead person.3 During his (short) stay in the netherworld, he continued to be a regular, living human being. He owed the unique privilege of going to “[t]he undiscover’d country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns . . .”4 to the fact that he invented music and poetry; and he was conceded the favor once, but not a second time.5 Within the two other monotheistic religions, the ideas of a heaven and a hell, where humans will continue their lives forever, do exist, but in a much less elaborate way than in the Christian tradition.6 This may be due to the fact that there is nothing like God’s self-sacrifice, his descensus ad inferos, and his freeing of the souls from the bonds of death. Life after death is at the center of Christians’ preoccupations, whereas in the other Abrahamic religions it seems to be less important. What at first glance yields a quasi-ideal structure enabling a concept like love after death is, however, weakened if not discouraged by Christianity’s strictly dichotomous way of considering what we usually label love in all Western vernaculars (amour, amore, amor, Liebe):7 on the one hand, there is the individual attraction between humans, eros, which is physical to a considerable extent, though not exclusively. This variant is judged negatively within Christianity. The debasement of the fascination provoked by physical beauty is linked to the dogma’s core. Christianity is not conceivable without the incrimination of luxuria.8 On the other hand, there is the notion called 3

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—as was Eurydice at the time. In addition, we are not told whether she loved him in the netherworld in the same way as he loved her, or whether she was simply complying with the permission given by Pluto and Proserpina when she followed him. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, eds. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Methuen, 2006), 3.1.7980. There is some minor or less prominent incidence of the love-after-death motif in texts from the classical age. The two other mythical heroes who were granted a katabasis, Odysseus and Aeneas, however, were not motivated by the wish to resume a relationship with a partner who had died. Aeneas encounters a couple in the netherworld that has resumed its earthly relationship: Dido and her husband Sychaeus (Vergil, Aeneid 6.450474). Dido’s harsh reaction to Aeneas’s appearance makes it evident, however, that she is still emotionally involved with him, which makes it hardly plausible to conceive of her posthumous union with Sychaeus as an authentic love after death in the sense, e.g., of the Ovidian Orpheus and Eurydice story (see below, p. 130–132), even if this is what is said explicitly in the text. I leave it to the specialists to give a more detailed account of Judaism’s and Islam’s respective attitudes regarding the problem (see Beatrice Gruendler’s and David Nirenberg’s essays in this volume). In my view, the following arguments hold true for the time before Judgment Day as well as for the time afterwards. In the final analysis, I do not see any pertinent difference in the attitude of orthodox theology towards the question of an individual love after death regarding “mere souls” (before Judgment Day) and regarding souls reunited with their resurrected bodies (after Judgment Day). Christianity differentiates itself from Judaism not primarily by postulating that Jesus is the Messiah, but by the belief that he is God. As such, his execution can only be taken as a self-sacrifice. If, however, God’s self-sacrifice was necessary in order to redeem humankind, it is logically excluded that humans would be able to redeem themselves (by observing certain ritualistic rules, by respecting the Ten Commandments, etc.). All humans are to be regarded as sinners. The emerging Chris-

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agape, the essence of which it is to be deindividualized as far as interhuman relations are concerned. Personal relationships subsumable under agape draw their legitimacy from the belief that the persons concerned are only there to be used (uti), as Augustine somewhat bluntly put it, in order to comply with the one and only task a pious Christian has: to love God and to rejoice in this love (frui).9 The only individual relationship the general (i.e., Catholic) dogma allows is marriage, whose purpose is divinely mandated procreation. If something like passion and physical desire are part of this love, even a marital relationship loses its legitimacy and becomes sinful. To my knowledge, the problem has never been systematically addressed in scholarly theological discourses. But for the reasons just mentioned, it seems evident that humans’ existence in the transcendental worlds of heaven, hell, and purgatory, as well as the lives conceded to them after the resurrection of the flesh, would have to be considered as free from individual feelings and a fortiori from something like a private life in the literal sense, that is, a life separate from others and withdrawn from their attention.10 The discursive scenario of early modern Europe leaves us, therefore, with a paradox: in

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tian theology thus had to look for a problematic feature that humans share without exception. This feature was found by Paul (Rom. 7) and it was paradigmatically elaborated on by Augustine: It is the pleasures of the body, luxuria in the language of theology. Its essence is the revolt of the body against the control exerted by reason, which is the godlike feature of humans. Augustine’s many famous descriptions of the phenomenon imply that it is, indeed, some kind of demon that controls the body’s movement in the state of sexual arousal. If the debasement of lust is considered a remnant of premodern, not enlightened times, as is the case in present-day European Protestantism, the consequence is the transition towards a symbolic interpretation of Christianity’s basic assumptions, that is, the end of Christianity as a religion. It then becomes a commonplace moralizing predicament hardly distinguishable from the discourses of ecology or of Marxism. See De doctrina Christiana 1.22(20); for more information on this dichotomy in the Bishop of Hippo’s works, see my essay “Uti and Frui in Augustine and the Problem of Aesthetic Pleasure in the Western Tradition (Cervantes, Kant, Marx, Freud),” Comparative Literature Issue Supplement, MLN 127, no. 5 (2012): 126155. Within mysticism, the relationship with God may even attain strata that are difficult to differentiate from eroticism for a beholder who considers the phenomenon from an exterior perspective. The variant of bridal mysticism is particularly problematic: nuns being considered betrothed to Christ with whom they will be effectively married after death is a feature of a theologically legitimate “love after death” that makes it especially difficult to draw a line between eros and agape. The entire problem is bound to the inability to express “spiritual” love in terms other than fleshly love (it is “sweet,” it makes us feel overwhelmed, it causes shivers, etc.): our sensory apparatus is part of the body, of our material part (pars sensitiva); and our medium of communication, language, is basically material as well. The scriptural basis for rejecting this possibility is the well-known declaration by Jesus, as reported in Matt. 22:30, in which he reacts to the Sadducees’ attempt to ridicule the idea of resurrection. On the other hand, Augustine offers quite detailed accounts of the bodies of the dead and the resurrected as individualized, material, and thus recognizable bodies (see, e.g., De civitate Dei 13.2223; also see Augustine’s consolatory letter to the widow Italica [Ep. 92]). In the following, I will suggest several hypothetical explanations for this paradox.

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principle, the prerequisites were given that one could hope to continue in another world the love that had been all too short or had remained unfulfilled; on the other hand, the laws governing these “other” worlds seem to preclude this actually taking place. The reception of Neoplatonism during the Renaissance did change these conditions to a certain extent, though not radically. Within a Neoplatonic frame, the enthusiastic reaction to individual beauty is legitimate. And love, even in the sense of eros, is not a sin from the outset. But it becomes an aberration if the lover does not strive for what is its (only) function: seeing in the beautiful body the material and thus corruptible appearance of those immutable ideas from which its beauty derives in the first place. Thus, Platonic love is a relationship whose legitimacy is bound to its degree of dematerialization. And the Neoplatonists never made changes to Plato’s position that the end of our physical lives coincides with the definitive freeing of the (immortal) soul from its prison, the body.11 Although the parable of the cave seems to imply that there are different individual souls,12 it is hardly conceivable to imagine a Platonic or Neoplatonic “heaven” where earthly, individual, physical love could resume.13 This said, there seems to have been a discursive space for the articulation of fantasies about love after death in medieval and early modern Europe, albeit without a solid ideological basis. The remarkable extension of this space may have arisen because, despite its unorthodoxy, the idea of love after death is difficult to repress within a Christian framework. The concept of eternal punishment only makes sense if the bodies of the resurrected are considered to be sentient; otherwise, they would not feel the pains inflicted upon them.14 If, however, the resurrected bodies are capable of feeling pain, why should they not be able to sense pleasurable feelings as well? This is the question behind all the speculation revolving around the idea of love after death. There is no satisfactory answer to this question within the theological discourse. Christian dogma produces unorthodox ideas regarding the conceptual complex of life after death, which it is unable to completely suppress if it does not want to get stuck in internal contradictions. 11 12 13

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See Phaedrus 245c249d. —different, in the first place, in rational quality. The Neoplatonic debasement of the body and, consequently, of physical love, has been contested only by one author who belongs to the broad stream of Renaissance theorizing of love—Leone Ebreo. In his Dialoghi d’amore, Leone argues that since the telos of love is perfection, the two souls of a Neoplatonic couple who have already attained the state of perfect unity in their shared contemplation of ideas will need a physical union in order to make their unity fully perfect (see Leone Ebreo, Dialoghi d’amore, ed. Delfina Giovannozzi [Rome: Laterza, 2008], 5257). But this most intelligently conceived subversion of the Neoplatonic system via arguments based on its own line of reasoning seems to have remained a marginal position in the Renaissance discourse, as far as philosophy proper is concerned; additionally, in the context discussed here, it is without further relevance since Leone’s argument is confined to the material world. Pain would then be understood as a mere privatio boni, in this case as being deprived of the joy accompanying the visio beatifica of God (this is the interpretation of “hell” advocated by twentiethcentury continental Protestantism). But the disciplining impact of such a hell might be (all too) weak. Tediousness is much easier to bear than the horrible physical pains devised by Dante.

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These are close to ideal conditions for literary discourses to take up the idea. Such texts became the privileged field for articulating the implications of what was first “offered” and then “denied” by the dominant ideological system, be it in its orthodox or in its somewhat more liberal, Neoplatonically influenced Renaissance variant. Since literary texts were assigned to the sphere of a playful mendacium not to be understood literally but rhetorically, there was a space in the discourse of early modern Europe where the idea of resuming a relationship after death could develop and even thrive.15 This space was then limited and became completely banned, at least in some Western countries, through the Counter-Reformation and its systematic attention to the strictly understood orthodoxy not only of theological discourses, but also of the entire sphere of artistic production.

I. Garcilaso de la Vega, Spain’s outstanding Renaissance poet, enjoyed the privilege of writing before this ideological threshold. It can hardly be thought of as a favor of fate, though, that he died in 1536 at the age of only 35. But his early demise allowed his poetry to be free from the somewhat distorted shapings of the concept of love after death produced by the next generation of Spanish poets.16 Garcilaso’s short poetic oeuvre is obsessed with the idea of grief originating from passion. The reason for this grief is not only the lack of reciprocation, but also the unattainability of the beloved. At times this seems to be an inaccessibility in the literal sense, that is, one motivated by legal status, but more often the reason is the premature

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It was Petrarch, first of all, and Boccaccio even more so, who ended the controversies between the theologians and the authors of literary texts provoked by Dante’s project of a sacro poema. They secured a rather wide area of discursive freedom by conceding that literary texts are “lies” as far as their literal meaning is concerned. They claimed their truth resides in their possible allegorical meaning (see Joachim Küpper, “Zu einigen Aspekten der Dichtungstheorie in der Frührenaissance,” in Renaissance—Episteme und Agon. Für Klaus W. Hempfer anläßlich seines 60. Geburtstages, eds. Andreas Kablitz and Gerhard Regn [Heidelberg: Winter, 2006], 4771). Thus, the idea, or the wish of a continuation of earthly relationships in heaven could always be postulated as referring to a bond that would not be “fleshly” but “spiritual” in analogy to the structure of allegory whose “material” surface only covers the “real” spiritual meaning. Quevedo’s famous satirical romance “Califica a Orfeo para idea de maridos dichosos” is an, albeit extreme, example of the somewhat oblique changes undergone by classical Renaissance literary patterns in that age. He praises Orpheus’s fate as the apogee of happiness a husband can attain since he became a widower not only once but twice, and of the same wife (“Dichoso es cualquier casado / que una vez queda soltero; / mas de una mujer dos veces, / es ya de la dicha extremo.” [vv. 3740; quotes from Francisco de Quevedo, Poesía original completa, ed. José Manuel Blecua (Barcelona: Planeta, 1981)]).

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death of the beloved.17 There are virtually innumerable passages where Garcilaso has the speaker of the poems proclaim that his love will persist even when he himself will be dead.18 There are a very few references to the motif of love after death in the strict sense. The most articulate is to be found in the first eclogue. At the end of his lamentation, the shepherd Nemoroso (who may be considered an alias of the lyrical I)19 utters the hope that he will see his deceased beloved Elissa again in the “tercera rueda” (v. 400), that is, in the Venus heaven, where he will rejoice to be with her for all eternity: He Divina Elissa, pues agora el cielo con inmortales pies pisas y mides, y su mudança ves, estando queda, ¿por qué de mí te olvidas y no pides que se apresure el tiempo en que este velo rompa del cuerpo y verme libre pueda, y en la tercera rueda, contigo mano a mano, busquemos otro llano, busquemos otros montes y otros ríos, otros valles floridos y sombríos donde descanse y siempre pueda verte ante los ojos míos, sin miedo y sobresalto de perderte? (vv. 394–407) 17

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Divine Elissa, since now the heavens you tread and measure with immortal feet and see their changes as you stand still, why do you forget me and not pray for the time to be hastened when I shall break the veil of this body and find myself free, and in the third sphere hand in hand with you we can seek another meadow, we can seek other mountains and other rivers, other valleys full of flowers and shade, where I can rest and always see you before my eyes, without the fear and shock of losing you?20

According to what we know about his life, Garcilaso seems to have had an inclination to fall in love with married women. This may, however, have been a transposition into his real life of his major cultural and literary achievement: that of introducing the “Italianizing” patterns of courtly literature and its derivatives to the Peninsula. In Son. 4, it is presented by way of a quote from a famous Petrarchan line (“muerte, prisión no pueden, ni embaraços, / quitarme de yr a veros como quiera, / desnudo ’spirtu o hombre en carne y huesso” [vv. 1214; all quotes are from Garcilaso de la Vega, Obras completas con comentario, ed. Elias L. Rivers (Madrid: Castalia, 1981)]; for the Petrarchan reference in the lines from Son. 4, see Canz. 37.118120). The concept is at times applied to the beloved as well; in Can. 5, it is used to exert rhetorical pressure on a person who seems unwilling or reluctant to reciprocate: the price she will have to pay for her “cowardice” will be that repentance will come too late and her soul will burn with love—as did Anaxarete’s—with such intensity that it will even make the marble glow (in this case to be understood as the tombstone; “Hágate temerosa / el caso de Anaxárete, y covarde, / que de ser desdeñosa / se arrepentió muy tarde, / y assí su alma con su mármol arde” [vv. 6670]; the mythical Anaxarete was metamorphosed into stone when she saw the corpse of her lover who had committed suicide because of her reluctance to reciprocate his love; but Ovid does not say that she, or the stone, would have burned or glowed with love after the metamorphosis occurred [see Ovid, Met. 14.698764]). See my argument below, regarding Égl. 3, where Nemoroso is introduced again. Translation based on Elias L. Rivers, ed., Renaissance and Baroque Poetry of Spain: With English Prose Translations (Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 1988), 67; (here and elsewhere I have made slight emendations). To my knowledge, Dante, Par. 8 and 9, are the (literary) sources of the idea of a specific part of heaven where lovers have their seat. The description as given in Dante, though,

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Let me stress that it is a wish that is articulated here, not a description of a “real” setting, and the wish does not immediately consist in things becoming as described by the speaker.21 In the first place, it consists of the speaker requesting his beloved to pray that his physical life will end as soon as possible. Here, as elsewhere in Garcilaso’s poems, the idea of love after death and related thoughts, which might be interpreted in a similar way, remain hinted at and unspecific. They indicate that the concept and the motif as such are well known;22 the question as to why Garcilaso may have refrained from giving them more prominence deserves further discussion. Possible answers might be found in the poem that can be considered the centerpiece of the poet’s treatment of the complex of love and death, the famous third eclogue, which is the last poem he produced.23 It provides a fairly subdued approach to the whole idea:

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does not focus at all on some kind of private living together of former couples; rather, it deals with historical and political information about the past and the future given by the souls the wanderer encounters. I should only like to hypothesize that the idea of grouping the souls in paradise according to their main earthly preoccupations is somewhat unorthodox and that the concept of a compartmentalized heaven reflecting the souls’ former predilections is, most likely, the result of the structural constraints of making heaven isomorphic to the reigns of hell and purgatory. For further instances of the concept in Garcilaso, see Égl. 1.321ff., where Nemoroso says that his death means going “to a place where he will / maybe see the coveted sun of Elissa’s beautiful face once again” (hasta que muerte’l tiempo determine / que a ver el desseado / sol de tu clara vista m’encamine). Also see Son. 26: “Aquéste es el desseo que me lleva / a que desee tornar a ver un día / a quien fuera mejor nunca aver visto” (vv. 1214; the vague hope articulated here in a quasi-conceptista fashion is an almost literal quote from Petrarch [“ch’i’ chiamo il fine, per lo gran desire / di riveder cui non veder fu ’l meglio” (Canz. 112.1314; quotes from Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. Marco Santagata [Milan: Mondadori, 1996])]). In Can. 1, the lover refers in a general way to the view that it is love’s nature or essence to “desire that the loved person lives and (then) be transposed to the place where the lover intends to go in order to save his soul, or, to have his soul saved” (. . . quel amor. . . / . . . quiere quel amante biva / y se convierta adó piense salvarse [vv. 18ff.]; my cautious formulations refer to the dilemma that this interpretation is contingent upon assigning the “piense salvarse” to another subject noun than the “se convierta,” which is a possible reading, at least in Golden Age poetic discourse with its tendency to succinct, even elliptical wording. If one assumed that the two finite verbs are ruled by the same subject, the content of the lines would be no more than the rather banal thought that the essence of love is to wish the beloved all the possible best [first to live and then to go to the place where the person concerned may wish to go in order to save herself (“piense” is to be interpreted as an optative)]). This is the main difference between the Garcilasean passage and its classical reference, the Orpheus and Eurydice story’s end in the Ovidian version (see below, p. 130–131). The commentaries regarding the quoted lines from Garcilaso’s first eclogue refer to the canzone “Donna, de’ cui begli occhi alto diletto” by Pietro Bembo as the source for the passage (“[I]mpetra dal Signor, non più ne’ suoi / lacci mi stringa il mondo, e possa l’alma, / che devea gir inanzi, omai seguirti. / Tu godi, assisa tra beati spirti[,] / . . .” [Rime 162.710; quotes from Pietro Bembo, Prose e Rime, ed. Carlo Dionisotti (Turin: UTET, 1966)]). Elias L. Rivers apostrophizes the poem as the “cumbre del desarrollo artístico y espiritual del poeta Garcilaso” (“Las églogas de Garcilaso: ensayo de una tayectoria espiritual,” in Actas del primer

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Aquella voluntad honesta y pura, illustre y hermosíssima María, que’n mí de celebrar tu hermosura, tu ingenio y tu valor estar solía, a despecho y pesar de la ventura que por otro camino me desvía, está y estará tanto en mí clavada quanto del cuerpo el alma acompañada.

That chaste, pure desire, oh illustrious and most beautiful María, which I used to have, to celebrate your beauty, your intellect and your high worth, despite the will of fortune which forces me to follow another road, is and always will be as much a part of me as the soul is accompanied by the body.

Y aun no se me figura que me toca aqueste officio solamente’n vida, mas con la lengua muerta y fria en la boca pienso mover la boz a ti devida; libre mi alma de su estrecha roca, por el Estygio lago conduzida, celebrando t’irá, y aquel sonido hará parar las aguas del olvido.

And I even imagine it will not be my lot to perform this function only in my lifetime, but with my tongue dead and cold in my mouth I intend to stir the voice which I owe to you. My soul, when it is free of its narrow prison and is being ferried over the Stygian Lake, will continue to celebrate you, and that sound will halt the waters of oblivion.

Mas la fortuna, de mi mal no harta, me aflige y d’un trabajo en otro lleva; ya de la patria, ya del bien me aparta, ya mi paciencia en mil maneras prueva, y lo que siento más es que la carta donde mi pluma en tu alabança mueva, poniendo en su lugar cuydados vanos, me quita y m’arrebata de las manos.

But Fortune, not satisfied with my suffering, besets me and takes me from one hardship to another; now it separates me from my country, now from my love, now tests my patience in a thousand ways; and what I most regret is that the paper on which I am to move my pen in praise of you, replacing it with vain worries, Fortune snatches from my hands.

Pero por más que’n mí su fuerça prueve, no tornará mi coraçón mudable; nunca dirán jamás que me remueve fortuna d’un estudio tan loable; Apollo y las hermanas todas nueve me darán ocio y lengua con que hable lo menos de lo que’n tu ser cupiere, que’sto será lo más que yo pudiere.

But, no matter how it tests its strength on me, it shall not make my heart become changeable; they will never say that I have been moved by Fortune from so praiseworthy a purpose. Apollo and all nine sisters will give me leisure and a tongue with which to speak the least of the praises of which you are worthy, for this will be the most of which I am capable.

En tanto, no te offenda ni te harte tratar del campo y soledad que amaste, ni desdeñes aquesta inculta parte de mi estilo, que’n algo ya estimaste; entre las armas del sangriento Marte, do apenas ay quien su furor contraste, hurté de tiempo aquesta breve suma, tomando ora la espada, ora la pluma.

Meanwhile, I hope that you are not offended or bored by my writing of the countryside and solitude you loved, and that you don’t disdain this rustic aspect of my style, which you once considered worthwhile. From among the weapons of bloodthirsty Mars, where almost no one can withstand his violence, I stole this brief quantity of time, wielding now the sword and now the pen.

Aplica, pues, un rato los sentidos al baxo son de mi çampoña ruda, indigna de llegar a tus oýdos,

Apply then for a while your senses to the humble sound of my crude pipes, unworthy of reaching your ears, for it is naked of adornment and grace;

congreso internacional de hispanistas, eds. Frank Pierce and Cyril A. Jones [Oxford, UK: Dolphin, 1964], 421427, here 423).

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pues d’ornamento y gracia va desnuda; mas a las vezes son mejor oýdos el puro ingenio y lengua casi muda, testigos limpios d’ánimo inocente, que la curiosidad del eloqüente.

but at times it is better to listen to the simple mind and almost silent tongue, pure witnesses of the innocent soul, than to the sophistication of the rhetorician.

Por aquesta razón de ti escuchado, aunque me falten otras, ser merezco; lo que puedo te doy, y lo que é dado, con recebillo tú, yo me ’nrriquezco. De quatro nymphas que del Tajo amado salieron juntas, a cantar me offrezco: Phillódoce, Dinámene y Climene, Nise, que en hermosura par no tiene.

Because of this argument I deserve, though I may have no others, to be heard by you. I’m giving you what I can, and your acceptance of what I have given you enriches me. Of four nymphs which together rose up out of our beloved Tagus, I offer to sing: Phyllodoce, Dynamene and Clymene, Nise, who in beauty has no equal.

Cerca del Tajo, en soledad amena, de verdes sauzes ay una espessura toda de yedra revestida y llena, que por el tronco va hasta el altura y assí la texe arriba y encadena que’l sol no halla passo a la verdura; el agua baña el prado con sonido, alegrando la yerva y el oýdo.

Near the Tagus, in pleasant solitude, there is a thickness of green willows all entwined and covered over in ivy, which climbs up the trunk to the top and so weaves and enchains it above that the sun cannot find its way through the greenness; the water bathes the meadow in sound, making joyful the grass and the ear.

Con tanta mansedumbre el cristalino Tajo en aquella parte caminava que pudieran los ojos el camino determinar apenas que llevava. Peynando sus cabellos d’oro fino, una nympha del agua do morava la cabeça sacó, y el prado ameno vido de flores y de sombras lleno.

So calmly the crystalline Tagus was flowing in that spot that one’s eyes could hardly determine in which direction it was moving. Combing her hair of fine gold, a nymph thrust out her head from the water where she lived, and saw the pleasant meadow full of flowers and shade.

Movióla el sitio umbroso, el manso viento, el suave olor d’aquel florido suelo; las aves en el fresco apartamiento vio descansar del trabajoso buelo; secava entonces el terreno aliento el sol, subido en la mitad del cielo; en el silencio solo se ’scuchava un susurro de abejas que sonava.

She was moved by the shady spot, the gentle wind, the sweet odor of that flowery spot. She saw the birds in cool withdrawal resting from the laborious flight. The earthy vapors were at that time being absorbed by the sun, which had climbed to the middle of the sky. In the silence one only heard a murmuring of bees that sounded.

Aviendo contemplado una gran pieça atentamente aquel lugar sombrío, somorgujó de nuevo su cabeça y al fondo se dexó calar del río; a sus hermanas a contar empieça del verde sitio el agradable frío, y que vayan, les ruega y amonesta, allí con su lavor a estar la siesta.

Having looked for a long while attentively at that shady spot, she plunged in her head again and let herself drop to the bottom of the river. She then begins to tell her sisters of the green place’s pleasant coolness, and she begs and urges them to go and spend the hot afternoon there with their sewing.

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No perdió en esto mucho tiempo el ruego, que las tres d’ellas su lavor tomaron y en mirando defuera vieron luego el prado, hazia el qual endereçaron; el agua clara con lascivo juego nadando dividieron y cortaron hasta que’l blanco pie tocó mojado, saliendo del arena, el verde prado.

She didn’t waste much time begging them to do this, for the three of them took their sewing and, when they looked out, saw at once the meadow, toward which they headed. The clear water in wanton play they cut through and divided as they swam, until their white feet damply touched the green meadow as they left the sand.

Poniendo ya en lo enxuto las pisadas, escurriendo del agua sus cabellos, los quales esparziendo cubijadas las hermosas espaldas fueron dellos, luego sacando telas delicadas que’n delgadeza competían con ellos, en lo más escondido se metieron y a su lavor atentas se pusieron.

Stepping now upon the dryness, they wrung the water out of their hair and, shaking it out, covered with hair their lovely shoulders and backs. Then taking out fine fabrics which in texture competed with their hair, they entered the deepest part of the thicket and began to concentrate upon their handwork.

Las telas eran hechas y texidas del oro que’l felice Tajo embía, apurado después de bien cernidas las menudas arenas do se cría, y de las verdes ovas24, reduzidas en estambre sotil qual convenía para seguir el delicado estilo del oro, ya tirado en rico hilo. La delicada estambre era distinta de las colores que antes le avian dado con la fineza de la varia tinta que se halla en las conchas del pescado; tanto arteficio muestra en lo que pinta y texe cada nympha en su labrado quanto mostraron en sus tablas antes el celebrado Apelles y Timantes.

The fabrics were formed and woven of the gold that the fortunate Tagus yields, refined after the tiny sands where it is produced have been sifted out, and of the green leaves, converted into fine yarn as was fitting to accompany the delicate style of the gold, now drawn out into rich threads.

Phillódoce, que assí d’aquéllas era llamada la mayor, con diestra mano tenía figurada la ribera de Estrimón, de una parte el verde llano y d’otra el monte d’aspereza fiera, pisado tarde o nunca de pie humano, donde el amor movió con tanta gracia la dolorosa lengua del de Tracia.

Phyllodoce, for this was the name of the oldest of the nymphs, with dexterous hand had depicted the bank of the Strymon River, on the one hand the green plain and on the other the wild jagged mountain, trodden late or never by human foot, where love moved so gracefully the grieving tongue of the Thracian.

Estava figurada la hermosa Eurídice, en el blanco pie mordida

Lovely Eurydice was depicted bitten on her white foot by the small poisonous snake hidden

The delicate yarn was changed from the colors it had formerly had by the fineness of the varied dye that is found in the shells of fish; each nymph shows as much artistry in what she depicts and weaves in her embroidery as was previously shown in their pictures by the celebrated Apelles and Timanthes.

As Rivers says in his commentary, 430431, ad v. 109, the incunabulum print edition contains the formulation “las verdes hojas” (the green leaves); Rivers, however, following Alberto Blecua (En el texto de Garcilaso [Madrid: Insula, 1970], 164167), adopts the above lectio from a still extant fragmentary manuscript; the formulation then reads “the green reed.”

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de la pequeña sierpe ponçoñosa, entre la yerva y flores escondida; descolorida estava como rosa que ha sido fuera de sazón cogida, y el ánima, los ojos ya bolviendo, de la hermosa carne despidiendo.

among the grass and flowers; she was pale like a rose that has been plucked out of season and, rolling her eyes back, was already exhaling her soul from her lovely body.

Figurado se vía estensamente el osado marido, que baxava al triste reyno de la escura gente y la muger perdida recobrava; y cómo, después desto, él, impaciente por mirarla de nuevo, la tornava a perder otra vez, y del tyrano se quexa al monte solitario en vano.

One saw depicted at length the daring husband going down to the sad realm of the dark people and regaining his lost wife; and how afterwards he, impatient to see her again, lost her once more, and complains in vain of the tyrant to the solitary mountain.

Dinámene no menos artificio mostrava en la lavor que avia texido, pintando a Apollo en el robusto officio de la silvestre caça embevecido. Mudar presto le haze el exercicio la vengativa mano de Cupido, que hizo a Apollo consumirse en lloro después que le enclavó con punta d’oro.

Dynamene showed no less artistry in the handwork that she had woven, painting Apollo as intent upon the robust exercise of forest hunting. Then he is made to change his occupation by the vengeful hand of Cupid, who made Apollo waste away in tears after piercing him with an arrowhead of gold.

Daphne, con el cabello suelto al viento, sin perdonar al blanco pie corría por áspero camino tan sin tiento que Apollo en la pintura parecía que, porque’lla templasse el movimiento, con menos ligereza la seguía; él va siguiendo, y ella huye como quien siente al pecho el odïoso plomo.

Daphne, with hair flying in the wind, without sparing her white feet, was running down a rough road in so headlong a way that it seemed in the painting that Apollo, in order to make her slow down, was following her less speedily. He continues to follow, and she to flee like one who feels in her heart the leaden arrow of hatred.

Mas a la fin los braços le crecían y en sendos ramos bueltos se mostravan; y los cabellos, que vencer solían al oro fino, en hojas se tornavan; en torcidas raýzes s’estendían los blancos pies y en tierra se hincavan; llora el amante y busca el ser primero, besando y abraçando aquel madero.

But finally her arms were growing and were seen to have been changed into two branches, and her hair, which used to outshine fine gold, was turning into leaves; as twisted roots her white feet stretched out and thrust themselves into the ground. The lover weeps and seeks her former self as he kisses and embraces that piece of wood.

Climene, llena de destreza y maña, el oro y las colores matizando, yva de hayas una gran montaña, de robles y de peñas varïando; un puerco entre ellas, de braveza estraña, estava los colmillos aguzando contra un moço no menos animoso, con su venablo en mano, que hermoso.

Clymene, very dexterous and skillful, by shading the gold and the colors, was giving variety to a great mountain with beeches, oaks and rocks. Among them a boar of unusual ferocity was sharpening his tusks in preparation for a youth, with spear in hand, no less spirited than handsome.

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Tras esto, el puerco allí se via herido d’aquel mancebo, por su mal valiente, y el moço en tierra estava ya tendido, abierto el pecho del ravioso diente, con el cabello d’oro desparzido barriendo el suelo miserablemente; las rosas blancas por allí sembradas tornavan con su sangre coloradas.

After this, one saw the boar there wounded by the youth, too brave for his own good, and the boy was stretched out already on the ground, his chest cut open by the raging teeth; with his scattered golden hair dragging wretchedly on the ground, the white roses growing around him were changed by his blood into red.

Adonis éste se mostrava que’ra, según se muestra Venus dolorida, que viendo la herida abierta y fiera, sobre’l estava casi amortecida; boca con boca coge la postrera parte del ayre que solia dar vida al cuerpo por quien ella en este suelo aborrecido tuvo al alto cielo.

One could see that he was Adonis by the way that Venus was grieving, who, seeing the fierce, open wound, was almost fainting on top of him. Mouth to mouth, she catches the last bit of air which used to give life to that body for which she on earth had scorned high heaven.

La blanca Nise no tomó a destajo de los passados casos la memoria, y en la lavor de su sotil trabajo no quiso entretexer antigua istoria; antes, mostrando de su claro Tajo en su labor la celebrada gloria, la figuró en la parte donde’l baña la más felice tierra de la España.

Fair Nise did not take as her task the remembering of past episodes, and in the embroidery of her subtle handwork chose not to weave ancient history; revealing instead, in her embroidery, the celebrated glory of her famous Tagus, she depicted it in the region where it bathes the most fortunate land in Spain.

Pintado el caudaloso rio se vía que en áspera estrecheza reduzido, un monte casi alrededor ceñía, con ímpetu corriendo y con rüido; querer cercarlo todo parecía en su bolver, mas era afán perdido; dexávase correr en fin derecho, contento de lo mucho que avia hecho.

One saw painted the mighty river which, hemmed in by jagged narrows, almost surrounded a mountain as it ran impetuously and noisily; it seemed to want to encircle it completely in its circling, but it was a wasted effort; finally it allowed itself to run straight on, satisfied with all that it had accomplished.

Estava puesta en la sublime cumbre del monte, y desd’ allí por él sembrada, aquella illustre y clara pesadumbre d’antiguos edificios adornada. D’allí con agradable mansedumbre el Tajo va siguiendo su jornada y regando los campos y arboledas con artificio de las altas ruedas.

Placed upon the lofty summit of the mountain, and from that point scattered down its slopes, was the illustrious and famous massiveness, with ancient buildings adorned. From there on, pleasantly calm, the Tagus continues its way, irrigating the fields and groves by the ingenuity of the lofty wheels.

En la hermosa tela se veýan, entretexidas, las silvestres diosas salir de la espessura, y que venían todas a la ribera pressurosas, en el semblante tristes, y traýan cestillos blancos de purpúreas rosas,

On the lovely fabric were seen, woven in, woodland goddesses coming out of the forest, and they were all hastening along the bank with sad faces and carrying white baskets of purple roses,

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las quales esparziendo derramavan sobre una nympha muerta que lloravan.

which they scattered and poured over a dead nymph for whom they wept.

Todas, con el cabello desparzido, lloravan una nympha delicada cuya vida mostrava que avia sido antes de tiempo y casi en flor cortada; cerca del agua, en un lugar florido, estava entre las yervas degollada qual queda el blanco cisne quando pierde la dulce vida entre la yerva verde.

With their hair torn, they all wept for a delicate nymph, whose life had evidently been cut off before its time and almost at its height. Near the water, in a flowery spot, she lay among the grass with severed throat as the white swan lies when it loses its sweet life among the green grasses.

Una d’aquellas diosas que’n belleza al parecer a todas ecedía, mostrando en el semblante la tristeza que del funesto y triste caso avía, apartada algún tanto, en la corteza de un álamo unas letras escrivía como epitaphio de la nympha bella, que hablavan ansí por parte della:

One of the goddesses, who in beauty, it seems, exceeded all the rest, showing in her face the sadness which she felt at this sad dire event, standing somewhat to one side, was writing some letters on the bark of a poplar, as an epitaph for the lovely nymph, which spoke thus on her behalf:

“Elissa soy, en cuyo nombre suena y se lamenta el monte cavernoso, testigo del dolor y grave pena en que por mí se aflige Nemoroso y llama ‘Elissa’; ‘Elissa’ a boca llena responde el Tajo, y lleva pressuroso al mar de Lusitania el nombre mío, donde será escuchado, yo lo fío.”

“I am Elissa, at whose name resounds and laments the cavernous mountain, a witness to the pain and heavy grief which for my sake afflicts Nemoroso, and he calls out ‘Elissa’; ‘Elissa’ fullthroatedly replies the Tagus, and hastily takes my name to the Lusitanian Sea, where it will be heard, I trust.”

En fin, en esta tela artificiosa toda la istoria estava figurada que en aquella ribera deleytosa de Nemoroso fue tan celebrada, porque de todo aquesto y cada cosa estava Nise ya tan informada que, llorando el pastor, mil vezes ella se enterneció escuchando su querella;

In sum, upon this artful fabric was depicted the whole story which on that pleasant riverbank had been made so famous by Nemoroso; for Nise was already so well informed of all this and of each detail that, while the shepherd wept, she very often was deeply moved as she listened to his complaint.

y porque aqueste lamentable cuento no sólo entre las selvas se contasse, mas dentro de las ondas sentimiento con la noticia desto se mostrasse, quiso que de su tela el argumento la bella nympha muerta señalasse y ansí se publicasse de uno en uno por el húmido reyno de Neptuno.

And in order that this sad story should not only be told among the woods, but that also within the waves grief should be felt at this news, she wanted the story on her fabric to show forth the fair nymph’s death and so be communicated from one person to another throughout the damp kingdom of Neptune.

Destas istorias tales varïadas eran las telas de las quatro hermanas, las quales con colores matizadas, claras las luzes, de las sombras vanas

Of such various stories as these consisted the tapestries of the four sisters, who with shaded colors and bright highlights caused the eye to see standing out in relief from the empty shadows

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mostravan a los ojos relevadas las cosas y figuras que eran llanas, tanto que al parecer el cuerpo vano pudiera ser tomado con la mano.

the objects and the figures that were flat, so that apparently the empty body could be seized by the hand.

Los rayos ya del sol se trastornavan, escondiendo su luz al mundo chara tras altos montes, y a la luna davan lugar para mostrar su blanca cara; los peces a menudo ya saltavan, con la cola açotando el agua clara, quando las nymphas, la labor dexando, hazia el agua se fueron passeando.

The rays of the sun were now turning away, hiding their light, dear to the world, behind high mountains, and were giving the moon a chance to show its white face; the fish were jumping frequently now, striking the clear water with their tails, when the nymphs, ceasing their work, began to stroll toward the water.

En las templadas ondas ya metidos tenian los pies y reclinar querían los blancos cuerpos quando sus oýdos fueron de dos çampoñas que tañían süave y dulcemente detenidos, tanto que sin mudarse las oýan y al son de las çampoñas escuchavan dos pastores a vezes que cantavan.

In the warm waves they had already put their feet and were about to recline their fair bodies when their ears were so attracted by two pipes playing softly and sweetly that without moving they could hear them, and to the sound of the pipes they listened to two shepherds who were singing alternately.

Más claro cada vez el son se oýa de dos pastores que venian cantando tras el ganado, que también venía por aquel verde soto caminando y a la majada, ya passado el día, recogido le llevan, alegrando las verdes selvas con el son süave, haziendo su trabajo menos grave.

Clearer and clearer the sound was heard of two shepherds who approached singing behind their sheep, which also came walking along through that green meadow and which they were taking to the fold, now that the day was over, making joyful the green woods with the sweet sound and making their work less painful.

Thyrreno destos dos el uno era, Alzino el otro, entrambos estimados y sobre quantos pacen la ribera del Tajo con sus vacas enseñados; mancebos de una edad, d’una manera a cantar juntamente aparejados y a responder, aquesto van diziendo, cantando el uno, el otro respondiendo:

Thyrreno was one of the two and Alzino the other, both well thought of and better educated than all who take their cattle to graze on the banks of the Tagus; youths well matched in age and manner to sing together and to reply, they go along saying the following, one of them singing and the other replying:

Thyrreno: Flérida, para mí dulce y sabrosa más que la fruta del cercado ageno, más blanca que la leche y más hermosa que’l prado por abril de flores lleno: si tú respondes pura y amorosa al verdadero amor de tu Thyrreno, a mi majada arribarás primero que’l cielo nos amuestre su luzero.

Thyrreno: Flérida, sweeter and more delicious to me than the fruit of another’s orchard, whiter than milk and more beautiful than the meadow in April, full of flowers: if you respond pure and loving to the true love of your Thyrreno, you will reach my sheepfold before the sky shows us its evening star.

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Alzino: Hermosa Phyllis, siempre yo te sea amargo al gusto más que la retama, y de ti despojado yo me vea qual queda el tronco de su verde rama, si más que yo el murciégalo dessea la escuridad, ni más la luz desama, por ver ya el fin de un término tamaño deste dia, para mí mayor que un año.

Alzino: Lovely Phyllis, may I ever be bitterer to your taste than furze, and may I be bereft of you as the trunk is bereft of its green branch, if the bat desires darkness more than I, or more dislikes the light, wishing to see the end of a period as long as this day, for me longer than a year.

Thyrreno: Qual suele, acompañada de su vando, aparecer la dulce primavera, quando Favonio y Zéphyro, soplando, al campo tornan su beldad primera y van artificiosos esmaltando de roxo, azul y blanco la ribera: en tal manera, a mí Flérida mía viniendo, reverdece mi alegría.

Thyrreno: As sweet springtime is wont to appear accompanied by its band when Favonius and Zephyr, blowing, bring back to the fields their former beauty and artfully enamel the bank with red and blue and white: so, when my Flérida returns to me, my joy comes to life again.

Alzino: ¿Vees el furor del animoso viento embravecido en la fragosa syerra que los antigos robles ciento a ciento y los pinos altíssimos atierra, y de tanto destroço aun no contento, al espantoso mar mueve la guerra? Pequeña es esta furia comparada a la de Phyllis con Alzino ayrada.

Alzino: Do you see the madness of the spirited wind, made wild in the steep mountains, which lays low by the hundred ancient oaks and lofty pines, and still not satisfied with so much destruction, wages war against the fearful sea? Such fury is small in comparison with Phyllis’s, when angry with Alzino.

Thyrreno: El blanco trigo multiplica y crece; produze’l campo en abundancia tierno pasto al ganado; el verde monte offrece a las fieras salvages su govierno; adoquiera que miro, me parece que derrama la Copia todo el cuerno: mas todo se convertirá en abrojos si dello aparta Flérida sus ojos.

Thyrreno: The white wheat multiplies and grows, the field produces in abundance tender grass for the sheep, the green wood offers to fierce wild beasts its protection; wherever I look, it seems that the horn of plenty is running over: but everything will turn into thistles if Flérida takes her eyes off it.

Alzino: De la esterelidad es oprimido el monte, el campo, el soto y el ganado; la malicia del ayre corrompido haze morir la yerva mal su grado; las aves veen su descubierto nido que ya de verdes hojas fue cercado: pero si Phyllis por aquí tornare, hará reverdecer quanto mirare.

Alzino: By sterility is oppressed the wood, the field, the meadow and the sheep; the evil of corrupt air makes the grass die despite itself; the birds see their nests revealed which were formerly covered by green leaves: but if Phyllis comes back here, she will turn green again everything she sees.

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Thyrreno: El álamo de Alcides escogido fue siempre, y el laurel del roxo Apollo; de la hermosa Venus fue tenido en precio y en estima el mirtho solo; el verde sauz de Flérida es querido y por suyo entre todos escogiólo: doquiera que sauzes de oy más se hallen, el álamo, el laurel y el mirtho callen.

Thyrreno: The poplar was always chosen by Hercules, and the laurel by red Apollo; by lovely Venus was prized and esteemed the myrtle only; the green willow is loved by Flérida, and for her own from among all she chose it; wherever willows are found from now on, let the poplar, the laurel and the myrtle keep silence.

Alzino: El frexno por la selva en hermosura sabemos ya que sobre todos vaya; y en aspereza y monte de ’spessura se aventaja la verde y alta haya; mas el que la beldad de tu figura dondequiera mirado, Phyllis, aya, al frexno y a la haya en su aspereza confessará que vence tu belleza.

Alzino: In the woods the ash’s beauty we know already supreme, and on rough, thick-grown mountains the tall, green beech is superior, but he who has seen anywhere, Phyllis, the beauty of your figure will confess that your loveliness conquers the roughness of the ash and the beech.

Esto cantó Thyrreno, y esto Alzino le respondió, y aviendo ya acabado el dulce son, siguieron su camino con passo un poco más apressurado; siendo a las nymphas ya el rumor vezino, juntas s’arrojan por el agua a nado, y de la blanca espuma que movieron las cristalinas ondas se cubrieron.

Thus Thyrreno sang, and thus Alzino answered him; and having now completed their sweet song, they went on their way with a slightly quickened step. When their sound almost reached the nymphs, the latter plunged together into the shallows, and the white foam that they stirred up covered the crystalline waves.25

The first stanzas up to v. 54 integrate into the poem what was typically a separate text. We do not know exactly who “María” is, the person to whom the speaker dedicates the story of the four nymphs he announces in vv. 55–56. There are many alternatives, all of which seem plausible.26 What is important for our context is that such dedicatory texts did not address persons involved in the story narrated, but were directed to high-ranking individuals to whom the piece in question was presented as a gift. Such contexts of patronage are reminiscent of feudal practices: the recipient (who previously had to agree to be the dedicatee) had the obligation to offer the author, much like to a liege man, his or her protection in exchange for his services. Within a postfeudal and nonmilitary but artistic frame, this protection referred to literary competitors and included a promotion amongst the culturally interested parts of the court.27

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Translation based on Rivers, Renaissance and Baroque Poetry, 6882. For a detailed overview of the alternatives, see ibid., 417. More than any other known to me, Spanish literary history is characterized by controversies between competitors that exceed in their acrimony all imaginable limits; the most famous and perhaps most violent of these poets’ wars was the one between Quevedo and Góngora.

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The gift offered by the speaker is a “song” about four beautiful water nymphs, Phillódoce, Dinámene, Climene, and Nise,28 who dwell in the river Tajo. Someday, he says, one of them who has emerged from the waters to comb her hair is fascinated by the locus amoenus that presents itself to her eyes, and she proposes to her sisters that they sit down in the midst of the pleasant scenery and continue their labor there. This labor consists of “weaving” (texer) extremely delicate tapestries, whose images could rival the paintings of Apelles and Timanthes, the most prominent painters of the classical age.29 The images refer to four stories, three of which are well known: Orpheus and Eurydice,30 Apollo and Daphne,31 and Venus and Adonis.32 The fourth, hitherto unknown story is about two persons named Elissa and Nemoroso. The general topic underlying the four stories is love that ends prematurely because of the death of one of the lovers.

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For further information on these names, see the commentary by Rivers, 423424, ad vv. 5556. Each of the four names is conventional and has its antecedents in Vergil, and partly also in Homer, Hesiod, and Sannazaro. As is frequently the case in pastoral fiction, the etymology of the names refers to the roles assigned to those who bear them. Rivers says that the specialists found the following meanings: Dinámene (in other prints: Diamane or Diamene): “poderosa en el mar”; Phillódoce (Phyllodoce): “quien coge hojas”; Climene (Clymene): “riego”; Nise (Nisa; Nesaee): “nadar, isla.” Since the nymphs are not at the center of the text (they are mediating instances), the meaning of their names is of minor importance; it is rather unspecific and refers to what they are: spirits of nature. Their somewhat reduced status becomes evident in the partial negligence of the choices made by the author; Phillódoce, e.g., is just a name he adopted from a classical foil without taking into consideration that it is a tree nymph’s name and thus not appropriate in this context. The question of naming is much more important for the characters of the four narrated stories, in particular for the one new story. As to the fame of these two painters in texts of the classical age, see Herrera’s commentary (Antonio Gallego Morell, ed., Garcilaso de la Vega y sus comentaristas. Obras completas del poeta, acompañadas de los textos íntegros de los comentarios de El Brocense, Fernando de Herrerra, Tamayo de Vargas y Azara [Granada: Universitad de Granada, 1966], 557). One could ask why Garcilaso did not refer to the most prominent painter of all, Zeuxis. As will be seen in my argument that follows, I would speculate that he consciously wanted to avoid the idea of a successful optical illusion: the images produced by the four nymphs are depictions, representations, fantasies; they are not “realities.” The production of enargeia is not the rationale of the poem’s middle section. This is underpinned by the formulation to be found several times: the mythical characters are “depicted,” “represented” on the tapestries (see, e.g., vv. 129130: “Estava figurada la hermosa / Eurídice . . .”; vv. 137138: “Figurado se vía estensamente / el osado marido . . .”; my italics). This is, however, the perspective suggested to the reader of the eclogue. As for the intrafictional beholders of the tapestries, the speaker underlines at the end of this section that the quality of the nymphs’ craftsmanship was so fine as to produce a quasi-Zeuxian illusion (“ . . . las telas de las quatro hermanas, / las quales . . . / mostravan a los ojos relevadas / las cosas y figuras que eran llanas, / tanto que al parecer el cuerpo vano / pudiera ser tomado con la mano” [vv. 266272]). See Vergil, Georgica 4.317558; Ovid, Met. 10.1154 and 11.166. The classical reference is Ovid, Met. 1.452567. See ibid., 1.503559 and 708739.

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Only the Orpheus and Eurydice story contains the motif of a real post mortem encounter of two lovers (only one of whom is effectively dead, however). It is presented here as one out of four succinctly, even fragmentarily narrated stories, as part of a rather small and thus quite specific paradigm.33 This structure invites the recipient to search for the semantic constituent of the paradigm, in other words for the reason behind grouping these four stories together and for choosing the specific sequences that are actually presented.34 Finding this semantic axis is crucial for grasping the poem’s message, which is linked to the only one of the stories that is not a retelling, that is narrated by far in the most extensive way (though also in a fragmented fashion), and under whose pastoral surface is hidden what the eclogue is about: the lyrical I’s unhappy love.35 The one story in the entire paradigm including at least the prospect of an ongoing relationship that involves the physical body and its beauty is marked by transience. In the other two stories, the union between the lover and the beloved is permanent, but the price to pay is metamorphosis; the matter is still there, but no longer the specific form (morphe) that once provoked desire.36 The Garcilasean Apollo “seeks Daphne’s former self” as he is kissing and embracing the piece of wood into which she has metamorphosed.37 What effectively remains here, as in the Venus and Adonis story, is a nonhuman being or object that is metonymically linked to the beloved, in other words, a symbol that may serve as an instance of remembrance.38 I would like to suggest that the essence of the three mythical stories can be put as follows: the merciless laws governing the physical and material world can, in rare cases, be partly modified regarding the effects produced by them. However, even gods and 33

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The framing in Garcilaso thus differs fundamentally from the classical foils. The Orpheus and Eurydice piece is neither presented as a single, unrelated story, as in Vergil, nor as a narrative within a collection of some 250 stories, all of which illustrate an abstract concept such as metamorphosis. Recall that the mythical tradition offers innumerable stories on the general topic characterized above. The renarrated mythical stories comprise between 15 and 23 lines each, whereas the story about Elissa is 68 lines long. If we look at the stanzas, the emphasis put on the hitherto unknown story is even more evident. In a carefully calculated symmetry, Garcilaso presents the new story in as many stanzas—nine—as the three mythical stories combined. Garcilaso gives even clearer expression to this idea in another piece where he thematizes the Apollo and Daphne story: metamorphosis takes away physical beauty and converts it into ugliness (“A Daphne ya los braços le crecían / y en luengos ramos bueltos se mostravan; / en verdes hojas vi que se tornavan / los cabellos quel oro escurecían;// de áspera corteza se cubrían / los tiernos miembros que aun bullendo ’stavan”; [Son. 13.16; my italics]). “llora el amante y busca el ser primero, / besando y abraçando aquel madero” (Égl. 3.167168; my italics). It is hardly possible to disagree more than I do in my reading of Égloga 3 with the essay by Howard B. Wescott, “Nemoroso’s Odyssey: Garcilaso’s Eclogues Revisited,” Hispania 78, no. 3 (1995): 474482 (“Through Elissa, Nemoroso speaks to us of a Neoplatonic plane of enduring spirituality, with Christian overtones of life after death” [477]).

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goddesses are not able to suspend them and restore the previous state to persistence. This holds true even more so for humans, including humans who are endowed with supernatural, godlike qualities;39 and still more, we are invited to conclude, this applies to those whose respective capacities move within the framework that conforms to regular humans.40 These observations seem to be in concordance with what is to be found when one reads the mythical stories for what they are: intertextual phenomena, as the poem itself makes explicit (“entretexer antigua istoria” [v. 196]).41 It is in the first of the four stories that Garcilaso rewrites the classical tradition in a most obvious way. The emulation of the canonized version(s) by the author is quite telling: “. . . él [Orpheus], impaciente / por mirarla de nuevo, la tornava / a perder otra vez, el del tyrano [Pluto] / se quexa al monte solitario en vano” (vv. 141–144).42 There is no hint at the mythical story’s (in both its versions) episode in which the Orphic song continued to move the natural world, including humans. And Garcilaso does not allude to the story’s final happy outcome as narrated in Ovid at least: after Eurydice’s second death, the singer first turns his attention to beautiful boys. Thracian women cruelly punish him for neglecting the female sex; they literally tear him to pieces. As all dead souls, he then has to go to Hades. There, he immediately resumes his love for Eurydice. He looks for her, and as soon as he finds her, he hugs her with desire and they wander about together (“coniunctis . . . passibus”) “safe” (“tuto”) from the danger of losing each other again.43 The Ovidian version thus ends with everlasting love after death in the literal sense. The praeteritio operated by Garcilaso is all the more significant as the above-quoted passage 39 40

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As I will stress in the following, Garcilaso avoids giving the Orpheus and Eurydice story in his poem an Ovidian happy ending. In this respect, also see the self-apostrophization of the speaker in the dedicatory section (“ni desdeñes aquesta inculta parte / de mi estilo . . . / Aplica, pues, un rato los sentidos / al baxo son de mi çampoña ruda, / indigna de llegar a tus oýdos, / pues d’ornamento y gracia va desnuda”; [vv. 3544]). This is, of course, a traditional modesty topos; but on the other hand we do not, anywhere in Garcilaso, find the pretence that his poetry might have Orphic, that is, reality-transforming qualities. The “Orphic” promise the speaker makes in the dedicatory section is likewise conventional: he will go on praising María when he will have crossed the Stygian Lake, and by his song he will halt the waters of the river Lethe (see vv. 1316), that is, prevent her name from being forgotten. When Nise begins to weave, that is, narrate her story, she says that she does not want to do what is apostrophized in the quote given above, thus implying that this is exactly what her sisters did. With regard to the stories about Icarus and Phaethon, I have tried to demonstrate that Garcilaso’s attitude towards the classical pagan tradition is a symptom of his highly developed selfconsciousness. Without perhaps being a moderne in the sense of the seventeenth-century Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, he frequently makes use of the mythical stories as a mere repertoire to be used and changed according to what he wants to express in a specific poem (Joachim Küpper, “Mythologie und Philosophie bei Garcilaso de la Vega,” Romanistisches Jahrbuch 55 [2004]: 339356). See Ovid, Met. 11.6166; quotes: v. 64 and v. 66 (from Ovid, P. Ovidii Nasonis Metamorphoses, ed. William S. Anderson [Leipzig: Teubner, 1977]).

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from the first eclogue is, in the guise of the speaker’s wish, an almost verbatim quote of the Ovidian story’s last section.44 The elimination of the compensatory end is applied by Garcilaso to the other two mythical stories as well, albeit in a less obvious way. The Garcilasean Daphne is just a piece of tree trunk. Nothing is said about the laurel leaves with which Apollo crowns his head and which will make her “his” in a most emphatic and permanent way (“. . . ‘at quoniam coniunx mea non potes esse, / arbor eris certe’ dixit ‘mea . . .’”).45 As for Venus and Adonis, neither the instauration of the Adonia—a ritual feast honoring the deceased beloved—nor the consecration of a flower that had grown out of his blood in his commemoration46 are found in Garcilaso’s version.47 As said above, the center of the entire eclogue is the only new story, presented by Nise, who has decided “not to intertext/interweave an ancient story” (“no quiso entretexer antigua istoria” [v. 196]). The fragmentary mode of presentation that we find in the case of the mythical stories is, however, preserved. Consequently, the story remains enigmatic and thus becomes the focal point of the readers’ attention. The enigma surrounding the new story is enhanced by its being presented as part of a paradigm mainly made up of mythical fables. In its form of presentation, it encodes the instruction to read it in the same way as the classical stories were typically understood in postclassical times:48 not as accounts of “real events” but as allegorically veiled narratives that refer to a meaning that has to be detected through hermeneutic activity. My observations will focus on some remarks concerning the names of places and people and then proceed to comment on the metaphor of the weaving nymphs. As is frequently, if not typically, the case in the genre tradition, the toponyms to be found in the poem refer to a real setting that allows us to link the entire story to a supposed authentic substratum.49 On the banks of the river Tajo, which flows into the Atlantic Ocean near Lisbon, Toledo is located, and it is apostrophized, albeit periphrastically, in the passage vv. 197–216. At the time, Toledo was the kingdom’s capital. The 44

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“ . . . quaerensque [sc. Orpheus] per arva piorum / invenit Eurydicen cupidisque amplectitur ulnis. / hic modo coniunctis spatiantur passibus ambo: / nunc praecedentem sequitur, nunc praevius anteit / Eurydicenque suam iam tuto respicit Orpheus” (ibid., 11.6266). Ibid., 1.557558. See ibid., 10.725739. Mary E. Barnard discusses some of the changes introduced by Garcilaso in a very elucidating way (“Garcilaso’s Poetics of Subversion and the Orpheus Tapestry,” PMLA 102, no. 3 [1987]: 316325; also see her “Correcting the Classics: Absence and Presence in Garcilaso’s Third Eclogue,” Revista de estudios hispánicos 26, no. 1 [1992]: 320). My above remark is somewhat schematizing as far as intellectual history is concerned. It is well known that the mythical fables were largely understood as allegorical as early as in the classical pagan era. But on the other hand, it is evident that it was only the definitive end of polytheism in the West that made it cogent to consider the entire mythical tradition as being deprived of a literal level of truth. This “authentic substratum” may be fictional. It is a genre convention, though, to invite readers to detect under the surface of the pastoral integumentum a message that refers to real persons.

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author spent most of his life there, and it was in this city that he met his beloved, Isabel Freyre. She was one of Isabel de Portugal’s ladies and came to Spain when the princess married Carlos V in 1526. Isabel Freyre died a premature death in 1533. The identification of Nemoroso as a carefully veiled persona of the speaker, or even of the author, is made more or less explicit, albeit in the poem’s characteristic deferred fashion. When Elissa says that Nemoroso is already or will be singing her name and may thus contribute to divulging the story of her unlucky fate to her Lusitanian country of origin, this is exactly what the speaker is doing at this moment and what the empirical author, Garcilaso, did when he composed the eclogue. If we now allow ourselves to etymologize the male person’s name,50 it is evident that it means “man from the woods” (from lat. “nemus” / wood, forest). Taking the entire poem and its enigmatizing tendencies into account, I would suggest a second, somewhat more veiled etymology, which results from reading the name as “someone of Nemo’s kind.” I would like to indulge in the speculation that “nemo” might be the translation into the pastoral’s original language, Latin, of what would read, “outis” in the language of the genre’s historical antecedent Greek, with this being the alias chosen by Odysseus in order to escape from Polyphemus’s and his fellow Cyclopes’ revenge. The name would then also be an alias in Garcilaso, used to conceal the identity of a person so as to protect him from the rage of someone he has harmed, blinded, or castrated.51 It covers, as we may speculate, a man who was in love with a woman who was not free.52 50

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As just pointed out, it is a current device of the pastoral, especially of pastoral poetry, to refer to authentic persons through the shepherds and shepherdesses who constitute the characters of the narrative. The names are traditional at times, while at others they are invented by the author. In any case, they are meant to bear a meaning that encodes semantic features of the person who is designated by the name in question. In the case of the adoption of traditional names, the intended reference is metonymically encoded; it is linked to the story to which the name in question is bound. In the case of invented or less familiar traditional names, the encoding typically operates via etymology. Elissa is one such traditional name used to designate the Queen of Carthage, more commonly known as Dido (see Ovid, Heroides 7.102 and 193196; also see Vergil, Aeneid 4.331336 and 607614), who died a violent death because of unhappy love (she committed suicide, though, and was not beheaded like the person in Garcilaso’s eclogue; but we may feel free to speculate that the latter may have deliberately—out of unhappy love?—caused her affair to become openly known and thus to have committed a sort of suicide); the name “Nemoroso,” however, seems to be Garcilaso’s own invention. Recall that Polyphemus is characterized by having just one eye. Not yet in Homer, but in Ovid (Met. 13.738897), who is the Renaissance poets’ main source regarding the mythical tradition, we have the classical love triangle with Polyphemus as the older, mighty but physically ugly man who wants to become Galatea’s husband, and the young and beautiful Acis as the one whom Galatea sincerely loves, but who is then killed by the Cyclops out of jealousy. Also see my essay “Mythologie und Philosophie,” where I try to confer consistency on the enigmatic mythological references to be found in the (largely uncommented) Son. 12 (Icarus, Phaethon) by reading them as a veiled hint that the speaker has committed an infraction of the “Law of the Father.”

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If we follow this train of thought, we may even gain a consistent reading of the nymph’s lying decapitated (“degollada” [v. 230]) in the beautiful, pleasant landscape—a scene which is developed at length (vv. 218–232). The motif is considered by many readers, starting with contemporary commentators, to be so strangely brutal that they try to play it down by assuming a mistake to have occurred in the text’s transmission.53 If they die premature deaths, “real” (mythical) nymphs succumb, indeed, to events caused by their living environment. They may be bitten by snakes or killed by wild beasts; they may fall prey to a sea monster commanded by Poseidon or to a bolt of lightning sent by Zeus. Elissa, the Garcilasean nymph, dies a violent death through the hands of a human being who remains completely anonymous. And the reason for her decapitation is not even mentioned, let alone discussed. The fragmentarism that constitutes the mode of presentation in the case of the mythical stories—and that does not impede their transparency since they belong to a tradition with which every reader is familiar—is transposed to the new story and thus creates the point in which its enigma is concentrated: Why is Elissa killed? Why did she have to die? Who cut off her head or ordered this to be done? Beheading is not a practice connected to the crimes of passion as would be strangling or stabbing. It is rather a practice that belongs to the sphere of punishment. In the pre-

53

See Morell, Garcilaso de la Vega, 275, 567, 638639, and 662; also see the concise account given by Rivers, 441442, ad v. 230. We do not have the complete autograph manuscript (there are only more or less reliable fragmentary manuscripts), and because of the poet’s premature and unexpected death, there is no authenticated print either. The first print from 1543 was prepared by Garcilaso’s fellow poet and close friend Boscán, who died, however, some months before the edition was actually published. It was Boscán’s widow who presented the incunabulum (for all the relevant details, see Rivers, 18ff.). The history of the text that has come down to us thus leaves room for emendations that should, however, be handled carefully. Let me stress that I do not want to suggest that Isabel Freyre would have been literally decapitated after her husband became aware of her affair with Garcilaso de la Vega. Beheading here is to be understood in its symbolic implications, as referred to above. Alberto Porqueras-Mayo advocates a more literal understanding of the epithet “degollada.” He thinks that the passage refers to the myth of Cephalus and Procris (Ovid, Met. 7.661862). In particular, Garcilaso could have been inspired by a painting of the Florentine Piero di Cosimo (1461–1521), Cefalo e Procris. Garcilaso could have viewed it when he visited Florence in 1536 (see “La ninfa degollada de Garcilaso [Égloga III, versos 225232],” in Actas del tercer congreso internacional de hispanistas, ed. Carlos H. Magis [México: El Colegio de Mexico, 1970], 715724). I did not find the suggestion particularly convincing since in Ovid, as well as in the painting by Piero di Cosimo, Procris is neither described nor depicted as beheaded, but as mortally wounded in the chest (Ovid: “Procris . . . tenens in pectore vulnus” [Met. 7.842]); let me add that the story of Cephalus and Procris narrates the life of a happily married couple; then unsubstantiated rumors make Procris suspect her husband of marital infidelity; she follows him secretly when he is hunting, he believes the rustling of the leaves he suddenly hears to be caused by a beast and hurls his lance in its direction, thus unwillingly killing his beloved spouse. The entire constellation seems to be somewhat different from what is suggested in Garcilaso’s text.

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modern age,54 it was a punishment typically applied to people whose guilt did not consist in regular crimes such as theft or murder, but in an infraction of the imperatives of loyalty.55 Let me now come to the second point, which I would like to consider in a more detailed manner. There has been a long discussion concerning Garcilaso’s idea to introduce the four unhappy love stories not directly, but as descriptions of tapestries woven by river nymphs. It is evident that the metaphorical roots of the word “text” play a role here.56 In addition, the many contemporary attempts and theoretical speculations revolving around the concept of ekphrasis are referred to.57 The idea of weaving river nymphs, however, is somewhat unusual.58 Within the mythical tradition, the demigoddesses called nymphs are currently characterized by their propensity for physical love, by the delight they take in telling each other their numerous love stories, and, in particular, by the physical activities they have had to perform. Typically, however, these are not activities linked to the sphere of techne/ars in the literal or in the transposed sense. The nymphs’ task is to move the natural world, to keep the water running (as is the case for the water nymphs, the Naiads, thematized here), to make the wind blow, to gently shake the leaves of the trees. In an age that did not yet have the notion of dynamis as a potential inherent in natural phenomena and governed by fixed laws, these demigoddesses were seen as the ones who kept the natural world moving. Art is not their primary competency; it pertains to the sphere of the gods proper and to a few, specifically skilled humans. For the art of weaving tapestries one could, in this context, refer to the story of Pallas Athena and Arachne.59 54 55

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That is, before its generalization by Dr. Guillotin’s invention. As for the symbolic implications of beheading in medieval and early modern Europe, see Volker Mergenthaler, Medusa Meets Holofernes. Poetologische, semiologische und intertextuelle Diskursivierung von Enthauptung (Berne: Lang, 1997). Decapitation stood in contrast to practices like hanging, drowning, strangling, quartering, or burning at the stake; these latter methods were seen as “dishonorable” ways of punishment that were applied to “baser” people and in retaliation for “baser” crimes. I would like to draw the readers’ attention to the fact that one of the three renarrated mythical stories contains the element of a cruel physical death accompanied by heavy bleeding (“y el moço en tierra estava ya tendido, / abierto el pecho del ravioso diente, / . . . / las rosas blancas por allí sembradas / tornavan con su sangre coloradas” [vv. 179184]). Adonis’s death is brought about by a jealous husband, Mars, who had taken the shape of a wild boar. This connection is more evident in castellano than in other Western, or even other Romance languages: “to weave” reads “texer”/ “tejer” in Spanish, and the verb appears a couple of times in the poem (vv. 105, 118, 146, and 196). Rivers (445, ad vv. 267272) gives an account of the contemporary discussions as well as the modern scholarship on this passage of the poem. See Rivers’s account of the—at times harsh—critical remarks made by commentators starting with Herrera regarding the idea of making the water nymphs not only leave their habitat, the river, but also weave tapestries (429, ad vv. 97104). The way the latter’s activities are described is without a doubt the origin of the corresponding passage in Garcilaso’s eclogue (Ovid, Met. 6.1145); the respective tapestries each display famous stories from the mythical tradition (in Ovid: Zeus and Europa, Zeus and Leda, etc.) which are pre-

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We do, however, find the motif of weaving water nymphs elsewhere; if not in the mythical tradition and its conventional continuations, then in another famous poem in Garcilaso’s collection, Sonnet 11, “Hermosas nymphas.”60 The demigoddesses are specified as Naiads, and their activities are described as follows: HeHermosas nymphas, que en el río metidas, contentas habitáys en las moradas de reluzientes piedras fabricadas y en colunnas de vidrio sostenidas, agora estéys labrando embevescidas o texendo las telas delicadas, agora unas con otras apartadas contándoos los amores y las vidas . . . (vv. 1–8)

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Lovely nymphs who, deep in the river, live happily in mansions built of shining stones and upheld by crystal columns: whether you are now busily embroidering or weaving fine fabrics, or whether in little groups you are telling one another of your loves and lives . . .61

sented as ekphrases; in both cases the narrator underlines that the pictures to be seen are so perfectly designed that they can hardly be distinguished from reality (“. . . verum taurum, freta vera putares” [v. 104]; the reference is to the Europa story). The second well-known Ovidian story about weaving women deals with Minyas’s daughters, who are regular human beings like Arachne (ibid., 4.135, 389415). The same holds true for Philomela (ibid., 6.412674). In Homer, there is one short passage where nymphs are said to weave clothes in their caves, but the corresponding depiction remains without further elaboration (see Odyssey 13.103112, esp. v. 107; Odysseus lands on Ithaca at a bay where this cave is said to be located). Given the innumerable references to nymphs in Homer’s work, we might conclude that the idea as such did exist, although it was at the margins of the concept of nymphs as spirits of nature. The idea of the weaving nymphs in Garcilaso seems to be inspired by a short passage in Sannazaro’s Arcadia, Prosa 12. This was already assumed by the contemporary commentators El Brocense (1574) and Herrera (1580): “E quivi dentro sovra verdi tappeti trovammo alcune ninfe sorelle di lei, che con bianchi e sottilissimi cribri cernivano oro, separandolo da le minute arene. Altre filando il riducevano in mollissimo stame, e quello con sete di diversi colori intessevano in una tela di meraviglioso artificio, ma a me, per lo argomento che in sé contineva, augurio infelicissimo di future lacrime. Con ciò sia cosa che nel mio intrare trovai per sorte che tra li molti ricami tenevano allora in mano i miserabili casi de la deplorata Euridice . . .” (Iacopo Sannazaro, Arcadia, ed. Francesco Erspamer [Milan: Mursia, 1990], 215; for the effect this episode by Sannazaro had on the Italian and Spanish poetry of the time, see Herrera’s commentary [Morell, Garcilaso de la Vega, 555556]). The decisive difference between Garcilaso’s and Sannazaro’s versions (largely neglected by the commentators as well as by modern scholarly literature) consists in the fact that the entire setting in Sannazaro is completely phantasmagorical. The episode presents a kind of pastoral katabasis, at the end of which the narrator sees the place where the Giants are punished for their revolt: a pastoralized città di Dite of some kind. The speaker, who is not sure whether he is dreaming or awake (“e non sapendo io stesso discernere s’io pur veghiasse o veramente ancora dormisse” [Sannazaro, Arcadia, 214]), is led by a nymph into an underwater cave and from there to other, even deeper caves (“ . . . [E]lla . . . mi condusse dentro al fiume” [215]) until he encounters the weaving nymphs. In Garcilaso’s eclogue, though, the whole scene is said to have taken place in a realistic setting, somewhere on the shores of the Tajo river and thus accessible to a beholder without any further fantastic ornamentation. Translation based on Rivers, Renaissance and Baroque Poetry, 36.

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What is remarkable about this passage is that the nymphs’ activities are neither meant literally nor fantastically (as is the case in Sannazaro). Rather, they are used as metaphors for natural phenomena and thus remain in full semantic consistency with the core of the mythical concept. The activity of weaving stands for producing those fine veils of water that we call waterfalls in everyday language.62 Transferring this naturalizing metaphor to the third eclogue produces a new reading of the weaving nymphs that seems to be consistent with the semantic isotopy at the basis of the entire poem: considering the metaphor in the same way as the nymphs themselves—as an anthropomorphization of natural phenomena—the Naiads’ emerging from the depths of the river Tajo and sitting down on the waterfront can be read as a poetic transposition of a meteorological phenomenon usually called a flood.63 The “weaving” might be the spreading or the withdrawing of the aquatic “tapestry” that covers the meadow. The material the nymphs use are “el oro . . . / apurado después de . . . / las menudas arenas . . .” (vv. 106–108)—the gold contained in the fine sands or sediments carried by the river—and the “verdes ovas” (v. 109)—the green reed; in other words, it is a composition of elements pertaining to the river and to its shore.64 But how, then, are we to understand the description of the “stories” (i.e., the “images” produced by the nymphs) being detected in these masses of water mixed with sediment and reed? Flowing water, especially when it covers a surface endowed with many different colors in many different shapes, as is the case here, may produce illusionary visual effects in the eyes of a beholder.65 And these effects will conform all the more to

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The “houses”/ “moradas” of the first stanza where the nymphs dwell would have to be interpreted as those types of caves that are to be found behind waterfalls. Geologically, waterfalls in most cases originate from the partial or complete collapse of huge caves that have developed underneath a river’s bed. In many cases, parts of the caves are preserved. The whole scene of the weaving nymphs is said, in vv. 57ff., to have taken place at the shores of a part of the river where the water moves so slowly that the eyes can hardly determine the direction of the flow; as for the description of the geological conditions in Toledo, see vv. 201ff.: the river is compressed deep in a rocky valley. A river bed narrowed by rocks is prone to produce floods at its headwaters. Whether we refer the epithet “mojado” (v. 95) to the nymphs’ feet or to the area’s green grass (both are possible), the meaning is that the place in question is damp or becomes damp when the nymphs’ feet touch the ground. And in v. 98 it is said that they “wrung the water out of their hair,” which is consistent with the idea of a flood. The commentators tell us that the frequent references to gold mixed with sand refer to a tradition beginning with Pliny (Hist. nat. 4.115), who says that the sediments of the river Tajo look like gold or even consist of it to a high degree. The flooded area is a pleasance, a classical locus amoenus, and the work done by nature is described using the same term as for the nymphs’ activities; see vv. 5764, esp. v. 61 (“y assí la texe . . .”); the reference is to the place as beheld by the nymph emerging from the water in order to comb her hair, that is, before she and her sisters “sit down” in the meadow (in my reading: before the river submerges the locus amoenus).

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certain images stored in one’s memory the more the beholder is obsessed with these images or the corresponding stories.66 I would suggest considering the hypothesis that the presentation of the mythical stories as tapestries woven by river nymphs is part of a more encompassing rationale informing the structure of the entire eclogue. This principle could be described as a chain of deferrals superimposed upon one another, to which my above suggestion may have added one further link.67 The lyrical I (which may be an oblique representation of the empirical author) defers his own love story by telling it in the guise of a pastoral episode: the story of Elissa and Nemoroso. This pastoral story is deferred by referring to its mythical antecedent, which is then fragmented into three (slightly) different versions. These three versions are presented not as narratives but as ekphrases of pictures that might be remembrances or fantasies of the lyrical I beholding a paradise-like place (where he may have once met with his beloved, or where he would have liked to see her again) under meteorological circumstances that are prone to producing visual illusions. Based on all the observations and speculations I have made above, one could perhaps understand the story alluded to—which is hidden under the mythical-pastoral integumentum of the eclogue—as follows: The speaker seems to mourn the death of a beloved

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The background of my entire reading is the medieval medical theory of amor hereos, which influenced Western literature heavily up to the end of the seventeenth century (Italy, Spain, France, England, Germany), mainly in poetry but also in drama. It is an essential feature of this malady that the image of the beloved “imprints” itself in a lasting way on that part of the brain that is the seat of the patient’s vis imaginativa, the faculty whose task it is to synthesize optical data and produce interior images. As a result, whatever the lover actually sees appears from his subjective standpoint as representations of or as scenes linked to the beloved. The most prominent poetic instance of this feature of lovesickness is Petrarch’s sonnet “Per mezz’ i boschi” (Canz. 176), in which the speaker believes he sees Madonna Laura and her ladies as he wanders about among pine trees and beeches (“abeti et faggi” [v. 8]; for a detailed analysis of this sonnet and for the entire complex of lovesickness in Petrarch, see Joachim Küpper, “[H]er[e]os. Der Canzoniere und der medizinische Diskurs seiner Zeit [mit einer Nachbemerkung zur Kontingenz des Entstehens von Texten epochalen Rangs],” in Petrarca. Das Schweigen der Veritas und die Worte des Dichters [Berlin: De Gruyter, 2002], 115161; also see “Mundus imago Laurae. Das Sonett ‘Per mezz’i boschi’ und die ‘Modernität’ des Canzoniere,” loc. cit., 5488; the seminal publication on amor hereos in general is Mary F. Wack’s Lovesickness in the Middle Ages. The Viaticum and its Commentaries, [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990]). It is a commonplace assumption found in the scholarship on this eclogue that the way Elissa’s and Nemoroso’s story is presented creates an effect of distance or distanciation (see the account on previous research given by Olga T. Impey, “El dolor, la alegría y el tiempo en la Égloga III de Garcilaso,” in Actas del IX congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas, ed. Sebastian Neumeister [Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 1989], 1:507518). In my view, “effect of distanciation” is too weak a concept to characterize Garcilaso’s achievement in this poem.

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mistress, possibly killed by a husband or a father, and wishes her to resurrect and be with him again.68 He has to accept, though, that remembering, fantasizing, sublimating, poetizing are the only ways to deal with the situation. This line of interpretation seems to gain further substantiation if one considers the arrangement of the four different stories regarding unhappy love in the poem. Why does the series start with the Orpheus and Eurydice story rather than with the Apollo and Daphne story or the Venus and Adonis story? I would suggest that in the order established by the poet there is one decreasing and one increasing semantic isotopy. What recedes is the hope for an authentic love after death. This hope is only implied in the Orpheus and Eurydice story, and only in one of its two well-known versions. So, the hope is vague, it is only implicitly present, and it is not articulated here.69 In the Apollo and Daphne story, such a hope no longer exists, but there is, at least, the idea of a permanent being together: Apollo will forever crown his head with laurel leaves. Even this reduced version of the concept of being together after death is absent from the third mythical story; the ritual feast in commemoration of Adonis takes place once a year, and nothing is known about Venus’s constantly carrying the flower consecrated to him. This decreasing line seems to suggest that the hope for a continuation of love after death is to be seen as completely excluded from the contexts of the enigmatic new story. The increasing line integrating the entire paradigm is constituted by the idea of violent death. Eurydice is accidentally killed by a snakebite. Her death is a consequence of a contingent and banal event of natural life.70 In the Apollo and Daphne story, intentional violence already characterizes the center of the narrative, but it is not consummated. In the Venus and Adonis story, we then witness authentic physical violence, still partial68

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Let us remember that such honor killings were not punishable under Spanish law up to the death of Francisco Franco. Typically, the deceased beloved or mistress of Garcilaso’s poems is identified as the above-mentioned Isabel Freyre, who is said to have died in childbirth (see, e.g., the introductory remarks to the poem by Rivers [417]). My reading as suggested above would thus introduce some new but not unusual elements into Garcilaso’s biography as known to us. A quite banal reading would be that he revered not only Isabel Freyre but also other women (there are indications in the collection that point in this direction; see, e.g., Son. 7). A more daring hypothesis would be that the official version of Isabel Freyre’s death was a counterfeit story fabricated to hide her and her husband’s loss of honor. For evident reasons we do not know very much about the real-life honor practices in contemporary Spain. But if we take the famous Golden Age comedias de honor, El castigo sin venganza by Lope de Vega, or El médico de su honra by Calderón, as a possible source, the above speculations may start sounding less hazardous (in the latter piece, e.g., the honor killing ordered by the husband is presented to the intrafictional public as an unfortunate accident that apparently occurred in the context of a contemporary medical cure—a bloodletting administered to the wife by a physician or a barber). Its virtual presence is guaranteed by its effective presence in the Nemoroso and Elissa story as given in the first eclogue (see above, p. 117). Only in the Vergilian version is some human violence involved. Eurydice runs away to protect herself from the beekeeper Aristaeus, whom she fears will rape her, and thus does not pay attention to what is hidden in the grass.

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ly veiled, since the jealous husband, Mars, has taken on the shape of a beast in order to kill Adonis, whose bleeding corpse acts as a sort of prefiguration of Elissa’s swanlike white body lying beheaded in the green grass of the locus amoenus. The vague, but ever-receding hope for love after death, the increasing insight that physical death’s violence is the final word regarding the question of what our love will become in the future—this seems to be the rationale behind presenting the four ekphrases in this particular order.71 There is another point worth mentioning with regard to this line of increasing rationalization and decreasing hope for supernatural compensation: the defunct beloved “speaks” in the poem after her death. In this context, the motif evidently provides a strong hint referring to the section of the Orpheus myth that presents the singer’s head floating on the river Hebros still singing; within the mythical tradition, we have a female analogy to this motif of the dead body still speaking and singing in the Echo story.72 In Garcilaso, however, it is no longer the dead person who sings; it is a substitute, namely another nymph who speaks in her place. It is not the “real thing” or person we have here, it is a stand-in. Language and its representative capacities have replaced the phantasmagorical “reality” of the age of myth. Quite frequently we find the speaker in Garcilaso’s poems longing for death, but not because he hopes to meet his beloved again, rather because death will free him from the pain caused by his unhappy love.73 This is in line with the third eclogue’s somewhat factual stance towards the entire complex of unhappy love, which seems to implicitly reject all enthusiastic hope for a continuation in a transcendental world. In this eclogue, 71

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As readers may realize, I take the liberty here of interpreting the isolated incident narrated in the text as the conveying of something “general” (ta kathólou; see Aristotle, Poetics 1451b7) and of accordingly understanding the specific violence contained in the stories as referring to the general concept of violence. See Ovid, Met. 3.339401. This idea is expressed very frequently in the collection of poems. See, e.g., Son. 3 (“y el que más cierto espero es aquel día / que acabará la vida y el cuydado” [vv. 78]). Also see Égl. 1.289294, where a man is praised for being dead since his physical death puts an end to all affections. In “eternal well-being” he will dwell while the living will remain in flames by love (“¡Oh bienaventurado, que sin ira, / sin odio, en paz estás, sin amor ciego, / con quien acá se muere y se sospira, / y en eterna holgança y en sosiego / bives y bivirás quanto encendiere / las almas del divino amor el fuego!”; apostrophizing what is first called “blind love” as “divine love” adds, however, a slightly subversive note to this stoically informed recusatio amoris). Also see Égl. 2.7084: the absence of the beloved which causes the lover’s pain (“el mal que siento” [v. 72]) will be over when life will be over (“porque por más y más que ausencia dure, / con la vida s’acaba, que’s finita” [vv. 8384]). Also see Son. 1, where the speaker says that the pains he expects from his imminent death, caused by unrequited love, are less than those caused by the idea that his passion will end with his death (“sé que me acabo, y más é yo sentido / ver acabar comigo mi cuydado” [vv. 78]). Also see Son. 6, in which he gives expression to the idea that he no longer needs to care about remedies for his lovesickness since the death he will have to suffer as a consequence of it will put an end “to so many grievances” (“la cierta muerte, fin de tantos daños, / me hazen descuydar de mi remedio” [vv. 1314]).

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however, the speaker alludes to another way of dealing with the finite character of love. The poem does not end with the ekphrasis of what is to be seen on the tapestry woven by Nise. Instead there is a third part that accounts for approximately one fourth of the poem’s length and is, in contrast to the introductory “dedicatory epistle,” diegetically integrated into the story of the weaving nymphs: as they have finished their work and are about to return to the depths of the river, they hear the beautiful voices of two shepherds, Thyrreno and Alzino, who tell each other the stories of their labors and their loves. So this last part returns to the classical, or even conventional setting of the pastoral or bucolic, as found in Vergil’s third and seventh eclogues, later transferred into the vernacular by Sannazaro. This setting is one of amorous shepherds and capricious shepherdesses whose affairs are, however, far from anything verging on the tragic. Rather they refer to a ludic and cyclical understanding of love: Flérida’s coming to Thyrreno is like the “sweet Spring” renewing nature. If, one day, she will be gone, in the literal or in the frivolous sense, there will be others who will appear so as to make his “happiness flourish once again” (“reverdece mi alegría” [v. 328]). Love, indeed, is a problematic thing. Many times it remains unreciprocated; sometimes it is brutally ended by accidents or by human-induced violence. Lamenting a lover’s or a mistress’s death is an alleviating convention, and, as the nymphs do, we indulge in listening to these lamentations, but only if they are presented in a pleasurable way. The course of nature, though, continues, and so does the peregrination of the shepherds. The river Tajo is not the Lethe; living on its shores, drinking from its waters, will not bring oblivion. But it may be good to forget Flérida and Phyllis and to seek new adventures. The author-speaker concludes the eclogue with an extremely dense image. Before the shepherds can come too close, the nymphs plunge into the water. Through their movement the crystalline waves are covered by white foam. Mimetically, this seems to convey that the story as depicted in the text is nothing that would be accessible to regular sensory perception. Symbolically, foam refers to illusion and transience, but also to beauty. Mythologically, it is linked to Aphrodite/Venus, who is said to have first emerged from the waters in a cloud of foam. Here it is not Venus, it is a group of demigoddesses closely attached to love who are linked to the shimmering matter, and they do not emerge, rather they disappear definitively.

II. As affirmed above, the conditions even for the cautious way that Garcilaso de la Vega gave expression to the idea of love after death became obsolete in Spain when the Counter-Reformation church and state imposed strict ideological control not only over matters of faith, but also over those regarding the arts, especially painting and literature.

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What had been tolerated in the liberal age of the late Renaissance became apostrophized as “torpezas” (frivolities, instances of lasciviousness), and their production was impeded by a generalized system of censorship. Nonetheless, the idea of a love stronger than death seems to have been so attractive that poets never relinquished it completely. Instead they searched for ways to continue articulating it; that is, for ways to reshape the basic concept so as to suit the changed ideological climate. The standard solution was to rewrite the mythical fables in an a lo divino way. The fables are thus preserved while being subjugated at the same time to the only “real” truth. Rhetorically and ideologically, the device is the repristination of a discursive practice that was developed in late antiquity by the emerging church in order to absorb and metabolize the entire pagan tradition. The Orpheus myth as reworked in Calderón’s auto sacramental entitled El divino Orfeo (1663) is a particularly precious product of this widely spread procédé of “divinization.” The Thracian singer who with his song (the logos) frees the deceased spouse from the bonds of death is Christ; Eurydice, the spouse, is the human soul. The outcome is joyful. Only if the spouse (and not the singer) turns her face to hell on her way back to life will she have to return to the place from which her husband freed her.74 It is worth mentioning that the most prominent contemporary commentator of Garcilaso’s poetry, Fernando de Herrera, whose annotations date from 1580, already presents a comparable moralizing and “Christianizing” reading of the Orpheus and Eurydice story given in the third eclogue.75 74

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The idea of interpreting the Orpheus myth in this way is first documented in the writings of Clement of Alexandria; for further information regarding the hermeneutical practices involved in this process of divinization and their theological background, see Joachim Küpper, Diskurs-Renovatio bei Lope de Vega und Calderón. Untersuchungen zum spanischen Barockdrama. Mit einer Skizze zur Evolution der Diskurse in Mittelalter, Renaissance und Manierismus (Tübingen: Narr, 1990), 131171. See Morell, Garcilaso de la Vega, 558559; regarding the pressure exerted upon poets and scholars by the Tridentine discourse, it is quite telling that Herrera presents an orthodox allegorization of this love-after-death story but does not try at all to integrate the (according to him) authentic meaning of the story as conveyed by Garcilaso into a comprehensive interpretation of the entire poem. In order to give an impression of the evolution of discursive control in Counter-Reformation Spain, I would like to add that Herrera’s allegorization is mainly moralizing (Orpheus wants to free the human soul [Eurydice] from the captivity of the baser, sensuous instincts into which it has fallen as a result of an all too close contact with vice [the serpent]) and only to a lesser extent christological (“Orfeo. . . con la lira de las sagradas leyes . . .” [558]). In Calderón, the christological and eschatological allegorizations are by far the most dominant, while the moralizing reading is the “lowest,” least important layer of the three allegorical levels of the story, thus in strict accordance with the medieval theory of the four senses of scripture. “Divinization” became, indeed, a sort of discursive routine in the age of the Counter-Reformation. Almost all texts of the classical and the Renaissance tradition were rewritten a lo divino. As is typically the case with literature obedient to certain ideological imperatives, the results were not always, but mostly, poor. As for Garcilaso’s works, there are two such divinizing rewritings (Las obras de Boscan y Garcilasso trasladadas en materias Christianas y religiosas, por Sebastian de Cordoua [Granada, 1575] and Christo Nuestro Señor en la cruz, hallado en los versos del Principe de nuestros Poetas, Garcilasso de la Vega, sacados de

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There seem to be only a few examples of the motif’s continuation in its traditional, nondivinized Renaissance style. By making use of an idea contained in two lines by Propertius,76 Quevedo managed to give it a new accentuation, which made it, a limine, tolerable in Tridentine times. In addition, his sonnet “Amor constante más allá de la muerte” is remarkable for its reformulation of the abstract idea expressed in the title in a way that goes beyond the tradition initiated by Petrarch’s in morte poems: Cerrar podrá mis ojos la postrera sombra que me llevare el blanco día, y podrá desatar esta alma mía hora a su afán ansioso lisonjera;

My eyes may be closed by the final shadow which will take away from me the bright day, and this soul of mine may be freed by an hour indulgent to its anxious longing;

mas no, de esotra parte, en la ribera, dejará la memoria, en donde ardía: nadar sabe mi llama la agua fría y perder el respeto a ley severa.

but it will not, on the further shore, leave the memory in which it used to burn; my flame is able to swim across the cold water and disobey a harsh law.

Alma a quien todo un dios prisión ha sido, venas que humor a tanto fuego han dado, medulas que han gloriosamente ardido,

A soul which has been imprisoned by no less than a god, the veins which have supplied the moisture to so great a fire, the marrow which has gloriously burned:

su cuerpo dejará, no su cuidado; serán ceniza, mas tendrá sentido; polvo serán, mas polvo enamorado.

it will leave its body, not its [loving] anguish; they will be ash, but it will have feelings; they will be dust, but dust which is in love.77

This is a strategy of inversion that serves to produce innovation when compared to the Petrarchan model, while at the same time avoiding an all too flagrant attack on the orthodox position. The beloved is not dead, but the lyrical I imagines what his love will be when he himself will have died (it is implied that the beloved will then still be living). What is expressed here is not a hope that is hardly acceptable from an ideological point of view; it is merely an affirmation: “my feelings are so intense that they will not

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diferentes partes, y vnidos con ley de centones . . ., por Don Iuan de Andossilla Larramendi [Madrid, 1628]). “[N]on adeo leviter nostris puer haesit ocellis, / ut meus oblito pulvis amore vacet” / “Our boy [i.e., Amor] did not settle down in my eyes in such a superficial way that my dust would forget the love and would lie there without a master” (1.19.56; from Sex. Propertii Elegiarum libri IV, ed. Mauriz Schuster [Leipzig: Teubner, 1954]; my translation). Translation based on Rivers, Renaissance and Baroque Poetry, 286287.

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end when I will die, even when my body will be nothing but dust, it will still be loving dust or dust in love.” The whole poem may be read as a paradigm exercise of topical literary wooing. The idea articulated in the sonnet cannot be considered as a “pious” rewriting of the motif’s Renaissance version, but it seems to stay within the discursive limits Christianity traditionally grants. The backdrop of the conceit that underlies the sonnet is, firstly, that there is indeed something material that remains after our physical death, that not only the soul subsists; and, secondly, that the literally understood impression the beloved’s beauty made on the speaker’s body was so strong that it will still be virulent when the body is reduced to dust or clay.78 It may be considered as an instance of this conceptista’s quite unique ingenio that he obliquely preserves the prospect of a genuine love after death through the reference to Christianity’s traditional description of the body. If this heap of dust is going to “fleshly resurrect” at the end of all earthly time, the renewed body may, indeed, carry the marks of its former love. This latter idea might seem somewhat provocative. I would suggest reading it as a poetic transposition of the consequences of what Catholic theology calls the liberum arbitrium. It is certainly not recommended to remain stuck in sin (in this case: luxuria) after death, but humans are free to choose this alternative. It is evident, however, that their life after death will consequently take place not in the lofty regions of heaven, not even on the uphill paths of Mount Purgatory, but in the gloomy netherworld. From this point of view, the metonymical naming of the river Lethe and of Hades are more than the poetic adornment they would have been in the Renaissance. In the age of the Tridentine (Spanish) baroque, their “pagan” implications indicate the transcendental realm to which the speaker of this sonnet is prepared to go for his love, at least for the time being. Before the “final shadow” will close his eyes forever, there will be time to redirect his longing towards the One who “imprinted” the body and the soul “in His image and likeness” before they could be impressed by human beauty.79

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See Augustine, De civitate Dei 1.13. The entire passage is characteristic of Christian theology’s difficulties in dealing with the problem of dead bodies or bodies of the dead. Augustine asks for the defuncts’ bodies to be respected and to be treated as something other than matter. On the other hand, he has to insist on the strict and complete separation of the soul from the corresponding body at the moment of death. Accordingly, if Christians are not able to treat their beloveds’ corpses in the right, that is, respectful way because, e.g., the city has been conquered by the enemies of faith, they should not be concerned, because the souls of the dead do not sense the shameful practices inflicted upon their material remnants. Here I allude to Dante’s (theologically accepted) metaphor of the process of creation as the imprinting of a “seal” (“suggel[lo]”) on a more or less recalcitrant matter by God’s own hand (Par. 13.67– 78; quote: v. 75; from Dante Alighieri, Commedia, vol. 3, ed. Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi [Milan: Mondadori, 1997]; also see Par. 7.64–69 and Purg. 10.44–45). The risks accompanying such a speculation based on the laws of the (Catholic) salvational economy have been thoroughly demonstrated by Tirso de Molina in his Don Juan piece (El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra).

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III. Are there any reasons why the motif of love after death seems to have such a limited prominence in Spanish poetry or is this fact (if it is one) to be thought of as a mere contingency?80 We might consider the quasi absence of courtly literature on the Peninsula as one possible reason.81 The concept of love as passion and the idea that there is only one “really” adequate partner in life seems to have emerged first within the framework of courtly culture.82 Spanish love poetry of the Middle Ages is primarily sensual, crass, even rude.83 It is about knights seducing or even raping young peasant girls, or shepherdesses who seem to take delight in such instances of male aggressiveness; or it is about ugly and filthy older women trying to seduce or rape good-looking and innocent young boys. The basic motif of love as passion enters the stage of Spanish poetry only in the period discussed above, at a time when the Reyes Católicos were trying to establish a variant of courtly culture on the Peninsula, and even more with Garcilaso’s and his generation’s adoption of the “Italian” mode of writing love poetry.84 In the thirties of the sixteenth century, the church’s reaction to Renaissance “liberalism,” provoked by the Reformation, did not as yet exert its full influence on the production of literary texts. But we should not forget that the first picaresque novel, the highly subversive Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), was published anonymously and with a fake place of publication (Antwerp). One might perhaps assume that as early as in Garcilaso’s period of active writing, all too daring infractions of the struggling Catholic dogma, especially of its somewhat strict view of luxuria, were carefully avoided.85 The way Garcilaso chose to 80

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I do not pretend to have scrutinized the entire body of Spanish early modern poetry under this aspect. I refer here to texts written in castellano. Catalan culture and literature have been heavily influenced by the neighboring Italian culture since the Middle Ages. We should not forget that the Androgyne myth in Plato is presented by Aristophanes, the author of comedies (Symposium 189a193d). In the classical pagan age, the idea of a personally exclusive love seems not to have been the common ideal it was to become in later times, from the Middle Ages to the present. Hispanistas will be somewhat shocked about what I am expressing here; my short remarks are schematic, of course. In the first place they are to be read as comparative. If we consider the medieval love poetry of Italy, France, England, and Germany, and then proceed to take a look at the Spanish texts of that age, my above assessment may not seem completely devoid of sense. For a more detailed account of this thoroughgoing break in Spain’s literary history, see the succinct but substantial information given by Rivers in his “Introducción” (see esp. 12). Is it necessary to recall that the main theological dissent between Catholicism and the reformed churches is linked to the stance towards lust? Protestants believe that humans are not able to contain this sin; even marriage is only a sort of palliative: God-given, but not sacramental, open to everyone, even priests and nuns, and subject to divorce if it no longer fulfills its function. The Protestant believer is thus entirely contingent upon God’s grace (sola gratia). Catholicism postulates that believers guided by the church and complying with the ritualistic obligations are in principle able to contain their sinful inclinations, even the most widespread amongst them, i.e., lust, and

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treat the motif, by deferring it again and again until its contours vanish and it metamorphizes into “foam,” was perhaps the only treatment possible on the Peninsula at that time.86 I would like to add another, more symptomatic speculation, an observation that refers to the topic treated in this paper in a rather indirect and mediated way: Hispanistas of Peninsular origin, starting with Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, love to indulge in the idea that, its incontestable cultural delay up to the end of the fifteenth century notwithstanding, Spain was far ahead of other European nations in terms of literary history. Pelayo holds that a paradigm as powerful as literary realism was “invented” on the Peninsula.87 Texts of world-class level, unfortunately forgotten outside the Spanish-speaking countries since the end of the nineteenth century, like the Libro de buen amor (fourteenth century), the Arcipreste de Talavera (1438), the Celestina (1499/1504), and the Lazarillo de Tormes (the only one still received in later times), testify to the justification of such a pretense. If for a while we do not consider the many attempts to define literary realism in systematic terms and only adhere to Erich Auerbach’s more historical view of the phenomenon,88 such a claim might appear less surprising. Spain’s distance, up to the end of the sixteenth century, from the repaganizing mode we call the Renaissance and its special commitment to Christian faith may, indeed, account for the aclassical mixture of styles and contents to be found in texts that, in their seemingly messy structure, appear to be a textual reproduction of the chaotic realities as such. And as another initially paradoxical feature we could add the at times visible, at times subliminal cultural influence of those communities whose presence on the Peninsula was the driving

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thus live without being permanently stuck in sin. In this way, they may “merit” (mereri) their ascent to heaven. Put succinctly, the way lust is conceived marks an inner-Christian theological threshold. The gap is all the more important as it translates into the question of an appropriate organization of the church, to the sphere of hierarchy and power. Since the Protestant believer is contingent upon divine grace alone, there is in principle no need for a bureaucratic apparatus called “church”; the more or less informal gathering of worshippers (which may take place in a literally understood basilica such as a shopping mall) is completely sufficient; there need not even be professional ministers. Even within those Protestant denominations where the institution of church is preserved, e.g., Lutheranism, it is considered to be a worldly construct and thus permanently in danger of becoming a part of the civitas diaboli. It is in the first place this syndrome of theological and institutional (that is, power-related) aspects that explains the Catholic church’s endeavors to strictly control the sphere of artistic production, ever prone to thematize the bodily pleasures, from the middle of the sixteenth century forward. In order to give an idea of the ideological climate on the Peninsula, I would like to mention that there were reprints, authorized and unauthorized, of the 1543 incunabulum edition almost every year up to 1622. The next printing of Garcilaso’s poems after this date was published during the Enlightenment (1765). This thesis is contained in the monumental “Introducción” to his Orígines de la novela, which covers the entire first volume (Madrid: Bally-Ballière, 1905); see, e.g., cxcxx and passim. See Mimesis. The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); first published 1946 by Francke, Berne.

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force behind Spain’s self-assumed role as sword and shield of the Ecclesia militans. On behalf of their doctrines (and regardless of their doctrinal differences), the two other monotheisms’ propensity to lofty spiritualization seems much more limited than is the case with Christianity. That the discursively somewhat oblique, but literarily very productive hybrid of Christian resurrection fantasies and Neoplatonic dreams of perfect union, crystallizing in the concept of love after death, did not rise to prominence on the Peninsula might have been caused by the combination of these two features: the lasting cultural influence of the less speculative Abrahamic religions, on the one hand, and a particularly orthodox interpretation of Christian faith, on the other, which seems to have had its roots in the religious polemics provoked by the not uncontested status of Christian belief in pre-1492 Spain.

RAMIE TARGOFF

Burying Romeo and Juliet: Love after Death in the English Renaissance

One of the most significant differences between the Petrarchan poetry written in Renaissance Italy and the Petrarchan poetry written in Renaissance England lies in the treatment of posthumous love. For the English imitators of Petrarch, the idea of maintaining relations to the beloved after her death held out little appeal; the in morte poems in Petrarch’s Canzoniere play almost no role in the translations of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Petrarch’s first significant translator; among the scores of sonnet series written during the Elizabethan period, not a single one adopts the central division of Petrarch’s series between poems written to Laura in life, and those written to her after death.1 The idea that love was mortal lies at the heart of sixteenth-century English Protestant culture, and represents one of its strongest breaks from the Italian and Catholic traditions it had inherited. The models for transcendent love in both Petrarch and Dante, elaborated (and often manipulated) by fifteenth-century Neoplatonic philosophers describing the ladder of love that ascended from the earthly beloved to the celestial spheres, found very little traction when they arrived on Reformed English soil. Indeed, when English poets began to grapple seriously with this Italian legacy, they consistently refused the alluring idea that love might transcend the grave. This refusal came out of a religious disposition that explicitly rejected the idea of continuity between relations in this world and the next. It has long been observed that the Protestant elimination of purgatory and the prohibition of prayers for the deceased altered the ways in which people conceived of the relations between the living and the dead.2 But what has been almost entirely over-

1

2

A version of this essay appeared as “Mortal Love: Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and the Practice of Joint Burial,” in Representations 120, no. 1 (2012): 17–34, and as chap. 4 of my book Posthumous Love: Eros and the Afterlife in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). I am grateful to the editors at Representations and at the University of Chicago Press for allowing me to reprint these pages here. See Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 244–245. For sixteenth-century denouncements of purgatory, see, among others, William Tyndale, An Answer to Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue (Cambridge, UK: Parker Society, 1850), 120–133,

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looked are the ways in which Protestant theologians also strove to alter the ways in which people conceived of what awaited them and their loved ones in heaven. As we shall see, for John Calvin and his followers, there was no possibility of spousal reunion after death; earthly attachments would be left behind in pursuit of loftier pleasures. What arose in post-Reformation England was a fundamental tension between this theological position—the idea that death would bring an absolute end to all erotic bonds—and the emotional yearning to remain connected to one’s husband or wife or lover beyond the mortal realm. Many poetic works arose out of this tension, which I explore at length elsewhere.3 But the single strongest example is William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, a play that registers the enormously high cost of denying posthumous love at the same time that it derives its emotional and aesthetic power from this very denial.

I. In the writings of Calvin and his followers, there is no allowance whatever for an afterlife shared between husbands and wives. The idea that marriage vows would come to an end with the death of one or the other spouse was not, of course, an innovation of Protestantism. Both Catholic and Protestant theologians maintained that marital bonds were strictly mortal, and had no possibility of renewal after death. They based this conclusion on scriptural evidence, citing above all the account of Jesus’s reply to the Sadduccees reported in the synoptic gospels, which was discussed briefly in the introduction to this volume. As Matthew relates it, the Sadduccees, who did not believe in resurrection, asked Jesus what would become of a woman who had married seven brothers successively when they all met again in heaven. Whose wife, they taunted, would she be? Jesus’s reply—“For in the resurrection, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven” (Matthew 22:30)—became for many the definitive position on posthumous union in the Christian church. Although the Bible did not specify the boundaries for marital union, Christian liturgies had always been clear about the limits of their jurisdiction. The Latin liturgy most commonly used in England before the Reformation, known as the Sarum use, declared wedding vows to be binding “till death us depart”; even before the adoption of an English liturgy in the mid-sixteenth century, this “plighting of troth” was conducted in the vernacular, to make certain that

3

142–143; and Martin Luther, Works of Martin Luther, vol. 6, Christian Songs Latin and German for Use at Funerals (Philadelphia: Castle Press, 1932), 288. See Targoff, Posthumous Love, for readings of English love poetry from Thomas Wyatt through Andrew Marvell.

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there could be no misunderstanding. The Protestant Book of Common Prayer, first published in 1549, made no substantial alterations to the Sarum matrimony service, and kept the language of the plighting unchanged. According to the Book of Common Prayer, the minister instructs first the man, and then the woman, to say, “I take thee N. to my wedded wife [husband] to have and to hold from this day forth … till death us depart, according to Gods holy ordinance; and thereto I plight thee my troth.”4 The formula “till death us depart” was almost certainly intended to prohibit abandonment or divorce—it was consistent, in other words, with Jesus’s response to the Pharisees’ question, as related in Matthew 19, as to whether it is “lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause,” to which Jesus replied, “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matthew 19.6). But in the post-Reformation period, there is evidence that “till death us depart” was also intended to reinforce the termination of marital vows after death. According to Calvin, we should expect no human fellowship in heaven: “To be in Paradise and live with God,” he preaches, “is not to speak to each other, and to be heard by each other, but is only to enjoy God, to feel his good will, and rest in him.”5 Calvin specifies that divine companionship is incompatible with the companionship of former spouses on earth. The scriptural text he uses to ground this argument is not Matthew 22:30 (“For in the resurrection, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven”), but a later verse from this gospel: “Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left” (24:40). The choice of Matthew 24:40 to argue against heavenly companionship between earthly loved ones was entirely idiosyncratic: this verse does not in any way suggest that the “two” people in the field were a married couple, nor was there any basis in the centuries of biblical commentary that Calvin had inherited for understanding it in this manner.6 But Calvin saw in Matthew 24:40 a clear articulation of the imperative to separate partners from one another at the moment of death, and he takes this opportunity to warn husbands and wives against any expectations of resuming their ties in the afterlife. “Husbands and

4

5

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For the Sarum rite, see William Maskell, Monumenta Ritualia Ecclesia Anglicanae, vol. I, The Book of Common Prayer, 1559: The Elizabethan Prayer Book, ed. John E. Booty (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1976), 292. John Calvin, Corpus Reformatorum, 33:227 (Opera Quae Supersunt Omnia). The Latin text reads as follows: “in paradiso esse, et cum Deo vivere, non est alterum alteri loqui, et alteram ab altero audiri: sed tantum Deo frui, sentire bonam eius voluntatem, in eo acquiescere.” The English translation is from Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 155. As Aquinas traces in his compilation of biblical commentaries, The Golden Chain, St. Hilary interprets the verse as the “two people of believers and unbelievers”: Chrysostom as the “masters and servant, they that work, and they that work not,” and Remigius of Auxerre as “the order of preachers to whom is committed the field of the Church.”

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wives will then be torn apart from one another,” he declares, employing the unambiguous Latin verb diripio (to tear to pieces), “lest the bonds that connected human beings to one another hinder the pious.”7 The reason for this shattering of human bonds is to ensure that men and women “run with cheerfulness” to their deaths, that they not hold back on account of any prior obligations or ties. Christ intended, Calvin concludes, “to cut off every occasion of delay, to enjoin every one to make haste, that those who [are] already prepared may not waste their time in waiting for their companions.”8 The Church of England never officially adopted Calvin’s position: there were no ecclesiastical articles or injunctions issued on the status of marital bonds after death, nor did either the Book of Common Prayer or the Book of Homilies describe what would await deceased spouses after death (in the latter’s “Homily of the State of Matrimony,” obligations related to the death of a spouse or its aftermath are not discussed). Versions of Calvin’s position surfaced regularly, however, in English sermons and treatises, where there are descriptions of heavenly company stripped of all prior earthly attachments. In the words of Edward Vaughan, author of A Divine Discoverie of Death (1612), in heaven we will exchange “the company of husband or wife for the company of Iesus Christe himself.”9 To the extent that human company is imagined in these contexts, it is always described in terms of biblical figures. As the Scottish minister Alexander Hume explains in his Treatise of Felicitie of Life to Come, We shall haue for our familiar brethren and companions our first progenitor Adam, Noe, Lot, Abraham, Isaac & Iacob, and the twelue Patriarks, the sonnes of Iacob: Likewise wee shall see, by familiar, and contract friendship & brotherhood which never shall be dissolved, with Moses, Aaron, Iosua, and the just judges of Israell, with Samuell, Elias, and Elisha, Esay, Ieremie, Ezechiell, and Daniell, with David, Ezechias, and Iosias, with Iohn the Baptist, Peter, Paul, & Iohn, whome our Saviour loved: with whome wee shal dwell as brethren and Citizens of a Cittie. 10

Our own families on this earth will be replaced with the likes of Adam and Noah, Peter and Paul. “We shal see them face to face,” Hume declares, “which none can behold, nor apprehend in this life, but by faith only.”11 At the same time that we have plenty of examples of conformity with the hard-line Calvinist position, we also find voices of subtle, or not so subtle, resistance. Robert Bolton, a fierce Puritan churchman and author of several polemical works against papistry, affirmed in 1632 that one of our principal duties in marriage is to “help one an-

7 8 9 10 11

Calvin, Corpus Reformatorum, 73:675 (Opera Exegetica et Homiletica); English translation adapted from McDannell and Lang, Heaven: A History. John Calvin, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists: Matthew, Mark and Luke, trans. Rev. William Pringle (Grand Rapids, MI: WM. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1949), 158–160. Edward Vaughan, A Divine Discoverie of Death (London, 1612), cited in Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002), 217. Alexander Hume, Treatise of Felicitie of Life to Come (Edinburgh, 1594), 34. Ibid., 35.

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other towards heaven, and that joyfull forethought of most certaine meeting together in the ever lasting mansions of glory, joy and blisse above.”12 Bolton later explains, in more or less explicit contradiction of Calvin, why the “glory, joy and blisse above” would not be adequate recompense without the companionship of our spouse. Because in heaven we shall “enjoy every good thing, and comfortable gift, which may any way increase and inlarge our joy and felicity,” it is not possible that we will be denied one of our central sources of happiness. Bolton directs his reader to a letter written by Augustine to a widow, Italica, who had applied to Augustine for comfort. Although on other occasions Augustine expressed his indifference as to the company of loved ones in heaven, emphasizing instead the importance of “the society of angels,” in this letter he offered the comforting reassurance that loved ones will in fact meet again. “We have not lost those of ours who have departed,” Augustine consoled the widow, “but have sent them on ahead, where they will be dearer to us to the extent that they will be better known and where they will be lovable without any fear of our losing them.”13 For someone like Bolton, Augustine’s letter to Italica, and not Matthew 22:30, was the ultimate authority on posthumous reunion in heaven. Whether spouses are actually “married” in heaven is not important, he declares, but we can be certain that we will know one another there. “Society is not comfortable,” he affirms, “without familiar acquaintance: Be assured then, it shall not be wanting in the height and perfection of all glory, blisse, and joy.”14 When John Donne writes to his friend, Lady Kingsmill, upon the death of her husband in 1624, he offers consolation similar in spirit if not in conceit to Augustine’s: Madame, Those things which God dissolves at once, as he shall do the Sun, and Moon, those bodies at the last conflagration, he never intends to reunite again; but in those things, which he takes in pieces, as he doth man, and wife, in these divorces, by death, and in single persons, by the divorce of body and soul, God hath another purpose to make them up again. 15

Elsewhere in his writings, Donne distinguishes between these two separations wrought by death—between husband and wife and between body and soul—as the difference between a union that is mortal, and a union that, come the resurrection, will be eternal.16

12 13 14 15

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Robert Bolton, Boltons Last and Learned Worke of the Foure Last Things, Death, Iudgement, Hell, and Heaven (London, 1632), 49–50. The Works of Saint Augustine, a Translation for the 21st Century, trans. and notes by Roland Teske; ed. John E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2001), letter 92, p. 371. Bolton, Boltons Last and Learned Worke, 145. John Donne, Letters to Severall Persons of Honour (London, 1651), 7. Lady Kingsmill’s maiden name was Bridget White; Donne engaged in a lengthy correspondence with White before her marriage. See Ramie Targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), chap. 2, for a discussion of the relationship between these two pairings.

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On this occasion, however, Donne identifies the two separations as comparable. Moreover, the discreteness of each unit, which he usually laments, is turned to his advantage. Because both pairings are made up of individual pieces (body, soul; husband, wife) rather than being single, indivisible masses like the sun or the moon, they can happily be pieced back together again. In a sermon preached in 1627 at the wedding of the Earl of Bridgewater’s daughter, Lady Mary Egerton, to the son of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Donne pursues this question of a heavenly reunion between spouses more directly. Having somewhat perversely selected Matthew 22:30—the single most difficult verse in scripture to defend the idea of posthumous reunion—as his text to preach before the newlyweds, Donne works to recover some prospect of hope. He begins by invoking Luke’s explanation for Christ’s proscription against heavenly marriage, spelled out in his gospel’s version of the same exchange between Jesus and the Sadduccees: The children of this world marry, and are given in marriage; But they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage; Neither can they die any more. (20:34–36)

Christ declared that they shall not marry, Donne begins, “Because they cannot dy. Because they have an eternity in themselves, they need not supply any defect, by a propagation of children.” “But yet,” he protests, clearly molding the verse in his hands, “though Christ exclude that, of which there is clearely no use in heaven, Mariage, (because they need no physick, no mutuall help, no supply of children) yet he excludes not our knowing, or our loving of one another upon former knowledge in this world, in the next.”17 “Christ does not say expressely we shall,” he admits, “yet neither does he say, that we shall not, know one another there.”18 This is the most that Donne can offer his listeners with any assurance: that although Christ does not affirm, he also does not deny the possibility that we shall have knowledge of one another in heaven. The effect of the mixed messages from English preachers and churchmen about the nature of heavenly love can perhaps best be gauged by the widely variant funerary inscriptions recorded from this period. In this respect, Erwin Panofsky’s distinction between two fundamentally different types of funerary sculpture—“prospective” versus “retrospective” tombs—can usefully be applied to identify at least two categories of the English epitaphs that have been recorded.19 Panofsky’s first category, the “prospective” tradition, is epitomized by the burials of the ancient Egyptians. The reliefs and sculptures of these tombs focus on the posthumous future of the dead, with no eye toward the past. They are filled with objects considered important for both survival and pleasure in 17 18 19

John Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, vol. 8 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 95. Italics in the original. Donne, Sermons, vol. 8, 99. Italics in the original. Erwin Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini, ed. H. W. Janson (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1964).

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the next world—tools, jewelry, pottery, weapons, and, above all, containers of food.20 According to Panofsky, such prospective tombs not only look forward to the posthumous future; they also attempt to shape that future, to perform, through their representations of the deceased and the deceased person’s possessions, what he describes as a type of “magic manipulation.” Panofsky contrasts the prospective with the retrospective tradition, whose origins he locates in ancient Greece, where the tomb served as a monument, a record of the earthly fame of the deceased. (The word used to describe funerary sculpture was in fact the same word as that for landmark or memorial.) Ancient Roman tombs maintained on the whole the Greek’s retrospective focus, offering loving care to the monuments of the deceased in order to preserve their earthly memory. To a larger degree than Panofsky’s general scheme acknowledges, Roman tombs also included prospective features— sarcophagi figuring Elysian banquets and celebrations were very common, for example, as were images of gods or cosmic figures connected with one’s posthumous life.21 But the bulk of Roman tombs focused, as Panofsky suggests, on commemoration rather than anticipation. On grander tombs, the deceased person is represented by a portrait-bust or effigy, sometimes accompanied by friezes depicting episodes from his or her life, including the funeral. On less extravagant tombs, inscriptions commonly mentioned the deceased person’s social status, means of livelihood, and other biographical details.22 Early modern England is full of examples of both retrospective and prospective spousal tombs. On the one hand, there are plenty of tombs that simply record, in a manner that Calvin would have approved, the earthly bond as something to be remembered, with no expectation of a heavenly future. This epitaph for Jane Hansby is typical of this category: Iane, the wife of Ralfe Hansby Esquire, daughter to William Vavafour Esquire, Grandchild to Thomas Manners Knight, died the 22 day of Iuly, in the yeere of our Lord 1617. And of her age the 23. To whose blessed memory her deare husband hath dedicated this sad monument to signifie that with her his joy lies here interred.23

20

21

22 23

See John Garstang, The Burial Customs of Ancient Egypt, as Illustrated by Tombs of the Middle Kingdom (London: Archibald Constable, 1907), and Wolfram Grajetzki, Burial Customs in Ancient Egypt: Life in Death for Rich and Poor (London: Duckworth, 2003). Consider, for example, the twin mausolea in the Vatican cemetery with a vivid wall painting of Lucifer and Hesperus, whose depiction was associated with the idea of rebirth after death; or the regular appearance of souls carried to safety in the next world on the backs of dolphins. See Jocelyn Toynbee and John Ward Perkins, The Shrine of St. Peter and the Vatican Excavations (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1956), 79. See J. M. C. Toynbee, Death and Burial in the Roman World (Baltimore: JHU Press, 1973), esp. chap. II: “Roman Beliefs about the Afterlife,” 33–42. John Stow, The Survey of London Containing the Original, Increase, Modern Estate and Government of That City, Methodically Set Down (London: Nicholas Bourn, 1633), 473.

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The surviving spouse may be filled with sadness, his joys may be buried with the body of his wife, but he does not dare to imagine anything further between them. There are also examples of the prospective spousal tomb, which, pace Calvin, anticipates a blissful posthumous reunion. In the 1568 epitaph for Lady Katherine Knollys in St. Edmund’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey, for example, her husband Sir Francis voiced his expectation of joining his wife in heaven: … Haec tecum multos Utinam vixisset in annos, Et tua nunc conjux Fact a fuisset anus: Noluit at Deus, hoc voluit Set sponsa maritum In Coelis maneas, O Katharina, tuum.24

[Would that she had lived with you for many years, and now your wife would have become an old woman. But God did not want this; rather he wished that you, pledged (sponsa), await your husband in heaven.]25

II. More striking, however, than either the retrospective or the prospective tombs is a third category that emerges with frequency in the century following the Reformation, a category that Panofsky did not seem to have encountered or at least did not recognize as worthy of attention. This third category focused neither on the past nor on the future, but instead on the subterranean present; its concern was the posthumous life and companionship of the corpse. The desire to lie side by side in a single tomb had no rationale or justification in a religion that regarded the corpse as something to be dispensed with as soon as the soul parted from the body; until the flesh was retrieved and made new at the resurrection, the corpse served no meaningful purpose within Protestantism, and hence there was no possible advantage to lying nearer or further from any other person’s remains. And yet, in spite of these circumstances, Protestants routinely petitioned to be buried alongside their spouses without mentioning any other hopes for the future. What these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English couples seem to have craved above all was posthumous intimacy in the grave. There are scores of examples of tombs that record the desire for posthumous intimacy in the grave; three such inscriptions will, I hope, serve to convey their overall feeling. In S. Sepulchers in the Bayly, Sir John Brewster erected a tomb for his wife Elizabeth (d. 1609) with this inscription:

24 25

Ibid., 515–516. I am grateful to T. Corey Brennan for his help with this translation.

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… Thou bed of rest, reserve for him a roome, Who lives a man divorc’t From his deare wife: And as they were one heart, So this one Tombe May hold them neere In death, as linckt in life. Shee’s gone before, And after comes her head; To sleepe with her Among the blessed dead.26

The reconstitution of the marriage, envisioned as a renewed “linking” after the divorce by death, will take place between the two corpses. It is a marriage of sleep and rest, not of wakeful consciousness. Despite the claim for their being “among the blessed dead,” there is no hint of a future life for them together beyond the space of this grave. Laurence Gibson buried his wife, Anne, in the parish church of S. Alban with this inscription upon her tomb: Here lye the bodies of Anne, the wife of Laurence Gibson, Gent. And of their three sonnes … Hoc moestissimus eius maritus, in piam memoriam Uxoris suae, talis, tamq; charissimae construi fecit: eundemq; hic cum illa esse sepulturm sperat & exoptat.

… [This most sad / mourning husband of hers, in pious memory of his wife, had constructed (this memorial); he hopes and longs to be buried with her.]27

This is followed by a short English poem, which ends with the lines: One mind, one Faith, One hope, one Grave, In life, in death, They had, and still they have. Amor conjugalis aeternus.

The longing expressed in both the Latin inscription and the English verse focuses on Gibson’s desire for joint burial—to be “one mind,” to have “one faith,” is to lie in a single grave. Taken apart, the Latin tag at the end, declaring the couple’s “eternal love,” may seem to gesture toward a heavenly future, but the inscription as a whole lacks any reference to the afterlife. Gibson may aspire to an eternal love, but this eternal love seems to lie in the ground. (There is no record of Laurence’s eventual burial here.)28

26 27 28

Ibid., 425. My translation. Stow, Survey of London, 309–310.

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In the parish church of S. Mary Hill, a joint tomb was erected for Sir Thomas Blanke and his wife Margaret, whose epitaph stressed the eternal rest they hoped to share underground: Death was deceiv’d, which thought these two to part: For though this Knight first left this mortall life, Yet till she dyed, He still liv’d in her heart…. The deare remembrance of so deare a thing, Was not by death in her chaste breast extinct. Building this Tombe Not long before she dy’d, Her latest duty To his Funerall Rite, Crown’d with her vertues, Like an honest Bride, Here lyes at rest By her beloved Knight.29

Here the stress falls on Lady Margaret’s enduring fidelity to her husband long after his death: she kept him alive, we are told, “in her heart,” and held his memory dear “in her chaste breast.” (Given her probable age at the time of Sir Thomas’s death, after fortyfour years of marriage, the likelihood of her remarrying was very low.30) But it also makes clear that the bonds between husband and wife, or husband and widow, were, finally, mortal bonds: they expired if not with his death, then with hers. There is absolutely no expectation or anticipation of a life for them beyond—the reward for their love is eternal rest, side by side, in the earth.31 29 30

31

Ibid., 227. According to the research of Vivien Brodsky, very few widows in late sixteenth-century London married beyond the age of 50. See Brodsky, “Widows in Late Elizabethan London: Remarriage, Economic Opportunity and Family Orientations,” in The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure, ed. Lloyd Bonfield, Richard M. Smith, and Keith Wrightson (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 130–131. The desire for physical proximity in death was expressed not only by married couples; it also surfaced on tombs for friends. As Alan Bray has beautifully documented, joint memorials to friends were erected throughout the early modern period, commemorating and securing vows between men or (more rarely) between women that were expressed in terms very close to those of the marriage ceremony. In 1619, John Gostlin erected a memorial in Gonville & Caius College at University of Cambridge for his friend Thomas Legge, master of the college, which includes this inscription: “Iunxit Amor Vivos Sic Inugat Terra Sepultos / Gostlini Reliquum. Cor Tibi Leggus Habes” (Love joined them living. So may the earth join them in their burial. O Legge, Gostlin’s heart you have still with you). That they understood their earthly union as the equivalent of a marriage is confirmed by one of their contemporaries, William More, who said that the two men had lived conjunctissime (“qui cum eo conjunctissime vixerat”), employing the superlative of the Latin adjective conjunctus, derived from the noun conjunx for “one who is united in marriage.” And yet, as we have seen for many married couples, the fact that the two men were joined in their mortal lives

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Many more tombs could be adduced, but the question they raise is the same: Why did couples specify a desire to lie side by side in the grave without also imagining the reward of a heavenly life together? Or, to put it more simply, what was appealing about the prospect of a shared life underground? The easiest answer would be that the wish for joint burial was in fact the tacit expression of a wish for heavenly companionship; because that wish ran counter to what their religion and their scripture told them would await them in heaven, couples voiced only the more modest petition to be together in the earth. But there are several problems with such an explanation. As we have already seen, the English Protestant church never officially prohibited the expression of desire for heavenly companionship between spouses, nor were epitaphs censored for their doctrinal or theological content. The fact that there were plenty of tombs that gave voice to this desire for heavenly reunion only emphasizes the oddity of those tombs that did not. What the evidence seems to suggest is that the desire for joint burial was independent of the desire for heavenly companionship. It was a desire, in other words, of its own. There is no obvious early modern corpus or collection of sources that explores the reasons why people sought companionship in the grave, nor are there treatises that spell out the advantages of joint over solitary burial. But a partial explanation emerges in Sir Thomas Browne’s 1658 Hydriotaphia, Urne-Buriall, Or, a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk, which, over the course of its meditation on the relative advantages of cremation versus inhumation, spends some time on the subject at hand. Browne traces the origins of the desire for joint burial back to the ancient world, citing several examples of lovers who combined their ashes in single urns. “The ashes of Domitian were mingled with those of Julia,” Browne relates, “of Achilles with those of Patroclus.” Neither of these examples—the Roman emperor Domitian and his mistress Julia, or the two male Homeric heroes—is one of marital love. But the conclusion

prompted them to request a similar union for their material remains. Their heavenly fates—for either their souls or their resurrected bodies—are not mentioned. At Christ’s College Chapel, also in Cambridge, is a similar monument completed in 1684 for Sir John Finch, ambassador to Constantinople, and his friend and companion, Sir Thomas Baine, with portrait-busts of the two men side by side. The effigy asks that they might “in death, at last mingle their sacred ashes” (“idem suos defuncti sacros tandem miscerent cineres”), echoing Homer’s description of Patroclus, whose spirit visits Achilles on the eve before his body is burned on the pyre, and requests, “Lay not my bones apart from yours, Achilles, but let them lie together … Let one coffer enfold our bones, a golden coffer with two handles, the one your queenly mother gave you.” This gorgeous golden coffer is different in kind, but not in spirit, from the monument for Finch and Baine, or the magnificent tomb that Fulke Greville planned (but never built) for his own burial with Philip Sidney. As Greville relates in a letter from 1615 to John Coke, he intended to erect a double tomb with two beds made of stone, one above the other; this form was identical to that used in many of the spousal tombs that graced early modern churches.

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Browne draws about their motives in combining their remains echoes over the centuries in the epitaphs for married couples: “Without confused burnings, they affectionately compounded their bones, passionately endeavouring to continue their living Unions.”32 Browne’s language here is peculiar—he describes the inevitably posthumous act of compounding the lovers’ bones together as “affectionate,” as if the bones themselves possessed an emotional will—and this peculiarity brings out the paradox at the heart of these joint burials. What can Browne mean by assigning affections, passions, desires, to the lovers’ material remains? He can mean only that he understood the particularity of one’s personhood in this respect to be continuous with his or her corpse—that some significant part of a person lies within his or her corporeal remains even though the soul has presumably departed (the soul as a category plays very little part in Browne’s narrative, and it is equally scarce in the Protestant epitaphs discussed in this chapter). There is no evidence that many ancient Greeks or Romans, let alone seventeenth-century Protestants, believed that consciousness persisted in their corporeal remains, so that the subterranean companionship of one’s beloved would bring real comfort. And yet, the simple urge for companionship overwhelmed any such rational explanations. What Browne imagines the ashes or bones to feel is precisely what people feel in their earthly lives—that sharing a single dwelling, or a single room, is in itself a rewarding form of companionship, comparable perhaps to the odd pleasure of sleeping, in a state of unconsciousness, next to one’s husband or wife or lover. Those who were not so lucky to be buried in a single urn, Browne continues, recovered at least a share of compensatory pleasure in having adjacent urns. “When distance of death denied such conjunctions,” he declares, “unsatisfied affections conceived some satisfaction to be neighbours in the grave, to lye Urne by Urne, and touch but in their names.”33 “To lye Urne by Urne” was not as fulfilling as sharing a single urn, but it provided “some satisfaction” of a neighborly sort: to know that just nearby, if not within one’s own private vessel, was someone beloved. Wanting to touch in the flesh, the dead meet only in name. Once again, the projection onto the ashes of rather full emotional lives, replete with “unsatisfied affections” and plans to remedy that dissatisfaction, suggests either that the soul has not in fact left the body (a heresy in which Browne admits earlier in his career, in Religio Medici, he once believed, but claims to have left behind) or, more likely, that the body does not need the soul to experience longing or loneliness.34 The corpse has, in effect, an emotional life of its own. Epitaphs for couples that emphasize the prospect of a shared subterranean intimacy do not conform to any particular religious or philosophical position, including those of antiquity. Epicurus and Lucretius denied the immortality of the soul, but they did not as 32 33 34

Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, Urne-Buriall, Or, a Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk (1658), 38. Ibid., 38. Thomas Browne, Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Ramie Targoff (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2012), 16.

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a consequence believe that our material remains have meaningful afterlives. Ancient skeptics like Cicero mocked the idea that one’s posthumous fate would have any significance: “It is clearer than daylight,” he declared, “ that, when soul and body have been made away with, the whole living being destroyed, and complete annihilation has ensued, the creature which has existed has become nothing.”35 And poets like Horace and Catullus routinely urged their lovers to embrace the pleasures of this world by assuring them that there would be nothing but a nox perpetua on the other side.36 What we observe in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant epitaphs is not, therefore, a straightforward symptom of Calvinism or atheism or paganism. Instead, it is a phenomenon that Protestantism, however accidentally or inadvertently, made more available than it had been before. First, because Protestantism cordoned off the heavenly as outside the manipulation or negotiation of human prayer—unlike Catholics, who could pray for the souls of their deceased spouses, Protestants were forbidden any such attempts at intervention—there was inevitably a heightened focus in these epitaphs on the bodies that were left behind. The desire for companionship in the grave was no doubt shared by their pre-Reformation predecessors, who were also routinely buried together, but it was not articulated on their tombs to nearly the same degree. Second, Protestants emphasized the idea of companionate marriage in a manner that was unparalleled in the earlier periods, and one unexpected consequence of this emphasis seems to have been a desire to extend certain marital bonds beyond their stipulated term. This term did not transcend the earthly realm, but it offered a consoling reassurance that there would be continuity between life above and below the ground. Finally, although connected to issues of salvation and eschatology, posthumous love lay outside any obvious category of jurisdiction; it fell in the category of adiaphora, or a “thing indifferent.” This was not the case for other questions about the afterlife that may seem to our eyes equally inexplicable: on questions concerning the resurrection of the flesh, for example, theologians opined with great conviction what would befall us, detailing exactly how body parts will be returned, and in what condition. But on this question of love after death, the church was surprisingly noncommittal. Posthumous love offered, it seems, an unusual opportunity for free play.

35 36

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King (London: William Heinemann, 1945), 1.26, pp. 86–87. The important exception to this attitude among Latin poets was Propertius, who both imagined a shared life underground—“my bones shall press yours in close entwining” (“et mixtis ossibus ossa teram” [Book IV.7])—and also envisioned his love continuing after death: “There [in the underworld] whatever I shall be, my shade will always be known as your property; great love transcends even the shores of death (“illic quidquid ero, semper tua dicar imago: traicit et fati litora magnus amor” [Book I. XIX.11–12]).

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III. The tension between the scriptural and liturgical position that death puts an end to marital bonds, and the emotional yearning to remain connected to one’s spouse beyond the mortal realm, not only produced scores of funerary inscriptions that expressed the desire to lie alongside one’s beloved in the earth. This tension also helped to create a powerful new mode of literary expression, which can best be understood as mortal poetics. Mortal poetics was shaped by the simultaneous recognition that love is only for and in this life, and that many lovers desperately want it to continue after death. Mortal poetics eschewed the hope of posthumous love in heaven, but its representation of love as thisworldly was intensified by the longing for something more that it knowingly denied. There are many significant works that were written out of the tension I have just described, but its most powerful and complex expression was Romeo and Juliet.37 In this play, Shakespeare at first seems to instantiate, but finally repudiates the meaningfulness of joint burial, turning on its head the longing that so many of his contemporaries clearly felt for a meaningful afterlife with their spouses. It has long been observed that death and love are inseparable in Romeo and Juliet.38 From the opening description of the Chorus, which announces, “A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life,” and declares their love as “death-marked,” the play concentrates our attention on the tragic destiny of the protagonists.39 It has also frequently been noted that the love in Romeo and Juliet is not so much compromised as conditioned by the shadow of death—in Julia Kristeva’s terms, the play shows how “erotic expenditure is a race towards death.”40 What has not been adequately explored, however, is how Romeo and Juliet understand the future of their love after death and, more specifically, how little either of the lovers imagines anything like the future of heavenly transcendence that characterizes Shakespeare’s sources. It is Romeo who first articulates the lovers’ lack of imagining a transcendent, heavenly love in their future. As he awaits Juliet before their clandestine marriage, he responds to the Friar’s supplication—“So smile the heavens upon this holy act / That after-hours with sorrow chide us not”—with an outright dismissal of the Friar’s concern:

37

38

39 40

For a full exploration of the literary manifestations of this phenomenon in Renaissance poetry, from Thomas Wyatt’s sonnets through the carpe diem lyrics of Robert Herrick and Andrew Marvell, see Targoff, Posthumous Love. See William Carroll, “‘We were born to die’: Romeo and Juliet,” Comparative Drama 15, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 54–71; Jonathan Dollimore, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998); Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Prol. 6, 9. Kristeva, Tales of Love, 233.

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Amen. Amen. But come what sorrow can, It cannot countervail the exchange of joy That one short minute gives me in her sight. Do thou but close our hands with holy words Then love-devouring death do what he dare— It is enough I may but call her mine. (2.5.6–8)

What begins as a seemingly conventional expression of enthusiasm for his impending nuptials quickly becomes a rather unexpected defiance of death. This defiance of death is in fact rather more like an invitation to death—an expression at once of anticipated satisfaction with the present, here reduced to “one short minute,” and a willingness to forego any future pleasures. Edward Snow has compared Romeo’s words to those of Othello, who declares upon his reunion with Desdemona in Cyprus: If I were now to dye ’Twere now to be most happy. For I feare My soule hath her content so absolute That not another comfort like to this Succeedes in unknown Fate.41

But in several respects the two speeches are importantly different. First, Romeo does not articulate anything like the fear that Othello articulates—he is not warding off future anxieties, nor is he declaring himself at the limit of something that can accommodate no more. He is merely stating that “one short minute” of joy is enough to counter either sorrow or death, that the joy of this present moment is in itself profoundly satisfying. Second, the phrase that Romeo uses to describe death—he calls it “lovedevouring”—supposes a very different relationship between love and death from what Othello seems to have in mind. Romeo does not strive to sustain love through death, which is how we might characterize Othello’s hope in murdering Desdemona: “Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee / And love thee after” (5.2.21–22). Here, the wish, however perverse, is that death will return Desdemona to her original purity, and hence render her lovable once again; the “monumentall alabaster” of her skin that Othello wants to keep intact is the equivalent of the marble effigy that will lie upon her tomb, preserving her beauty for his posthumous adoration. For Romeo, by contrast, “love-devouring death” means that there will be no more love after death. In place of the idea that the bond between Romeo and Giulietta might transcend the mortal world, Shakespeare gives us a clear, irreversible ending for love. In Romeo and Juliet, death is not something that love can overcome. It is what kills love, or brings it to closure.

41

William Shakespeare, Othello, 2.1.217ff. Edward Snow, “Language and Sexual Difference in Romeo and Juliet,” in Shakespeare’s “Rough Magic”: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, ed. Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 168– 192, here: 181.

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There is much to be said about how Shakespeare conveys this conception of love throughout the play, and how deeply it is shared by both of the lovers. Indeed, from Juliet’s deeply ambiguous declaration to her mother wishing Romeo dead, to her fantasy of his being scattered after death in the sky, she is certainly her lover’s equal in linking love and death together, and in denying the possibility, or even the hope, that anything might await them in the future. In the pages that remain, my focus will be on the lovers’ death scene and subsequent burial, where central questions about the afterlife are raised, but it is important to recognize how deeply these questions pervade the text from its very beginning.42 As even a brief look at his sources makes clear, Shakespeare’s decision to strip the prospect of posthumous intimacy from Romeo and Juliet’s death scene was entirely conscious and deliberate. In Matteo Bandello’s 1554 novella, the primary source used by subsequent French and English translators,43 Romeo berates himself for not taking his own life immediately upon hearing of Giulietta’s death, imagining that her spirit is already in heaven and grows impatient with his delay: “Marry, she goeth yonder wandering and waiteth for thee to follow her.”44 Giulietta’s final words similarly address the imminent reunion of her soul with that of her husband: Do I not feel that thy spirit goeth wandering hereabout and already marvelleth, nay, complaineth, that I tarry so long? Seignior mine, I see thee, I feel thee, I know thee and I know that thou awaitest no other than my coming.45

Similar dialogue characterizes all of the subsequent versions of the story, even in its loosest adaptations; in Luigi Groto’s 1578 play, La Hadriana, for example, the last words of the Juliet figure (Hadriana) are “Wait for me, husband, I follow you.”46 What Shakespeare creates between Romeo and Juliet, by contrast, is a distinctly mortal conception of love, governed by two central premises. First, that love is fleeting, brief, and restricted to this world; and second, that this temporal restriction intensifies and renders more precious the nature of erotic experience. This idea was an important 42 43

44 45 46

For a full account of Shakespeare’s denouncement of transcendent love in Romeo and Juliet, see chap. 2 of Targoff, Posthumous Love. Before the story of Romeo and Giulietta reached Shakespeare’s hands, it underwent several modest re-workings, first by the French author Pierre Boiastuau, and then by two English authors, Arthur Brooke and William Painter, who worked from Boiastuau’s text directly. Although Shakespeare almost certainly knew both of the English versions, Arthur Brooke’s 1562 poem, The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, is widely believed to have been his primary source. See Romeo and Juliet before Shakespeare: Four Early Stories of Star-Crossed Love [stories by Masuccio Salernitano, Luigi da Porto, Matteo Bandello, and Pierre Boaistuau], trans. with introduction and notes by Nicole Prunster (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2000). Matteo Bandello, The Novels of Matteo Bandello, Bishop of Agen, now first done into English prose and verse by John Payne, vol. 3 (London: Villon Society, 1890), 156. Ibid., 166. Translation from Payne slightly altered. “Aspettatemi, Sposo, ch’io vi seguo.” From Luigi Groto, La Hadriana, act 5, scene 7. My translation.

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modification of his sources: it is a move away from the sentimental toward the tragic. The burial of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is not framed as a cozy or private cohabitation, with the grave as a substitute for the pleasures of a life together in heaven. It is simply where their story inevitably reaches its end.47 The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet builds to no small degree upon thwarting the desire to sustain some form of posthumous intimacy. As a result, the play’s orientation becomes overwhelmingly concerned with the present—it is neither forward- nor backward-looking in its erotic energy. When Shakespeare’s lovers learn of each other’s deaths, they respond with no hope whatever for a heavenly life together. Romeo’s immediate concern is with entering— and remaining within—the Capulet tomb. When he arrives at the monument, he addresses it as a devouring rival that stands in his way: Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death, Gorged with the dearest morsel of the earth, Thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open, And in despite I’ll cram thee with more food. (5.3.45–48)

Like Mercutio’s description earlier in the play of his flesh as “meat for worms,” Romeo envisions the Capulet’s corpses as food, differentiating Juliet’s from the others not in kind, but only in degree: she is the “dearest morsel,” but substantially no different from the rest. There is no mention of a soul that has recently departed and whom he wishes to join; his only concern is with protecting her corpse. When Romeo declares his intention to lie beside his beloved, he does so precisely in the context of preventing Death from having Juliet’s flesh all to himself: … Ah, dear Juliet, Why art thou yet so fair? Shall I believe That unsubstantial death is amorous, And that the lean abhorred monster keeps Thee here in dark to be his paramour? For fear of that I still will stay with thee, And never from this pallet of dim night Depart again. (5.3.101–108)

Romeo perceives death as “unsubstantial” and yet hungry for matter; he resolves this paradox by imagining death to be “lean” and hence in need of nourishment, but the problem he has fallen upon is one that haunts his conception of death in general: it is always material, and never metaphysical. The perceived threat of Death as necrophiliac and preying on his bride is what propels Romeo forward, and prompts his decision never to “depart again”: 47

Carroll makes a strong case for the prevalence of the journey metaphors in the play, always heading toward death as their ending (see Carroll, “‘We were born to die’: Romeo and Juliet,” 65). I share with him, and many other readers, the sense of Romeo and Juliet’s love “already contain[ing] its own beginning and end,” although I disagree, as the following pages will make clear, with the sense of their end as “endless.”

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Here, here will I remain With worms that are thy chambermaids. O, here Will I set up my everlasting rest, And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last. Arms, take your last embrace, and lips, O you The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss A dateless bargain to engrossing death. (5.3.108–115)

Romeo invokes the terms of a Christian afterlife—he asks for “everlasting rest,” or requiem eternam, the formula used on countless epitaphs over many centuries to describe the repose of the blessed dead. But he immediately qualifies this request, indicating that he means nothing more than the “everlasting rest” that the vermiculated earth will provide, not a rest that will lead to heavenly bliss.48 (The sentimental interpretation offered by the German critic and translator August Wilhelm Schlegel, that Romeo “cheers himself with a vision of everlasting marriage,” shows the extent to which readers over the centuries have resisted the very bleak terms of Romeo’s wish.49) Romeo does not, moreover, turn to God, nor does he mention his soul’s imminent liberation from his flesh, as he does in what is believed to be Shakespeare’s direct source for the play, Arthur Brooke’s 1562 poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet. Upon discovering the seemingly dead Juliet, the first instinct of Brooke’s Romeus is to pray to Christ for forgiveness: Lord Christ, that so to raunsome me descendedst long agoe Out of thy fathers bosome, and in the virgins wombe Didst put on fleshe, O let my plaint out of this hollow toombe, Perce through the ayre, and graunt my sute may favour finde; Take pity on my sinnefull and my poore afflicted mynde. For well enough I know, this body is but clay, Nought but a masse of sinne, to frayle, and subject to decay. (2674–2680)

Rehearsing the traditional language of Christian metaphysics, Brooke’s Romeus dispenses altogether with his flesh, which he relegates to the earth, while he petitions God to pardon his “poore afflicted mynde.” Shakespeare’s Romeo, by contrast, emphasizes only his material, corporeal fate: he repeats three times in the space of two lines that he will remain “here.” When Juliet awakens to find Romeo dead beside her, she likewise makes no mention of their posthumous heavenly prospects. Gone are the words that Bandello gives to Giulietta, who prays that “where [Romeo] goeth I may go abide / With him, for this alone I seek and sue”; gone, too, is the expression of hope uttered by Brooke’s heroine: “That so our parted sprites, from light that we see here / In place of endlesse light and 48 49

The phrase cuius anima requiescat in pace surfaces repeatedly in John Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments (London, 1631). Cited in The New Variorum Edition, vol. 1, Romeo and Juliet (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1874), 222.

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blisse, may ever live yfere.” The compromised pleasures of earth are replaced with “endless light and blisse”; the separations that the lovers have endured are erased by an eternity of life “yfere,” an archaic English word for “together.” In Shakespeare’s hands, there is no prospect of a heavenly reunion, nor is there even any mention of the possibility that the couple might enjoy each other’s company in the tomb. Juliet even lacks Romeo’s desire to lie together as corpses. Instead, she concerns herself exclusively with bringing her life to a quick end before the Friar might take her away—she longs for death itself, and not what might follow upon it. Juliet dies with an apostrophe not to the heavens above, nor to the husband lying in her bosom, but only to the dagger that she thrusts into her breast: “O happy dagger / This is thy sheath. There rust, and let me die” (5.3.168–169). Shakespeare does not even allow his audience to imagine the couple sharing a private corner in the Capulet tomb: in a twist of the plot unique to his play, the lovers lie together with Juliet’s would-be second husband, Paris. The presence of Paris is entirely Shakespeare’s innovation—he makes no similar entrance in any of the sources, nor does he meet his death. By introducing Paris to this scene, Shakespeare not only adds to the sense of lives wasted by adding another innocent body to the newly dead. He also intensifies the already powerful sense in the play that love has no meaningful posthumous future. As Paris lies dying, he neither turns to God in prayer nor expresses any hope that his soul may ascend to the heavens. His focus is only on his corpse, and where its burial place shall be. Having come to the Capulet tomb to perform his solemn obsequies to his intended bride—“Sweet flower,” he exclaims, “with flowers thy bridal bed I strew” (5.3.12)—he now requests from Romeo that he might join Juliet in the grave. “O, I am slain!” he exclaims. “If thou be merciful / Open the tomb, lay me with Juliet” (5.3.72– 73). Like many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, he wants nothing more than to mingle his remains with those of his beloved. These are the final words that Paris speaks. “In faith, I will.” So Romeo responds to Paris’s request, and Shakespeare makes clear that Romeo is good to his word. “I’ll bury thee in a triumphant grave,” Romeo declares, “A grave—O no, a lantern, slaughtered youth / For here lies Juliet.” Paris’s burial inside the Capulet tomb is then confirmed in the exchange between the Friar and Juliet: when Juliet awakens from her sleep and asks, “Where is my Romeo?” the Friar responds, “Thy husband in thy bosom there lies dead / And Paris, too” (5.3.155–156). This is a strange response, in several respects. First, the Friar describes Romeo as lying dead “there,” in Juliet’s bosom, as if her bosom were in effect not “here,” part of her body, but instead somewhere else. Second, the location of Paris’s corpse is entirely ambiguous: “And Paris, too” either indicates simply that Paris is also dead, or that Paris is also dead in her bosom. “Thy husband in thy bosom there lies dead” could simply mean “thy bosom husband” or “the husband thou lovest” lies “there,” but this interpretation still leaves the problem of the “there,” which contains the bodies of both men, somehow set apart from Juliet. Juliet makes clear, however, that she awakens next to Romeo, from whose lips

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she takes a final kiss, and the Chief Watchman informs us that the three bodies (Romeo, Juliet, and Paris) are all entangled together. In fact, when he first describes the scene, he forgets to mention Romeo, exclaiming, “Pitiful sight! Here lies the County slain / And Juliet bleeding, warm, and newly dead”; some twenty lines later, he expands this description in his account to the Prince: “Sovereign, here lies the County Paris slain / And Romeo dead, and Juliet, dead before / Warm, and new killed” (5.3.173–174, 194–196). In nearly all of the sources for Romeo and Juliet, the bodies of the lovers are removed from the Capulet monument in order to be buried together in a private tomb.50 In Shakespeare’s play, they are left in the complicated tangle with the corpse of Paris, along with the remains of “bloody Tybalt, yet but green in earth” (4.3.42), as well as the rest of the family. The funerary statues that the fathers propose to erect are envisioned as a separate monument. “I will raise her statue in pure gold,” boasts Montague, “That whiles Verona by that name is known / There shall no figure at such rate be set / As that of true and faithful Juliet,” to which Capulet, not to be outdone, replies, “As rich shall Romeo’s by his lady’s lie / Poor sacrifices of our enmity” (5.3.303–304). The statues are in effect a form of cenotaph: literally an empty (kenos) tomb (taphos) that commemorates the bodies in their absence. There is no relationship established between the sculptures honoring their love and the lovers’ physical remains. Why does Shakespeare do this? I propose that in Romeo and Juliet, the playwright discovered a new source for tragic power, one that depended upon first raising, and then denying expectations for consolation at the end of this death-ridden tale. This is not to say that Shakespeare was the first poet to deny lovers an afterlife for love—we find instances of this position dating back to the Latin elegists of antiquity. But the difference between Catullus or Horace declaring the meaninglessness of posthumous love and Shakespeare making such a declaration is a difference in both cultural resonance and poetic affect. In Shakespeare, it is tinged with a poignancy that the Latin poets lacked. This poignancy came from an awareness that the pleasures imagined from a shared afterlife together, whether in heaven or in the ground, were something that the members of his audience had grown accustomed to anticipating. They were then forced to bear witness as these prospects were emptied of all significance on stage. What Shakespeare gives us in Romeo and Juliet is a couple that resists any of the forms of consolation available for spouses confronting their mortality, a couple that seems to want only the pleasure that their shared experience can bring them, and nothing more. Romeo and Juliet becomes, in the end, Shakespeare’s greatest expression of carpe diem.

50

A partial exception is Bandello, who relates that the prince was “willing that they should abide ensepulchred in that same tomb”; he then relates, however, that an epitaph was placed “upon the two lovers’ sepulcher,” which suggests some sort of private tomb inside the Capulet monument was erected (Bandello, Novels of Matteo Bandello, 167–168).

Notes on Contributors

Beatrice Gruendler is Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at Yale University. Her research focuses on Arabic script and its use, classical Arabic poetry and its social context, the integration of modern literary theory into the study of Near Eastern literatures, and early Islamic book culture (ninth century CE) viewed within the history of media. Currently she researches literary accounts (akhbār) to throw light on the often practical functions performed by poetry in the ninth century and its reigning cultural aesthetics, and the role of philologists. In 2010/2011, she was a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. In addition to numerous articles and reviews, her publications include The Development of the Arabic Scripts: From the Nabatean Era to the First Islamic Century (1993); Understanding Near Eastern Literatures: A Spectrum of Interdisciplinary Approaches (2000; co-editor); Medieval Arabic Praise Poetry: Ibn al-Rūmī and the Patron’s Redemption (2003); Writers and Rulers: Perspectives from Abbasid to Safavid Times (2004; co-editor); Classical Arabic Humanities in Their Own Terms: Festschrift for Wolfhart Heinrichs (2007; editor); Abū Bakr al-Ṣūlī: The Life and Times of Abū Tammān (Library of Arabic Literature) (forthcoming; editor and translator). Bernhard Jussen is Professor of Medieval History at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. His main research fields are political language in the Middle Ages, computational historical semantics, pre-modern kinship, and modes of picturing medieval history in nineteenthand twentieth-century scholarship. He was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG) in 2007. He was Visiting Scholar at École Normale Supérieure Paris (2008) and Harvard University (2008/2009). Jussen is principal investigator of the Cluster of Excellence The Formation of Normative Orders at Goethe-Universität (since 2008) and member of the Advisory Board of the German Historical Institute in Washington DC and of the European Research Council (both since 2010). Among his publications are Spiritual Kinship as Social Practice. Godparenthood and Adoption in the Early Middle Ages (2000); Der Name der Witwe. Erkundungen zur Semantik der mittelalterlichen Bußkultur (2000); Die Macht des Königs. Herrschaft in Europa vom Frühmittelalter bis in die Neuzeit (2005; editor); Die Franken. Geschichte, Gesellschaft, Kultur (2014).

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Joachim Küpper is Professor of Romance Philology and Comparative Literature at Freie Universität Berlin. He is the director of the Dahlem Humanities Center at Freie Universität Berlin and was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG) in 2001. In 2009 he received an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. He is a member of Leopoldina – German National Academy of Sciences, and a corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities. His research focus is on Romance literatures and the theory of literature and arts. His books include Ästhetik der Wirklichkeitsdarstellung und Evolution des Romans von der französischen Spätaufklärung bis zu Robbe-Grillet (1987); DiskursRenovatio bei Lope de Vega und Calderón (1990); Petrarca. Das Schweigen der Veritas und die Worte des Dichters (2002); Zum italienischen Roman des 19. Jahrhunderts. Foscolo, Manzoni, Verga, D'Annunzio (2002). Glenn W. Most is Professor of Greek Philology at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. He has taught at the universities of Yale, Princeton, Michigan, Siena, Innsbruck, Heidelberg, and Paris, and has been Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago since 1996. His research fields are ancient and modern literature and philosophy, the history and methodology of classical studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, the history of religion, literary theory, and the history of art. He was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG) in 1996, and he has been serving as External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin since 2010. Most has published numerous articles, reviews, and translations, such as The Measures of Praise: Structure and Function in Pindar’s Second Pythian and Seventh Nemean Odes (1985); Raffael, Die Schule von Athen. Über das Lesen der Bilder (1999); Hesiod, Loeb Classical Library, 2 volumes (2006/2007); The Classical Tradition (2010; co-editor); David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, ed., The Complete Greek Tragedies. Third Edition (2013; co-editor). David Nirenberg is the Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Professor of Medieval History and Social Thought at the University of Chicago, where he is also the Roman Family director of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society and Dean of the Social Sciences. His research focuses on the ways in which Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultures constitute themselves by interrelating with or thinking about each other, particularly in Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean World. His work on these three religious traditions ranges across literary, artistic, historiographic, and philosophical genres. More generally, he is interested in how societies have imagined the possibilities and limits of various types of community and communication. In addition to dozens of articles and reviews, some of his publications include Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (1996); Wie jüdisch war das Spanien des Mittelalters? Die Perspektive der Literatur (2005); Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition

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(2013); and Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, Medieval and Modern (2014). He has edited a number of volumes, among them Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism (2011); and Race and Blood in Spain and Colonial Latin America (2012). Gerhard Regn is Professor Emeritus of Italian Philology at the Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversität München and Honorary Professor at the Universität zu Köln. He also taught as Professor of Romance Philology at the Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on Italian medieval and pre-modern literature and on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and Italian literature, with a particular emphasis on the connection between literature and life sciences. He is a full member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (since 2005) and corresponding member of the Berliner Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft. In 2007 he was nominated Commendatore dell’ Ordine della Stella della Solidarietà Italiana of the Italian Republic. Regn has published numerous articles, reviews, and books, including Questo leggiadrissimo Poeta! Autoritätskonstitution im rinascimentalen Lyrik-Kommentar (2004; editor); Letture petrarchesche, a cura di Klaus W. Hempfer e Gerhard Regn (2007; co-editor); Francesco Petrarca. Africa. Lateinisch – Deutsch (2007; co-editor and -translator); Lyriktheorie(n) in der italienischen Renaissance (2012; co-editor); Francesco Petrarca. Secretum meum. Lateinisch – Deutsch (second, newly revised edition, 2013; co-editor and -translator). Ramie Targoff is Professor of English, Co-Chair of Italian Studies, and the Jehuda Reinharz Director of the Mandel Center for the Humanities at Brandeis University. Her research focuses on Renaissance English and Italian literature, with an emphasis on the relationship between poetry and religion. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1995), Yale University (1998), the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2003), the American Council of Learned Societies (2009), and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2012). Targoff was an American Academy in Rome Scholar in Residence in 2012. In addition to many articles and reviews, she is the author of Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion (2001), which was honored in 2002 with the Best Book of the Year Award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature; John Donne, Body and Soul (2008); and Posthumous Love: Eros and the Afterlife in Renaissance England (2014); she is also the co-editor with Stephen Greenblatt of Religio Medici and Urne-Burial (2012). She is currently writing a biography of the sixteenth-century Italian poet, Vittoria Colonna.

Table of figures

Figure 1: Epitaph of Jane Colt. Figure 2: Digitized page of Thomas Mores’s Epigrammata. Figure 3: The Rothschild Canticles, New Haven, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Ms. 404, 72v–73r. Figure 4: Luca Signorelli, The Last Judgment, Orvieto, Capella Nuova, 1499–1503. Figure 5: A typical page from one of many philosophical comments on Petrarch’s in morte poems, modelled on the practice of commenting the bible; Francesco Petrarca, Rime, Venice: Bartholomaeus de Zanis, 1497, p. 63. Figure 6: A Marble Tombstone from the time of Emperor Tiberius (AD 1437); today in the Vatican, site of the find unknown. Figure 7: Richard de Fournival, Bestiare d’Amour, MS Douce 308, fol. 102, Bodleian Library, Oxford: The turtledove’s natura figures as role model, as figura, for the faithful lovers. After the spouse’s death, the bird sits on a dead branch lamenting. Figure 8: The three residences in heaven are expressed with the different eternal harvests of the three estates according to their merits on earth; Speculum virginum, MS W 276a, Historical Archives, Cologne; mid-twelfth century, probably from the Augustinian Sisters monastery in Andernach (Rhine valley, close to Bonn).

The figures are taken from: Bernhard Jussen, Der Name der Witwe. Erkundungen zur Semantik der mittelalterlichen Bußkultur, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000 (fig. 3, 6, 7, 8); Steffi Roettgen, Wandmalerei der Frührenaissance in Italien, vol. 2: Die Blütezeit 1470–1510, Munich 1997, plates 215 and 219 (fig. 4); Ramie Targoff, “Passion. Petrarch to Wyatt,” in Cultural Reformations. Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, Oxford 21st Century Approaches to Literature, eds. Brian Cummings and James Simpson, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010, 609–634 (fig. 5).

Index of names

A Aaron 61, 150 ʿAbbās b. ʿAbdallāh al-Tarqufī 91 al-ʿAbbās b. al-Faraj see al-Riyāshī ʿAbdallāh b. al-Muʿtazz see Ibn alMuʿtazz ʿAbdarraḥmān b. Isḥāq 90 Abraham 58, 65–66, 69, 150 Abū ʿAmr al-Ashtar 92 Abū ʿAmr b. al-ʿAlāʾ 81 Abū l-Faḍl al-Rabaʿī 81, 85, 88 Abū l-Faraj b. al-Jawzī see Ibn al-Jawzī Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. ʿAbdallāh 93 Abū Ḥāzim Salama b. Dīnār 93 Abū Miskīn 88 Abū Muṣʿab Aḥmad b. Abī Bakr see alZuhrī Abū Mushir 91 Abū Nahshal b. Ḥumayd 86 Abū l-Sāʾib al-Makhzūmī 93 Abū Tammām 87 Abū ʿUyayna al-Muhallabī 86 Abū Zayd the Grammarian 94 Achilles 72, 157 Adam 150 Admetus 20–21 Adonis 123, 128–129, 131, 134, 138 Aeneas 22, 57, 113 Aeschylus 56–57 Aesop 48 ʿAfrāʾ bt. Aḥmar 75–77, 88 al-Afshīn 87 Agamemnon 56 Agnes Blannbekin 43, 45 Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm al-Raqqī 86 Aḥmad b. Jaʿfar 92 Aḥmad b. Ismāʿīl al-Muzanī 84

Aḥmad b. ʿUthmān al-Raqqī 86 ʿAlā al-Dīn b. Qilīj 80 Albrecht of Eyb 42 Alcestis 20–21, 23 ʿAlī b. ʿAdlān al-Mawṣilī 73 ʿAlī b. al-Aʿrābī 83–84 ʿAlī b. ʿUmrūs 83 Alī b. ʿĪsā 90 ʿAlī b. Tamīm al-Khuzāʿī 88 ʿAlī b. Zayd al-Ḥarrānī 86 Alzino 125–127, 140 Ambrose 34, 46 Anaxarete 117 Aphrodite 140 Apollo 119, 122, 126, 128–129, 131, 138 Aquinas, Thomas see Thomas Aquinas Arachne 134–135 Aristaeus 22, 138 Aristophanes 144 Aristotle 64, 139 al-Aṣmaʿī 81 Asmāʾ bt. ʿAbdallāh b. Hishām 76, 84 Athena 134 ʿĀtika bt. Yazīd 76 Augustine 34, 46, 98, 101, 103–104, 108–109, 114, 143, 151 Augustus 32–33 ʿAzza 79, 8 B Bābak 87 Baine, Thomas 157 Bandello, Matteo 162, 166 Beatrice (Dante) 101–102, 104–106 Benedict XII. (pope) 107–108 Bernard of Clairvaux 44 Blanke, Thomas 156

Index of names

174 Boccaccio, Giovanni 116 Boaistuau, Pierre 162 Bolton, Robert 150–151 Boscán, Juan 133, 141 Brewster, John 154 Brooke, Arthur 162, 164 Browne, Thomas 157–158 al-Buḥturī 87 Buthayna 79 C Calderón de la Barca 138, 141 Calvin, John 16, 148–151, 153–154, 159 Canetti, Elias 55–56 Carey, Catherine 154 Catullus 21, 159, 166 Cephalus 133 Charles V. (emperor) 132 Chaucer, Geoffrey 41–42 Christ see Jesus Christ Cicero 159 Clement of Alexandria 141 Clymene (nymph) 120, 122, 128 Clytaemnestra 56 Colonna, Giovanni 107, 110 Cosimo, Piero di 133 Cupid 122 Cynthia 21, 24 D Daniel (prophet) 57, 150 Dante Alighieri 99–106, 109, 111, 115– 117, 143, 147 Daphne (nymph) 122, 128–129, 131, 138 David 67, 150 al-Daylamī 73 Desdemona (Shakespeare) 161 Dido 57, 113, 132 al-Dimirdāsh 72, 80–81, 87 Dionysus 23 Domitian (emperor) 157 Donne, John 151, 152 Dumuzi 56 Dynamene (nymph) 120, 122, 128 E Ebreo, Leone 115 Edward Vaughan 150 El Brocense 135

Elazar ben Shimon 67 Eleusis 23 Eliade, Mircea 56 Elias 150 Elisha 150 Elissa 117–118, 124, 128–129, 132–133, 137–139 Enkidu 55 Erasmus of Rotterdam 3–4 Euripides 20–21, 23 Europa 134 Eurydice 21–22, 113, 118, 121, 128–130, 135, 138, 141 Ezechias 150 Ezechiell 150 F Favonius 126 Finch, John 157 Flérida (Garcilaso de la Vega) 125–127, 140 Fra Angelico 8 Francesca (Petrarch) 97 Francesca (Dante) 112 Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas see El Brocense Franciscus (Petrarch) 108 Franco, Francisco 138 Freyre, Isabel 132–133, 138 G Gad 67 Galatea 132 Garcilaso de la Vega 16, 111, 116–118, 121, 128–135, 137–141, 144–145 Geshtinanna 56 Gilgamesh 55 Gibson, Laurence 155 Góngora, Luis de 127 Gostlin, John 156 Greville, Fulke 157 Groto, Luigi 162 H Ḥabāba 74, 76, 83–84 Hades 112 al-Ḥallāj 79 Ḥamza (Companion) 93

Index of names Hanina Ben Dosa 59 Hansby, Jane 153 al-Ḥārith b. al-Shadīd 75–76, 88 al-Ḥasan b. Ayyūb al-Ziyādī 84 Ḥayyim Vital 65–66 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 69 Hercules 20–21, 126 Herod 67 Herrera, Fernando de 128, 134–135, 141 Herrick, Robert 160 Hesiod 128 Hippolytus 20 Homer 19, 22–23, 128, 132, 135, 157 Horace 11, 21, 159, 166 Horowitz, ShlaH, R. 65 Horus 56 Ḥumayd al-Ṭūsī 75, 86–87 Hume, Alexander 150 I Ibn Abī Ḥajala 73–74, 84 Ibn Abī Kāmil 79 Ibn Abī ʿUyayna 86 Ibn al-Fāriḍ 79 Ibn al-Ǧauzī see Ibn al-Jawzī Ibn al-Jawzī 71–72, 80–84, 93 Ibn al-Muʿtazz, ʿAbdallāh 83 Ibn al-Nadīm 71 Ibn ʿArabī 74, 79 Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya 72, 80, 84, 87–88 Ibn Qutayba 82 Ibrāhīm b. al-Mahdī 86 Icarus 130, 132 Inanna 56 Iphigenia 57 Isaac 58, 150 Isaiah 150 al-Iṣbahānī 92 Isḥāq b. Ibrāhīm al-Mawṣilī 76, 79, 88, 90 Isḥāq b. al-Ṣayf 91 Isis 56 J Jacob 58, 150 Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī 74 Jamīl 82 Jerome 29, 34, 44, 46 Jeremiah 150

175 Jesus Christ 6–10, 12–14, 35, 43–46, 58–59, 105–106, 109, 111, 113–114, 141, 148–150, 152, 164 John XXII. (pope) 107–108 John the Baptist 150 Josephus 58, 67 Josias 150 Josse the Galilean 68 Jovinian 44 Judah ha-Nasi 68 Judah the Prince 68 Juliet 160, 162–166 K Kāmil b. al-Waḍīn 76, 79, 84 al-Kharāʾiṭī 72–74, 80, 83–84, 88, 91 Karo, Joseph 65 Kleist, Heinrich von 72 Knollys, Katherine see Carey, Catherine Kramer, Samuel Noah 56 Kuthayyir ʿAzza 82 L Laura (Petrarch) 16, 27, 97–100, 103–110, 137, 147 Lawrence of Arabia 70 Laylā 79 Leda 134 Legge, Thomas 156 Leuconoe 11 Lope de Vega 138 Lot 150 Louis of Bavaria 107 Lubnā 79 Luke 58, 152 Luria, Isaac 65 Luther, Martin 31, 148 M al-Maʾmūn 86, 90 Maimonides 61–63, 66 Mālik b. Anas 92 Mariamne 67 Mars 119, 134, 138 Marvell, Andrew 11, 148, 160 Mary 6, 112 Matthew 12–14, 31, 58, 63, 109, 148–152 Mawlānā 74 al-Mawṣilī see Isḥāq b. Ibrāhīm

176 Medea 20 Medici, Catherine de’ 10 Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino 145 Menexenus 31–32 Mercutio 163 Metella (Sulla’s wife) 24 Minyas 135 More, Alice (Th. More’s wife) 3–4, 6 More, Jane (Th. More’s wife) 3–6, 77 More, Thomas 3– 6, 11–12, 43, 47, 147 More, William 156 Moses 58, 60–61, 64, 68, 150 al-Mubarrad 79 al-Mufaḍḍal al-Ḍabbī 84 Mughulṭāy 80 Muḥammad (prophet) 82, 93 Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Baṣrī 86 Muḥammad b. al-Faḍl 91 Muḥammad b. Ḥumayd al-Ṭūsī 75, 86–87 Muḥammad b. Jaʿfar al-Dūlābī 90 Muḥammad b. Khalaf b. Ḥayyān see Wakīʿ Muḥammad b. ʿUbaydallāh al-ʿUtbī 85 Muḥammad b. Yūsuf b. al-Faryābī 91 al-Muʿtaṣim (caliph) 87 al-Mutanabbī 73 N Nachmanides 64 Nemoroso 117–118, 124, 128–129, 132, 137–138 Neptune 124 Nise (nymph) 120, 123–124, 128, 130–131, 140 Niẓām 74 Noah 150 O Odysseus 19, 113, 132, 135 Origen Adamantius 45–46 Orpheus 21–23, 112–113, 116, 118, 128–131, 138–139, 141 Osiris 56 Othello 161 Ovid 22, 117, 128, 130–134, 139 P Painter, William 162 Paolo (Dante) 112

Index of names Paris (Shakespeare) 165 Parthenius of Nicaea 20 Patroclus 157 Paul 150 Penthesilea 72 Peter 150 Petrarch 16, 27–30, 47, 97–100, 102–111, 116–118, 137, 142, 147 Petronius 35–36, 40, 48, 57 Petrus Lombardus 102 Phaedrus 48, 115 Phaethon 130, 132 Philomela 135 Phyllis 125–127, 140 Phyllodoce (nymph) 120–121, 128 Plato 31–32, 115, 144 Pliny 136 Plutarch 24, 56 Pluto 113 Polyphemus 132 Porto, Luigi da 162 Procris 133 Propertius 21–25, 142, 159 Proserpina 113 Pseudo-Ibn Qayyim 84 Q Quevedo, Francisco de 116, 127, 142 R Rajāʾ b. ʿAmr al-Nakhaʿī 79 Richard de Fournival 40–41 al-Riyāshī al-ʿAbbās b. al-Faraj 81 Romeo 160–166 Romeus 162, 164 Ronsard, Pierre de 10–11, 47 S Saadia ben Joseph Gaon 60 Saʿīd b. al-ʿĀṣ b. Umayya 92 Saʿīd b. Ghassān b. Mālik 92 Salernitano, Masuccio 162 Samuel 66, 150 Sannazaro, Jacopo 128, 135–136, 140 Sappho 20 al-Sarrāj 73, 79–80 al-Sarī b. al-Muṭṭalib 88 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von 69, 164 Seth 56

Index of names Shakespeare, William 16, 40–41, 54, 113, 147–149, 160–166 Shams al-Tibrīzī 74 Shaybān (tribe) 89 Scholem, Gershom 64 Sidney, Philip 157 Signorelli, Luca 8–12, 47 Socrates 31, 32 Solomon bar Simson 66 Sulaym 85 Sulla 24 Surgère, Hélène de 10–11 Sychaeus 57, 113 T Tacitus 57 Taghlib (tribe) 94 Tamīm (tribe) 82, 88 al-Tamīmī 94 Thyrreno 125–127, 140 Tiberius (emperor) 32–33 Tibullus 21 Thomas Aquinas 102, 112, 149 Turner, Tina 17 Tybalt 166 U ʿUdhra, Banū (tribe) 72, 81 al-ʿUkbarī 73 ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (caliph) 93 Ulpian 33 ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz 93 Umayma 75–76, 85 Umm al-Banīn 75–76, 91–92 V Venus 100, 103, 117, 123, 126–129, 131, 138, 140 Virgil 22–23, 57, 104 W Waḍḍāḥ al-Yaman 75–76, 91–92 al-Wāḥidī 73 Wakīʿ, Muḥammad. b. Khalaf 90 al-Walīd b. ʿAbdalmalik 91 Walīd b. ʿAbdalmalik (caliph) 76, 91–92 al-Washshāʾ 82 al-Wāthiq 90

177 Weever, John 164 Wyatt, Thomas 27, 30, 147–148, 160 Y Yazīd II. b. ʿAbdalmalik (caliph) 74–76, 83 Z Zadok 67 Ẓalūm 75, 86–87 Zephyr 126 Zeus 133–134 al-Zuhrī, Abū Muṣʿab Aḥmad b. Abī Bakr 92 Zulaykha 79