Medievalia et Humanistica, No. 35: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Culture (Medievalia et Humanistica Series) 9780742570184, 9780742570191, 0742570185

Table of contents :
Contents
Editorial Note
Articles for Future Volumes
Preface
Juan Luis Vives on the Turks
“Double-Talk” (Bilinguium) in Faus Semblant’s Discourse in the Roman de la Rose
Torello and the Saladin (X, 9): Notes on Panfilo, Day X, and the Ending Tale of the Decameron
Farting and the Power of Human Language, with a Focus on Hans Wilhelm Kirchhof’s Sixteenth-Century Schwänke
Dante and Statius: Revisited
Review Notices
Books Received

Citation preview

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(continued from front flap) that Jean de Meun portrays the figure of Faus Semblant as an illustration of the thesis of bilinguium proposed by Peraldus. Valerio C. Ferme in his article, “Torello and the Saladin (X, 9): Notes on Panfilo, Day X, and the Ending Tale of the Decameron” provides scale of connectivity as he argues that, at least within the context of the frame characters’ vision, it is Torello’s story that more aptly closes the narration. In “Farting and the Power of Human Language, with a Focus on Hans Wilhelm Kirchhof ’s Sixteenth-Century Schwänke” Albrecht Classen emphasizes strong continuities over the medieval and Renaissance period, arguing that farting was consistently treated as transgressive and offensive. The use of an excursus—a running forth—on Dante and Statius seeks to balance the post-romantic, impressionistic readings of ancient Latin poets— Vergil, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius—and a medieval tradition with Latin glosses, commentary, and accessus. This volume also features twenty-two review notices of recent publications in medieval and Renaissance culture.

Contents Editorial Note • Juan Luis Vives on the Turks, Marcia Colish • “Double-Talk” (Bilinguium) in Faus Semblant’s Discourse in the Roman de la Rose, Gabriella I. Baika • Torello and the Saladin (X, 9): Notes on Panfilo, Day X, and the Ending Tale of the Decameron, Valerio C. Ferme • Farting and the Power of Human Language, with a Focus on Hans Wilhelm Kirchhof ’s Sixteenth-Century Schwänke, Albrecht Classen • Dante and Statius: Revisited, Paul M. Clogan

Paul Maurice Clogan is professor emeritus of English at the University of North Texas and a fellow of the American Academy in Rome. He is editor of The Medieval Archilleid of Statius and author of numerous articles on classical, medieval, and Renaissance literature.

Other Volumes in Medievalia et Humanistica

SINCE ITS FOUNDING IN 1943, Medievalia et Humanistica has won worldwide recognition as the first scholarly publication in America to devote itself entirely to medieval and Renaissance studies. Since 1970, a new series, sponsored by the Modern Language Association of America and edited by an international board of distinguished scholars and critics, has published interdisciplinary articles. In yearly hardcover volumes, the new series publishes significant scholarship, criticism, and reviews treating all facets of medieval and Renaissance culture: history, art, literature, music, science, law, economics, and philosophy. Authors in each volume make a contribution in their own specialized field and present material in such a way that its significance may be appreciated by nonspecialists. Together, these articles and reviews provide the scholar and serious student with new insights into the richness and diversity of medieval and Renaissance studies.

Volume 33: Editorial Note • Abraham and the Northmen in Genesis A: Alfredian Translations and Ninth-Century Politics, Heide Estes • The Life and Times of Judas Iscariot: Form and Function, Irit Kleiman • Transgression and Laughter, the Scatological and Epistemological: New Insights into the Pranks of Till Eulenspiegel, Albrecht Classen • Pagan versus Christian Values in the Roman d’Eneas, Raymond J. Cormier • Expressing the Unexpressed: Silence as Emotive Performance in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Stephanie Chamberlain Volume 34: Editorial Note • Boethius and the Consolation of the Quadrivium, Michael Fournier • Language, Power, and Holiness in Cynewulf ’s Elene, Laurence Erussard • A Precarious Quest for Salvation: The Theophilus Legend in Text and Image, Jerry Root • Shielded Subjects and Dreams of Permeability: Fashioning Scudamour in The Faerie Queene, Nathanial B. Smith • Erotic Symbolism, Laughter, and Hermeneutics at Work in Late-Medieval mæren: The Case of Das Häslein, Albrecht Classen • The Romance Epic Hero, the Mercenary, and the Ottoman Turk Seen through the Lens of Valentin et Orson (1489), Shira Schwam-Baird • Schoolmasters, Seduction, and Slavery: Polyglot Dictionaries in Pre-Modern England, Susan Phillips

For orders and information please contact the publisher Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, Maryland 20706 1-800-462-6420 www.rowmanlittlefield.com

Volume 35—Scales of Connectivity—offers new, original, and scholarly articles that each in its own sphere comes to terms with and engages in what may be identified/described as scales of connectivity in medieval and Renaissance studies. Connectivity is the quality or condition of being connected or connective, the ability to make and maintain a connection between two or more points in a telecommunications system; and scales, from the Latin scala, means a series of marks along a line used in measuring, or a series of degrees classified by size or amount. ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

About the Editor

Medievalia et Humanistica Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Culture New Series—Number 35, Scales of Connectivity Edited by Paul Maurice Clogan

Marcia Colish’s article, “Juan Luis Vives on the Turks,” is a lucid and authoritative contribution and illustrates scales of connectivity in the scholarship on humanist attitudes to the Turks. Gabriella I. Baika in her article, “‘Double-Talk’ (Bilinguium) in Faus Semblant’s Discourse in the Roman de la Rose,” demonstrates connectivity in her defense of at least two theses: Jean de Meun follows the teachings of Guillaume de St. Amour concerning the mendicant friars, and more specifically (continued on back flap)

MEDIEVALIA ET HUMANISTICA

M ED I EV A LI A ET H UM A N ISTICA Editor Paul Maurice Clogan University of North Texas B O O K REV I EW ED I TORS Alcuin Blamires Goldsmiths, University of London

Robert Boenig Texas A&M University

Albrecht Classen University of Arizona

Jacques Dalarun Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes

Reinhold Glei Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Yasmin Haskell University of Western Australia

Marcia Kupfer The Ohio State University

David Lines University of Warwick

Richard Marsden University of Nottingham

Adriano Prosperi Scouloa Normale Superiore, Pisa Francesco Stella Università di Siena ED I T O RI A L B O A R D

David Bevington University of Chicago

Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski University of Pittsburgh

Daniel Bornstein Washington University, St. Louis

Christopher S. Celenza Johns Hopkins University

Marvin L. Colker University of Virginia

Peter Dembowski University of Chicago

Peter Dronke University of Cambridge

Charles Witke University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Jan M. Ziolkowski Harvard University

MEDIEVALIA ET HUMANISTICA STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE CULTURE NEW SERIES: NUMBER 35

Sca les of C on n ect ivit y EDITED BY PAUL MAURICE CLOGAN

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowmanlittlefield.com Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2009 by The Medieval and Renaissance Society, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available The Library of Congress has cataloged this serial publication as follows: Medievalia et humanistica, fasc. 1–jan. 1943–; New ser. No 1– 1970– Totowa, N.J. [etc.] Rowman & Littlefield [etc.] no. 29 cm Annual, 1943– “Studies in medieval and renaissance culture.” Vols. for 1970–1972 issued by the Medieval and neo-Latin society; 1973– by the Medieval and Renaissance Society. Key title: Medievalia et humanistica, ISSN 0076-6127. ISBN: 978-0-7425-7018-4 eISBN: 978-0-7425-7019-1 Library of Congress (8108) Printed in the United States of America

 ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Editorial Note

ix

Manuscript Submission Guidelines

x

Articles for Future Volumes

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Preface Juan Luis Vives on the Turks Marcia L. Colish, Oberlin College

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“Double-Talk” (Bilinguium) in Faus Semblant’s Discourse in the Roman de la Rose Gabriella I. Baika, Auburn University

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Torello and the Saladin (X, 9): Notes on Panfilo, Day X, and the Ending Tale of the Decameron Valerio C. Ferme, University of Colorado

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Farting and the Power of Human Language, with a Focus on Hans Wilhelm Kirchhof’s Sixteenth-Century Schwänke Albrecht Classen, University of Arizona

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Dante and Statius: Revisited Paul Maurice Clogan, University of North Texas

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review notices Laura Ashe, Fiction and History in England, 1066–1200 (Richard Marsden) Fatemeh Chehregosha Azinfar, Atheism in the Medieval Islamic and European World: The Influence of Persian and Arabic Ideas of Doubt and Skepticism on Medieval European Literary Thought (Albrecht Classen)

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Cammy Brothers, Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture (Michael Hill) Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship (Ewan Fernie) Marios Costambeys, Power and Patronage in Early Medieval Italy: Local Society, Italian Politics and the Abbey of Farfa, c. 700–900 (Mary Stroll) Jerrilynn D. Dodds, María Rosa Menocal, and Abigail Krasner Balbale, The Arts of Intimacy: Christian, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture (Teofilo F. Ruiz) Eglal Doss-Quinby and Samuel N. Rosenberg, eds. and trans.; Elizabeth Aubrey, music editions and commentary, The Old French Ballette: Oxford Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308 (Nancy Vine Durling) Matthew Giancarlo, Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England (Clementine Oliver) Guy Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376–568 (Walter Goffart) Barbara A. Hanawalt and Anna Grotans, eds., Living Dangerously: On the Margins in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Albrecht Classen) Barbara A. Hanawalt and Lisa J. Kiser, eds., Engaging with Nature: Essays on the Natural World in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Renzo Baldasso) G. A. Loud, The Latin Church in Norman Italy (Maureen C. Miller)

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William Lyster, ed., The Cave Church of Paul the Hermit at the Monastery of St. Paul, Egypt (Charles Witke)

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Laurence W. Marvin, The Occitan War: A Military and Political History of the Albigensian Crusade, 1209–1218 (Christopher H. MacEvitt)

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Lynette R. Muir, Love and Conflict in Medieval Drama: The Plays and Their Legacy (William F. Hodapp)

138

Jenni Nuttall, The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship: Literature, Language and Politics in Late Medieval England (Alcuin Blamires)

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Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (Yasmin Haskell)

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Philip de Souza and John France, eds., War and Peace in Ancient and Medieval History (Albrecht Classen)

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Barbara R. Walters, Vincent Corrigan, and Peter T. Ricketts, The Feast of Corpus Christi (Charles Witke)

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Carl S. Watkins, History and the Supernatural in Medieval England (Caroline Walker Bynum)

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Logan E. Whalen, Marie de France and the Poetics of Memory (Albrecht Classen)

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Jan M. Ziolkowski, trans., Letters of Peter Abelard: Beyond the Personal (Charles Witke)

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Jan M. Ziolkowski, Solomon and Marcolf (Marvin L. Colker)

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Books Received

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Editorial Note

Since 1970, this new series has sought to promote significant scholarship, criticism, and reviews within the fields of medieval and Renaissance studies. It has published articles drawn from a variety of disciplines, and it has given attention to new directions in humanistic scholarship and to significant topics of general interest. This series has been particularly concerned with the exchange between specializations, and scholars of diverse approaches have complemented each other’s efforts on questions of common interest. Medievalia et Humanistica is sponsored by the Modern Language Association of America. Publication in the series is open to contributions from all sources, and the editorial board welcomes scholarly, critical, or interdisciplinary articles of significant interest on relevant material. Contributors are urged to communicate in a clear and concise style the larger implications and the material of their research, with documentation held to a minimum. Text, maps, illustrations, diagrams, and musical examples are published when they are essential to the argument of the article. In preparing and submitting manuscripts for consideration, potential contributors are advised to follow carefully the instructions given on pages x–xi. Articles in English may be submitted to any of the editors. Books for review and inquiries concerning Fasciculi I–XVII in the original series should be addressed to the Editor, Medievalia et Humanistica, P.O. Box 28428, Austin, Texas 78755–8428. Inquiries concerning subscriptions should be addressed to the publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, Maryland 20706

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Manuscript Submission Guidelines Preparing Your Word File • Double-space your file, except for extracts (lengthy quotes), which should be single-spaced with a line space above and below. • Use only one space between sentences. Use tabs, not letter-spaces, to indent text. • Type note callouts as superior numbers, then type out the notes themselves at the end of your document. Avoid the Notes feature of Word. Style Matters • Spell out numbers up to one hundred—both cardinals and ordinals (e.g., twentieth century). • Use American punctuation and spelling: commas and periods go inside closing quotation marks. • Lowercase biblical, medieval. Capitalize Bible, Middle Ages, West, Western. • Style for literary works includes Book of Acts, Genesis (book of the Bible), Genesis A (poem), Gospel of Matthew. • Short quotations: Put small quotations with translations in running text into parentheses: “Ipsa autem nocte vidit mulier . . .” (“That very night his wife saw . . .”). • Long quotations: For longer quotations with translations, set them off as extracts with the translation in brackets below. If the original text is poetry with half-lines, use only one tab between each half-line. Although the text will look uneven in your Word file, the tab will make the lines align exactly when typeset: Cynewulf describes her as she sits on a throne while the Jews crowd around her: þrungon þa on þreate in cynestole geatolic guðcwen

þær on þrymme bád casere mæg, golde gehyrsted.

[They crowded where the Caesar’s kinswoman was waiting / in majesty upon a throne, / a magnificent battle-queenclad in gold] (329–331) Sample Notes Journal Article: 1. Melinda Shepard, “The Church in Eleventh-Century Europe,” Medieval Studies 15, no. 1 (1993), 211–226. Book: 2. Shepard, p. 223. Shepard notes other similarities as well. See also R. A. Potter, Church and Medieval State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 301.

Articles for Future Volumes

Articles may be submitted to any of the editors, but it would be advisable to submit them to the nearest or most appropriate editor for consideration. A prospective author is encouraged to contact his or her editor at the earliest opportunity to receive any necessary advice. The length of the article depends on the material, but brief articles or notes normally are not considered. The entire manuscript should be typed, double-spaced, on standard 8 1/2-by-11 bond paper, with ample margins; documentation should be held to a minimum. The submission must also include a final copy of the manuscript in Microsoft Word, 3 1/2-inch formatted diskette or CD-R. Endnotes, prepared according to The Chicago Manual of Style, fifteenth edition (University of Chicago Press), should be double-spaced and numbered consecutively, and they should appear at the end of the article. All quotations and references should be in finished form. Electronic submissions should be accompanied by two hard copies. Authors’ names should not appear on manuscripts, but a cover letter with the author’s name and address should be included with each manuscript. The addresses of the American editors can be determined by their academic affiliations. The addresses of the editors outside the United States and their respective areas of interest are as follows: Alcuin Blamires, Professor of English and comparative literature, Chaucer, fourteenth-century literature, and medieval women writers, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths College, University of London, Lewisham Way, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW UK Jacques Dalarun, 3 rue du général Delestraint, 75016 Paris, France Reinhold Glei, Professor für Klassische Philologie, Seminar für Klassische Philologie, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, D-44780 Bochum, Germany Yasmin Haskell, Professor of Latin humanism, School of Humanities (M205), University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia David Lines, Professor of Italian, Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK xi

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Articles for Future Volumes

Richard Marsden, Professor of English, School of English Studies, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK Adriano Prosperi, Professor of History of the Reformation and CounterReformation, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy Francesco Stella, Dipartmento di Teoria e Documentazione delle Tradizione Culturali, Università di Siena, viale Luigi Cittadini 33, I.52100, Arezzo, Italia

Preface

This volume, the thirty-fifth in the new series, offers new, original, and scholarly articles that each in its own sphere comes to terms with and engages in what we may identify or describe as scales of connectivity in medieval and Renaissance studies. I suspect most readers of Medievalia et Humanistica know what is meant by connectivity (that is, the quality or condition of being connected or connective, or the ability to make and maintain a connection between two or more points in a telecommunications system) and scales (from the Latin scala, meaning a series of marks along a line used in measuring, or a series of degrees classified by size or amount). Marcia Colish’s article, “Juan Luis Vives on the Turks,” is a lucid and authoritative contribution and illustrates scales of connectivity in the scholarship on humanists’ attitudes to the Turks. The conclusion, that Vives realized that “European Christendom . . . had moved into the colonial phase of its history” and that the “trans-Atlantic Iberian option” was the “best hope for a beleaguered Old Europe,” is convincing. (I detect a scale of connectivity in Vives’s view in later Jesuit authors from Habsburg lands justifying the colonization of Mexico as a refuge for the liberal arts from Turkish barbarity.) Vives is a figure who deserves more mainstream attention than he has often received, and this outstanding article argues, in a timely and very up-to-date way (bibliographically speaking), that Vives’s voice was distinct in a debate that was growing in intensity in his day: Vives’s humanist-inflected pragmatism merges with his effortless classicism in this fine reading. Gabriella I. Baika, in her article, “‘Double-Talk’ (Bilinguium) in Faus Semblant’s Discourse in the Roman de la Rose,” demonstrates connectivity in her defense of at least two theses: that Jean de Meun follows the teachings of William of St. Amour concerning the mendicant friars, and more specifically that Jean de Meun portrays the figure of Faus Semblant as an illustration of the thesis of bilinguium proposed by Peraldus. Bailka contributes an intelligent analysis of the discourse of Faus Semblant, one of the important figures of the Roman de la Rose, and argues persuasively that the discourse of Faus Semblant follows the pattern of coincidentia oppositorum. xiii

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Valerio C. Ferme, in his article, “Torello and the Saladin (X, 9): Notes on Panfilo, Day X, and the Ending Tale of the Decameron,” provides a scale of connectivity as he argues that, at least within the context of the frame characters’ vision, it is Torello’s story that more aptly closes the narration. The main argument (Panfilo’s controlling attitude as mirrored in his storytelling choices) and the corollaries (the brigata’s response to his strategy) are scales of connectivity that are indeed interesting, well documented, and essentially convincing. In “Farting and the Power of Human Language, with a Focus on Hans Wilhelm Kirchhof’s Sixteenth-Century Schwänke,” Albrecht Classen emphasizes strong continuities over the medieval and Renaissance period, arguing that farting was consistently treated as transgressive and offensive. This undermines sociologist Norbert Elias’s thesis of an increase in feelings of shame during the civilizing process. The empirical foundation for these claims are episodes from medieval and sixteenth-century nouvelles, fables, comedies, and so forth, which are examined to show that farting carried “a whole complex of social, ethical, linguistic, and religious connotations.” It was not used merely to shock or offend but was “tied to rhetoric and human intellect,” that is, to make the point that “those who succeeded in explaining it away with rhetorical skill not only earned loud and respectful laughter but were also admired for their witticism, intellect, and diplomatic abilities.” Classen argues that criteria such as “shame” to evaluate outputs of the human body “prove to be of little help and can safely be put to rest.” The use of an excursus—a running forth—in this volume is not the first time an excursus has been employed and may well be continued in later volumes in the series. This excursus on Dante and Statius seeks to balance the post-romantic, impressionistic readings of ancient Latin poets—Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius—and a medieval tradition with Latin glosses, commentary, and accessus. In addition to the original articles and the excursus, this volume also features twenty-three review notices of recent publications in medieval and Renaissance culture. Moreover, the editorial board and book review editors have been developed and expanded to accommodate the range and number of submissions; ten members of both are now from the United States and ten members are international, making Medievalia et Humanistica a truly international publication. As ever, I am grateful to the editorial board for their expert advice and to the staff of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers for their helpful assistance in the production of the annual volume. P.M.C.

Juan Luis Vives on the Turks MARCIA L. COLISH

Like other authors alarmed by Ottoman expansion in the eastern Mediterranean and on the European mainland in the early sixteenth century, Juan Luis Vives addressed this issue, and more than once. His De dissidiis Europae et bello turcico, a dialogue published in 1526, was an immediate response to the Turkish victory at Mohács, and it was followed by his De conditione vitae christianorum sub turca in 1529. Vives makes passing reference to the Turks as well in his De concordia et discordia in humano genere, also published in 1529. This topic has drawn scant attention from Vives scholars, although contemporary works on this subject by other humanists and reformers have inspired considerable interest. This essay argues that Vives was well aware of the views of the Turks common in his day and that he used them quite selectively. And, not always on the contemporary wavelength, he imparts some original features of his own to this theme. In documenting that thesis, and in placing Vives in his immediate historical context, it will be useful to recall, first, the Renaissance and early Reformation approaches to the Turkish problem available to Vives, and modern scholarly interpretations of them. It is true that medieval thinkers viewed the achievements of Muslim philosophy and science with deep respect, and gave Saladin and the fictitious Muslim of chivalric romance a good press. At the same time, the conventional picture of Turks and other Muslims simply as “Saracens,” whatever their ethnicity, sect, or profession, was far less flattering. Renaissance humanists and sixteenth-century reformers inherited a fund of negative images of Turks as “Others” from medieval Crusades rhetoric and from polemics against Islam that mixed fact and fiction on Muslim doctrine and praxis, including libels on Muhammad’s moral character.1 In this tradition, brutality and malevolence were united with theological error. The Turks were reviled as infidels, as ruthless savages punishing Christians for their sins, and as the advance troops of the Antichrist. Nancy Bisaha argues that a key achievement of Renaissance humanists was to secularize the Turks by classicizing them. This strategy yielded two conflicting assessments, which humanists felt no need to Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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reconcile. One the one hand, they saw the Turks as un-Hellenic barbarians; on the other, as “Asian,” or hypercivilized.2 The findings of other scholars, however, suggest that Bisaha’s thesis is too narrowly conceived. James Hankins observes that “the humanists wrote far more often and at greater length about the Turkish menace and the need for a crusade than they did about . . . true nobility, liberal education, the dignity of man, or the immortality of the soul.”3 While calling on the classics, and while focusing on the recovery of Constantinople rather than the Holy Land, fifteenth-century pro-crusade humanists cited the honorific and practical benefits accruing to those princes who, they urged, should assume leadership roles. As Hankins shows, they recycled the standard religious stereotypes, presenting the Turks as minions of the devil sent by God as a moral wake-up call to Christians. Likewise, charting continuities and discontinuities in successive humanist reactions to Turkish military advances, Margaret Meserve demonstrates that they ranged from the diplomatic to the millenarian and from moral self-flagellation to finger-pointing. The providential, apocalyptic, and crusading motifs derived from medieval traditions, no less than the revival of classical ethnography, remained well in evidence.4 Those who, like the Venetians and the Genoese, actually engaged in diplomatic and commercial relations with the Turks tended to have a more positive and pragmatic view of them, as scholars studying both sides of those transactions clarify.5 And Niccolò Machiavelli also took a practical line, focusing on political and military institutions, policies, and outcomes. In the Discorsi he awards the Turks the palm of virtù for their military discipline, and in the Istorie fiorentine he presents their attack on Otranto in 1480 as beneficial to Florence and to inter-Italian affairs, enabling Lorenzo de’ Medici to make a separate peace with Naples that same year.6 Both early Protestants and their Catholic opponents yoked the Turks as God’s flagellum and as agents of the Antichrist to their particular confessional agendas, while the pacifist Christian humanists with whom Vives aligned himself found the topic a conundrum. Arguing at first in his Resolutiones disputationum of 1518 that Christians should not resist the Turks but should accept their victories as the penalty for sin, Martin Luther changed his mind a decade later. He retained his earlier eschatological view of the Turks. But, in works written between 1529 and his death in 1546, he stressed the need to refute Muslim doctrine and praxis and urged the German princes and their subjects to fight a defensive war against the Turks under the banner of a reformed Holy Roman Emperor, that is, Charles V, but only if he abandoned his allegiance to

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the papal Antichrist in favor of the gospel.7 While cudgeling each other with Luther’s advice, Thomas More and William Tyndale harnessed “the Turks” to a more local debate, starting in 1529, as a metaphor for what each loathed in his opponent’s version of Christianity, as did Christopher St. German when he entered this polemical field in 1531. With More and Johan Cochlaeus, whose Dialogus de bello contra Turcos, in antilogias Lutheri appeared in 1529, Desiderius Erasmus attacked Luther’s initial recommendation of passive resistance. In his Utilissima consultatio de bello turcis inferendo of 1530, Erasmus offered his own alternative. Framed as a commentary on Psalm 28, the work reprises the Old Testament prophetic point that the omnipotent God uses the defeat of his people by their enemies as punishment for their sins, and that their moral regeneration is the first order of the day. While acknowledging that peaceful evangelization is the preferred mode of the address of God’s people to the Gentiles, Erasmus supports the military leadership against the Turks of the Catholic Habsburgs, as is. Like other antiLutherans, Erasmus remains vague on the scope of their reclamation of lost territory and on the military tactics they should invoke.8 Vives on the Turks has been read by some scholars as a source for Erasmus.9 Yet, particularly in De dissidiis Europae, both Vives’s literary strategy and the specifics of his argument are his own. It is true that, in his De concordia, he flies his pacifist colors. He maintains in that work that the Turks, as with other non-Christian groups, should be approached with charity. Christians should win them over by reasoning compatible with human nature and intelligence and by the example of a pure and upright moral life, practicing what they preach, loving their enemies, and turning the other cheek.10 But treating the real, not the ideal, in his immediate response to the Turkish invasion of eastern and central Europe, Vives recognizes the need for military action. In so doing he includes concrete political and military recommendations not found in Erasmus and other humanists; he deletes some well-worn conventional topics; and he adds fresh perspectives, some specific to him, ignored by his predecessors and contemporaries. Our focus here will be on Vives’s De dissidiis Europae, supplemented by the De conditione, in which he basically reinforces the position taken in the earlier work. De dissidiis Europae is a dialogue, set in the Underworld, one in which several speakers share the stage. As such, it has been studied primarily in the context of the Renaissance dialogue as a literary genre and its classical models.11 Vives presents his case in the speeches of five interlocutors. Three are historical or legendary classical worthies: Minos, a judge of souls in the afterlife; Tiresias, the ancient sage par excellence; and

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Scipio Africanus, victor over Hannibal in the Second Punic War. The other two speakers are moderns, whose names spell out their generic identities: Polypragmon, the much-traveled merchant, and Basilius Colax, the sycophant courtier. At the beginning of the action, reprising Aeneid 6.309–310 (“quam multa in siluis autumni frigore primo / lapsa cadunt folia”), Minos observes that new souls have been arriving and accumulating like falling leaves in autumn, and suggests to Tiresias that they find out why, by questioning some new arrivals. Tiresias agrees, and Polypragmon and Colax are commissioned to report on the events on earth that have occasioned so many recent deaths. These two latter speakers serve as the dialogue’s chief informants, with the classical interlocutors keeping the conversation going and offering their reactions and comments, which end by giving advice to the living. Vives shares the pacificist view that the wars among European princes have prevented them from making common cause against the Turks. Peace in Europe must thus precede such joint action. But he goes well beyond the theme of interprincely hostility in depicting the dissension that plagues Europe. Not only does kingdom war against kingdom; so also do cities contend with each other, and even neighborhoods within cities. Factionalism divides noble houses, nobles from the lower classes, and rulers from the ruled. Members of one nation despise and stigmatize those of other nations. Laymen are pitted against clerics. In the schools, Hellenists battle Latinists; moral philosophers attack dialecticians; Thomists, Scotists, and Ockhamists give each other no quarter. Lutherans, divided among themselves, vie with anti-Lutherans. Within Catholicism, members of one religious order bad-mouth brethren in other religious orders, as do observants and nonobservants within the same order. Greed, pride, licentiousness, selfishness, dishonesty, lust for power, bad example, bad advice, bad education, the unwillingness to forgive and forget, the willingness to inflict atrocities against enemies, including noncombatants, and even a propensity for conflict fueled by laziness and boredom characterize Christian Europe. Such vices afflict high and low across the continent. Responding to the question of what, if anything, differentiates Christians from Turks, Polypragmon replies, “They do pretty much the same thing, and warfare, discord, and hatred are ubiquitous.”12 While for Vives the causes of European conflict are fully as diverse as they are lamentable, and richly illustrated by recent history, he agrees that the remedy lies with the Christian princes. It was their disunity, he concurs, that made possible the catastrophe at Mohács. At the same time, Vives departs from the commonplace view of the Turks as the

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scourge of God punishing Europeans for their sins. And he eliminates all traces of eschatology and of the apocalyptic role accorded to the Turks by previous and current observers. These omissions look to be quite deliberate. Vives also adds a new political issue to the list of European misdeeds and problems, although without overtly naming names. At this time, the French monarchy, in addition to forming alliances with the Protestant princes in Germany, was negotiating with the Turks, a pact consummated in 1528 that continued to characterize its foreign policy for the rest of the century and more. Anything that discomfited their Habsburg rivals was fair game. It can be said that French foreign policy in the sixteenth century did more to secularize the Turks and to bring them into the European family of nations than anything envisioned by fifteenth-century Italian humanists and mercantile communities. This geopolitical approach to international relations cuts no ice with Vives. He alludes to the Franco-Turkish alliance only to undermine its feasibility. His interlocutors offer reasons why a pact with the Turks is a good, or bad, idea. On the one hand, and here Vives presents a stereotype in the mouth of Tiresias, the Turks are untrustworthy. The only law they take seriously is the law of the victor. They feel no obligation to take international conventions seriously.13 Nonetheless, Polypragmon reports, “There is a rumor afoot on earth that the Turks were brought into Hungary by those who should least have done so, whom no one would ever have suspected.”14 Colax suggests that, by such an alliance, a European prince might neutralize the Turkish threat, at least for his own people, an observation that forecasts French propaganda on that subject.15 To this Tiresias replies that the very idea that such an alliance could actually work is overly optimistic. This conclusion follows, he notes, from the current events that Polypragmon and Colax have related. European Christians freely break oaths and treaties among themselves. Just as one cannot trust commitments made by the faithless Turks, neither can one place confidence in those of one’s fellow Christians. Given their own deplorable record in this field, Christians have no grounds for assuming that the Turks will behave any better than they do.16 In the respects just noted, the Turks thus have no monopoly on barbarism. European Christians do not breathe a purer air or observe higher moral or political standards. This judgment conditions Vives’s treatment of Ottoman religious and cultural attitudes. He has little to say about the Turks as Muslims and omits the traditional canards against the morals of Muhammad and the theology and praxis of Islam. At the same time, with his humanist predecessors, he holds a cultural as well as a religious brief against the Turks. Voicing the “lament for Greece,” the eulogy for

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the homeland of the Western intellectual tradition, earlier humanists had excoriated the Turks not only as inhumane in their social and political life but also as lacking the studia humanitatis. Vives agrees: The Turks are ignorant of the liberal arts and sciences and disdain philosophy and literature. Yet, given that Europeans possess these advantages, they are the more to be blamed for their intellectual wrangling, especially about religious faith, in any case an argumentum non apparentium.17 On the religious front, Tiresias articulates the standard view that the Turks are fundamental opponents of the Christian faith; as he puts it, the sultan is “expressly an enemy of religion.”18 In De conditione, Vives charges more specifically that the Turks blaspheme Christianity, punish severely any criticism of the Prophet, and condemn Muslim apostates to death.19 Worst of all, for Vives, following tradition and reflecting a common gap between European perceptions and Ottoman realities, is the levy of Christian youths recruited into the sultan’s service and converted to Islam. This policy, which Christian subjects of the Turks often saw as a positive career opportunity for their sons and a means of promotion for their families, is condemned by Vives in the harshest terms: “Is not the gravest and bitterest of all the kidnapping of small boys in the farthest provinces, to the abnegation there of the name of Christ and the consignment of all religion into oblivion, so that they may serve a most foul and impious master?”20 At the same time, rare if not unique among his contemporaries, Vives acknowledges another Ottoman policy, respect for the “People of the Book,” with its large measure of religious tolerance accorded to Christians. Vives flags the fact that the Turks are more supportive of religious diversity than are European Christians, who typically persecute or expel minorities adhering to different Christian confessions within their domains. Thus, Vives observes, given the choice of living under the Turks or under an oppressive European ruler, subject Christians might well prefer the sultan, “since he may be kinder in granting this liberty than is the Christian.”21 This point about Turkish religious policy is one contradiction, among others, that Vives raises and makes no attempt to resolve. Nor does he deal cogently with another contradiction inherited from the classicizing of the Turks by earlier humanists. As we have seen, he repeats the canard that the Turks are inhumane and faithless, brutal and uncultivated barbarians. But he also describes them as “Asians,” indolent, unwarlike, and overcivilized. This latter claim is made by Scipio, who takes over as the chief classical interlocutor midway through the dialogue. He observes that Christians, by contrast, do possess martial valor, even if it

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has been misdirected into intra-European warfare.22 On the face of it, this notion makes it difficult to explain how these allegedly timid and effeminate Turks have scored victory after victory on the battlefield. Rising to the occasion as the resident military expert, Scipio explains that their successes have been purely opportunistic. He cites numerous examples deemed parallel from ancient history to illustrate the point and offers concrete strategic analysis. His concern is not merely to advise Christians on how to stem a further Ottoman advance into central Europe, or how to recover Constantinople, Greece, and the Balkans.23 Nor, it should be added, does he limit himself to tactics that would enable Europeans to reconstitute the full extent of the ancient Roman empire in hither Asia. Well beyond the goal of invading Turkey and conquering Anatolia, Scipio advocates imperial expansion as far east as India. He offers two rationales for this policy. First, military conquest will facilitate the spread of Christianity to the Turks. While Scipio admits that Christ himself might not approve of this mode of evangelization, a doubt reinforced by Tiresias,24 they agree that an acceptable benefit would be the liberation of the Turks’ subject Christians. These, they also agree, are just waiting to revolt and who will rise by the thousands at the first approach of a western army—and this despite Vives’s recognition of the Turks’ policy of religious toleration and the preferences of these same subjects for it—implicitly turning on its head a standard topos by arguing that a European Christian invasion and dispossession of the Turks will punish them for their sins.25 Second, Scipio supports the idea of imperial expansion from East to West and from sea to sea, up to and including the Indian Ocean, as a thoroughly practical goal, and one accepted by Tiresias even though, in the latter’s final speech, he justifies defensive and recuperative war alone. Noting that internal warfare has distracted attention from Europe’s imperial agenda, Scipio encourages Christian princes to expand eastward at the expense of the Turks and other Asian peoples. In so doing, he observes, they will gain renown. But, more importantly, they will also acquire vast reserves of land and wealth, an abundance providing more than enough for all. Scipio implies that intra-European greed and lust for power should be diverted into extra-European conquest.26 While he rejects purely offensive war, Tiresias fails to spring for full-bore pacifism at the dialogue’s end. Although he contradicts his earlier view that diplomacy with the Turks is futile, he affirms that the military defense of Christendom is the European princes’ top priority and reiterates the need to strengthen Germany’s fortifications. He does not second Scipio’s Asian strategy. But the existence of an extra-European empire is

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far from a negative, for him. Indeed, Tiresias concludes that, as a backup security measure, if all else fails and western Europe falls to the Turks, Christians “who do not want to live under their dominion will have to take flight, in tall ships, to the New World.”27 This escape hatch, afforded by Iberian imperialism, is a real and positive one, as Vives presents it. In Francisco Calero’s reading of De dissidiis Europae, the dialogue has no apparent winner; its alternatives lie open at the end.28 Whether or not one agrees with that assessment, or holds that Vives wants both Tiresias and Scipio to score major points, it is clear that he makes his own a topic that was standard at the time. While Vives is clearly no stranger to the available commonplaces, he supports some, with all their contradictions, and rejects others. His Turks are both barbaric and hypercivilized, both effete “Asians” and remorseless warriors, both kind and faithless, both oppressive and tolerant of subject Christians. From all perspectives, Vives’s Turks are designed to highlight the failings of European Christians, in various walks of life. Europeans, as he presents them, are too skilled at inflicting punishment for their sins on each other for Vives to need to reassign that task to the Turks. They play no apocalyptic role whatever in his scenario. In his view, it is not Heilsgeschichte but secular history, both ancient and modern, that counts, providing concrete strategic guidelines for what to do and what to avoid on the battlefield, albeit without concern for the new military technologies and modes of organization of the day. On the whole, diplomacy with the Turks, as among Europeans, is useless, all smoke and mirrors. Vives appeals to the utile, acknowledging that the honestum is less potent as a motivational force. Perhaps the most striking feature of Vives on the Turks is his recognition that European Christendom, in his day, had moved into the colonial phase of its history, and that he can capitalize on this fact. For this Valencian, who regarded a return to his native land as a possibility foreclosed for himself, the trans-Atlantic Iberian option, as the last best hope for a beleaguered Old Europe, stands out as his final message on the Turkish threat.

Notes 1. Earlier surveys include those of Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1960; rev. ed., Oxford: Oneworld, 1993), who tracks learned opinion through 1350, treating the period 1350–1700 at 306–309; C. A. Patrides, “‘The Bloodie and Cruell Turke’: The Background of a Renaissance Commonplace,” Studies in the Renaissance 10 (1964), 126–135, who accents the Old Testament prophetic background and its payoff in seventeenth-century English literature;

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2.

3.

4.

5.

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Robert Schwoebel, The Shadow of the Crescent: The Renaissance Image of the Turk (1453–1517) (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967), although conditioned by a Cold War East-West dialectic; John W. Bohnstedt, The Infidel Scourge of God: The Turkish Menace as Seen by German Pamphleteers, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., 58/9 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1968), who focuses on vernacular works, 1518–1543; Carl Göllner, Turcica: Die europäischen Türkendrucke des XVI Jahrhunderts, 3 vols. (Bucharest: Editura Academiei R.P.R., 1961–1968), whose third volume treats European attitudes to the Turks; and, more recently, the contributors to John Victor Tolan, ed., Medieval Christian Perceptions of Islam (New York: Garland, 1996); the contributors to Bodo Guthmüller and Wilhelm Kühlmann, eds., Europa und die Türken in der Renaissance, Frühe Neuzeit 54 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2000); Mustafa Soykut, Image of the “Turk” in Italy: A History of the “Other” in Early Modern Europe, Islamkundliche Untersuchungen 236 (Berlin: K. Schwartz, 2001), esp. 5–11, 15–22, 24–28, 39–62; and, richly documented, Margaret Meserve, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought, Harvard Historical Studies 158 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), who stresses the Renaissance carryover of medieval attitudes from both western Europe and Byzantium. Nancy Bisaha, “‘New Barbarian’ or ‘Worthy Adversary’?: Humanist Constructs of the Ottoman Turks,” in Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Perceptions of the Other, ed. David R. Blanks and Michael Frassetto (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 185–206; Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). James Hankins, “Renaissance Crusaders: Humanist Crusade Literature in the Age of Mehmet II,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 49 (1995), 112–207, at 112; reprinted in James Hankins, Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Rome: Storia e Letteratura, 2003–2004), 1:293–424. See also, on Flavio Biondo’s crusade rhetoric and its influence, Dieter Mertens, “Claromontani passagii exemplum: Papst Urban II. und der erste Kreuzzug in der Türkenpropaganda des Renaissance-Humanismus,” in Guthmüller and Kühlmann, Europa und die Türken, 65–78; and Johannes Helmrath, “Pius II. und die Türken,” in Guthmüller and Kühlmann, Europa und die Türken, 79–137. Hankins, “Renaissance Crusaders,” 112–146, with an appendix of texts, 147–207; Margaret Meserve, “The News from Negroponte: Politics, Popular Opinion, and Information Exchange in the First Decade of the Italian Press,” Renaissance Quarterly 59 (2006), 440–480; Meserve, Empires of Islam, 9–18, 47–202, 218, 224, 237, 239, 244. Meserve’s account of the varieties of Italian Renaissance thought on the Turks can be contrasted with the consistently negative view of them in central Europe treated by Paula Sutter Fichtner, Terror and Toleration: The Habsburg Empire Confronts Islam, 1526–1850 (London: Reaktion Books, 2008); Fichtner discusses authors in the period 1400–1500 at 21–71. Eric R. Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science 124/2 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 7–10, with a good discussion of the literature on this point. See also Hankins, “Renaissance Crusaders,” 126–131, 135–146; Meserve, Empires of Islam, 182–186, 203–237. For the diplomacy conducted by the Turks, see Daniel Goffman, “Negotiating with the Renaissance State: The Ottoman Experience and the New Diplomacy,” in The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire,

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ed. Virginia H. Aksen and David Goffman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 61–74. 6. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discorsi 2 preface 14–16; Istorie fiorentine 8.22, in Tutte le opere, ed. Mario Martelli (Florence: Sansoni Editore, 1971), 145, 833, for these respective passages. See also Discorsi 1.1.7, 1.19.7–8, 2.17.43; Il principe 4, 19; Istorie fiorentine 6.32, 6.33, 7.4, 7.6, 7.22, 8.14, 8.20, 8.21, 8.33, ibid. 78, 104, 171, 262, 288, 787, 789, 795, 796–97, 807, 827, 831–32, 841. 7. The first major shift is in Martin Luther, “On War against the Turks” (1529), trans. Charles M. Jacobs, in Luther’s Works, ed. Robert C. Schultz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967), 46:61–205. There is extensive recent commentary on this subject. Contributors agree that Luther maintained an apocalyptic view of the Turks across his career, seeking to yoke them to the pope as the Antichrist, but accent different aspects of this topic. John T. Baldwin, “Luther’s Eschatological Appraisal of the Turkish Threat in Eine Heerpredigt wider den Türken,” Andrews University Seminary Studies 33 (1995), 185–202, and Ulrich Andermann, “Geschichtsdeutung und Prophetie: Krisenerfahrung und -bewältung am Beispiel der osmanischen Expansion im Spätmittelalter und in der Reformationszeit,” in Guthmüller and Kühlmann, Europa und die Türken, 29–54, place this attitude in the context of Luther’s overall apocalyptic thought and in the wider context of medieval apocalyptic responses to crisis (although the list of military crises could be pushed back to the fall of Acre in 1291, and some of the scholars cited by Andermann argue that this outlook was not triggered exclusively by crisis). Gregory J. Miller, “Luther on the Turks and Islam,” Lutheran Quarterly n.s. 14 (2000), 79–97, accents Luther’s critique of Islam as a (para-Catholic) religion of works-righteousness; in Gregory J. Miller, “Fighting Like a Christian: The Ottoman Advance and the Development of Luther’s Doctrine of Just War,” in Caritas et Reformatio: Essays on Church and Society in Honor of Carter Lindberg, ed. David M. Whitford (St. Louis, Mo.: Concordia, 2002), 41–57, Miller stresses Luther’s placement of the call to arms in the setting of a theory of just war detached from Catholic crusade ideology and attached to his doctrine of the two Regimente, emphasizing the duty of princes to wield the sword against lawbreakers within and enemies outside the polity, and the duty of subjects to obey them. Martin Brecht, “Luther und die Türken,” in Guthmüller and Kühlmann, Europa und die Türken, 9–27, agrees with this accent on Luther’s political theology, especially his attack on the indulgences associated with participating in, and contributing financially to, Crusades, but sees Luther’s main innovation as his promotion of the study of the Koran so as to attack Islam more knowledgeably. This latter point receives detailed attention in several publications of Hartmut Bobzin; he offers concise treatments in his “Martin Luthers Beitrag zur Kenntnis und Kritik des Islams,” Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 27 (1985), 262–289, and “‘Aber itzt . . . hab ich den Alcoran gesehen Lateinisch . . . ’: Gedanken Martin Luthers zum Islam,” in Luther zwischen den Kulturen: Zeitgenossenshaft-Weltwirkung, ed. Hans Medick and Peer Schmidt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 260–276. While including these perspectives, and providing an exhaustive bibliography on Luther on the Turks, Adam S. Francisco, Martin Luther and Islam: A Study in Sixteenth-Century Polemics and Apologetics, History of Christian-Muslim Relations 8 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 84–237, argues for Luther’s primarily apologetic and pastoral concern with refuting Islam and strengthening Christians against possible apostasy. As with earlier scholars who treat Luther’s support of the study of the Koran based on earlier medieval translations such as that of

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Ricoldus of Montecrucis (d. 1320), in his treatment of the pre-Reformation background, at 9–65, Francisco discusses only the negative, distorted, and polemical views Luther inherited. Cf. the more accurate and objective treatments of the Koran and Islam in some medieval translations and paraphrases documented by Thomas E. Burman, Reading the Qur’ n in Latin Christendom, 1140–1560 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). For a concise reprise of Luther on the Turks that steers clear of these debates, see Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 109–111. 8. For general treatments of Christian humanist pacifists on the Turks, see Robert P. Adams, The Better Part of Valor: More, Erasmus, and Vives on Humanism, War, and Peace (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962), 274–276; Soykut, Image, 39–41. On More and Tyndale, see Clare M. Murphy, “The Turks in More and Tyndale,” in Word, Church, and State: Tyndale Quincentenary Essays, ed. John T. Day, Eric Lund, and Ann O’Donnell (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1998), 228–242. On St. German, see Daniel F. Eppley, “Lawyer Turned Prophet: Christopher St. German on Islam” (paper presented at the Renaissance Society of America conference, Chicago, Ill., April 3, 2008). On Erasmus, see Desiderius Erasmus, Utilissima consultatio de bello turcis inferendo, et obiter enarratus Psalmus XXVIII, ed. A. G. Weiler, in Desiderius Erasmus, Opera omnia (Amsterdam: North-Holland Elzevier, 1986), 5/3:31–82; trans. Michael J. Heath in Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 64:211–266. Erasmus is treated in detail by Maria Cytowska, “Érasme et les turcs,” Eos 62 (1974), 311–321; Michael J. Heath, “Erasmus and War against the Turks,” in Acta conventus neo-latini turonensis, ed. Jean-Claude Margolin (Paris: J. Vrin, 1980), 2:991–1001, emphasizes here and in the introduction to his translation, 64:202–208, the primacy of Erasmus’s anti-Lutheran polemic in this work; Jean-Claude Margolin, “Érasme et la guerre contre les turcs,” Il Pensiero Politico 13 (1980), 3–38, reprinted in Jean-Claude Margolin, Le prix des mots et de l’homme (London: Variorum Reprints, 1986), no. 11; A. G. Weiler, “La Consultatio de Bello Turcis inferendo: Une oeuvre de piété politique,” in Actes du colloque international Érasme, Tours, 1986, ed. Jacques Chomarat, André Godin, and Jean-Claude Margolin (Geneva: Droz, 1990), 99–108, who here, and in the introduction to his edition of Erasmus, Opera omnia, 5/3:4–27, emphasizes the primacy of moral over political issues. For two more sharply opposing views on this work, compare Jacques Chomarat, “Aspects de la conscience européenne chez Valla et Érasme,” in La conscience européenne au XVe et au XVIe siècle, Actes du Colloque international organisé à l’École Normale Supérieure de Jeunes Filles, 30 septembre–3 octobre 1980, Collection de l’École Normale Supérieure de Jeunes Filles, 22 (Paris: École Normal Supérieure de Jeunes Filles, 1982), 64–74, who ignores all its military aspects, stressing that for Erasmus peaceful evangelization is the only alternative and that some Turks may already be members of the ecclesia spiritualis; and Marie-Madeleine Payen de la Garanderie, “Érasme: Quelle conscience européenne?” in La conscience européenne au XVe et au XVIe siècle, 296–308, who sees in the same work only unmitigated hostility to the infidel “Other” and who argues that, in any case, Erasmus was a universalist, not a “European.” More recently, for the view that Erasmus maintained his pacifist outlook even in this critique of Luther, see Ronald G. Musto, “Just Wars and Evil Empires: Erasmus on the Turks,” in Renaissance Society and Culture: Essays in Honor of Eugene F. Rice, ed. John Monfasani and Ronald G. Musto (New York: Italica Press, 1991), 197–216. Edward V. George, “Rules

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of Engagement: The Humanist Apologetics of Vives’ De veritate fidei Christianae,” Erasmus of Rotterdam Yearbook 27 (2007), 1–36, at 32–35, accents this point as well as Erasmus’s disinterest in the Turks as Muslims. I thank Jane E. Phillips for this last reference. 9. Heath, “Erasmus and War against the Turks,” 994–95; Heath, introduction to his translation of Erasmus, Utilissima consultatio, 64:204, 258 n. 236; at 204 Heath also agrees with Weiler, in the introduction to his edition of this work, 5/3:11–16, that Erasmus’s most immediate literary source was Giambattista Egnazio; also seeing Vives as a source is Margolin, “Érasme et la guerre contre les turcs,” 31–32; Margolin, “L’Europe dans le miroir du nouveau monde,” in La conscience européenne, 236–237. 10. Juan Luis Vives, De concordia et discordia in humano genere, in Opera omnia, ed. Gregorio Mayens de Síscar, 8 vols. (Valencia: Montfort, 1782–1790; repr., London: Gregg Press, 1964), 5:390–391: “Amandi sunt Turcae, nempe homines, amandi ab iis qui illi volunt parêre: Diligite inimicos vestros: illis ergo, quid veri est amoris, bene cupiemus, illudque optabimus unicum et maximum bonum, agnitionem veritatis, quod nunquam assequentur conviciis aut maledictis nostris, sed eo modo, quo nos ipsi ope ac beneficio sumus Apostolorum consecuti, rationibus naturae et humanis ingeniis congruentibus, integritate vitae, modestia, moderatione, inculpatis moribus, ut nos ipsi priores se ostendamus quae profitemur et jubemus, ne a fide nostrorum dictorum arceat eos tam discrepans vita; nec solum hoc erimus affatu atque animo in eos impios, a quibus non laedimur, sed in eos ipsos qui nos persequuntur et affligunt. . . .” All citations to Vives are drawn from this edition. On this passage, see Francisco Calero, introduction to his edition of Juan Luis Vives, Obras políticas y pacifistas, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles 304 (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1999), 42–43, 45–46. 11. The best overall study to date is Jean-Claude Margolin, “Conscience européenne et réaction à la menace turque d’après le ‘De Dissidiis Europae et bello turcico’ de Vives (1526),” in Juan Luis Vives, ed. August Buck, Wolfenbütteler Abhandlungen zur Renaissanceforschung 3 (Hamburg: Hanswedell, 1981), 107–141. The fullest literary analyses are by Michael Zappala, “Vives’ De Europae Dissidiis et Bello Turcico, the Quattrocento Dialogue, and ‘Open’ Discourse,” in Acta conventus neo-latini torontoniensis, ed. Alexander Dalzell, Charles Fantazzi, and Richard J. Schoeck (Binghamton, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1991), 823–830, and Edward V. George, “Juan Luis Vives’ De Europae dissidiis et bello turcico,” in Acta conventus neo-latin bariensis, ed. Rhoda Schnur, Juan F. Alcina Rovina, et al. (Tempe, Ariz.: MARTS Press, 1998), 58–66; reprised in George, “Rules of Engagement,” 32. See also Adams, Better Part of Valor, 262–264; Carlos G. Noreña, Juan Luis Vives (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 225–227. The argument of Antonio Fontan, Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540): Humanista, filósofo, político (Valencia: Ajuntament de València, 1992), 66, 105–108, 110–111, 118–120, 124–125, 128, 137–144, that Vives merely recycles medieval commonplaces, is belied by evidence that he himself cites. On the other hand, the fact that Vives refers to “Europe” rather than “Christendom” in his title is seen as betokening a new, modern consciousness of Europe on his part by Margolin, “L’Europe dans le miroir du nouveau monde,” 236–237, and John M. Headley, The Europeanization of the World: On the Origins of Human Rights and Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), 80; while Calero, in the introduction to Vives, Obras, 11–59, esp. 28–29, 31–32, presents Vives as a proponent of the European Union avant la lettre.

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12. Juan Luis Vives, De dissidiis Europae et bello turcico, 6:454–458, 6:462–464, 6:470–473, 6:480–481. The quotation is at 6:454: “Prope modum eadem ista; et bellum ubique, discordae, odia”; see also De conditione vitae christianorum sub turca, 5:451–452, 5:456. 13. De dissidiis, 6:468, 6:470; De conditione, 5:455–457, 5:458, 5:460. On this stereotype, see Hankins, “Renaissance Crusaders,” 121–123; on the fifteenthcentury humanists envisioning the Ottoman Empire as part of Europe, see Hankins, “Renaissance Crusaders,” 135–144. 14. De dissidiis, 6:467: “Atqui constans est apud superos rumor, immisum Turcam in Pannoniam ab iis quos minime decebat, et a quibus nemo unquam metuisset.” 15. De dissidiis, 6:469. See the discussion of official royal rationalizations and of propagandistic French writers on this issue in the sixteenth century in Klaus Malettke, “Die Vorstöffe der Osmanen im 16. Jahrhundert aus französischer Sicht,” in Guthmüller and Kühlmann, Europa und die Türken, 373–394, at 383–394, accenting the containment of internal and external critics, and Michael Heath, “Foolish or Fearsome Franks? The Supposed Ottoman View of European Christians in the Sixteenth Century,” in Conceptions of Europe in Renaissance France: Essays in Honour of Keith Cameron, ed. David Cowling (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 153–176. Neither Malettke nor Heath makes reference to Vives in this connection. 16. De dissidiis, 6:470. 17. De conditione, 5:458, 5:460. For humanist canards on the Turks as lacking the arts and sciences, even civilized foodways, see Hankins, “Renaissance Crusaders,” 121–123; Margaret Meserve, “Medieval Sources for Renaissance Theories on the Origins of the Ottoman Turks,” in Guthmüller and Kühlmann, Europa und die Türken, 420, 421; Meserve, Empires of Islam, 69, 75, 101, 102–103, 116, 128. For more on the “lament of Greece,” see Bodo Guthmüller, “‘Se tu non piangi, di che pianger suoli?’ Der Lamento di Constantinopoli in ottava rima,” in Guthmüller and Kühlmann, Europa und die Türken, 317– 332. That Vives does not really concern himself with the Turks as Muslims is also noted by George, “Rules of Engagement,” 32, 35. 18. De dissidiis, 6:468: “ex professo, hoste pietatis.” 19. De conditione, 5:457. 20. De conditione, 5:457: “Quid illum omnium gravissimum et acerbissimum, abduci liberos parvulos in remotissimas regiones, ut ibi abnegatio Christi nomen, et tota pietate in oblivionem missa, serviant domino spurcissimo ac impio?” See also Scipio’s speech to the same point in De dissidiis, 6:474–75. On the gap between European perception and Ottoman reality in this area, see Norman Itzkowitz, Ottoman Empire and Islamic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 50; Goffman, The Ottoman Empire, 67–68. 21. De conditione, 5:449: “ideo vel Turcam mallent, quasi is benignior sit in largienda libertate hac, quàm Christianus . . . .” Noted by Margolin, “Érasme et la guerre contre les turcs,” 31–32; Calero, in the introduction to Vives, Obras, 21. Vives may be compared here with Erasmus in Utilissima consultatio, ed. Weiler, 64:75–76, who refers not to the Turks’ subject Christians themselves but to the “voces abominandae” who make this claim for Ottoman religious toleration, one which, he argues, is unfounded. On the basic Ottoman policy, see Antoine Fattal, Le statut légal des non-Muslims en pays d’Islam (Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique, 1958), 366–370; Peter Sugar, Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977), 4–7, 13, 16–19, 21, 31, 33,

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22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

Medievalia et Humanistica 39–40, 45–49; Itzkowitz, Ottoman Empire, 34, 49–54, 59–61; Goffman, The Ottoman Empire, 11, 16–18, 46–49, 51, 67–68, 83–91, 101–105, 111–112, 169–183, 187–188, 231. Vives is not interested in Ottoman toleration of Judaism; for a recent survey of scholarship on that subject, see the contributions to Avigdor Levy, ed., Jews Turks, and Ottomans: A Shared History, Fifteenth to Twentieth Century (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2002). De dissidiis, 6:467–468; on Turks as “Asian,” 6:477–479. This strategic dimension, but not its geographic sweep, is flagged by Calero in the introduction to Vives, Obras, 14–15, 42–43; on the other hand, George, “Rules of Engagement,” 32, notes a policy of vaguely Asian expansion, but not its strategic dimension. De dissidiis, 6:479: Scipio: “ampliata etiam pietate, et propagata in tam multos: nescio an idem Christo videatur. . . .” De dissidiis, 6:474–475; De conditione 5:456. On the humanist tradition that Christians subject to the Turks were primed for revolt, see Hankins, “Renaissance Crusaders,” 121. Cytowska, “Érasme et les turcs,” 321, notes its occurrence in Erasmus, but not in Vives. Meserve, Empires of Islam, 203–237, discusses the humanists’ notion, and its medieval roots, that European Christians could wreak God’s vengeance on the Turks through an alliance with the Mongols or other Asian enemies of the Turks. De dissidiis, 6:473–479. De dissidiis, 6:480–481, for Tiresias’s final speech, quotation at 6:481: “aliter nihil restat spei quo minus cedant illi possessione occidentis, et in novum orbem magnis classibus perfugeant qui nolint sub illius dominatu vivere. . . .” Calero, in the introduction to Vives, Obras, 14–15.

“Double-Talk” (Bilinguium) in Faus Semblant’s Discourse in the Roman de la Rose GABRIELLA I. BAIKA

“The problem of Faus Semblant”1 in criticism of the Rose is strangely similar to “il problema di Ulisse” in Dante studies. Over the course of time, the two characters have sparked an almost equal amount of controversy among critics and inspired passionate polemical writings. If for Ulysses the main question remains the exact sin for which Dante punished him in hell, for Faus Semblant (“False Seeming”) the issue at stake is why Jean de Meun included in his poem such an utterly evil character, responsible for a great deal of extraneous and irrelevant poetic material.2 To counter this negative critical assessment, recent studies have offered powerful arguments justifying the necessity of Faus Semblant’s presence in the Roman de la Rose. In her groundbreaking study of the semiotic structures of deceit in the Rose, Susan Stakel sees Faus Semblant as the main site where Jean de Meun articulates his literary treatment of moral duplicity.3 In a similar vein, Richard Emmerson and Ronald Herzman promote the controversial character as a key element for understanding the poem’s apocalyptic framework.4 Guy Geltner questions the antifraternalism of Faus Semblant’s speech, whereas Sarah Kay sees this character as the locus where two essential literary techniques—allegory and irony—converge.5 Finally, Kevin Brownlee argues that Faus Semblant’s discourse is vital to the poem because it provides “one of the most important meditations on the status of language.”6 In the context of the great debate on discursive practices carried by the allegorical characters in the poem, we undertake to revisit the episode of Faus Semblant and place it in relationship to William of St. Amour’s texts against the mendicant friars. This comparative reading enables us to demonstrate that the portrayal of Faus Semblant is based on the apocalyptic signa (“signs”) posited by William of St. Amour for the identification of the pseudo-apostles of his time. In the second part Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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of the essay, we examine the discursive practices of Faus Semblant and suggest that his constant bouncing from one ideological position to its opposite can best be explained through William Peraldus’s notion of bilinguium (“double-talking”), from his popular tract on transgressive speech De peccato linguae (ca. 1236).7 A close examination of the character’s fraudulent rhetoric through Peraldus’s ethics will reveal that, far from damaging Faus Semblant as a fictive construct, as some critics have maintained, discursive bipolarity is Jean de Meun’s main technical means for articulating the mimetic coherence of his hypocritical personage.8 Like Ami (“Friend”) and La Vieille (“The Old Woman”), Faus Semblant is a hybrid personage, displaying not only abstract and universal features but also a biography grounded in the social realities of the time. As a literary artifact he presents such a complex intertwining of allegorical and concrete traits that if we operate a disjunction between these two levels—allegory and history—it is only for analytical purposes. Even within the framework of allegoresis, Faus Semblant is not a typical representative, in the sense that he cannot be interpreted as the personification of a single vice (or virtue), in the old-fashioned mode of Prudentius’s Psychomachia. He rather embodies so many vices and crimes that he ultimately imposes himself as the absolute allegory of human evil, in all of its hideous manifestations. Besides the apostrophes of the God of Love, who repeatedly calls him “devil,” Faus Semblant himself reveals that he works for Antichrist, does not fear God, and will be active on the social stage “as long as the world lasts” (v. 12345). If allegorically Faus Semblant is the representation of sheer evil (or the devil himself), biographically he is a character rooted, as Kevin Brownlee has pointed out, in the history of those times. Jean de Meun casts Faus Semblant as the representative of the mendicant friars, a religious type with a central and controversial role in the religious arena of the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries. By virtue of his historically grounded biography, Faus Semblant acquires a clear and distinctive social identity: he is a preacher and a confessor. However, these two ecclesiastic functions are deeply altered, insofar as the character brags that he pursues only fraud, in everything he does: Mais en quelque lieu que je viengne, Ne comment que je m’i contiengne, Nient plus fors barat n’i chaz. Ausi com dant Tyberz li chaz N’entent qu’a soriz et a raz, N’entent je a riens fors a baraz. (vv. 11069–74)9

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[But whatever place I come to, no matter how I conduct myself, I pursue nothing but fraud. No more than Tibert, the cat, has his mind on anything but mice and rats do I think of anything except fraud.]

Why Jean de Meun builds into his poem such a morally suspect character and why the author’s view of the mendicant friars is so radically negative are questions that can best be answered by looking at a medieval source dear to Jean: William of St. Amour.10 Passionately engaged in an attack against the fraternal orders that had infiltrated the high levels of the Parisian University, St. Amour wrote several antimendicant texts that rapidly gained him both popularity and enemies. The most notorious of these texts, De periculis novissimorum temporum (1255; On the Dangers of the Last Times), would fuel the conflict between the secular clergy and the fraternal orders for many years to come.11 St. Amour was outraged by the great social powers of the Franciscan and Dominican orders and the extremist Christian movement initiated by Joachim of Fiore. Animated by his strong antipathy for the friars, St. Amour does not hesitate to call them servants of the devil. Most of De periculis deals with these antichristi, who are extremely dangerous because of the great power of seduction of their preaching. In St. Amour’s lexicon, seduction has an idiosyncratic meaning: it means drawing people away from Christ toward the devil. Although these ecclesiastics are very skilled verbally, the author admits, their doctrine is nothing but poison, for it does not spring from the heart, but rather from a devilish thirst for powers and privileges. These false preachers corrupt people’s morals and drive them away from true faith, as they are corrupt and heretics themselves.12 Both their intelligence and their oratorical talent are real, warns St. Amour, and because of this, people of good faith cannot recognize them as false preachers, but succumb to their diabolical power of seduction. De periculis further draws attention to the heretical climate of the day prefiguring the end of the world, and calls for Christians to unmask the friars as false apostles and antichristi. Feeling compelled to instruct people how to recognize the false apostles (or preachers), William of St. Amour gives his audience a list of forty-one (!) signs as tools for identification.13 This care for innocent people who, without clear criteria for moral assessment, are unable to recognize a person or an activity as fraudulent is also the foundation on which Jean de Meun builds Faus Semblant into the text, through the agency of the God of Love. Expressing awareness of the fact that “one needs good wits” to be able to recognize Faus Semblant among so many disguises or places with which he associates himself, the god compels him to clearly state what the best “clues” for his identification are (vv. 10947–55). The organization of

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Faus Semblant’s discourse follows this list of indexes required by the god of love.

William of St. Amour’s “Signs” in the Rose In his poem, Jean de Meun praises St. Amour’s work, expressing his sympathy for its oppressed and exiled author. The name Faus Semblant itself was suggested to Jean by a character in Rutebeuf’s Complainte de William de St. Amour. A thorough reading of De periculis shows that Jean actually assimilated many of St. Amour’s signs for identifying a hypocritical preacher and used them as representational devices for patterning the textual behavior of Faus Semblant. Pinpointing these signs is not without a challenge, for Faus Semblant’s speech is not monovocal. In many places he speaks as a fraudulent ecclesiastic, whereas in many others he goes in the exact opposite direction and assumes the voice of the moralist, criticizing and exposing the false religious. It is Jean de Meun’s literary pleasure and purpose to constantly play with these shifting voices or levels of Faus Semblant’s discourse. The longest passage in which there is a complete and overt identification between Faus Semblant’s words and St. Amour’s voice is the discussion of licit mendicancy (vv. 11291–11512). Here Jean de Meun twice cites the author of De periculis and examines six cases of morally justified beggary, using all the arguments and examples furnished by St. Amour. It is an interesting case of medieval intertextuality, in which the (“translated”) text of De periculis substitutes for that of the Rose in a brilliant manner that, only a few centuries after Jean de Meun, Michel de Montaigne would raise to the status of art in the Essais. Jean de Meun’s stroke of genius in this passage is to place Faus Semblant in a direct relationship with William of St. Amour in the realm of fiction, where the antifraternal moralist and the literary representation of the mendicant friar have a sort of close encounter. Faus Semblant narrates how, by intrigues, his mother, Hypocrisy, had St. Amour exiled on account of his anti-hypocritical writings. In these writings, the false friar complains, St. Amour cruelly “wanted him,” Faus Semblant, to renounce mendicancy and his life as a drunkard and to go to work (vv. 11513–11522). This is one of the strongest textual connections between the Rose and De periculis, a connection that turns St. Amour from an author into a sort of character who interacts with Faus Semblant in the fictive world of the poem. Needless to say, Faus Semblant opposes St. Amour’s desires and refuses to work, choosing instead the garment and practices of a corrupt

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mendicant friar (vv. 11523–11528). Through this direct reference to the relationship between Faus Semblant and William of St. Amour, the latter transpires as a moral authority who in his texts sets high behavioral standards, while the former is depicted as a knowledgeable individual who is aware of these texts and ethical imperatives but who refuses to comply with them. This refusal can also be read as emblematic for the reaction of the real mendicant friars to St. Amour’s teachings and ideals of honesty and moral purity. Through the ingenious textual encounter between “maistre Guillaume de Saint Amour” (v. 11510) and Faus Semblant, Jean de Meun also subtly pays homage to the latter by obliquely acknowledging his power over the textual evolution of this personage and by showing us, readers, that the literary product called “Faus Semblant” in the Rose was designed with the ideological contribution of the antimendicant writer. Besides minor indexes like the love of fine food or other temporal goods that according to William of St. Amour characterize the false friar (signs twelve, sixteen, twenty-one, twenty-seven, and twenty-nine in De periculis)—and which are overtly admitted to by Faus Semblant—one of the major aspects that is salient in Faus Semblant’s self-revelations is that he does not act alone in the social arena. He constantly speaks of his likes, either by using the third-person plural pronoun “they,” when he presents them as a diffuse and dangerous crowd that he takes pain not to upset with disparaging words, or by using the inclusive pronoun “us,” when he asserts his affiliation with this evil social force. Faus Semblant’s cohorts, although depicted as a vague presence—mes amis, mes compagnons, mes frères (and the last term is not accidental)—are always there, in the outside world, lurking in the background, never manifesting themselves, but constantly invoked as an unsettling and menacing power. This apocalyptic image closely echoes William of St. Amour’s portrayal of the friars as a multitude of false preachers (“pseudopredicatores”) and antichristi, embodying the apocalyptic prophecies of the New Testament.14 According to St. Amour, one of the main actions of this large and evil mob is “penetratio domos” (“penetration of homes”; sign one), a violent intrusion exerted by people able to infiltrate everywhere, even places from which they are normally excluded.15 In the Rose, after confessing to the God of Love that he can be found either in the cloister or in the world, Faus Semblant admits, however, to his preference for open and intensely populated areas, where he can make more victims: Es bours et es chastiaus, as citez Ai mes sales et mes pales Ou l’en puet corre a plain eslais,

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Et di que je suis hors dou monde; Mais je m’i plunge et m’i affunde Et m’i aese et baigne et noe Mieus que nus poissons de sa noe. (vv. 11710–11716) [I make my halls and palaces in towns, castles, and cities, where one can run with a free rein. I say that I am out of the world, but I plunge into it and immerse myself in it; I take my ease and bathe and swim better than any fish with his fin.]

As the verses tellingly reveal, the urban location is a faithful identifier for the fraternal orders, whose mendicant way of life and preaching activities would draw them to cities rather than to rural settlements. Remarkable in this passage is the open cynicism with which Jean de Meun highlights, on the one hand, the easy movement of Faus Semblant in an urban location and, on the other, the contradiction between his compatibility with a worldly type of life and his purported isolation from the world. Apart from the false friars’ unsettling presence in the seculum, there are other features connected with the mendicant orders that render them dangerous: their persuasive eloquence and the ease with which they get in touch with people from all social estates (signs two, fourteen, fifteen, and twenty-six in De periculis). According to St. Amour, both seduction and social skills rely on the care with which the typical friar is “composing” his public figure. We will see these signs at work in the Rose, as well. For in order to ensure a better circulation from one level of society to another, Faus Semblant is constantly and carefully building his external image, an image based on his physical appearance (his clothing, i.e., his “masks”) and his linguistic skills: Trop sai bien mes habiz changier, Prendre l’un et l’autre estrangier: Or sui chevaliers, or sui moines, Or sui prelaz, or sui chanoines, Or sui clers, autre heure sui prestres, Or sui deciples, or sui mestres, Or chastelains or forestiers; Briement, je sui de touz mestiers. Or sui princes, or resui pages, Et sai par cuer trestouz langages. Autre heure sui vieulz et chenuz, Or resui juenes devenuz. Or sui Roberz, or sui Robins, Or cordeliers or jacobins. (vv. 11191–11204) [I know very well how to change my garment, to take one and then another foreign to it. Now I am a knight, now a monk; at one time I am a prelate, at another a canon; at one hour a clerk, at another a priest; now disciple, now master, now lord of the manor, now forester. Briefly, I am in all occupations. Again I may be prince or page, and I know all languages by heart. At one hour I am old and

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white, and then I have become young again. Now I am Robert, now Robin, now Cordelier, now Jacobin.]16

In light of this detailed self-description foregrounding his chameleonlike nature, Faus Semblant represents the mendicant friar as a dynamic actor on the social stage. The masks he changes with great ease assure him direct access to all the people with whom he wants to interact. By collapsing differences in both the religious and lay hierarchies, by blurring distinctions between professions (“métiers”), and by asserting at once his lack of ethnic specificity and his ability to speak any language, the character is in fact affirming his universality as an agent of evil, as the all-invasive incarnation of sin.17 The three elements on which his identity is based—lineage, wearing apparel, and verbal activity—all point in this direction. From the viewpoint of his family line, as son of the world-governing Fraud and of Hypocrisy, Faus Semblant is genetically predisposed to a fraudulent existence; from the viewpoint of the apparel he wears, a type of language itself, he is a lie; and finally, from the viewpoint of his verbal activity, he breathes forth lies, perjury, and false promises. Another sign of the friars’ composing their fraudulent public image is the care they take to be perceived as virtuous persons and holy pastors. A tool in this fabrication of a false social and moral outlook is, according to St. Amour, the request for letters of commendation (sign five). The idea reappears in Faus Semblant’s discourse, within the framework of his confessed hatred of honest work and poor people: Et pour avoir des genz loanges, Des riches hommes par losanges Empestrons que lettres nous doignent Qui la bonté de nous tesmoignent, Si que l’en croie par le monde Que vertuz toute en nous habonde. Et touz jours povres nous faignons . . . (vv. 11673–11679) [In order to win people’s praise we tell lies to rich men and get them to give us letters bearing witness to our goodness, so that throughout the world people will think that every virtue abounds in us. We always pretend to be poor . . .]

According to De periculis novissimorum temporum, requesting letters of recommendation is routinely accompanied by the false preachers’ intolerance to any kind of criticism (signs three and seventeen). The friars’ distaste for any form of correction is present in Faus Semblant’s discourse, as well. Jean de Meun’s character asserts not only his incapacity to accept criticism from others and his will to order and control people’s lives, but also his determination to physically exterminate any person who would dare oppose his methods of conversion to evil. The

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propensity to murder of Faus Semblant and of the antichristi whom he represents is not only verbalized when he warns about the fate awaiting those who do not follow him, but actually enacted on two separate occasions: the slaying of the Norman soldiers and the heinous extermination of Malebouche (“Evil Mouth”). Nowhere is the combination of fraud and violence more evident than in the section depicting Malebouche’s slayer during his pious act of confession. Since Malebouche represents a danger for Amant’s conquest of the beloved, Faus Semblant and his concubine Astinance Constrainte (“Constrained Abstinence”) decide to eliminate him. Before going to Faus Semblant’s house, where Malebouche is lodged, the two felons premeditate their act and debate how best to kill him. They wonder if they should make themselves known to Malebouche or assume false identities. Of course, they choose to assume false identities and disguise themselves as pilgrims. With meticulous care, they compose their masks to appear as virtuous and pious Christians. Astinance Constrainte puts on a robe of cameline and disguises herself as a Beguine, whereas: Faus samblant qui bien se ratorne Ot aussi com pour essoier Vestuz les dras frere Soier:18 La chiere ot mout simple et piteuse Ne regardeüre orgueilleuse N’ot il pas, mais douce et paisible. A son col portoit une bible. A pié s’en va sanz escuier, Et pour ses membres apuier Ot ausi com par impotence en sa main destre une potence Et fist en sa manche glacier .i. bien tranchant rasoir d’acier, Qu’il fist forgier en une forge Que l’en apele coupe gorge. (vv. 12086–12100) [False Seeming, who was also equipping himself well, had dressed, as though to try it out, in the clothing of brother Seier. He had a very simple, compassionate face without any appearance of pride, a sweet, peaceful look. At his neck he carried a Bible. Afterward, he went off without a squire, and, to support his limbs, as though he had no power, he used a crutch of treason. Up his sleeve he slipped a very sharp steel razor, that he had made in a forge and that was called Cut-Throat.]

The detailed description of the religious attire of the two criminals and the compassionate looks they display while pretending to be holy people serve to highlight the disjunction between appearance and moral substance, between the outer self and the inner self. Both their external image and the pious speech they skillfully deliver to gullible

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Malebouche before killing him will turn out to be deceptive codes meant to warn the reader about the dangers represented by what William of St. Amour labeled “falsi fratres sub habitu sanctitatis” (“false friars wearing the habit of sanctity”), and whom he identified with the mendicant orders. The slaying of Malebouche in the midst of his act of confession enacts St. Amour’s message about the religious persecution by hypocrites. The several “signs” we have seen so far attached to the figure of Faus Semblant in the Roman de la Rose suggest that Jean de Meun projected this character in the wake of William of St. Amour’s negative perception of the mendicant preachers. Our comparison between the two texts does not exhaust all of the places in which Jean de Meun embedded the traits of the false preachers or apostles into the portrait of Faus Semblant; more signs can be identified when it comes to the friars’ appetite for sophistical reasoning or carnal delights, for instance. Out of forty-one signs posited in De periculis there is hardly one that cannot be detected in Faus Semblant’s speech in the Rose. Jean arguably knew some corrupt mendicant friars directly, from his own experience, but when he built Faus Semblant into his text, he relied not only on his own experience, but also (or especially) on the tally of signs developed by the secular master he admired so much. It takes great literary craftsmanship and industriousness to give life and textual body to a list of criteria from another author’s work. Jean de Meun not only devises a character who walks and acts following this long lists of identifying signs, but at the same time, he paradoxically creates one of the most original personages of the entire French tradition. The means by which the poet achieves this literary performance is an almost obsessive concern with the character’s devious speech.

The Traps of Rhetoric In St. Amour’s view, the gift of rhetoric is one of the most important signs that help identify a false friar, and, in the Roman de la Rose, Faus Semblant repeatedly illustrates this point of view.19 The character declares that his ecclesiastical skills are exceptional, and that his long experience in preaching attests to his magisterial expertise in the use of religious language: “Prelat ne sont mie si sage / Ne si lettré de trop com gié; / J’ai de devinité congié, / Voire, par dieu, pieça leü” (vv. 12354–12357; “There are no prelates so wise and learned as I. I have a license in divinity, and, in fact, by God, I have lectured for a long time”). Beyond this

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mere declarative level, there are indeed several passages in which the personage aptly quotes, and glosses on, Scriptures. In reality, however, Faus Semblant uses his ecclesiastical privileges and knowledge for the purpose of defrauding people, as he himself admits: “Mais de religion sanz faille, / J’en lais le grain et preng la paille. / Pour genz enbascher y abit: Je n’en quier sanz plus que l’habit” (vv. 11219–11222; “But without fail, I leave the kernel of religion and take the husk. I dwell in religion only to trick people; I seek only its habit, no more”). The sermons he allegedly delivers to his audience are in sharp contrast with his moral depravation, and his discourse in the poem unrelentingly highlights the contradiction between what he says and what he truly thinks or does. Faus Semblant establishes a genetic affiliation with fraudulent language from the very beginning of his textual activity. Not only is he introduced in the poem through a sin of speech signaled by the god of love—“c. mile foiz t’es parjurez” (v. 10947; “you have perjured yourself a hundred thousand times”)—but he is also the son of a sin tightly linked to speaking: Hypocrisy. The lineage of the character, with Barat (“Fraud”), as the father and Hypocrisy as the mother, preordains the textual life of Faus Semblant and circumscribes his evolution in the narrative within essentially immoral parameters. The dialogue between Faus Semblant and the God of Love reveals the discrepancy between Faus Semblant’s preaching and his inner structure: “Car si com tes habiz nous conte, Tu sambles estre .i. sainz hermites!” (Faus samblant): “C’est voirs, mes je sui ypocrites.” (Li dieus d’amours): “Tu vas preschant astinance!” (Faus samblant): “Voire voir, mais j’emple ma pance De tres bons morsiaus et de vins Tels comme il affiert a devins.” (Li dieus d’amours): “Tu vas preschant povreté.” (Faus samblant): “Voire, riches a poesté. Mais combien que povres me faigne Nul povre je ne contredaigne.» (vv. 11234–44) [As you tell us of your habits, you seem to be a holy hermit / — It is true, but I am a hypocrite. / — You go around preaching abstinence. / — True, indeed, but I fill my paunch with very good morsels and with wines such as are suitable for theologians. / — You go around preaching poverty. / — True, abundantly richly. But however much I pretend to be poor, I pay no attention to any poor person.]

With lines swiftly moving back and forth between the two interlocutors like in a miniature dramatic scene, the short remarks of the God of Love seem to have the mere function of prompting long denials from Faus Semblant, who is compelled to introduce and define himself. This

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humorous dialogue is designed to emphasize the contradiction between appearance and moral essence, between truth and lie, and to dismantle conventional systems of signs—the clothes and the words—commonly regarded as faithful indicators of social identity and moral profile. The hypocritical character not only gives many details about his preaching skills but also boasts about his ability to speak all languages: “sai par cuer trestouz languages” (v. 11200; “I know all languages by heart”). His manipulation of speech associated with fraudulent ecclesiastic activities is best seen when he brags about systematically breaking the secrecy of the confessional. According to Faus Semblant’s philosophy, pastoral care must be directed primarily at the rich, as they are much more sinful than the poor, and therefore in more need of his guidance. He uses the privileges that he gains as a confessor to the rich for fraudulent purposes: he blackmails the sinners over their moral errors and is willing to give pardon only to those who pay for his silence. Along these lines, it is worth noting that in the medieval ethical texts, making public other people’s secrets was a sin of the tongue, a sin called “secreta revelare” (“the disclosing of secrets”). In the moral system of William Peraldus, the most authoritative theorist of speech in the late Middle Ages, this sin is all the more serious when committed by religious figures. Faus Semblant makes of “secreta revelare” his political and social agenda, since this verbal practice is one of his main means of making a living.20 If we gather all these traits related to the moral outlook of Faus Semblant, it becomes evident that the sins mainly associated with him are the sins of the tongue. Through him, they invade the lives of both the rich and the poor, affect both the young and the old, and infiltrate the languages of both the native and the foreigner. Faus Semblant’s statement “Je connais tous les langages” is an ironic allusion to the Pentecost, but, on a different level, it can also mean: “I speak the inner language of every soul; I know how to get to every person’s moral substance; I therefore know how to relate to people and manipulate them.” Faus Semblant’s sentence seems a verbatim translation of William Peraldus’s definition of the double-talkers: “Bilingues sunt pseudo apostoli variis linguis loquentes” (“The double-talkers are false apostles able to speak various languages” [translation mine]).21 Further clues in the text contribute to Jean de Meun’s unmasking the corruption of rhetoric. One of the constants of Faus Semblant’s speech is the care he takes to make visible and explicit the gap between his words and his deeds. Apart from the programmatic avowal “Mout est en moi muez li vers: / Trop sont li fait au diz divers” (vv. 11223–11226; “The tune is very much changed in me; my deeds are very different from my

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words”), he values praying over working, although, he says, his prayers are in sharp contrast with what he does behind people’s backs. When he comes to speak about chivalry as an eminently honest social class, he curses all the honest people for the harmony between their sayings and their actions. Another interesting instance occurs when he warns about the deceitfulness implicit in his way of talking: “Ne ja certes pour mon habit / Ne savrez o quel gent j’abit; / Non ferez vous voir as parole, / Ja tant n’ierent simples ne moles” (vv. 11076–79; “Certainly by my habit you would never know with what people I dwell, any more that you would from my words, no matter how simple and gentle they were”). In the context of this quote, it is useful to note that in the Middle Ages the adjective simple had a different connotation than its current main meaning. It was the opposite not of complicated but of double, which had a negative moral connotation. Being double meant being dishonest, and William Peraldus took up these initially Augustinian terms—simplex/ duplex—in his treatment of hypocrisy. For Peraldus the hypocrite is a twofold person, an individual with a split personality: one whose outer self (exterius) does not correspond to the inner self (interius). That Faus Semblant constantly establishes for himself the textual posture of a double dealer, who says one thing and does the opposite, brings into focus his talent as a double-talker, a medieval term denoting a person whose outer speech does not correspond to his mental scheme. Although the words of the hypocrite seemingly convey simplicity (in the medieval sense of honesty), they are in fact “double,” because what the hypocrite says is different from his internal, mental speech. Like snakes, the sinners by bilinguium have two tongues, Peraldus asserts. One is the outer tongue that proclaims the good intention, and the other, the inner tongue that speaks the evil thought. The words of the double-talker seem simple, to wit, honest, but are in sharp contrast to his “verba interiora mentis” (“the inner words of the mind”), which translate the intent of wrongdoing. The sin of double-talking has extremely dangerous consequences for the public life, Peraldus adds, and it is all the more grievous when committed by those who are supposed to teach the Christian doctrine. All throughout his discourse, Faus Semblant casts himself as the embodiment of religious hypocrisy and double-talking. His immorality is predicated upon the split between his words and his deeds, between his outer speech and his cast of mind. This is what renders Faus Semblant’s speech in the Rose paradoxical; this is what confers a contradictory aspect to his discourse. All of the critics who have dealt, from one perspective or another, with the “problem” of Faus Semblant have noted the

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paradoxes inherent in his discourse, paradoxes rooted in the fact that the character engages with several topics and alternately adopts, with respect to them, pro and con positions. He curses the noble people for not being as hypocritical as he is (vv. 11935–11940), and later on, he compares the hypocrite with a pig returning to his vomit, and teaches how a hypocrite can be recognized. He abhors working but refuses mendicancy. He speaks in favor of William of St. Amour in the quarrel against the mendicant friars, but then he complains that he feels personally threatened by his book. He vituperates against the Eternal Gospel that he considers full of grossly erroneous comparisons, then he expresses regret that this book was not circulated more. He deplores the state of the Church and praises the University as a defender of Christianity, then brags about being one of Antichrist’s boys. These unrelenting shifts should not surprise us in a hypocrite; they are to be accounted for in light of the same bad habit of bilinguium (“double-talking”) germane to this category of people. Domenico Cavalca, one of Peraldus’s followers, defines “bilinguals” (“men with doubleforked tongues”) as “quegli, i quali dicono ed una prima, ed una poi, sicchè rivoltano le parole a suo modo, e dicono e disdicono; non hanno fermezza in loro parole, sicchè per seguente generano molti scandoli” (“those who first say one thing, then another, and thus twist the words as it pleases them, they say and unsay things; they lack steadfastness in their speech, therefore generate many scandals”).22 In the wake of this definition that applies in spectacular ways to Jean de Meun’s hypocritical character, I respectfully disagree with the assessment expressed by Lee Patterson, who considers Faus Semblant a representational failure. The conflicting positions on which Faus Semblant’s speech is patterned have prompted Patterson to assert that “these crude juxtapositions make it impossible for Jean to portray either the ethos or language of hypocrisy. As a speaker, Faus Semblant dissolves before the pressure of the inherited rhetorics that jostle side by side in his discourse, dissipating any coherence of the character before it can coalesce.”23 The descriptions of the “bilinguals” that William Peraldus and Domenico Cavalca gave in their famous treatises on the sins of the tongue contradict Lee Patterson’s pronouncement. In my opinion, the shifts in perspective that characterize Faus Semblant’s discourse are a mimetic tool for representing his duplicitous nature.24 Here, the “jostling of rhetorics” that Patterson is speaking of works not to demolish the character but to figure him forth. Particularly because the changes in perspective are a recurrent motif, the spotlight falls on the patterns of speech, and the oscillation, by being a productive scheme, reveals

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a premeditated literary technique for portraying the sins of bilinguium and hypocrisy. Emmerson and Herzman have noted in this respect that “Faus Semblant is unique not because of his hypocritical nature, but because his hypocrisy is so blatant.”25 My opinion is that this blatancy is a deliberate representational strategy adopted by the writer. Jean de Meun surely knew the mendicant friars from his own daily life, but the close reading of this section of the poem proves that he also drew on the energies of two important traditions: that of antifraternal literature, as best expressed by William of St. Amour, and that of the moral writings of his time. All throughout the Faus Semblant section in the Roman de la Rose, the authorial stress on his speaking habits is too evident and cultivated to be a deficiency of craftsmanship, as Patterson argues. The constant bipolarity of the friar’s speech is not a factor of mimetic dissolution, but the hermeneutical key to the character. His discourse is indeed, as all his critics have noted, paradoxical in nature, but paradoxia is, as Charles Presberg, one of the theorists of this figure of speech, has pointed out, an “artful discourse” that is both “trope of thought and rhetorical strategy.”26 Paradoxical discourse has its roots in Plato’s definition of dialogue as the art of simultaneously arguing opposite sides of a question, the effect of which is, in Presberg’s view, to “systematically use the categories of language and logic to question and mock the very categories that undergird language and logic as discursive systems.”27 In analyzing Faus Semblant, we have to consider not only what the character says and does but, across his fluctuating moods and statements, also what the writer does with his character and with the text. Faus Semblant’s textual figure is constructed along paradoxical lines as a coincidentia oppositorum. His discourse is designed by Jean de Meun as a dialectical space in which each argument can be seen from both sides. The speech of the character is cast by the writer in the medieval mold of a dialogue between the two sides of man—the inner and the outer— each with its attendant speech, the oral and the mental, here constantly in disagreement. Since the internal structure of Faus Semblant is mutability, the organization of his discourse, as an authorial project, had to reflect mutability. Jean de Meun not only makes his character say he is a hypocrite, but also makes him express himself as a double-talker, designing his discourse as systematically bipolar. The carefully cultivated linguistic duality is a textual rendering of the sins of double-talking and hypocrisy, otherwise less perceptible for the reader. Only by having Faus Semblant constantly bounce from one ideological position to its opposite, from one assertive statement to its denial, can Jean de Meun render

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transparent the secret workings of the mind of his character and expose the potentially fraudulent resources of language. Faus Semblant’s speech is the embodiment of Presberg’s definition of paradoxy. Using the voice of the false friar, Jean de Meun constantly mocks language and logic as human institutions, with both their seductions and their weaknesses, and makes visible to the reader the dangers they entail. The target audience of the Roman de la Rose will now be more on guard against external signs of sincerity and religiousness and more inclined to follow the path of interiority and look for the true intent underlying each word or deed. Far from being a literary fiasco, as some have suggested, the portrayal of Faus Semblant is so accomplished and has played such an impressive role in the history of European literature that George Puttenham, an English Renaissance writer, used the name of Faus Semblant in his rhetorical encyclopedia as a technical term for a figure of speech. In his Arte of English Poetry, Puttenham uses “False Semblant” as a common noun to designate allegory, and defines it as “speaking otherwise than one seems to speak.”28

Notes To my friend and former teacher, Professor Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, for an unparalleled seminar on the Romance of the Rose. 1. The phrase belongs to Kevin Brownlee, “The Problem of Faus Semblant: Language, History, and Truth in the Roman de la Rose,” in The New Medievalism, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Stephen Nichols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 253–271. 2. This is the position expressed by C. S. Lewis in The Allegory of Love (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), 142, and by William W. Ryding, “Faus Semblant: Hero or Hypocrite?” Romanic Review 60 (1969), 163. 3. Susan Stakel, False Roses: Structures of Duality and Deceit in Jean de Meun’s “Roman de la Rose” (Saratoga, Calif.: Anma Libri, 1991). 4. Richard K. Emmerson and Ronald B. Herzman, “The Apocalyptic Age of Hypocrisy: Faus Semblant and Amant in the Roman de la Rose,” Speculum 62 (1987), 612–634. 5. Guy Geltner, “Faux-Semblants: Antifraternalism Reconsidered in Jean de Meun and Chaucer,” Studies in Philology 4, no. 101 (2004), 357–380. Geltner’s central argument is that Jean de Meun uses Faus Semblant to attack, not necessarily the mendicant orders, but all religious hypocrites, in general. For Sarah Kay, see The Romance of the Rose (London: Grant and Cutler, 1995), 23–30. 6. Brownlee, “Problem of Faus Semblant,” 253. Although the scholarship on the Romance of the Rose is vast, I am invoking here only those critical standpoints that have revolved around this character. The most recent collection of essays

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7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

Medievalia et Humanistica devoted to the Rose reserves no room for Faus Semblant (Catherine Bel and Herman Braet, eds., De la Rose: texte, image, fortune [Dudley, Mass.: Peeters, 2006]). William Peraldus (born about 1190) is the illustrious author of an encyclopedia of vices, in which we find ample descriptions of the twenty-four abuses people commit in speaking. See Summa Vitiorum, Gulielmo Peraldo Episc. Lugdunensi. Apud Gulielmum Rovilium, 1585. In the wake of Peraldus’s tract, bilinguium will become a recurrent class of verbal sin in the ethical texts from the late Middle Ages. For more about Peraldus’s work and bibliography, see Carla Casagrande and Silvana Vecchio, I Peccati della lingua: Disciplina ed etica della parola nella cultura medievale (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1987). In the wake of Casagrande and Vecchio’s findings, Edwin Craun has published two books dealing with the sphere of influence of Peraldus (and his followers) on medieval English culture: Lies, Slander and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) and The Hands of the Tongue: Essays on Deviant Speech (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007). Lewis, Allegory of Love; Ryding, “Faus Semblant”; and Lee Patterson, “‘For the Wyves Love of Bathe’: Feminine Rhetoric and Poetic Resolution in the Roman de la Rose and the Canterbury Tales,” Speculum 58 (1983), 656–695. For the French text of the Romance of the Rose, I use William de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la rose, ed. Armand Strubel (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1992), whereas for the English version I use William de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Charles Dahlberg (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995). In his study about the medieval antimendicant tradition, Penn Szittya argues for the impressive presence of William of St. Amour’s antifraternal ideas in the discourse of Faus Semblant. Szyttia follows in this a suggestion made by Ernest Langlois, one of the editors of the Rose, and reaches the conclusion that “this section of the Roman is saturated with the language of W. of St. Amour. . . . Jean de Meun clearly had texts of William’s works in front of him.” See Penn Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 186. It is worth adding that as a result of the influence of St. Amour’s subversive texts on Jean de Meun, the Faus Semblant episode itself would be considered subversive by some of its readers. Sylvia Huot notes in this respect: “The discourse of Faus Semblant, with its biting satire on the mendicant orders, was viewed as dangerous by some scribal editors of the Rose, who occasionally inserted warnings that the passage was not for the general dissemination or even deleted parts of the text.” See Sylvia Huot, The “Roman de la Rose” and Its Medieval Readers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 17. The passages from De periculis I cite throughout my essay belong to William of St. Amour: De periculis novissimorum temporum, ed. Guy Geltner, Dallas Medieval Texts and Translations 8 (Paris: Peeters, 2008). For the other works of St. Amour, I rely on Guillaume de St. Amour: Opera Omnia, Constance, 1632. “And yet their counsels will become exceedingly dangerous, since ultimately they will be men of degenerate manners and of corrupted faith; as the Apostle says in the same place in these words, men of corrupt minds, degenerate in faith. Eventually, as they will lead the Christian leaders and people in the said ways away from the prelates’ counsels and later from obedience to them, so they will easily send them into error, both against good customs and against faith” (De periculis, 65).

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13. In a subsequent text, he extends this list to fifty signs (see Pericula imminentia Ecclesiae generali per Hypocritas, Pseudopredicatores, et Penetrantes Domos, et Otiosos, et Curiosos, et Gyrovagos, in Opera Omnia). 14. St. Amour had a particular scheme about salvation history, a scheme that posited three major phases of persecution against the church. The first one, from the time of the first martyrs of the Church, was a persecutio violenta, based on an effusion of blood; the second, from the time of Augustine and Hilary, was a persecutio fraudulenta; whereas the third, close to the time of William of St. Amour, was a persecution performed by hypocrites and predicated upon the conjunction of violence and fraud. In Szittya’s and Emmerson and Herzman’s interpretations, St. Amour casts the friars as the agents of the third persecution, insofar as they are both simulators of pastoral care (fraudulent ecclesiastics) and perpetrators of violence. 15. By “houses” St. Amour did not mean just lodgings but also the place, or house, of the soul, and the idea is almost literally taken up by Jean de Meun, who has Faus Semblant describe himself as an intruder in all types of settings: religious and secular, and even as a thief of hearts. 16. This passage serves Guy Geltner to argue that, through Faus Semblant, Jean de Meun represents the “nature of all liars, not of all friars” (Geltner, “Faux-Semblants,” 365). Although I do acknowledge the protean nature of Faus Semblant, his self-proclaimed talent of disguise able to transcend age, gender, social estate, and language altogether, the fact remains that in the text of the Rose he only embodies, that is, acts as, a false friar. We never see him act like a prince or a page, for instance, and in the same passage, his obsession with embodying religious figures is rendered transparent through the enumeration of several types of religious: moines, prelaz, chanoines, clers, prestres, cordeliers, jacobins. All these impersonations point in fact to Faus Semblant as the devil able to take on any garb, but truly obsessed with discrediting God’s servants and the holy. The methodological disjunction I have proposed at the beginning of the essay, a disjunction between the interpretive levels of allegory and history, helps clarify this hermeneutic node woven into the character: allegorically, Faus Semblant symbolizes evil (or the devil), whereas historically he is meant to represent the mendicant friars. As I have mentioned, oftentimes these two levels overlap. 17. “Faus Semblant identifies himself and his cronies with avarice, hypocrisy, cruelty, pride, gluttony—all of the seven deadly sins, in fact, except lust” (Stakel, False Roses, 48). 18. Nickname based on a pun (soie, “silk”) and standing for the Dominican friars reputed for their love of silk garments. 19. “The second sign is that apostles do not deceive the hearts of simple men; [gloss: the false] extol their ways by ornate words, with which they deceive the hearts of simple men” (De periculis, 113). Or: “The fourteenth sign is that true apostles, unlike false ones, do not strive for eloquence or an ornate arrangement of words” (De periculis, 121). The idea obsessively recurs in a subsequent text: “Credit enim vulgus quandoque illum Praedicatorem sanctiorem esse, qui linguam habet in praedicando eruditam, et eloquentiam elegantem. . . . Verba enim Sanctorum Praedicatorum, non ab ingegno, vel arte procedunt; sed a spiritus sancti gratia” (Pericula imminentia Ecclesiae generali, 393; “Common people think that those Preachers are holy who have an erudite tongue in preaching and an elegant eloquence. . . . But the words of the Holy Preachers do not spring from talent or skills, but from sacred inspiration” [translation mine]).

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20. See the chapter “De peccato linguae” from the Summa Vitiorum, where secreta revelare is one of the twenty-four sins Peraldus assigns to abusive speech. 21. Peraldus, Summa Vitiorum, 582. 22. Giorgio Bottari, ed., Il Pungilingua (Milan, 1837), 199, translation mine. Domenico Cavalca is an Italian translator of Peraldus during the first half of the fourteenth century. Cavalca actually develops some of the ideas expressed by Peraldus in “De peccato linguae” and ends up writing an autonomous book that he calls Il Pungilingua (The Wounding Tongue). For more about this author, see “Cavalca, Domenico,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1979), 22:577–586. A synopsis of the life and works of Domenico Cavalca has more recently been offered by Edoardo Barbieri, “Domenico Cavalca volgarizzatore degli Actus Apostolorum,” La Bibbia in Italiano tra Medioevo e Rinascimento: Atti del Convegno Internazionale, Firenze, Certosa del Galluzzo, November 8–9, 1996, ed. Lino Leonardi (Florence, 1998), 291–328. A session focusing on the transmitters of William Peraldus, including Domenico Cavalca, was offered at the Annual Conference of the Medieval Academy of America, Chicago, March 26–28, 2009. 23. Patterson, “‘For the Wyves Love of Bathe,’” 672. 24. Referring to the same contradictory statements made by Faus Semblant, Guy Geltner makes an adequate analogy with the “Cretan liar’s dilemma, a moving field of deceit” (Geltner, “Faux-Semblants,” 364, 376), whereas for Sarah Kay, Jean de Meun’s character presents the readers with “the conundrum of the hypocrite who unmasks himself, and so solicits belief, and yet remains a hypocrite, and so places himself beyond it” (Kay, Romance of the Rose, 29). 25. Emmerson and Herzman, “The Apocalyptic Age of Hypocrisy,” 627. 26. Charles Presberg, Adventures in Paradox (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 2. 27. Presberg, Adventures, 2. 28. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poetry, ed. G. Doidge Willcok and A. Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936). Puttenham’s term is also quoted by Richard A. Lanham in A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

Torello and the Saladin (X, 9): Notes on Panfilo, Day X, and the Ending Tale of the Decameron VALERIO C. FERME

The title of this essay invites criticism. Readers of the Decameron know that the story of Messer Torello and the Saladin (X, 9) is not the final tale per se in Boccaccio’s collection. That distinction rests with the more famous and controversial story of Gualtieri and Griselda narrated by Dioneo. Yet, I wish to posit that, at least within the context of the frame characters’ vision, it is Torello’s story that more aptly closes the narration, while Griselda’s is, once more, Dioneo’s (and Boccaccio’s) attempt to subvert the direction of the day and, as Millicent Marcus and others have already argued,1 to deny a perfected narrative pattern to the Decameron as a whole. Boccaccio might argue against my choice, but from the perspective of the fictional frame characters, Panfilo’s story is more in tune with the brigata’s desire to complete its narrative excursus. Indeed, the brigata reacts to the end of this story with perceived harmony (“Finita la lunga novella del re, molto a tutti nel sembiante piaciuta”), whereas the end of Dioneo’s elicits contradictory reactions, especially from the women (“e assai le donne, chi d’una parte e chi d’altra tirando, chi biasimando una cosa, chi un’altra intorno ad essa lodandone, n’avevan favellato”).2 As I hope to make clear, the response to the two narratives highlights the juxtaposition and possible opposition between the narrators of the last two stories: Panfilo, the king of Day X and the bearer of the “armonico equilibrio” that is supposed to restore the brigata to more virtuous behaviors;3 and Dioneo, the narrator whose privilege it is, after the first day, to have the last word and digress off topic. It also shows that the story of Torello emerges as the most faithful representation of the day’s topic in tune with the king’s desire that the stories of the day achieve for the characters a “laudevole fama” and serves as a much better send-off of the brigata in its return to Florence.4

Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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Before discussing Day X, 9, I wish to focus on the frame story and the narrative dynamics that emerge from comparing intertextually the position of the narrators in certain days and situations. Franco Fido has pointed out that, if we consider the interrupted story of Filippo Balducci that Boccaccio narrates in the prologue to Day IV, the Decameron is a collection of 101 stories.5 If we allow for Fido’s perspective, the story of Torello becomes the one-hundredth story in the book, and Dioneo’s Griselda tale the 101st. In this context, Panfilo, the king of Day X, has the privilege of narrating both the first story in absolute (Cepperello) and the “quasi” one-hundredth, creating an interesting binary “inversion that frames the hundred stories, binding Cepperello to Griselda and Torello.”6 Just as interesting is comparing Torello to Cepperello (notwithstanding the rhyming assonance between the characters’ names) to reveal what their description says about Panfilo’s trajectory as a narrator. A similar symmetry, and one that to my knowledge has not been evidenced by others, occurs if we notice that the Saladin, who is Torello’s counterpart in Day X, 9, also appears as a character in Day I, 3, the third story of the Decameron. If we discount the author’s Balducci story in the prologue to Day IV and follow the traditional narrative count, the Saladin appears as a character in the third and ninety-ninth stories of the Decameron. Dividing the latter by the former, we obtain the number thirty-three, both the age attributed to Jesus in the New Testament and the fundamental, root number of Dante’s Divine Comedy (three canticas of thirty-three cantos each, plus an introductory one; the average number of syllables in each poetic, hendecasyllabic tercet). Just as intriguing is the presence in both Saladin stories of “rings” as tropes in the narration: in Day I, under the guise of Melchisedech’s story of the three rings (again, the number three!); in Day X, in the form of exchanged rings given, first, by Alalieta to her husband Torello, and then by the Saladin himself to Torello (the triad is completed when Torello returns Alalieta’s ring to aid in his recognition during the new wedding banquet).7 This play on numbers would seem to highlight the “perfection” of the story (or its contents), a topic I will return to later in my analysis. More significant at this point is a brief analysis of Cepperello’s story in light of what it tells us about Panfilo’s narrative intentions, here and in the story of Messer Torello. In the first story of Day I, Panfilo alerts his companions and the readers that the ending of Cepperello’s story means to glorify God, who has used an unlikely go-between to grant believers their wishes: “E se così è, grandissima si può la benignità di Dio cognoscere verso noi, la quale, non

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al nostro errore, ma alla purità della fede riguardando, così faccendo noi nostro mezzano un suo nemico, amico credendolo, ci esaudisce, come se ad uno veramente santo, per mezzano della sua grazia, ricorressimo” (38, italics mine). Millicent Marcus has shown that Panfilo himself seems to be duped in ascribing Cepperello’s miraculous beatification to God’s benevolence, rather than human credulity. Additionally, she has astutely pointed out that Panfilo’s story highlights Boccaccio’s playful use of his narrator to underscore the blasphemous nature of such an approach: “By taking an example of what appears to be God’s malice toward man, and by twisting that into greater proof of his benevolence, Boccaccio suggests the folly of any human attempt to understand and render divine meaning in exempla.”8 Yet, Panfilo’s remarks allow us to glimpse an integral part of his understanding of the world. The whole story seems to posit a perverse reading (and undermining by Cepperello) of the interplay between the three theological virtues. In the tree of virtues in Beinecke MS 416,9 one notices that the theological virtues (Faith, Hope, and Charity) subsume within themselves other virtuous behaviors that both result from and help achieve them. Among Faith’s subcategories are Benevolence and Purity (to which Panfilo refers in his conclusion), as well as Chastity, Virginity, Continence, Simplicity, and Moral Cleanness, which, conveniently, Cepperello checks off in his spurious confession to the gullible priest. Similarly, Hope subsumes Confession, Penitence, and Contrition (all three falsely taken on by Cepperello in his final moments), as well as Patience, Joy, Discipline, and Contemplation (which can be attributed to the priest’s demeanor toward Cepperello and his confession). While it is more difficult to highlight Charity in the story, its presence and that of its resulting virtues (Concord, Pleasantness, Indulgence, Peace, Forgiveness, Piety, Clemency, Compassion, and Mercy) all implicitly result both from Cepperello’s “confession” (he is forgiven, and God’s mercy is invoked in the priest’s absolution but also in his speech to the crowds following his death) and by the extended “charity” that God shows toward human beings in gracing them and forgiving their sins. Read within this frame, the story of Cepperello becomes a strange cataloging of the theological virtues, whereby Panfilo’s concluding statement wishes to establish the primacy of true Faith (by underscoring the power of the faithful’s “purity” of heart and of God’s “benevolence” toward those who embrace faith) over the other two theological virtues, Hope and Charity, which have been abused and subverted in the false confession of sins by Cepperello, and in their absolution by the gullible priest. But because, as Marcus notices, Boccaccio undermines Panfilo’s

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point of view, the author himself might be pointing out the fallibility of his own character’s understanding of the virtues, which, in many medieval discussions on virtue, are presented with Charity as the foremost and Faith and Hope in ancillary roles.10 A second detail underscored by Panfilo’s conclusion is the dichotomy highlighted by the chiastic juxtaposition of “facendo noi nostro mezzano un suo nemico, amico credendolo.” I would like to point out that this opposition, and the tilting of its balance toward amity, is central to many stories of Day X. More importantly, Panfilo’s words summarize precisely what happens in Day X, 9, where Saladin—an “enemy” of the true faith— becomes a go-between in Torello’s reunion with his wife as a way to honor their new bond of friendship. But in X, 9, the “belief” in the friendship is based on the concrete interactions between the two characters, whereas in the Cepperello story it is based on a mistaken belief held by the priest and worshipers. We might say that Panfilo has transposed a discussion of the theological motivations behind God’s action in Day I, 1, to a more “concrete” human plane in Day X, 9, where human beings incarnate in a visible and comprehensible way the intrinsic value of friendship and faith in each other. One last remark highlights Panfilo’s constancy as a character. The story of Cepperello, as Marcus notices, falls within the category of medieval exempla, real or fictional stories in the vernacular used by medieval friars and preachers to teach moral lessons about life.11 When it is Panfilo’s turn to suggest the topic for the last day of the narration, one is not surprised to see that, uniquely among the frame characters, he chooses a topic that is predicated precisely on the narration of virtuous exempla. Indeed, by asking his fellow frame characters to narrate stories that display the enactment of “liberalità e magnanimità,” Panfilo sets the day up for the type of narration that centers on the display of positive exemplary behavior.12 And, as Franco Fido has noticed, this creates a fairly repetitious and formulaic narration of stories that “spingono fino al limite estremo la stilizzazione di comportamenti umani,”13 which for others seem to undermine their very status as exempla.14 That Panfilo would be the frame character most concerned with the discussion of exemplary liberality and magnanimity invites scrutiny. Some critics have argued that Panfilo embodies all virtues and his choice of topic for the last day pushes the other characters to narrate stories that “describe generosity and virtue in its highest form . . . [and] are arranged in an increasing degree of selflessness.”15 This interpretation works if the readers buy into the idea that Panfilo truly does embody the summation of all virtues and that the frame characters’ own words

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are accurate in defining the “exemplary” virtue of their stories. Yet, an analysis of Panfilo’s character and the stories he narrates debunks this idea.16 Panfilo is one of the few frame characters whose name is easily translatable from the Greek, as παν translates to “all” or “everything,” while ϕιλος means “friend” and possibly “lover.” So, as the “friend/lover of all,” his name seems to suggest that Panfilo could exemplify the greater “love” implicit in the virtue of Charity. However, one must question the validity of this assertion since, besides the story of Cepperello, only two stories narrated by Panfilo deal specifically with exemplary behavior.17 These are the stories of Andreuola (IV, 6) and, obviously, Torello. Andreuola’s story is one of several examples in the Decameron of a woman who stands up against traditional patriarchal powers. When she and her new (secretly married) husband, Gabriotto, have matching dreams that predict doom, only Andreuola believes in their omen. Gabriotto then dies, and Andreuola is accused of the murder and taken to the podestà, who, having been told by the doctors that Gabriotto died of internal bleeding, decides to use his position to seduce her in exchange for her freedom. Andreuola resists and, eventually, is rescued by her father, who lets her join the nunnery rather than remarry. Significantly, Panfilo begins the tale with a “moralizing” introduction in which he warns against interpreting dreams too literally, but also against dismissing them completely as nonsense. He then concludes: “Per che giudico che nel virtuosamente vivere e operare di niuno contrario sogno a ciò si dee temere, né per quello lasciare i buoni proponimenti; nelle cose perverse e malvagie, quantunque i sogni a quelle paiano favorevoli e con seconde dimostrazioni chi gli vede confortino, niuno se ne vuol credere; e così nel contrario a tutti dar piena fede” (320). Panfilo’s “moral stance” invites criticism beyond the scope of this essay.18 Here, suffice it to say that Panfilo uses an exemplum to generalize about virtue and vice in relation to dreams. The story itself, instead, can be read as the first story—and only one thus far narrated by Panfilo—that highlights the virtuous qualities of one of his characters (while still underscoring the moral turpitude of the podestà). It will take Panfilo until the last day to return to the narration of virtuous behaviors. At the end of Day IX, Emilia crowns Panfilo king of Day X with the heavy burden (“gran carico”) of “sì come è l’avere il mio difetto e degli altri che il luogo hanno tenuto che tu tieni, essendo tu l’ultimo, ad emendare” (667). Panfilo answers that her virtue and the virtue of the other members of the brigata “farà sì che io, come gli altri sono stati, sarò da lodare” (667). He proceeds, first, to praise Emilia for having given the

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brigata an open topic that allowed its members to rest (from the strictures of a specific one), then, to set the theme of his day as “di ragionare sopra questo . . . di chi liberalmente ovvero magnificamente alcuna cosa operasse intorno a’ fatti d’amore o d’altra cosa” (668). Not content with having set a theme for the narration, Panfilo further expounds on the reasons for his choice: “Queste cose e dicendo e udendo, senza alcun dubbio gli animi vostri ben disposti a valorosamente adoperare accenderà; ché la vita nostra, che altro che brieve esser non può nel mortal corpo, si perpetuerà nella laudevole fama; il che ciascuno che al ventre solamente, a guisa che le bestie fanno, non serve, dee, non solamente desiderare, ma con ogni studio cercare e operare” (668). Panfilo’s words deserve analysis because they affect, at least in the character’s intentions, how one reads the day’s stories. Handed the burden to “repair” the defects of the previous narrators, Panfilo chooses as his theme “of those who liberally or magnificently acted” with regard to “love” or “other things.” His hope is to spur the hearts of the other members of the brigata to operate valiantly in life, since (and here he does include himself: “vita nostra”) we should enrich our lives with more than the desire to “fill our bellies like beasts do.” The switch from “animi vostri” to “vita nostra” is curious in light of Panfilo’s previous (misguided) moralizing stance on virtue in Days I and IV. In differentiating between the other characters’ animi and “our lives,” he suggests that he is already enlightened about the deeper meanings of one’s journey through life, but that he needs to teach the rest of the frame characters what this virtuous enlightenment is all about. Seen in this light, Panfilo’s name conveys a subtle irony on Boccaccio’s part. The “friend” (or lover) of all, who bungled his attempt to make sense of God’s choices in Day I and then again confused morality and dreams in Day IV, bases his friendship on a sense that he can, and should, teach the other members of the brigata how to act virtuously and lovingly in their lives. This hypothesis is further validated by Panfilo’s statement, already cited, that Emilia’s virtue and the virtue of the other members of the brigata “farà sì che io, come gli altri sono stati, sarò da lodare.” There too Panfilo sets himself apart from the other frame characters, pointing out that it will be the virtue displayed by the other characters as his underlings that will make his reign worthy of praise. That this might be the case is confirmed by a closer analysis of the narration in Day X. The first narrator of the day, Neifile, prepares the readers for the topic of the day. In her opening lines, as she thanks Panfilo, she claims “che il nostro re me a tanta cosa, come è raccontar della magnificenza m’abbia preposta, la quale, come il sole è di tutto il cielo bellezza e ornamento,

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è chiarezza e lume di ciascuna altra virtù” (670). In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle discussed munificence (or “magnificence”) as the virtue of those who wish to pursue noble ends despite the costs.19 Dante further elaborated these ideas in the Convivio20 (through an assimilation of Thomas Aquinas’s reading) by suggesting that “nobility” pertains to those essences that reach perfection in soul and body. This perfection is achieved, according to Dante, by following the “moral virtues,” among which liberality (“la quale è moderatrice del nostro dare e del nostro ricevere le cose temporali”) and munificence (“la quale è moderatrice de le grandi spese”) are those that pertain to kings and rulers.21 Neifile’s introduction furthers the scope of munificence by claiming that it gives luster and improves all other virtues, whereas in Dante it is just one of the eleven moral virtues. One should notice that the virtues being discussed here are “moral” and pertain to the temporal/human domain, not to the theological sphere, thus highlighting the fact that, contrary to some interpretations, Panfilo has shifted his exemplarity to the realm of humanity from his original Day I focus on theological virtues. If the goal of the day is to discuss liberality and munificence, most stories narrated by the frame characters fail to demonstrate these virtues convincingly.22 Hollander and Cahill have already discussed at length the failures of many of the day’s stories to adhere to Panfilo’s topic, since munificence and liberality are gratuitous acts that are self-initiated and require no prompt or subsequent recognition.23 Neifile sets the wheels in motion by praising the generosity of Anfonso, king of Spain, even though her narrative highlights his deviousness. The king never rewards Ruggieri’s military deeds, bestowing instead lands and castles on others whom Ruggieri deems inferior in valor to himself. When Ruggieri, fed up, decides to return to Florence, the king shows his true nature. First he gifts him with “una delle miglior mule . . . e la più bella” (671) for his trip back home (as a knight, the gift of a mule instead of a horse, especially after witnessing the stubbornness of mules in IX, 9, might have seemed a slap in the face; and this mule also shows stubbornness by refusing to urinate when the other animals do, choosing instead to do so in the river, thus prompting the remark that reveals Ruggieri’s feelings toward the king). Secondly, he sets up one of his “famigliari” to travel incognito with the Florentine knight, so as to gather “ogni cosa che egli [Ruggieri] dicesse di lui [Anfonso]” (671). That this information then leads the king to blame Fortune for Ruggieri’s lack of rewards, rather than his own incompetent awarding of lands and castles to others, certainly does not appear to underscore his “liberality.” The king only shows himself munificent toward Ruggieri after having tricked him into

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explaining the true reasons for his departure and having been publicly exposed for his niggardliness. The four stories that follow are peculiar because each successive narrator makes a claim for the increasingly munificent behavior of its characters, from the Abbot of Cluny to Nathan, to Gentile de Carisendi, and finally to Messer Ansaldo. Hollander and Cahill have already debunked the idea that the Abbot acts out of intrinsic generosity, since his munificence is caused by Ghino di Tacco’s own and by the lesson in humility he imparts to the angry and gluttonous Abbot.24 While Nathan’s story, on the surface, truly is about his munificence—to the point that he is willing to die to show how generous he is—his behavior leading up to the forfeiting of his life is questionable. First, when prompted by Mitridanes to show him Nathan’s palace, he does so without revealing his identity. Then, more curiously and without having been prompted by his guest, he volunteers that “come che ogni altro uomo molto di lui si lodi, io me ne posso poco lodare io” (681). Why would he offer such a negative depiction of himself, especially since, as the narrator says, “queste parole porsero alcuna speranza a Mitridanes . . . con più consiglio e con più salvezza dare effetto al suo perverso intendimento” (681–682)? Why would he goad the stranger into enacting his perverse plan (of which Nathan knows nothing yet) if not to satisfy an egocentric “desire for fame and recognition as a superlative generous figure” since he “does not allow Mithridanes to go home without first making sure that his ‘convert’ believes him to be the ‘richest and most generous man who ever lived’”?25 Nathan thus seems guilty not only of seeking recognition through his generosity (“disideroso che fosse per opera conosciuto” [679]) but also of the pride that comes from claiming for himself the spot of “most generous man on earth.” Given that munificence and liberality are supposed to be gratuitous and rewarding in themselves, Nathan’s behavior suggests that his motives are not as pure as Filostrato suggests. Day X, 4, is even less convincing, and is risible, as an example of munificence. Gentile de Carisendi comes to his munificent deed only as a result of less than honorable acts. First, he exhibits a necrophilic desire for Madonna Catalina: he rides to her sarcophagus, enters it, and kisses the lady he thinks is dead; then, to top it off, he starts fondling her breasts because, as Lauretta notices, “noi veggiamo l’appetito degli uomini a niun termine star contento, ma sempre più avanti desiderare. . . . Vinto adunque da questo appetito, le mise la mano in seno” (687). Is this the ultimate display of liberality? The only liberal action on display here is the one accorded to Gentile’s hand, as it explores the woman’s

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chest.26 Subsequently, when Gentile realizes the woman is alive (curiously, his lustful behavior stops once he finds out she is alive, suggesting the macabre possibility that, had she been dead, he might have continued his exploration of her body), he sets up certain rules and conditions for returning her to the husband: he hides her in his house, lets her nurse her baby at his home, and, “con lei ordinato il modo che dovesse tenere,” prevents her from answering any queries as to her identity at the party where he will “unveil” her and his generosity (“La donna . . . per servare l’ordine posto, tacque” [691]). One can hardly claim that Gentile’s actions are the stuff of liberality. What is clear, instead, is that his behavior means to glorify his munificence, and must result in the public acknowledgment of his liberal deed. Gentile’s egocentric trip and poorly conceived lust for Madonna Catalina thus make Lauretta’s concluding remarks (and the approbation of the brigata) even more puzzling. When she claims that Gentile far outstrips the previous examples of munificence because he gives back “quello che egli soleva con tutto il pensier disiderare e cercar di rubare” (692), Lauretta suggests that she (and the rest of the frame characters) truly do not understand what liberality and munificence entail. Surprisingly, then, the hypothesis that Panfilo’s introductory remarks to the topic suggest his need to “teach” the rest of the brigata a lesson he has already learned is lent some credence. Indeed, thus far in the day, none of the narrators has presented a story that can truly be said to deal with disinterested munificence and liberality. This pattern continues into the day. While Emilia’s story shows a triple deed of one-upmanship in liberality—Madonna Dianora’s husband, Gilberto, wants his wife to fulfill the contractual obligation to Messer Ansaldo for having produced, with the help of a necromancer, a garden in winter, the condition she had set to break her marriage vows; Messer Ansaldo, touched by the husband’s generosity, relinquishes his claim on the woman; and finally, the necromancer, impressed by both men’s liberality, refuses his monetary reward—each man’s generous deed is marred by faulty premises or behavior. Gilberto’s decision that his wife should fulfill her contractual obligation to Ansaldo in “body if not in spirit,” is not based on his liberality: what “moves” him is the fear of the necromancer, “al quale forse messer Ansaldo, se tu il beffassi, far ci farebbe dolente” (695). Ansaldo’s munificence only comes in response to the husband’s act, and itself is set up by his initial, unlawful desires toward a married woman. Finally, the necromancer may be indeed generous, but he practices an art that, in medieval times, had not only been outlawed but, as Gilberto’s reasoning shows, was understood to carry dangerous consequences for those who resisted its practitioners.27

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At the end of the narration, the women devote many “ragionamenti” to discuss who among the three men showed “maggior liberalità” (697), underscoring, once more, their superficial understanding of what constitutes liberality. The tales of King Carlo (X, 6) and King Pietro (X, 7) are only slightly better. Hollander and Cahill have shown that Carlo’s munificence is undercut by the “sexual tone of the story”; and it only occurs in response to Guy of Monfort’s counsel that his sexual escapades might escalate the political instability of the kingdom of Naples, as well as show him to be no better than the man he defeated to conquer the kingdom, Manfred of Swabia.28 Similarly, King Pietro might appear more noble-hearted, but only because Lisa belongs to a class that is far below his own: Pietro gives over his lust for the lovely and love-struck Lisa, daughter of an apothecary, after experiencing the following anagnorisis: “Solo il re intendeva il coperto parlare [see Inferno 4.51] della giovane e da più ogn’ora la reputava, e più volte seco stesso maladisse la fortuna che di tale uomo [a mere apothecary] l’aveva fatta figliuola” (10.7.35). Had Bernardo Puccini been not rich but of minor nobility, would Lisa have been spared the king’s embrace?29

Clearly, then, neither king is fully virtuous, as both wish to take advantage of their power as overlords but must show restraint in light of social and political codes imposed upon them. The next narrator, Filomena, seems to understand the double-edged liberality exhibited by the two kings. Indeed, as she introduces her own story (X, 8), she claims that we expect the restrained munificence of kings (“loro altressì spezialissimamente richiedersi l’esser magnifico” [711]), given their status as models for the many: their munificence comes with the territory they cover. Much more praiseworthy is the munificence of those who are our equal (“de’ nostri pari” [711]). She then proposes to tell the story of two friends (“due cittadini amici”), Tito Quinzio Fulvio and Gisippo, who demonstrate “laudevole opera e magnifica” (711). The significant detail here is that for the first time in Day X, the liberality of the characters is founded on the premise of friendship, a relationship that is absent thus far in the day. Unfortunately, we once more are exposed to a failure of understanding in the narrator’s logic, as the story points out that the relationship between Tito and Gisippo is only nominally based on this characteristic. Initially, Tito decides he must have Gisippo’s promised bride, Sofronia; so, rather than disinterestedly give up his passion (which would have been a true act of liberality), he reveals his desires to Gisippo, who consents to relinquishing his claim on the woman and even helps Tito achieve his goal of sleeping with Sofronia. Gisippo’s actions do qualify

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as a liberal act, even though it is not his prerogative to choose his wife’s future husband (the parents, whose reaction both Gisippo and Tito justly fear, “own” that prerogative). Yet, when it comes time for Tito to explain to the woman’s relatives why he is entitled to marry her, he reveals his true colors. Instead of justifying his pursuit of Sofronia on the basis of love, he bases it on two spurious claims. Firstly, he points out that Gisippo behaved as a friend would in such a situation (“egli ha fatto quello che amico dee fare” [720]), conveniently forgetting that, by that token, he himself should have renounced his passion knowing what legal and personal problems it would cause his own friend. Secondly, and more disturbingly, he lays claim to Sofronia’s hand by stating that a comparison between the two men based on citizenship (Roman versus Athenian), nobility, and riches proves that he is a far superior match for Sofronia, thus putting into question where the true balance of their friendship lies. He then takes Gisippo’s rather than Sofronia’s hand and walks out on the relatives (providing a hint of the homoerotic relationships of the Greek world, but probably confusing even more the poor Gisippo, who is easily maneuvered by his controlling ways). To add insult to injury, Tito quickly departs with Sofronia for Rome, leaving Gisippo to endure disdain and eventual exile at the hands of the Athenian people. It is this general imbalance in the characters’ status, too, that eventually allows Tito to be heard by Varrone when he wishes to save Gisippo from his suicidal confession of murder and leads to the subsequent true murderer’s confession, a general self-accusation that results in Octavian’s pardon and the happy ending of the story. Curiously, Filomena concludes with a lengthy discussion of how friendship (focused on Tito’s retroactive liberality) is the relationship that more than any others promotes what one would consider virtuous behavior: “Santissima cosa adunque è l’amistà, e non solamente di singular reverenzia degna, ma d’essere con perpetua laude commendata, sì come discretissma madre di magnificenzia e d’onestà, sorella di gratitudine e carità, e d’odio e d’avarizia nimica, sempre, senza priego aspettar, pronta a quello in altrui virtuosamente operare che in sé vorrebbe che fosse operato” (726–727, italics mine). Thus far in Day X, the narration reveals a failure on the part of the frame characters to adhere to the topic set by Panfilo. Hollander and Cahill suggest that the narrators’ failure to stick to the topic assigned reveals that, while the characters of the brigata emphasize from early in the Decameron a desire for order, the stories “they tell often depict chaos and irrationality, mirroring their own fears and their own temptations.”30 More simply, I believe that the members of the brigata, required to show

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examples of virtuous behavior after a fortnight away from civilization and from the plague that has destroyed their world, are either incapable of such a feat, especially since they have been telling stories based on other principles, or subversively unwilling to comply fully with Panfilo’s diktat. It is thus left to him, as king, to reestablish his authority and follow more closely the topic of the day. We have seen before that kings and queens of the brigata, if dissatisfied with the stories proffered by the other narrators, intervene either directly with comments or indirectly through their tales to reassert their guidance and authority over the day’s narration.31 Panfilo is no exception. In recounting the story of Torello and the Saladin, he seems to borrow elements from the previous stories to underscore their errors and highlight how they strayed from the topic of the day.32 From Filomena’s awkward amity tale in X, 9 (which he mentions explicitly), to the strange “liberality” displayed by kings and abbots (X, 1; X, 2; X, 6; and X, 7), from the use of magic in X, 5, to the final banquet that helps reveal a character’s identity and reunite a married couple in X, 4, Panfilo interweaves details from the other stories in his own, as if to improve on their qualities and make them fit more precisely within the topic he has chosen. Not surprisingly, even though it praises Filomena, Panfilo’s introduction to his own story reveals his desire to “correct” his fellow narrators and teach “gli animi vostri a valorosamente adoperare” (668): Vaghe donne, senza alcun fallo Filomena in ciò che dell’amistà dice racconta ´l vero, e con ragione nel fine delle sue parole si dolfe lei oggi così poco da’ mortali esser gradita. E se noi qui per dover correggere i difetti mondani, o pur per riprendergli, fossimo, io seguiterei con diffuso sermone le sue parole; ma per ciò che ad altro è il nostro fine, a me è caduto nell’animo di dimostrarvi forse con una istoria assai lunga, ma piacevol per tutto, una delle magnificenzie del Saladino, acciò che per le cose che nella mia novella udirete, se pienamente l’amicizia d’alcuno non si può per li nostri vizi acquistare, almeno diletto prendiamo del servire, sperando che, quando che sia, di ciò merito ci debba seguire. (728)

Panfilo’s words underscore a distancing on his part from the concerns of the previous story (and possibly of the other narrators as a whole). He chooses not to add a preachy sermon to Filomena’s lengthy diatribe, because he feels that his goal should not be correcting “i difetti mondani,” which are beneath him. Instead, he will tell an equally lengthy story that might show how serving others can result in an unforeseen merito (or reward) based on one’s selflessness, a much loftier ambition that is more closely related to the topic of the day. The tale of Torello and the Saladin is peculiar because it provides examples of reciprocal magnanimity in characters who should have been

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sworn enemies. Panfilo chooses to narrate about the magnanimity of a crusading knight and the chief Muslim ruler, at a time when the two faiths engaged in one of their greatest conflicts. This is significant since, with possibly the exception of the second story, none of the examples of liberality in the day occur between characters who are divided by such a wide geographical and cultural chasm. From the beginning, it is clear that the only reason Torello and the Saladin meet is that the latter is on a secret reconnoitering mission to spy on the “apparecchiamenti de’ signori cristiani a quel passaggio,” the Crusade (728). Thus, a relationship of liberality, respect, and friendship develops between them in spite of the negative historical premises upon which the relationship between Christians and Muslims is based. In itself, this suggests Panfilo’s desire to outdo his companions in the scope and reach of his story. Not content, Panfilo ensures that Torello and Saladin are noticed not for one, but for two acts of liberality each. Torello first invites the Saladin to spend one night at his hunting lodge outside Pavia, then tricks him and his companions into spending a second one at his home inside the city walls. Saladin, on his part, first frees Torello and makes him almost co-ruler of his lands and then provides the necromancer that will deliver Torello back to his wife, just before she is to remarry following the promise they made to each other upon his departure for the Crusades. By making the two men exemplary of the virtue of munificence, even with the backdrop of the conflict between the Muslim rulers and their European rivals, Panfilo forces his audience to acknowledge the remarkable virtue of both men. In addition, he extends this virtuous behavior to Torello’s wife, Adalieta, who equals her husband in liberality (her generosity is underscored by the narrator’s comment that when Adalieta is informed of her husband’s plans, she takes care of them “non con feminile animo, ma con reale” [731]). Indeed, she entertains her hosts graciously and gifts them the finest garments, including underwear (“panni lini”), explaining that “considerando che voi siete alle vostre donne lontani . . . e che i mercatanti sono netti e dilicati uomini, ancor che elle vaglian poco, vi potranno esser care” (733). The delicacy of having provided for their most intimate needs so graciously strikes the Saladin, to the point that, when Torello asks to be returned to her, Saladin can only concur: “Messer Torello, se voi affettuosamente amate la donna vostra . . . per ciò che di quante donne mi parve veder mai, ella è colei li cui costumi, le cui maniere e il cui abito, lasciamo star la bellezza che è fior caduco, più mi paion da commendare e da aver care” (739).33 As if these examples of magnanimity were not sufficient, Boccaccio strikingly has Panfilo add a remarkable detail to the narration, one that,

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in my view, underscores the exceeding liberality of the protagonist. When Torello reaches San Piero in Ciel d’oro on his magic bed and is recognized by the Abbot as his living nephew, he asks that neither the abbot nor the other monks reveal his return “infino a tanto che egli non avesse una sua bisogna fornita” (742–743). The “bisogna” turns out to hinge upon a strange request: “Avanti che di mia tornata si sappia, io intendo di veder che contenenza sia quella di mia mogliere in queste nozze” (743). Why would Torello wish to preserve his anonymity until he has seen his wife’s behavior as she prepares to marry anew? The answer comes implicitly at the banquet, where Torello sits facing his wife, “la quale [Adalieta] egli con grandissimo piacer riguardava, e nel viso gli pareva turbata di queste nozze” (743, italics mine). Only when Torello has satisfied his need to know that his wife is not enjoying the wedding and the idea of remarrying, he sets in motion the events that lead to his being recognized by and reunited with Adalieta. It comes naturally to ask why he waits to witness her unhappiness. Might it be that Torello, the ever-generous man, wants to ascertain whether his wife is truly happy to remarry, before making his claim? Could it be that, had she been happy, he would have let events run their course and respected his wife’s choice, thus countering medieval marriage laws in the name of true magnanimity? The addition of this detail forces the reader and the other characters of the brigata to pause and consider this possibility, especially since this story follows Filomena’s tale of Titus and Gisippus. The juxtaposition makes even more remarkable the disparity in how the two characters behave toward others, as Titus abuses his friendship precisely by interposing himself between Gisippus and his betrothed, Sofronia, rather than allowing them to fulfill their destiny. (One should also notice that the language Filomena uses to describe Titus’s desire for Sofronia echoes Torello’s observance of his wife, with the exception of the immoderate—“smisuratamente”—quality of Tito’s gaze: “Tito . . . la cominciò attentissimamente a riguardare, e ogni parte di lei smisuratamente piacendogli” [712]).34 Read through the framework of this interpretation, Panfilo’s story becomes one of the pinnacles of earthly liberality expressed by characters in the Decameron. Indeed, it fulfills the narrator’s desire to teach his companions about virtuous behavior, since none of them has presented a narrative that had fully responded to the day’s topic. The story, of course, has a happy ending, when Adalieta overthrows the wedding table to embrace her husband (an interesting counter to Cimone who, in V, 1, destroys the wedding tables to steal Iphigenia from her betrothed, a detail that ties Cimone’s story not only to X, 9, but, as we have just seen,

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to X, 8). This prompts Panfilo to notice that in the end both Torello and “la sua cara donna” received “il guiderdone delle lor liete e preste cortesie” (745), a further confirmation that for Panfilo it is both the male and female characters that are exemplary within the context of the day’s topic. Panfilo’s depiction of Adalieta and Torello’s successful relationship also might help clarify why Dioneo, who, as the readers of the Decameron know, has the prerogative of narrating the last tale of the day and does not follow its topic, chooses to tell the story of Gualtieri and Griselda. If we understand Dioneo’s narrative to be a direct response to and critique of Panfilo’s tale, rather than an attempt to present a summa of virtue for the whole book, or even for the day, then X, 10, like most tales narrated by Dioneo, qualifies as the kind of subversion to which he has accustomed us. Dioneo suggests as much when, addressing the praise heaped by the other characters onto Panfilo for his tale of love and liberality, he says, “Il buon uomo che aspettava la seguente notte di fare abbassare la coda ritta della fantasima, avrebbe dati men di due denari di tutte le lode che voi date a messer Torello” (745). While the other frame characters praise Panfilo’s story, Dioneo is not impressed, and suggests that their praise is worth less than “due denari”; the implication being that the story itself is not that good, or that the exemplum of Torello defies, in its exceptionality, any believability standard. Indeed, almost as if to counter the munificence and magnificence of Panfilo’s story, Dioneo claims that he will not discuss “cosa magnifica,” but “una matta bestialità” (746), undermining the perspective of those critics who see in Dioneo’s story the celebration of Griselda’s patience and virtue. As Dioneo makes clear again in his brief addendum at the end of the story, his focus is not on the “magnificent thing” that is Griselda’s virtue, but on the “crazy bestiality” that is Gualtieri’s marriage and his absurd testing of Griselda: “Chi avrebbe, altri che Griselda, potuto col viso, non solamente asciutto ma lieto, sofferire le rigide e mai più udite prove da Gualtieri fatte? Al quale non sarebbe forse stato male investito d’essersi abbattuto a una, che quando fuor di casa l’avesse in camicia cacciata, s’avesse sì ad un altro fatto scuotere il pellicione, che riuscita ne fosse una bella roba” (756, italics mine). By underscoring the exceptionality of Griselda (“altri che Griselda” implies that only she could behave this way) and what should have happened to Gualtieri (e.g., that a different woman, kicked out of the house, would have given herself to someone else in exchange for a new dress), Dioneo deconstructs the tale he has just narrated. He is not endorsing the marriage of Gualtieri and Griselda, but rather uses the exceptionality

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of Griselda to suggest that any other woman would not have thought twice of cuckolding such a husband. Indeed, by juxtaposing his tale to Panfilo’s, Dioneo seems also to mock the perfection of Torello and Adalieta’s union by emphasizing the real power disparity that existed between men and women in medieval marriages. While Torello gives his wife the freedom to remarry and remains hidden waiting to see the emotions on his wife’s face before revealing himself—thus truly giving her freedom of choice—Gualtieri controls and dictates the tenor of his relationship, repeatedly humiliating Griselda in front of their relatives and the court, and emphasizing not only the social but also the gender disparity that exists between him and his wife. Tongue-in-cheek, then, Dioneo seems to suggest that the only option left to women is to use their charms to get nice dresses! The question we should ask is why Dioneo would choose to describe a marriage that is at the antipodes to the one narrated by Panfilo. The answer is found in Dioneo’s first words in the Decameron. As the characters sit for the first day’s narration, Dioneo explains that he has not joined the group to delve into heavy thinking: “Io non so quello che de’ vostri pensieri voi v’intendete di fare; li miei lasciai dentro dalla porta della città allora che io con voi poco fa me n’uscii fuori; e perciò, o voi a sollazzare e a ridere e a cantare con meco insieme vi disponete . . . o voi mi licenziate che io per li miei pensieri mi ritorni e steami nella città tribolata” (21, italics mine). His goal, clearly stated, is to have fun. Moreover, as he reaffirms at the end of the first day, he requests not to be “costretto di dover dire novella secondo la proposta data, se io non vorrò, ma quale più di dire mi piacerà” (70). When Panfilo chooses to discuss magnanimity as the topic for Day X, it becomes clear that none of the stories will be entertaining in the style to which Dioneo has accustomed his audience. Dioneo has already been upset once by the choice of the other male character, Filostrato, to select a topic that deals with the darker subject matter of unhappy loves. Now, as the brigata prepares to return to Florence, he must sit and listen to his fellow narrators try to outdo each other in presenting examples of liberality and munificence. As Panfilo tells his story, which, as I have attempted to show, wishes to correct and improve on every tale narrated during the day, regaling the audience with an exemplum of perfected love and harmony, we can just sense Dioneo bristling on the side (especially since Panfilo has suggested that he needs to teach the other members of the brigata about virtue, and Dioneo is the least inclined to respect that kind of authority). Discussing virtue requires the kind of thoughtfulness Dioneo wanted to avoid.

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So what better revenge than, when it is his turn to narrate, to tell a story that upsets virtuosity and makes “matta bestialità” its centerpiece? If Torello and Adalieta’s “cathartic” union seems to be an attempt to repudiate the countless broken marriages and illicit affairs of the previous days, why not subvert Panfilo’s perfect world by telling a story that only on the surface is about the virtuous behavior of a woman, but in its depths hides all the controversial power imbalances embedded in medieval marriages and gender relations?35 Given Boccaccio’s initial address to women in the Proemio, how not to see Dioneo’s last story as a warning to women against embracing the idealized and harmonious world of Adalieta, Torello, and the Saladin, instead preparing them for more of the life of boredom, confinement, and obedience that the return to Florence portends? We might thus say that Panfilo’s last story more aptly concludes the formal unit of narratives in Day X, whereas Dioneo’s wishes to rebuke the rest of the brigata for having departed from its original goal of entertainment (and yet, read in the optic I have just presented, Dioneo’s story is more likely to provide the “utile consiglio” that Boccaccio wishes to impart his female readers [5]).36 In the end, this analysis is not about which tale offers a better interpretive key to the Decameron. They fulfill different functions and reveal the true artistry and psychological complexity that Boccaccio imparted to his collection and his characters, especially the narrators in the frame. Panfilo, coherently with his representation, wishes to teach his companions and be a harbinger of virtue, just as he did in opening the storytelling with the dogmatic tale of Ser Cepperello and God’s infinite grace. His choice of topic for Day X and the tale of Torello simply move his discussion of virtues from a theological realm to the realm of human liberality and munificence. Conversely, Dioneo, ever the “bad boy” of the brigata, wishes to subvert and attack any easy interpretive scheme or purview of reality to the end. Not surprisingly, his Gualtieri is the ideal counterpart to Cepperello: how not to see the former’s “matta bestialità” as the ideal complement to the latter’s “era il piggiore uomo che forse mai nascesse” (27)? How not to see them as exemplary models of the world-turned-upside-down reality that the plague had brought to the forefront in Boccaccio’s time? Panfilo, disturbed by the chaos, attempts to the end to reassert the sanctity of virtue and the values of tradition. Dioneo, much more at ease among the shades of gray wrought by the plague-infested world, revels in upsetting any essentialist interpretation of his world. Boccaccio indulges us, the readers, by balancing them against each other in dynamic fashion, never letting one truly have the upper hand over the other. In doing so, he underscores the tensions

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that a book like the Decameron reveals about its people, poised between the end of one era and the dawn of the next.

Notes 1. In An Allegory of Form (Saratoga: ANMA Libri, 1979), Marcus argues that “[it] is as if Dioneo, the most subversive of all the brigata in his refusal to adhere to the topic of the day, were included in the Decameron expressly to forbid the thematic critics any perfection of pattern, any interpretive key, any ideological complacency” (5). Similar arguments about the unreliable nature of the narration have been made by Guido Almansi (The Writer as Liar [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975]), Giuseppe Mazzotta (The World at Play in Boccaccio’s Decameron [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986]), and Joy Hambuechen Potter (Five Frames for the Decameron: Communication and Social Systems in the Cornice [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982]). An exception to these interpretations is Giorgio Barberi Squarotti’s article “Gli ammaestramenti di Dioneo” in Il potere della parola: Studi sul Decameron (Naples: Federico ed Ardia, 1983), where the author claims that Dioneo is aware that his function as narrator “fuori delle regole” is precisely to highlight “lo splendido ordine della brigata e le leggi che essa si è data” (174). 2. Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron in Decameron—Filoloco—Ameto—Fiammetta, ed. Natalino Sapegno (Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, 1952), 745, 756; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. The addition of “nel sembiante” (“in their countenance”) suggests that, while everybody’s appearances reveal an enjoyment and appreciation for the short story, there might be some who disagree with its content and narrative flow. Dioneo would seem the obvious candidate, especially in light of the comment with which he ridicules the ending of Panfilo’s story when it is his turn to narrate. 3. Emma Grimaldi, Il privilegio di Dioneo: L’eccezione e la regola nel sistema Decameron (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1987), 350–351. 4. In taking this stance, I am working counter to a number of interpretations that see in the Griselda story the crowning achievement not only of the day’s topic but also of the return to order and civilization that seems to govern the brigata’s last day of narration (thus embracing the now-famous interpretative slant given to the last story by Petrarch in his Latin translation and in his letter to Boccaccio). This seems the point of view embraced by a majority of Italian scholars who, following the lead of Vittore Branca (Boccaccio medievale e nuovi studi sul Decameron [Florence: Sansoni Editore, 1981], 17), see in the Decameron as a whole, and in the last day specifically, an ascensional movement of the stories toward the celebration of the highest human (and in the case of Griselda, spiritual) virtues. See also Giorgio Cavallini’s La decima giornata del Decameron (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1980) and Emma Grimaldi’s Il privilegio di Dioneo. Among English-speaking scholars, one should mention the interpretations of Joan Ferrante in “The Frame Characters of the Decameron: A Progression of Virtues,” Romance Philology 19, no. 2 (1965), 212–226; and Victoria Kirkham in “The Last Tale in the Decameron,” Mediaevalia 12 (1989), 204–223, where the author argues, citing her own work, for the “ascensional direction (Kern), and . . . rising moral action (Kirkham 1985a)” of the brigata’s journey into the final day (215, citing Victoria Kirkham, “An Allegorically Tempered Decameron,” Italica 62, no. 1 [1985], 1–23). Marga

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5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

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Cottino-Jones also claims that the Griselda story would clearly establish for its medieval audience “new implications by which Griselda turns out to be associated with the Christ archetype, while Gualtieri grows into a Divine King or Divine Father figure” (“Fabula vs. Figura: Another Interpretation of the Griselda Story,” Italica 50, no. 1 [1973], 41). Given the nature of Dioneo’s previous narratives and his use of exemplary behavior (see Friar Cipolla, Day VI, 10), one must be cautious in attributing undue seriousness and moral implications to Dioneo’s last story. Franco Fido, “The Tale of Ser Cepperello,” in The Decameron First Day in Perspective, ed. Elissa B. Weaver (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 73. Fido, “Tale of Ser Cepperello,” 68. While these two stories are not the only ones in the Decameron where rings function as part of the narrative structure (see, for example, Andreuccio da Perugia in II, 5; and Giletta di Nerbona in III, 9), only in these do they seem to appear in a triadic relationship. Marcus, Allegory of Form, 18. For a translation of the original Latin tree in Beinecke’s possession, see http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/speculum/pages-translated/3v.jpg. This belief was first expounded by Saint Augustine in De Doctrina Christiana (now translated as On Christian Doctrine by D. W. Robertson Jr. [New York: Macmillan, 1989]), and further elaborated by Saint Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica (I–II). For a similar stance coeval with Boccaccio’s Decameron, see Wilhelm Jordaens’s Avellana: A Fourteenth-Century Virtue-Vice Debate, ed. Lawrence J. Johnson (Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America, 1985), where Charity, as the foremost theological virtue, fights and defeats Venus and her subservient vices. For a general discussion of the exempla in medieval times, J.-Th. Welter has discussed extensively the spread and popularity of vernacular exempla among Dominican and Franciscan traveling preachers in the late Middle Ages (L’Exemplum dans la literature religieuse et didactique du Moyen Age [New York: AMS Press, 1973; reprint of the original published by Occitania in 1927]). He cites, among others, the famous Cardinal Jacques de Vitry (for his influence, see also Thomas Crane’s editor notes to “The Exempla or Illustrative Stories from the Sermones Vulgares of Jacques de Vitry” in Folk-Lore 26 [1980]), Alain de Lille, Vincent de Beauvais, and, in Italy, F. Galvano Fiamma. With regard to exempla and their presence in Boccaccio’s work, see Salvatore Battaglia’s Giovanni Boccaccio e la riforma della narrativa (Naples: Liguori, 1969); Carlo Delcorno and Maria Luisa Doglio’s recent Scrittura religiosa: Forme letterarie dal Trecento al Cinquecento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003); Lucia Battaglia Ricci’s Boccaccio (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2000); and, with an eye toward his greater influence, Larry Scanlon’s Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For a discussion of the persistency of this preaching model from the Middle Ages to our days, Elaine J. Lawless has traced its patterns in “Narrative in the Pulpit: Persistent Use of Exempla in Vernacular Religious Contexts,” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 21, no. 1 (1988), 48–64. In An Allegory of Form, Marcus similarly notices the “exemplary” nature of the stories in Day X (101, passim). Franco Fido, “Il sorriso di Messer Torello,” Romance Philology 23 (1969), 165. This is not to say that other days do not contain exempla in their narration

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14. 15. 16.

17.

Medievalia et Humanistica (one need only think about a few stories in Day II or the story of the Scholar and the Widow (Day VII, 7). In fact, many stories do rely on this literary device to make their point. What one notices about Day X, however, is that the exempla in every story highlight either the failure of one character in terms of his virtue or the initial underscoring of a vice that needs to be corrected through positive exemplary behaviors. Battaglia, Giovanni Boccaccio, 44. Ferrante, “Frame Characters,” 226. In my opinion, Ferrante’s analysis, which stresses the “progression of virtues” of the brigata toward an orderly return to Florentine, post-plague society, overstates its aims. Occasionally, Ferrante’s assigning virtues to the frame characters seems arbitrary. This is especially true of Panfilo, whom she sees as Virtue itself, even when, as we shall shortly see, very few of his stories have anything to do with virtuous behavior per se. After narrating the exemplary story of Cepperello in Day I, Panfilo narrates the most sexually promiscuous story of Day II (Alatiel) and the equally promiscuous story of Don Felice and Brother Puccio in Day III. Each of these stories is predicated on lies being perceived as truth; and, in Day I, 1, and Day III, 4, respectively, on the serious theological question of God dispensing his grace through a fake saint; and on the truth’s indirect subversion in the “saintly” penance of a devout man enabling the all-too-earthly achievement of an earthly paradise by his wife and confessor. (For a discussion of the way this story and many others in Day III focus on the attainment of this earthly paradise, see Marga Cottino-Jones’s “Desire and the Fantastic in the Decameron: The Third Day,” Italica 70, no. 1 [1993], 1–18). Alatiel’s story, instead, finds a worthy and symmetrical counterpart in Panfilo’s Day IX, 6, story, in which a woman “restores” the virginity of her daughter in her husband’s eyes by lying about who slept with whom during a night of bed-swapping and sex. Panfilo narrates at least two more stories that are founded on lying and sex. In Day VII, 9, Lydia, with the aid of her wouldbe lover Pyrrhus, tricks her husband Nicostratos into believing that he was hallucinating on a pear tree while they were having sex below, whereas in Day VIII, 2, the priest of Varlungo seduces Belcolore by promising a gift that he does not deliver on, before the two agree to further sexual escapades, but only because the priest has threatened her with a painful afterlife in hell. So far, in the catalog of Panfilo’s stories, none pertains to or could be perceived as focusing on virtuous behavior. In fact, all of them highlight the character’s deviousness and ability to restore the appearance of truth and honesty through lies, therefore subverting any virtuosity one might find in the stories. Of the remaining stories, neither Day V, 1 (Cimone), or Day VI, 5 (Giotto), seems particularly focused on all-encompassing love or the achievement of virtue. In fact, we might say that Cimone’s story is an even further deconstruction not only of the idea of love per se, but also of the pursuit of virtue, as promoted by the tenets and ideals of the Dolce Stil Novo (Antonio Toscano has expertly shown how Cimone’s “virtuous” transformation is based on a misunderstanding and perversion of the ideals of the Dolce Stil Novo in “Decameron: Cimone’s Metamorphosis,” Italian Quarterly 29, no. 114 [1988], 25–35). While the sight of Iphigenia does spur Cimone to intellectual growth and an apparent longing for virtuous pursuits, his crass behavior and dogged pursuit of her through land and sea (and murderous feats) subverts any idea that Panfilo might be teaching anything about virtue. As for Giotto’s story, there is little in the story that indicates that either

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18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

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Giotto or Forese Rabatta is interested in virtue, and the story itself, in line with the topic of the day, is more focused on the power of a quick repartee than on more profound ideals. The last sentence (“e così nel contrario a tutti dar piena fede”) raises an interesting interpretive issue with regard to this story. Panfilo claims that those who are acting virtuously should not stop acting virtuously because of negative dreams and, vice versa, those who are performing evil deeds should not be emboldened by favorable dreams. Then, he suggests that one should believe (“dar piena fede”) the opposite (“nel contrario”). We are thus led to believe that those who act virtuously should believe in favorable dreams, whereas those who are performing evil deeds should give heed to negative dreams. Since the couple in question has two negative dreams that come to fruition, one must assume that their actions are considered evil or dishonest by Panfilo, even though, as opposed to most couples we meet in the stories narrated in Day IV, Andreuola and Gabriotto do exchange wedding vows and are married before indulging their passions. While I do not wish to analyze the odd conclusion of Panfilo’s moralizing, once more we are alerted (as pointed out in Marcus’s analysis of the Cepperello story) that Panfilo is sometimes unaware of the impact of his own words vis-à-vis the story he narrates. For a different take on this story, which equates Panfilo’s moralizing stance with regard to dreams to a hermeneutics of truthfulness similar to the one embraced by Boccaccio, see Simone Marchesi’s article “Dire la verità nei sogni: la teoria di Panfilo in Decameron IV.6,” Italica 81, no. 1 (2004), 170–183. This discussion occurs in Book IV of Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. and ed. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill Educational, 1980), 83–93. Dante Alighieri, Convivio, ed. Daniele Mattalìa (Milan: Fratelli Fabbri, 1965). Dante, Convivio, IV, xvi–xvii. One must notice that, in this sense, Italian critics are practically unanimous in accepting the narratives as examples of virtuous behavior, often even praising the “ascensional” quality of the virtue in the stories, whereby each narrator’s depiction of virtue outdoes and improves on the previous narrator’s tale. In this, Italian critics reveal a Bloomian “anxiety of influence,” as they defer to Branca’s belief (already mentioned in note 4) that the Decameron as a whole and the last day in particular reveal a movement upward in the celebration of virtuous human behaviors. Among the staunchest supporters of this view are Giorgio Cavallini in his La decima giornata del Decameron and Emma Grimaldi in “Sotto il segno di Panfilo” (included in her book Il privilegio di Dioneo), but also Michelangelo Picone in Boccaccio e la codificazione della novella (Ravenna: Longo, 2008); Ada Novajra in “Dalla pratica della virtù all’esercizio del potere,” in Prospettive sul Decameron, ed. Giorgio Barberi Squarotti (Turin: Tirrenia Stampatori, 1989) 165–192; and to a degree Giorgio Barberi Squarotti in Il potere della parola. The most notable dissenting voice is instead Cesare De Michelis, who attributes to Panfilo’s “buon senso” and “conformismo maschile” the choice of a topic that runs counter to the subversive nature of the previous days’ narration (Contraddizioni nel Decameron [Milan: Guanda, 1983], 29–32). See Robert Hollander and Courtney Cahill, “Day Ten of the Decameron: The Myth of Order,” Studi sul Boccaccio 23 (1995), 113–170. While I reached a similar conclusion in the teaching of the Decameron to my students, this article expertly discusses many of these conclusions. I am indebted to the clarity of the authors’ argumentation for elements of the following discussion.

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24. Hollander and Cahill, “Day Ten of the Decameron,” 122. The fact that the readers have already heard of the Abbot in Day I, 7, suggests a comparison between his behavior in the two stories—there narrated by Bergamino to Can Grande della Scala as a metaphor for his own mistreatment at the court of a generous and munificent lord. While Day I, 7, suggests that the Abbot is known for his munificence, he is exposed in that story, as in this one, as a man whose munificence is not proactive, but reactive, caused by the embarrassment of being shown up for his lack of awareness (I, 7) and for his angry and prideful outbursts (X, 2). My interpretation thus differs both from Joan Ferrante’s (“Narrative Patterns in the Decameron,” Romance Philology 31 [1978], 585–604) and Hollander and Cahill’s. 25. Hollander and Cahill, “Day Ten of the Decameron,” 129. 26. Again, it is interesting to notice how Italian critics, in their unquestioning acceptance of the virtuous behavior of Day X’s characters, find themselves bending over backward in attempting to explain—and dismiss—Gentile’s necrophilic interest in Madonna Catilina. Cavallini, for example, claims that Gentile’s “liberality” should be understood within the context of medieval love theories, whereby renouncing one’s love for the beloved would be understood as the greatest sacrifice. Thus, while in a first moment Gentile simply follows the natural consequences of his love (even if they are expressed toward a dead married woman!), the moment he renounces pushing his attraction to the extreme, he is praised as a paragon of virtue (Cavallini, La decima giornata, 60–61). See also Grimaldi, Il privilegio di Dioneo, and Novajra, “Dalla pratica della virtù.” 27. Boccaccio himself might have been familiar with the negative controversy surrounding magic and necromancy, as the one hundred years preceding the Black Death had seen increasing pronouncements against their practice. Particularly important had been the pronouncements and writings of William of Auvergne (bishop of Paris from 1229 to 1249), who in his De legibus denounced its evils. While Thomas Aquinas himself condemned the practice, the publication of the Summa Confessorum by John of Freiburg in 1298 and, more importantly, a series of manuals for preachers, culminating in John Brumyard’s 1348 Summa Praedicantium (a text Boccaccio might have known), codified the reasons why the practice of magic was inherently sinful. Edward Peters thus summarizes Brumyard’s beliefs: “Those who profess to practice the magical arts err in three ways: they lie, since they are unable to perform that for which they are paid; they violate divine, canon and civil law, which forbid their practices; and they err in doctrine, thereby becoming guilty of idolatry and superstition” (Edward Peters, The Magician, the Witch, and the Law [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978], 142). Additionally, as others have shown (see Richard Kieckhefer’s European Witch Trials [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976], especially the chapter “Calendar of Witch Trials,” 106–147), the first half of the fourteenth century is when the practice of trying and executing magic practitioners took hold. 28. Hollander and Cahill, “Day Ten of the Decameron,” 122–123. 29. Hollander and Cahill, “Day Ten of the Decameron,” 123. 30. Hollander and Cahill, “Day Ten of the Decameron,” 166. 31. In Day IV, Filostrato objects to Pampinea’s “funny” tale of Frate Alberto, noticing that only the ending properly fits with his topic of “loves that end unhappily.” When it is his turn, Filostrato narrates what might arguably be the most gruesome story of the day, the killing of Guiglielmo Guardastagno by his friend and fellow knight Guiglielmo Rossiglione, before the latter has

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32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

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the former’s heart cooked and served to his wife, with whom Guardastango had had an affair. Filostrato borrows elements from previous stories (such as the cutting of body parts and the burial together of unfortunate lovers separated in life) to make his point and make his story the summa of the day’s narration. For Neifile’s borrowings and corrections of her fellow narrators in Day III, see Howard Cole’s “Dramatic Interplay in the Decameron: Boccaccio, Neifile and Giletta di Nerbona,” MLN 90 (1975), 38–57. Franco Fido goes further, suggesting that Panfilo’s last tale “ripropone e riordina . . . casi eticamente ed esteticamente esemplari incontrati lungo tutto l’arco delle dieci giornate” (“Il sorriso di Messer Torello,” 160). Not surprisingly, Hollander and Cahill affirm that “Panfilo’s tale of Saladin and Torello seems to come closest to fulfilling the conditions for genuine magnanimity put forward by the king of the day. . . . One almost drowns in all that magnanimity” (“Day Ten of the Decameron,” 123, italics mine). They dismiss this possibility, though, by claiming that, in order to do so, Panfilo wants the readers to believe in “flying carpets” and in Torello’s “egotism in hosting” through “frenetic hostmanship” (124). While they see his acts as being completely unrealistic, they fail to see that Panfilo’s story is a summa of the previous stories, and thus contains elements, including magic, that were used by previous narrators to give credence to their stories. As Franco Fido notices, “Torello e Adalieta sono l’unica coppia adulta di cui il Decameron ci mostri la felicità coniugale in atto” (“Il sorriso di Messer Torello,” 161): they represent a balanced happiness between husband and wife that is rarely witnessed elsewhere in the Decameron. Where I disagree with Fido, as I hope to show when discussing X, 10, is in the assessment that both this and Dioneo’s story represent “una palinodia dell’autore-Dioneo, una moralistica riabilitazione del matrimonio tra i gai adulteri della settima giornata e la non lontana, livida misoginia del Corbaccio” (Fido, “Il sorriso di Messer Torello,” 161). To understand these stories as a unit fails to take into account both Panfilo’s moralistic stance in setting the topic of the day and Dioneo’s special function in the narration. Of course, as described in Andreas Capellanus’s De Amore (http://www .thelatinlibrary.com/capellanus/capellanus1.html), “immoderate” liking is appropriate for the initial stages of love (“Non quaelibet cogitatio sufficit ad amoris orignem, sed immoderata exigitur,” I.i.13, italics mine), whereas it is not becoming for a married couple such as Torello and Adalieta. For a more extensive and general discussion of the treatment of marriage and gender relations in the Decameron, see Marilyn Migiel’s A Rhetoric of the Decameron (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003) and Thomas Stillinger and Regina Psaki’s Boccaccio and Feminist Criticism (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Annali d’Italianistica, 2006). As readers we are aware that Dioneo’s narrative is followed by a conclusion, whereby Panfilo once more takes control in leading the brigata back to Florence. Panfilo’s intervention appropriately interrupts the longish responses of the characters to the Griselda story, as if the king wished to quash the discussion (and possible dissension) among the frame characters, a discussion that contradicts the more desirable harmony that had followed his own narration. Boccaccio seems unable to decide which of the two should have the upper hand in providing the final word and message due his book, to the point that he will add an epilogue to assert an authorial control that his characters seem to have wrested away from him.

Farting and the Power of Human Language, with a Focus on Hans Wilhelm Kirchhof’s Sixteenth-Century Schwänke ALBRECHT CLASSEN

In the second tale of Les cent nouvelles nouvelles (early fifteenth century) a young woman is terribly inconvenienced by hemorrhoids, but no medical doctor seems to be competent enough to provide a cure for her. Nevertheless, they all use the opportunity to study the poor victim’s body most attentively, clearly revealing their sexual interest and dereliction in their professional duties. Finally, a friar monk promises a miracle cure, and he employs various objects not only to study the cause of her malady but also to insert a certain powder into the orifice. When the young woman, resting on her bed, covered with a cloth that has an opening only for the rear, turns around and observes the funny scene with the monk, who has only one good eye, staring through a tube at her body, laughter builds in her that finally erupts in a loud fart. Unfortunately, the explosive wind blows the powder, obviously highly acidic, directly into the monk’s healthy eye and soon enough makes him blind, preventing him forever from gazing at females. The ensuing legal conflict is only mentioned in passing and does not receive much further attention, except that the entire case becomes the object of public entertainment. Two significant points here need to be raised that will also be the basis of our subsequent investigation: As the narrator emphasizes himself: “celle qui était auparavant connue d’un certain nombre de personnes pour sa beauté, ses qualités et son élégance fut, désormais—et de notoriété publique—celle qui avait attrapé ces maudites ‘broches’ . . . dont elle finit d’ailleurs par guérir” (39; “The maiden, who had formerly been known by many people for her beauty, goodness, and kindness, thus became notorious to all for her accursed hemorrhoids, of which she was eventually cured”; 25). More important, however, whereas she had been Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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the victim of male sexual lust throughout the entire period of medical treatment, by farting she suddenly triumphs over the male authorities and builds a strong defense against the friar’s and all other men’s sexual desires, at least temporarily.1 The obvious phallic connotation of the tube through which the friar had stared at her orifice does not require further explanation,2 nor does his disregard of the girl’s true medical needs, insofar as he seems only to pretend to know what he is doing with his instrument and the powder. The real catalyst in this narrative consists of the crucial moment when she suddenly breaks wind and destroys his eyesight; hence she overcomes the phallic operation and deconstructs all of the male and church authority with her peal of laughter. Farting has never represented an ordinary, publicly tolerated bodily function; instead it has been consistently treated as transgressive and shameful, and this already in the early Middle Ages, contrary to general assumptions by some anthropologists and sociologists, such as Norbert Elias, according to whom the process of civilization as it moved into the early modern age increasingly imposed feelings of shame over exposing the body or making the body heard (farting). It is unclear what historical markers Elias uses to distinguish between the medieval and the modern world, but he states with great astonishment the frankness with which Erasmus of Rotterdam (1465–1536) discussed in a didactic treatise all body functions, equating this with an early stage of this civilizing process. In the premodern world, and so among “primitive” peoples today, “the different standard of repugnance . . . which preceded our own and is its precondition” is to be taken seriously.3 Referring to urinating, defecating, and farting, Elias draws the rather questionable conclusion that since premodern didactic authors talked openly about those functions, they were less affected by shame than people today.4 If we consider, for instance, the evidence of the Till Eulenspiegel tales (first printed in 1510) or the satirical narratives making fun of all courtly manners and politeness of high society contained in Friedrich Dedekind’s Grobianus: De morum simplicitate (1549) and in his Grobiana (1554), which drastically expose people’s pretenses, we must wonder about the widespread applicability of Elias’s theses.5 We also ought to keep in mind the common association of farting with the devil, which adds a religious component entirely disregarded by the sociologist.6 Some of Elias’s sharpest opponents, such as the anthropologist Hans Peter Duerr, have rightly pointed out how much farting in public has always and everywhere been regarded as most shameful, despite some facetious comments here and there, jokes about inadvertent breaking wind, and crude statements about the bodily functions in certain social

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groups.7 Others have also indicated the problematic generalizations and specific mistakes by Elias, but his global concept of the civilization process still holds sway in many circles,8 despite growing criticism against an increasing number of specific points in his overarching theory.9 Even though farting is mostly considered a transgressive behavior because of the noise the body makes, the disturbing smell associated with it justifies the discussion of this aspect of bodily function within the context of the larger issue at stake, the human senses and what we know about their cultural-historical relevance. As C. M. Woolgar observes, “From its association with the Devil, breaking wind gained a moral opprobrium. If it was taken up in courtesy books from the point of view of manners and polite behaviour, it was an action that was replete with diabolical connotations.”10 In a later context, Woolgar adds, “A bad smell, ‘stinking,’ might be both a characteristic of those whose activities were nefarious or hypocritical and a term of abuse. . . . Evil smells marked out bad things or those destined for Hell; the stench of bad breath or of those who had eaten onions, leeks and garlic . . . was a sign that could not be ignored.”11 We would have to probe much more deeply and widely to understand fully the function of bodily effluents in their social context than can be done here, but we can refer to the fundamental work of Mary Douglas, who has noted that “bodily refuse [can] be a symbol of danger and of power” insofar as “body symbolism is part of the common stock of symbols, deeply emotive because of the individual’s experience.”12 As she also underscores, laying the foundation for her main thesis, “As we know it, dirt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder.”13 And to help us comprehend the structural function of dirt within a cultural context, she offers the following definition, which also applies to farting: “Dirt, then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, insofar as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements.”14 Dirt is here to be understood not only as feces but also as gaseous emissions, all waste products of the body’s digestive system. Significantly, dirt, especially body refuse, has been used since late antiquity by representatives of the three world religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, to denigrate the Other, and that discourse of dirt, based on disgust, flourished throughout the Middle Ages and far beyond. In this light any attempt to reach a critical comprehension of dirt within the so-called process of civilization, that is, as a marker of progress or lack thereof, seems to be doomed to fail.15 The present article does not

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intend to offer a comprehensive critique of Elias’s thesis but wants to shed light on one specific aspect often dealt with in early modern German and European jest narratives that might force us to reconsider the idea of the process of civilization in quite a different light. This allows us to return to our initial narrative, and from there to leap to a number of sixteenth-century jest narratives where farting is also of greatest relevance, without constituting any clear-cut evidence for the theory propounded by Elias. There is certainly a strong sense of transgression and embarrassment involved in exposing the young woman’s behind for medical examination. But ultimately she laughs loudly about the foolish friar and exposes his hidden intent, to satisfy his sexual lust, even if only by proxy, using the tube to insert the powder into her anus. Despite the heavy impact of Elias’s theory on the larger sociological discourse on bodily refuse, which also includes foul smells, we can safely put it aside for the time being and explore important literary examples from the sixteenth century where individuals of both high and low social rank also lose control over their body and break wind. The most famous example can easily be identified as Till Eulenspiegel, a truly well-known jester figure who might have lived in the late Middle Ages. The tales about him have enjoyed tremendous popularity from 1510 onward, when the first collection was published, and this until today.16 Surprisingly, this protagonist regularly operates with his own feces publicly for satirical purposes in order to ridicule, to stymie, to defeat, and to expose his opponents in many different contexts, but he never enjoys his own bodily refuse or demonstrates indifference to it; instead, it is as disgusting to him as to his compatriots. Nevertheless, he hesitates considerably less than everyone else to employ it for his devious strategies because he knows just too well how much disgust and horror he can evoke thereby.17 As we have learned to understand in recent years, Eulenspiegel consistently operates with his bodily refuse because he aims for laughter and entertainment, to tear off the mask of his compatriots, to expose the sycophants, and to pull their legs.18 But he was not the only literary figure to aim for deliberate transgressions by means of his own body. Early modern German literature, mostly composed during the time when the Protestant Reformation had already established itself quite solidly, knows numerous examples where protagonists lose control over their bodies and fart, which triggers each time a whole chain of reactions among those present.19 In the sixteenth century, German audiences were regaled with a large number of prose narratives that we categorize today as Schwänke, or jest narratives. These were short prose text with some humorous but

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commonly also didactic elements, reflecting upon a wide gamut of various situations in ordinary life, predicating their witticism and irony on people’s failures and shortcomings. The Schwänke authors culled much of their literary material from authors flourishing in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, such as Boccaccio (Decameron) and Poggio Bracciolini (Facetiae), but also drew from their own experiences. In comparison with medieval verse narratives (fabliaux, mæren, novelle),20 the focus in the Schwänke is shifting to the world of the burghers and peasants, but there are also numerous examples that treat funny events in the lives of students, lansquenets, innkeepers, priests, medical doctors, apothecaries, merchants, craftsmen, and royalties.21 Wherever an individual commits a faux pas and breaks wind, this meets with strong disapproval and chastisement and is regarded as a most shameful situation. But this is nothing new in medieval or early modern literature, if we consider, for instance, that in the religious legend “Gongolf” by the tenth-century Benedictine nun Hrotsvit of Gandersheim the shamefulness and disgrace resulting from farting underscore the essential message of the text. Here God metes out punishment against a cursing woman who had instigated the murder of her saintly husband. Upon reports about miracles that occur at his grave, she publicly declares that she could create more miracles with her behind than he with his words, or spiritual power, and God makes her fart every time she tries to say anything henceforth.22 By contrast, courtly literature does not address farting at all,23 and instead we would have to turn to fabliaux and similar verse narratives to find relevant examples where primarily women are guilty of breaking wind to their own shame and embarrassment.24 Some of the most interesting examples of similar situations can be found in the corpus of jest narratives by Hans Wilhelm Kirchhof (ca. 1525–1605), a highly respected mid-sixteenth-century author who enjoyed great popularity with his five-volume Wendunmuth (1563–1603). Already the first volume sold 118 copies, as the Frankfurt book trader Michael Harder reported in his Meßmemorial; hence it ranked ninth in the list of his best-selling items during the book fair. Wendunmuth comprises 2,083 short narratives, many of which are borrowed from ancient and medieval sources. Many pursue a clearly didactic goal, others provide simple entertainment, others warn the readers of a dangerous situation or people, and others again expose criminals, evil people, and even tyrants. This wide range of themes and motifs provided the foundation for the appearance of five editions of Wendunmuth.25 Kirchhof proves to be fascinating for us also because of his rather unstable life, first

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as a promising student, then as a runaway young man who joined the lansquenets and fought at many different theaters of war in Germany, France, and elsewhere. Later he entered the administrative service of the Hessian landgrave in Kassel and was finally rewarded for his loyal service with the post of a castellan in Spangenberg (northern Hesse). In the Schwank “Von einem gesandten der statt Ulm” (vol. 1, no. 121; About a diplomat of the city of Ulm) we learn of an incident that happened at the court of the Duchess Mechthild of Austria and that obviously caused much laughter.26 The council of Ulm, a significant and wealthy south German imperial city, had sent one of its best diplomats to the court of the Duchess of Austria in Rottenburg on the Neckar to settle a complicated case.27 The narrator underscores not only his learning, but also his wisdom and rationality: “einen weisen und verstendigen man” (152). He adds to this the high level of academic training that the protagonist had received: “ein doctor rechtens” (ibid.), and also mentions the personal ties to the most important urban families: “rathsverwandter” (ibid.). Unfortunately, he is of short stature and does not seem to enjoy the best health since climbing up several flights of stairs already robs him of his breath. In his haste to approach the duchess immediately after his arrival in the court chamber, bowing before her, “entfuer ihm ein kleines fürtzlein” (ibid.; “he broke a little wind”). Keeping his mission in mind, and not allowing this little transgression to distract him, he simply continues with his oration, and the duchess, with her good manners, also ignores the foul smell. However, the chambermaids and other courtly women immediately take this opportunity to ridicule the emissary and loudly whisper behind his back about his failure to control his body. Instead of maintaining their good demeanor and paying their respect to him, a respectable representative of the influential city of Ulm, they feel bold enough as a group to laugh about him publicly. They carry on like this for a long time until one of them also loses control and allows some wind to break: “kützelten sich mit diesem fürtzlein so lang, das irer ein auch einer, der des doctors weit übertraff, entwüschet” (ibid.; “poked so much fun at this little fart until one of them also let a fart out which was much louder than the doctor’s”). The diplomat, displaying his wit and intellectual alertness, immediately jumps on this opportunity and, interrupting his speech to the duchess, retorts: “Fart flucks fort nach einander! wenns herumb und an mir ist, wil ich wider anheben” (ibid.; “Continue quickly, one after the other, and once the turn will be mine again, I will begin once again [to fart]”). Of course, everyone at present breaks out in laughter, which

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substitutes, in an intriguing linguistic fashion, the breaking of wind with breaking of laughter, very similar to the example of the second tale in the Cent nouvelles nouvelles. Whereas there the young woman triumphs, at least temporarily, over the lustful friar, here the diplomat resolutely quiets the silly chambermaids and mutes his foolish critics by resorting to his superior rhetorical skill and his impressive witticism. Not surprisingly, the duchess honors him for this quick change of events and his intelligent strategies: “die hertzogin, durch solche des doctors höflichkeit bewegt, tractiert in herrlichen und war dieser krieg dardurch entschlichtet” (ibid.; “the duchess, impressed by the doctor’s courtliness, treated him gloriously and the conflict was solved thereby”). The male protagonist demonstrates that verbal skills can overcome even the most embarrassing situation in society because he has ridiculed the maids and other women much more than they ever could ridicule him because he proved to them that farting is hard to suppress, especially in the case of body movements that are difficult to perform. Moreover, bodily self-control does not necessarily make a person more educated or grant him or her more public esteem. In fact, at the end the diplomat triumphs completely over the chambermaids because he has turned their breaking of wind into an occasion of hilarity for the entire company—not at his own expense, as the women had hoped, but at that of the foolish women. They all know that each one of them can easily be liable of committing the same transgression because farts are simply by-products of bodily digestion. At the same time, there is no doubt that farting as such is regarded as shameful and as totally inappropriate for anyone in good society. Nevertheless, laughing about the one person who fails in this regard can easily backfire, as the diplomat powerfully demonstrates. In this sense, both the diplomat and the duchess emerge as truly well-educated and courtly figures; he is well aware of his own inadvertent offense, but she is graceful enough simply to ignore it in order to preserve his honor and that of her court. The chambermaids and other women, however, do not display this degree of respect and politeness; instead they openly ridicule him until they have to realize suddenly, not only that breaking wind is not such a excessive social transgression, but that it can also happen to them, which then, however, proves to be much more shameful because of the hypocrisy that is now exposed, as demonstrated by the court’s collective laughter. At closer analysis, however, this Schwank actually does not specifically explore the social, moral, or ethical implications of losing control over one’s own body, as revealed by foul smell. The key proves to be the diplomat’s impressive linguistic skill with which he can face the challenge

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by the maids and quickly fend off their attempt to shame and fool him. The narrator confirms this observation in his epimythion, where he explicitly emphasizes: “Und ist der auch ein kluger mann, / Der schimpff geben und auch nemen kan” (ibid.; “He is a smart man who knows how to make fun and also how to be the butt of a joke gracefully”). The duchess, after all, did not think much about the fart released by the diplomat, especially because he smartly acted as if nothing had happened. By contrast, she admires him greatly for his ability to give tit for tat when one of the maids also releases some air, embarrassing herself much more than the diplomat had in the first place. Whereas the maids had aggressively targeted the poor man who could not help himself due to his obesity and the physical exercise of climbing the stairs and then bowing before the duchess, the real blame would have to be imposed on the maids. But the diplomat only turned the entire situation into a joke, pretending that farting was a normal, commonly practiced ritual in which he would be happy to join again once it would be his turn. In other words, he proves to be brilliant in the witticism with which he utilizes an embarrassing situation as a basis to satirize all of polite society, facetiously insinuating that he would be happy to break wind again as part of a game publicly performed at court. At first his farting seems to have signaled his personal failure, but as soon as one of the maids has also broken wind, the diplomat translates it into an expression as if this lack of bodily control was part of a ritual commonly performed at court. Laughter results on all sides because of his superior skill as a rhetorician who knows how to overcome an embarrassing situation and turn it into good entertainment for all without either side feeling truly insulted or hurt. Altogether, this Schwank is predicated on linguistic strategies that productively compensate shameful feelings and signal that farting is, despite generally being a matter of taboo, a rather human matter that cannot always be suppressed. The maids should not have made fun of the diplomat, and therefore he forces them to become the—almost literal—butt of the joke.28 Kirchhof presents a very common situation with which even we would be familiar, and he illustrates most poignantly fundamental social values, ethical norms, and the political structures of a shame culture in which breaking wind is generally regarded with consternation, yet without treating it as a complete loss of honor. In other contexts, especially in later centuries, farting was associated with peasants and regarded as a sign of their foolishness and lack of culture.29 But already in Heinrich Wittenwiler’s famous Ring (ca. 1400) the medical doctor Crippenchra had broken wind when he laughed so hard over the

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realization that his female patient, the peasant woman Mätzli Rüerenzumph, though wooed by Bertschi Triefnas, to whom he is supposed to respond with a love letter on her behalf, lacks any ethics and can be easily seduced sexually: “Der ward do lachent, daz er fartzet, / Und sprechen: ‘Mätzli Rüerenzumph, / Dein nam ghört wol zuo meinem stumph’” (2116–2118; “he laughed so hard that he farted, and said: ‘Mätzli Touch-the Penis, your name belongs to my stump’”).30 The narrator clearly identifies it as a transgression, but it does not undermine the doctor’s authority and power since he then can proceed to sleep with Mätzli and impregnate her. If we turn to another Schwank by Kirchhof, we easily gain a clearer sense of the degree to which breaking wind was regarded as embarrassing and as a sign of a lack of education, and this also in the sixteenth century, surprisingly similar to the example provided by the tenth-century nun Hrotsvit of Gandersheim. In “Wie ein weib beichtet” (no. 380, How a wife is doing her confession) a woman commonly commits adultery whenever her husband is out of the house. One day she confesses this to the priest, using an idiomatic expression for this transgression: “den hund hincken liesse” (416; “to let the dog limp”). When the priest learns of her sinful behavior, he identifies it as such, but he promises to grant her absolution at a later point in time if she were to allow him to sleep with her as well. She is immediately ready to comply with his wishes, but while she approaches him, warming up to the idea of having sex with him right there and then, she accidentally farts very loudly. The poor woman feels deeply embarrassed, so she pleads with the priest to impose a penance on her, such as a prayer, to make up for this lack of bodily self-control. Unfortunately, she expresses herself once again in a rather idiomatic fashion: “Ach, lieber herr, da setzt mir was für” (ibid.; literally, “Oh, dear sir, put something in front of it” or “counteract this for me,” probably in the sense of “impose a punishment on me for this”). The priest, however, entirely misunderstands her and believes, instead, that she intended to use her fart as a signal to begin their sexual affair right there in the church. For him farting in the church represents a total loss of good manners, and to suggest, as he believes, that he regard the fart as his signal to enjoy her body amounts to aggravated insult and disrespect of his priestly authority, although he himself had asked for sexual gratification.31 But we have to keep in mind that he asked her to grant him that favor after Easter would have passed, hence probably at another location, either at her house or in his own. The text itself is not easy to understand because the narrator has the priest reflect on an idiomatic expression as well that requires careful translation: “Verstund,

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er solte ihr etwas für den husten setzen” (ibid.; “He understood that he was to give her a remedy against her coughing”).32 His vehement reaction in this situation does not come as a surprise because he finds the association of sexuality with scatology rather disgusting and assumes that she only intended to ridicule him most egregiously. His loud exclamation also deserves to be cited because he himself falls back to crude language and combines it then quickly with an incantation: “Pfui, auß mit der unflehtigen protzeln in aller teuffel namen, wie bistu so unverschämpt!” (ibid.; “Phew, stop this vulgar farting [blurting?] in the name of the devil; how insolent you are!”). Subsequently he chases her out of the church and never grants her absolution. Everything in this narrative hinges on two points: her willingness to prostitute herself, and her lack of bodily control; hence the fart. However, the simple account quickly proves to be considerably more complex and meaningful for an anthropological interpretation because she expresses great embarrassment after having farted, and tries to appease the priest by voluntarily accepting a special kind of penance. But was she embarrassed and contrite regarding her adulterous behavior? The narrator briefly comments that she mentioned her affairs only in passing during her general confession. The priest, at the same time, although he underscores the severity and danger of her sinfulness, offers her an easy way out of it if she were to grant him sexual pleasures in return for the absolution, a common motif in late medieval literature pertaining to the sex-starved clerics, underscoring the prevalent theme of anticlericalism.33 There is no doubt that she would have to be condemned for her utter lack of ethics and her complete willingness to prostitute herself at any moment if the circumstances are right. But when she suddenly farts, she feels deeply ashamed and tries to make up for it as best as she can. Breaking wind in the presence of a lover is seen as an embarrassment, whereas prostitution is not. The priest, however, feels equally disgusted and rejects her outright because he thinks that her sexual offer might force him to defile the confessional or, much worse, to turn to scatology, that is, to have anal sex with her because she seems to associate intercourse with bodily gases. The fart, in other words, suddenly begins to speak for itself, irrespective of what she might be trying to explain about it at that moment. Of course, she would have liked to suppress the foul wind, but since she had not been able to do so she hopes that the priest might grant her relief from the public shame, allowing her to pray or to do some kind of ritual penance. By contrast, he believes that she is defying all of his authority and is, perhaps, even asking for a deviant kind of

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sex that he cannot and does not want to provide, especially not within the church, so he finally repulses her. The confessing and yet still-sinning wife feels deeply ashamed about the situation and would have liked to compensate for her bodily shortcoming. However, since the communication with the priest breaks down, the latter rejects her as a vile creature who cannot even hold her own foul gas.34 In the epimythion we then learn the lesson that those who are supposed to provide some kind of teaching but resort to vile and sordid matter and hence undermine their own ideal as ethical and moral leaders of their community are to be condemned: “Deß meisters sitten sein verkehrt, / Dergleichen er sein jungen lehrt” (ibid.; “The Master’s habits are all wrong; he teaches them to his apprentices”). The thematic connection to the actual narrative might not be as close as one would expect from such didactic verses, but this is not quite unusual for the entire genre of Schwänke. Nevertheless, there is still a certain element of grandiose humor in this short narrative because the woman exposes the priest’s own lack of ethics when she offers herself for sexual pleasure but suddenly releases some gas. Basically, he should have ignored this little failure on her part, whereas his own breaking of the vow of celibacy would have represented a most egregious transgression. Moreover, the critical issue does not even prove to be her farting, especially because she feels great embarrassment and tries to make up for it immediately. By contrast, the humor rests on the inability of both people to understand fully what the idiomatic expressions mean that they use in their secret conversation. She completely understands the priest when he comments: “wann ir wolten mich nach diesen ostern ein freundtschafft theilen, würdet ir von mir ietzt absolvieret werden” (ibid.; “if you were to allow me to share in this friendliness after Easter, you would be absolved by me now”). In other words, he wants to have sex with her as soon as the Easter holidays have passed. But he does not grasp the true meaning of her words once she has farted and tries to make up for it: “da setzt mir was für” (ibid.), confusing the religious association—penance for having farted during confession—with her assumed encouragement to have, perhaps, anal sex with her.35 After all, in his mind he resorts to the term “husten” (“coughing”), a substitute for failed breathing, or failed utterance of human words, as the narrator explains, which then leads to a radical break between them since he has lost interest in a sexual intercourse with her and then throws her out of the church. Ironically, however, just because of this complete misunderstanding, she never commits the sin of sleeping with the priest, which ultimately

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implies that the fart has indirectly yet effectively protected her from transgressing in the most dangerous and sinful way against her marital vow and the priest from breaking his vow of celibacy, not to speak of the crime of adultery in the first place. After all, she did not intend to fart, she felt terribly ashamed of having done so, she tried as much as possible to do penance for having broken wind, and thus, satirically, she avoids one of the worst sins according to the church teachings. Very similarly in the second tale of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, farting emerges as being not of central importance, whereas the people’s reactions and the consequences of the fart constitute the central aspect of this Schwank. Finally, in “Ein pfaff will ein kind tauffen” (I, 2, no. 94; A priest wants to baptize a child),36 we are confronted with another case of farting, which carries a whole complex of social, ethical, linguistic, and religious connotations. Here a newborn child is to be baptized according to the old tradition of the Catholic Church.37 Part of this ritual requires that the child be sprinkled with some soil to remind it of its being earthbound and mortal. The wet nurse bends down to pick up some dust for that purpose, and in that moment she breaks wind. However, while she is still bent down in front of the baptismal font, the priest offers a hilarious and witty comment on the fart, which she does not hear, and once she has straightened up again, she tries to cover for her own shortcoming, blaming the child for the foul smell. She knows too well that everyone has heard her farting, but she hopes to distract them from herself, playing on the general assumption that small children do not yet have any control over their bowel movement and hence would fart freely: “Lieber herr, ich hab es trauwen nicht gethan, sondern das kindlein” (548; “dear sir, I have not done it; it was the child”). Unfortunately for her, the priest had already made an effort to put the best possible spin on this embarrassing situation, pretending himself that the fart was only an expression of the devil who left the innocent body of the young child. Since they all can smell the foul air, this would be, as he argues, and this probably partly tongue-in-cheek but partly actually quite seriously, evidence for the devil who just had departed from them, leaving, as was commonly assumed in the Middle Ages, such a bad smell behind, whether we think of folkloric superstition or of most esoteric literary and theological discourse, such as in Dante’s Divina Commedia, in Inferno.38 Significantly, the priest made a joke out of the embarrassing situation, translating the simple fart into a divine sign that God has demonstrated his power and expelled the devil. If the wet nurse then just would have let it all rest, no one would have commented on it further, despite the priest’s unmistakably facetious intent. However, she insists, foolishly yet

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deeply embarrassed, that the baby had farted, and not she, which makes everything much worse for her, setting up the stage for being badly ridiculed in public. After all, the priest again knows how to handle the situation and translates even her silly defense into a moral and theological teaching: “Ey, so geb gott dem balg die drüß und beulen! sagte der pfarrherr; weil es sich in seiner jugend und blüenden jaren vor einem ehrwirdigen priester so unverschampt leßt mercken, wirdt deß one zweiffel im alter vil weniger sich zucht befleissen” (ibid.; “Oh, then may God give this brat warts and boils, said the priest, because it does not hesitate to make itself heard so unabashedly in front of an honorable priest during his youth and his early flowering years. Without doubt, when it will have grown up, it will certainly display even worse manners”). Actually, the priest had welcomed the fart because it had allowed him to pretend to be authorized by God to exorcize the devil during this baptism, transforming it into a truly important event in the struggle against evil incarnate resting in all people. It is not clear whether the audience believed his original explanation, but they all had heard and smelled the fart. There is no indication that the priest intended to pull their legs or to make a joke out of the situation. Instead, fully keeping in the tradition of interpreting sensory and physical experiences also in spiritual, metaphysical terms, he seriously suggests that the foul smell was to be regarded as the devil’s refuse. But when the wet nurse then stands up again and tries to defend herself, she ruins the priest’s strategy completely. Nevertheless, very similar to the diplomat, he proves to be flexible enough to turn even the wet nurse’s silly explanation into a moral teaching, warning his audience to pay close attention to the dangers when young people disrespect the authorities and break the laws, which finally could lead to the emergence of a rebellious person at an older age. The true humor rests in the contradictory attempts by both persons to come to terms with the foul smell. Neither one can simply ignore it; instead an explanation is required. The wet nurse naively points at the newborn child, hoping that those present might believe this flimsy excuse. The priest, on the other hand, at first utilizes the foul smell to give his listeners a highly religious teaching about the danger of the devil and the original sin that rests even in newborns. Since the wet nurse undermines this plan with her ignorant and foolish strategy to blame the defenseless child, the priest quickly accepts her words and builds a new case, now pursuing a moralizing strategy. The resulting laughter rewards the priest for his witticism and fast thinking, whereas the wet nurse, despite her silly subterfuge, actually disappears from the narrative focus.

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She is not ridiculed or blamed; instead no one actually cares about her because the priest displays such extraordinary rhetorical skill and proves to be competent enough to handle almost any situation, even the most embarrassing ones. Returning to the larger issues at stake, that is, whether the early modern world witnessed a tremendous intensification of the shame level and began to hide the body and all of its functions, the evidence of all three Schwänke remains rather elusive, if not contradictory. Those who happen to fart feel great embarrassment, and society certainly tends to ostracize them for their failure in bodily self-discipline. But this does not represent a new development, if we think as far back as to tenth-century religious legend by Hrotsvit of Gandersheim and then to numerous thirteenth-century fabliaux. When the medical doctor in Wittenwiler’s Ring (ca. 1400) farts, he laughs it off, though not without a sense of embarrassment because it seems inappropriate to his profession. However, he enjoys so much more authority over the peasant woman that he easily shrugs it off and then proceeds to rape her. Curiously, farting and foul smells are intimately tied to rhetoric and human intellect, whereas it would be erroneous, as even Barbara C. Bowen still assumes, to indirectly adopt the global thesis of the civilization process developed by Norbert Elias, arguing that “farting seems to have been more common and more acceptable, than it is today, both in public . . . and in private.”39 No one enjoys farts, no one voluntarily breaks wind (at least not in our examples, whereas the situation in Till Eulenspiegel proves to be very different for a number of specific purposes), and the foul smell is regarded as shameful and disgusting. Farting happens involuntarily and is a sign of lacking self-control. Equating the increasing references to involuntary releasing of bodily gases and to human feces with a change of civilization does not seem well founded and ignores just too many different factors involved here. Most importantly, whereas Erasmus had discussed proper behavior in a didactic context, the Schwänke author primarily looked for opportunities to discuss transgressive behavior and to ridicule those guilty of it in order to entertain and to demonstrate their rhetorical wit and intellectual superiority. But in all three Schwänke the main protagonist quickly grasps the situation and turns it into a rhetorical game in which the fart becomes the basis for public laughter, which then eases the overall tension. Moreover, when a character is so unfortunate as to break wind in public, this is evaluated as deeply embarrassing. Nevertheless, in all three cases, the appearance of foul smell in contradiction to courtly norms—and this throughout the Middle Ages, if we consider the evidence of the fabliaux

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and fifteenth-century mæren and Shrovetide plays40—offers the unique opportunity to resort to linguistic strategies, to rhetorical operations of the highest order, and to puns. Particularly because of the transgressive nature of these scatological elements in the Schwank literature, the key component turns out to be the power of human language and intelligence strong enough to handle successfully even such embarrassing situations and to come out of them triumphing over the opposing, mostly mean-spirited forces. As we know already from the tales about Till Eulenspiegel (1510), the combination of language (wit) with the involuntary “expressions” of the body had already been realized as a significant strategy for epistemology and hermeneutics, which finds a remarkable expansion and intensification—if that were even possible—in the midsixteenth-century Schwänke.41 Efforts by sociologists such as Norbert Elias to correlate the allegedly changing treatment and evaluation of excrement and other bodily effluents with the process of civilization do not prove to be particularly helpful because the evidence from throughout the premodern world is too complex and contradictory to resort to it as a foil against which to contrast the modern world.42 In contrast to Elias’s assumptions, human refuse has always been considered as extremely filthy, creating strong reactions in those who are exposed to it in the form of sight, smell, touch, or even taste; otherwise there would not have been such great effort to build toilets in castles and in monasteries already in the high Middle Ages, clearly separate from the living quarters.43 But whereas fools simply try to distance themselves from the shameful situation of relieving themselves or to pretend that they are not responsible for the production of these waste products, the true intellectuals understand how to transform the embarrassing case into an occasion to allow human language and wit to triumph over foul matter. The Schwänke authors, especially Kirchhof, provide excellent illustration for this observation and underscore with their literary examples that, first, farting was simply not acceptable in public and regarded as lack of education. However, those who succeeded in explaining it away with rhetorical skill not only earned loud and respectful laughter but were also admired for their witticism, intellect, and diplomatic abilities. Criteria such as “shame,” “the attitude toward the body,” “honor,” or even “progress in civilization” to evaluate farting and other outputs of the human body in early modern literature (Elias) prove to be of little help and can safely be put to rest. As the examples analyzed above indicate, by contrast, the critical issue proves to be the correlation between breaking wind (shameful) and communicative skills and witticism. Moreover, the fact that everyone involved ultimately laughs also

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reveals a deeper psychological level that I can only allude to here. After all, farting is shameful, but the comic effect triggered by the sophisticated rhetorical strategy reminds the audience of their own childhood and their uninhibited attitude toward and dealing with the own body and its excrements. The laughter, then, would be a relief strategy compensating for the public embarrassment and also an acknowledgment of the priest’s or the diplomat’s extraordinary intellectual abilities to cope with the situation.44 Whereas Elias had assumed that in the early modern age the process of civilization increasingly cast a taboo on the body and all of its effluents, the opposite almost seems to be the case. Whereas in the Middle Ages courtly and other literature mostly abstained from discussing excrements, farting, and other aspects related to the digestive system, early modern literature discovered all these elements once again, obviously in the same tradition as the fabliaux, mæren, and novelli, as powerful catalysts for satire, irony, and even grotesque humor.

Notes 1. Les Cent nouvelles nouvelles, ed. Roger Dubuis (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1991). The English translation is taken from The One Hundred New Tales (Les Cent nouvelles nouvelles), trans. Judith Bruskin Diner, Garland Library of Medieval Literature, ser. B, 30 (New York: Garland, 1990). For the critical aspect of male gaze that significantly determines the development of this tale, see Madeline H. Caviness, Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy, The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 2. See, for example, though not specifically focusing on the second tale, David Fein, “The Dangerous Sex: Representations of the Female Body in the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles,” Romance Notes 39, no. 2 (1999), 195–202; Cristina Azuela, “Les Métaphores érotiques des Cent Nouvelles nouvelles: sexe et écriture,” Fifteenth-Century Studies 29 (2004), 35–51. 3. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, trans. Edmund Jephcott (1939; Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 47. 4. Elias, Civilizing Process: “The unabashed care and seriousness with which questions are publicly discussed here that have subsequently become highly private and strictly prohibited in society emphasizes the shift of the frontier of embarrassment” (107). 5. See Barbara Correll, The End of Conduct: ‘Grobianus’ and the Renaissance Text of the Subject (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996). 6. Georges Vigarello, Le Propre et le sale: L’Hygiène du corps depuis le Moyen Age, Collection Point: Série Histoire, H092 (Paris: Edition Seuil, 1985); Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993). 7. Hans Peter Duerr, Nacktheit und Scham, Der Mythos vom Zivilisationsprozeß, 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), 234–241.

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8. For a broad discussion, see Albrecht Classen, “Naked Men in Medieval German Literature and Art: Anthropological, Cultural-Historical, and MentalHistorical Investigations,” Sexuality in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: New Approaches to a Fundamental Cultural-Historical and Literary-Anthropological Theme, ed. Albrecht Classen, Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture 3 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008), 143–169. 9. See the contributions to Rüdiger Schnell, ed., Zivilisationsprozesse: Zu Erziehungsschriften in der Vormoderne (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004). 10. C. M. Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 76. 11. Woolgar, Senses, 125–126. 12. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Praeger, 1966), 120–121. 13. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 2. 14. Doulas, Purity and Danger, 35. 15. Alexandra Cuffel, Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). Along those lines, we would also have to consider the symbolic significance of blood; see Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 16. Bodo Gotzkowsky, “Volksbücher”: Prosaromane, Renaissancenovellen, Versdichtungen und Schwankbücher. Bibliographie der deutschen Drucke, part 1, Drucke des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts, Bibliotheca Bibliographica Aureliana 75 (BadenBaden: Valentin Koerner, 1991), 467–488; for the history of research on this topic, see Albrecht Classen, The German Volksbuch: A Critical History of a LateMedieval Genre, Studies in German Language and Literature 15 (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995), 185–212; William C. McDonald, “Mythos Eulenspiegel—Sieg eines zwitterhaften Listreichen,” in Verführer, Schurken, Magier, ed. Ulrich Müller and Werner Wunderlich, Mittelalter Mythen 3 (St. Gallen: UVK Fachverlag für Wissenschaft und Studium, 2001), 227–241. 17. For older studies on Eulenspiegel, see Sonja Zöller, “Der Schalk in der entfremdeten Gesellschaft: Dil Ulenspiegel als anachronistische Figur,” Till Eulenspiegel in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Thomas Cramer, Beiträge zur Älteren Deutschen Literaturgeschichte 4 (Bern: Peter Lang, 1978), 7–28; see also the other contributions to this volume. Dieter Arendt (Eulenspiegel—ein Narrenspiegel der Gesellschaft, Literaturwissenschaft –Gesellschaftswissenschaft 37 [Stuttgart: Klett–Cotta, 1978], 86–95) claimed that Eulenspiegel utilizes feces and other bodily refuse to deconstruct society’s false pretenses in establishing a clean and hygienic world, directing our attention to the fecal anarchy behind everything. Moreover, playing with his own feces reflects, according to Arendt, a regressive and infantile opposition to the authorities. See also Gerhild Scholz Williams and Alexander Schwarz, Existentielle Vergeblichkeit: Verträge in der Mélusine, im Eulenspiegel und im Dr. Faustus, Philologische Studien und Quellen 179 (Berlin: Schmidt, 2003), 76–107; but they recognize in Eulenspiegel primarily a fool from the Shrovetide tradition, a melancholic, and simply an ambiguous and untrustworthy figure. 18. Albrecht Classen, “Der komische Held Till Eulenspiegel: Didaxe, Unterhaltung, Kritik,” Wirkendes Wort 42, no. 1 (1992), 13–33; Albrecht Classen, “Transgression and Laughter, the Scatological and the Epistemological: New Insights into the Pranks of Till Eulenspiegel,” Medievalia et Humanistica 33 (2007), 41–61; Albrecht Classen, “Laughter as the Ultimate Epistemological

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19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

Medievalia et Humanistica Vehicle in the Hands of Till Eulenspiegel,” Neophilologus 92 (2008), 417–489. For an English translation, see Till Eulenspiegel: His Adventures, ed. and trans. Paul Oppenheimer (1991; New York: Routledge, 2001). We need to keep in mind, however, that many of these early modern narratives were based on much older Latin, Hebrew, and even Arabic and Persian sources. Another remarkable figure who deliberately resorts to farting on many occasions in order to ridicule his most learned, if not wise, opponent, King Solomon, proves to be Marcolf in the Latin tradition of Solomon and Marcolf. For an English translation with extensive notes and commentary, see Jan M. Ziolkowski, Solomon and Marcolf (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 127–128, 138–139, 147, 151, 164–165, and passim. Klaus Grubmüller, in his Die Ordnung, der Witz und das Chaos: Eine Geschichte der europäischen Novellistik im Mittelalter: Fabliau—Märe—Novelle (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006), impressively situates the genre of the mære in the European context, but he limits himself completely understandably to the end of the fifteenth century. Leander Petzoldt, ed., Deutsche Schwänke (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1979); Albrecht Classen, “Witz, Humor, Satire: Georg Wickrams Rollwagenbüchlein als Quelle für sozialhistorische und mentalitätsgeschichtliche Studien zum 16. Jahrhundert, oder: Vom kommunikativen und gewalttätigen Umgang der Menschen in der Frühneuzeit,” in Jahrbuch der ungarischen Germanistik (Budapest: ELTE Germanistisches Institut; Bonn: Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, 1999): 13–30; Werner Röcke, “Fiktionale Literatur und literarischer Markt: Schwankliteratur und Prosaroman,” in Die Literatur im Übergang vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit, ed. Werner Röcke and Marina Münkler, Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 16 Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart 1 (Munich: Hanser, 2004), 463–506; Hermann Bausinger, “Schwank,” in Enzyklopädie des Märchens, ed. Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, vol. 12, 1 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005), 318–332; Sebastian Cox, Laughter and Narrative in the Later Middle Ages: German Comic Tales 1350–1525 (London: Legenda, 2008); Albrecht Classen, Deutsche Schwankliteratur des 16. Jahrhunderts: Studien zu Martin Montanus, Hans Wilhelm Kirchhof und Michael Lindener (Trier: WVT Verlag, 2009). Hrotsvit, Opera omnia, ed. Walter Berschin, Bibliotheca scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana (Munich: Saur, 2001), 42–62. Research on Hrotsvit has been surprisingly quiet regarding this legend; neither in Katharina M. Wilson’s edited collection (ed., Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: Rara avis in Saxonia? Medieval and Renaissance Monograph Series 7 [Ann Arbor, Mich.: Marc, 1987]) nor in Phyllis R. Brown, Linda A. McMillin, and Katharina M. Wilson’s edited collection (eds., Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: Context, Identities, Affinities, and Performances [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004]) is there any study on Gongolfus. Dennis J. Billy, “Translatio Fontis et Passio Martyris: Narrative Diptych in Hrotsvitha Gongolfus,” Germanic Notes 22, nos. 3–4 (1991), 67–71, does not address the issue that concerns us here. The noun vurz and the verb vurzen appear in the respective dictionaries (Lexer, BMZ; only the MHDBD online has no entry), but the references pertain to late medieval peasant satires, Shrovetide plays, and other satirical texts. For an in-depth study, see Valerie Allen, On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 55–56. She offers the interesting comparative perspective: “Fart discourse of the late medieval and early modern periods shows an interest in the connection with classical

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25. 26.

27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

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oratory and in exposing scholastic logic as hot air. Fart satire of the earlier Middle Ages seems more associated with acrobatics, and more pointedly political, more antecclesiastical” (165). Gotzkowsky, “Volksbücher”, 513–516. Kirchhof probably borrowed this tale, as so often is the case, from Heinrich Bebel’s Facetiae (1508–1512), here 2.74, but there are a number of other story collections that also contain this tale. The Schwänke authors typically culled much of their material from previous sources, and there is much overlap in the respective Schwankbücher; see Hans Wilhelm Kirchhof, Wendunmuth, ed. Hermann Oesterley, vol. 5 (1869; Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1980), 40. Hans-Martin Maurer, ed., Eberhard und Mechthild: Untersuchungen zu Politik und Kultur im ausgehenden Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1994). Barbara C. Bowen, “The ‘Honorable Art of Farting’ in Continental Renaissance Literature,” in Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art: Studies in Scatology, ed. Jeff Peersels and Russell Ganim, Studies in European Cultural Transition 21 (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2004), 1–13, discusses a number of related narratives, but she does not reach any significant interpretative conclusions. Elfriede Moser-Rath, “Lustige Gesellschaft”: Schwank und Witz des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts in kultur- und sozialgeschichtlichem Kontext (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1984), 74, 241–42; perhaps characteristically for older scholarship, she shies away from providing us with the text or at least a summary of it in which the focus rests on farting, 426 (no. 46). Heinrich Wittenwiler, Der Ring, Frühneuhochdeutsch/Neuhochdeutsch. Nach dem Text von Edmund Wießner ins Neuhochdeutsche übersetzt und herausgegeben von Horst Brunner (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1991). In Till Eulenspiegel, even the sacred space of the church is not taboo for farting and defecation. In the Histori no. 22, “How Eulenspiegel Became the Sexton in the Village of Büddenstedt,” the priest breaks a thunderous wind while standing in front of the altar and preparing for mass. Eulenspiegel reprimands him for this “incense smoke” (22), and then dares him to shit right in the middle of the church. The foolish priest accepts the wager and does his business, not understanding that Eulenspiegel had based the wager not on the idea of defecating itself, but on the central location of the spot where the priest places his feces. So the priest loses the wager and has to pay Eulenspiegel a barrel of beer. This is just one of an endless number of metaphors for coitus; see Johannes Müller, Schwert und Scheide: Der sexuelle und skatologische Wortschatz im Nürnberger Fastnachtspiel des 15. Jahrhunderts, Deutsche Literatur von den Anfängen bis 1700 2 (Bern: Peter Lang, 1988). However, he does not list coughing in his collection. For a comprehensive treatment of the ridiculing of priests in late medieval mæren, the precursors of the Schwänke, see Birgit Beine, Der Wolf in der Kutte: Geistliche in den Mären des deutschen Mittelalters, Braunschweiger Beiträge zur deutschen Sprache und Literatur 2 (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 1999). For earlier examples, see Helmut Brall, “‘Wahrlich, die Pfaffen sind schlimmer als die Teufel!’: Zur Entstehung der deutschen Schwankdichtung im 13. Jahrhundert,” Euphorion 94, no. 3 (2000), 319–334. In the fabliaux tradition we occasionally find explanations for women’s irrepressible desire to talk and to gossip, correlating it with the devil who had planted a fart on their tongues; see, for instance, “Du con qui fu fait a la

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35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44.

Medievalia et Humanistica besche,” in Nouveau recueil complet des fabliaux, vol. 4, ed. Willem Noomen and Nico van den Boogaard (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1988), 8–22. I know of no parallel case in late medieval or early modern literature where “coughing” might serve as a metaphor for having sex. See, for example, Stefan Zeyen, . . . daz tet der liebe dorn: Erotische Metaphorik in der deutschsprachigen Lyrik des 12.–14. Jahrhunderts, Item Mediävistische Studien 5 (Essen: Item, 1996). This is also based on Heinrich Bebel’s Facetiae; see Kirchhof, Wendunmuth, 71. Michael Lindener also included this theme in his Rastbüchlein, vol. 1, Texte, ed. Kyra Heidemann, Arbeiten zur Mittleren Deutschen Literatur und Sprache 20.1 (Bern: Peter Lang, 1991), no. 6. Bowen, “‘Honorable Art of Farting,’” 3, briefly summarizes the account as it appears in Bebel’s collection, but again she does not offer an interpretation. For the rituals and formulas uttered, see http://www.newadvent.org/ cathen/02258b.htm#I (last accessed on January 24, 2009). Robert Muchembled, A History of the Devil: From the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Jean Birrell (2000; Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003); see also Woolgar, Senses, 122–132. Bowen, “‘Honorable Art of Farting,’” 12. Sheila J. Nayar, “Coprus [sic] Christi: The Scatological Tales of the Fabliaux,” in Comic Provocations: Exposing the Corpus of Old French Fabliaux, ed. Holly A Crocker, Studies in Arthurian and Courtly Cultures (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 63–81; Grubmüller, Die Ordnung, der Witz und das Chaos, 238–241. Classen, “Transgression and Laughter,” 41–61; see also Allen, On Farting, 129–144, who offers numerous fascinating cross-references and allusions, though she tends to border on the speculative at times. See also David Inglis, A Sociological History of Excretory Experience: Defecatory Manners and Toiletry Technologies (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000), 104. But the eleventh story in Marguerite de Navarre’s mid-sixteenth-century Heptaméron fully confirms how disgusting a dirty toilet was for most ordinary audiences even then. A lady visits a Franciscan monastery and then has to use the privy, where she gets stuck in the horrible dirt and needs to call for help. Since her maid assumes that she is being raped by one of the monks, she calls the entire company together, who witness the miserable state the lady is in. For her, this is extremely embarrassing and disgusting. Marguerite de Navarre, The Heptameron, trans. P. A. Chilton (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1984), 156–157. Daniel Furrer, Wasserthron und Donnerbalken: Eine kleine Kulturgeschichte des stillen Örtchens (Darmstadt: Primus Verlag, 2004), 50–58. See the excellent analysis of the comic in Shrovetide plays based on excrement, carefully drawing from Freud’s insights, without excessively arguing for a psychological reading, by Johannes Merkel, Form und Funktion der Komik im Nürnberger Fastnachtsspiel, Studien zur deutschen Sprache und Literatur 1 (Freiburg: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1971), 195–201.

Dante and Statius: Revisited PAUL MAURICE CLOGAN

Literary critics claim that Dante’s celebration of ancient Latin poets, in particular, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius, illuminates his own poetic formation as he engages in the stories of forces and passions that fashioned the poetic worlds of his ancient ancestors. Individual studies of Dante’s celebration of one or more of these “classical” poets in the Divine Comedy have been undertaken with some success. Yet in most of these studies these poets seem to have been perused under the rubric of the similarity between the ancient Latin poet’s “literary self-consciousness”1 and Dante’s own, at best a post-romantic conception that seems to have survived into the twenty-first century despite great advancements in literary theory, cultural studies, and textual studies. This chapter seeks to explore the role Dante assigns Statius in the Commedia, the significance of Statius’s detailed religious biography, and the reasons why Dante assigns him the long discourse on the development of the soul and the human embryo in the Purgatorio.

Meaning of the Classics First, the use of the term classics with respect to ancient Latin poets deserves some exploration. Today the term is generally used to refer to the works of noted ancient Greek and Roman authors, or to something characteristic of the literature, art, and culture of ancient Greece and Rome.2 Yet as Jan M. Ziolkowski reminds us: “But were the classics in the Middle Ages identical with the classics today, or did such a category as the classics exist at all in the medieval period? . . . The very category of classics may be an anachronism when retrojected upon the Middle Ages: classical and postclassical did not belong to any of the triages to which literature was routinely subjected by the remote forebears of modern-day literary historians.”3 “Texts were pagan or Christian, metrical or rhythmic, and so forth, but were not classical or postclassical. Perhaps even more important than any of these other qualifications Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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was a linguistic one: in Western Europe, the classics were all Latin— so much so that the region was Latin Christendom, omnis Latinitas. Whatever Greek prose or poetry survived, it did so almost exclusively in Latin translations, such as Boethius’s Aristotle or the Homerus Latinus of the Iliad.”4 Aldo Scaglione also reminds us that education and the classics were closely united in the Middle Ages, more so than at any other time in history. Apparently, Servius Tullius, King of Rome (578–535 b.c.), divided Roman citizens into five classes; those in the highest class were called “classicus”; anyone of the four lower classes was “infra classem” (“below the grade”). In time the word classicus came to be used to describe a class of pupils. With respect to literary texts, classics have become and continued to remain classics by virtue of having been used in such classes.5 Moreover, medieval authors whom we refer to today as “postclassical” or at least “late antique” actually had a comparable or equal authority with Virgil, Statius, or Horace. We know this by the “frequency with which their works were copied in scriptoria and the intensity with which they were perused in the curriculum.”6 That is, Prudentius (348–ca. 405), Boethius (ca. 480–524), Martianus Capella (fifth century), Priscian (ca. 500), Eugenius of Toledo (d. 657), and others were highly respected and esteemed. By the tenth century a.d. their texts were considered comparable to those of authors framed in the curriculum for more than half a millennium. They too were auctores, commanding authority and respect.

Texts of Latin Auctores However, the texts and editions of the ancient Latin auctores engaged in modern-day studies are problematic and untoward. They are mainly twentieth-century editions, dating approximately from the mid-1970s, perhaps due in no small part to C. S. Lewis’s delightful 1956 essay, “Dante’s Statius,”7 which sparked a revival of interest in Statius and his works. To use only twentieth-century editions of Latin auctores neglects literary theory and cultural studies, ignores Latin glosses and commentaries on the auctores, and disregards the manuscript context in which the auctores appear. In effect, it serves to treat the auctores as modern writers. Yet for a account of the engagement of the auctores as they were read, studied, and known in the medieval curriculum, accompanied by glosses and commentaries including but not limited to, in the case of Statius, those of Lactantius Plancidus, Fulgentius Planciades, and the so-

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called anonymous commentator on Statius’s Achilleid,8 the use of such modern editions is indeed untoward. It says little, if anything, about the reception of the texts and above all leaves the reader to imagine Dante situated in a comfortable, well-lighted, modern-day library with ready access to twentieth-century editions, some bilingual, but not contextualized or surrounded by accessus, commentaries, and glosses. Most of the manuscripts of the Thebaid and of the Achilleid contain glosses and very often extensive notes or full-length commentaries.9 We have good reason to suggest that Dante’s manuscript of Statius did as well. One thing is clear: Dante did not read Statius in a twentieth-century critical edition or in a Loeb Classical Library edition. Like Boccaccio, he read the Thebaid in a glossed manuscript.10 The medieval tradition of allegory ought to be embraced and not overlooked; it may well help to explain the role of Statius in the Purgatorio. Figures of ira and pietas dominate the narrative of the Thebaid, ending with the figure of Clementia. The epic narrates the tragic consequences of Oedipus’s parricide and incest and self-imposed blindness; his curse of his sons; the rivalry of the sons of Oedipus, Eteocles and Polynices; the division of Thebes; the exile of Polynices; his journey to Argos; the pieta’s of Maeon and Menoeceus; the defeat of Adrastus; the Argives at Nemea and the thirst for “the fountain of faith”; the embassy of Tydeus; the duel and final defeat of Eteocles and Polynices; the return of Theseus and his promise of aid; the altar of Clementia; the march to Thebes and the end of gens profana; the burial of the Argives; and the coming of peace and the triumph of virtue over sin.

Story of Thebes The Thebaid is a grisly narrative of the consequences of sin, hate, and anger that explores the depth of human degradation and folly in books 1 to 11. Yet it does not end equivocally with a sense of loss but rather with a sense of hope. In the twelfth book a new moral order and a new vision of man and his destiny are revealed. It had been anticipated throughout the story, in the exemplary examples of pietas in the darkest moments of the narrative and in the midst of seemingly universal depravity, in the doctrine of aemulatio, animation of the human soul to the divine, in the altar of Clementia that heeds all prayers, and in the return of Theseus and the end of strife, that evil does not control the universe and the redemption of sinners. The Thebaid is a narrative not of evil but of triumphant good.

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Pietas of Maeon and Menoeceus I suggest that Dante came to recognize this subtext—that the exercise of virtue or even a virtuous action leads to and brings about divine activity. The glossed manuscripts of the Thebaid note this affirmation. So Dante assigned the figure of Statius the important role of new translator and guide in the Purgatorio. Two exemplary figures of pietas in the Thebaid will illustrate my point. Maeon in books 2 and 3 is the lone survivor of the fifty warriors sent by Eteocles to ambush Tydeus on his return journey after his failed mission to negotiate with Eteocles to honor his bargain with Polynices. Yet Tydeus kills all his opponents, except Maeon, who must now report the grim news back to Eteocles. Maeon, the unwilling survivor of his comrades’ slaughter, is an augur, and he foresaw the fate awaiting his companions before they undertook the ambush (2.691–694). Statius comments on him that “vita miserandus inerti damnatur” (2.695-696, “His doom is to be pitied as useless life”). Tydeus permits him to survive so that Eteocles will learn of his bravery; as Maeon confronts the king on his evil plan to ambush and foretells the disastrous results of his unlawful rule (3.59–77), he triumphantly and joyfully ends his own life with his own sword. As a Stoic, he prefers the nobler act of death as a way to liberty. His suicide is apparently an innovation of Statius’s since it does not appear in any earlier source.11 Statius points out that Maeon’s reward is that his soul enjoys the bliss of Elysium: the animals respect his corpse and refrain from mutilating it for it is protected by reverentia; that is, Maeon’s remains will endure inviolate forever (3.108–113). Though Statius’s Maeon may have the characteristics of Roman Stoicism, his death, the first victory of pietas and virtus over the powers of evil, is the triumph of spiritual as well as political freedom; spiritual freedom is achieved by the exercise of virtue, the power to overcome and rise above all human conflicts and temptations.12 Statius’s account in the Purgatorio of the animation of the mortal soul and the activity of the divine recalls Statius’s own account of the sacrifice of the brave Theban Menoeceus in the Thebaid (10.650–55), another exemplary example, perhaps the highest example, of pietas in the Thebaid.13 By situating the devotion of Menoeceus at a time when Thebes is confronting its greatest danger, the defeat by the Argives led by the madness of Capaneus, Statius selected an appropriate and effective moment to represent the pietas of Menoeceus as a remedy that will please the gods. The goddess Virtue—“Virtus, / seu pater omnipotens tribuit, sive ipsa capacis / elegit penetrare viros, caelestibus ut tunc /

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desiluit gavisa plagis!” (10.632–635; “whether the almighty Father hath sent her, or she herself hath chosen to dwell in men worthy of her—how gladly then did she leap down from the heavenly places”)—prepares Menoeceus to fight Capaneus. In this climactic scene, the striking difference between pietas and furor is effectively and forcibly dramatized better than anywhere else in the Thebaid. Menoeceus sacrificed his life to protect Thebes (10.60–-620), and goddesses bear his body to earth. At the moment of his death “ast illum amplexae Pietas Virtusque ferebant / leniter ad terras corpus; nam spiritus olim / ante Iovem et summis apicem sibi poscit in astris” (10.780–782; “But Piety and Virtue clasped and bore his body lightly to the earth; for his spirit long since is at the throne of Jove, demands for itself a crown ’mid highest stars”). Capaneus is struck by a thunderbolt on the Theban battlements by the king of the gods and falls to earth, where his body remains a charred and dishonorable wreck. The two deaths contrast real nobility and haughty savagery, guidance by divine decrees and vain impiety. Both the sacrificial suicides of Maeon and Menoeceus are important to the action of the story, and they serve as exemplary figures of pietas to others as well as to the doctrine of aemulatio.

The Supernatural and the Spiritual Statius’s empathy for the supernatural and the spiritual may be seen in his treatment of the gods, the ghost of Laius, and the katabasis of Amphiaraus. Though the gods of the Thebaid generally resemble their counterparts in the Aeneid, they have important differences in function.14 In his most remarkable creations Statius had no model in Virgil.15 Statius plants the seeds of the Theban war early in book 1 of the Thebaid, in which he sets up the themes and determining causes of the whole epic. Oedipus’s self-imposed blindness is the result of his own sin and guilt. He curses his sons and appropriately appeals to the infernal gods to come to his aid (56–87). His prayer is commendable as it is inspired by furor (73–74). Tisiphone hears his prayers and moves to fulfill them (88–113). Statius depicts Tisiphone in terms of the traditional Fury of literature. At the request of Oedipus, she enters the world and “her activity continues throughout the epic” (Vessey 75).16 Yet Statius to some extent seems to have demythologized her. In the Thebaid, she is transformed into a personification of hate and furor, a figure of aggression and folly; “she is an objectified embodiment of Oedipus’ spiritual state. Oedipus has brought her into existence

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and, indeed, Tisiphone is nothing other than a reflection of him. His madness, the strength of his curse, has a life of its own. She has been allegorized in a manner often found in the Thebaid.”17 Statius reinstates the “deorum ministeria”18 in his mythological epic, yet Lucan’s legacy is evident in his allegorized treatment of the gods and in personification of abstractions like pietas and virtus.19 C. S. Lewis notes: “Its gods are only abstractions and its abstractions, though confessedly belonging to the inner world, are almost gods.”20 On the human level, Oedipus’s curse is the cause of the Theban war, which is now sanctioned by Fate. “Atque ea Cadmeo praeceps ubi culmine primum / constitit adsuetaque infecit nube penates, / protinus adtoniti fratrum sub pectore motus” (123–125; “Then Fury, swooping headlong upon the Cadmean towers, straightway cast upon the house its wonted gloom: troubled dismay seized the brothers’ hearts”). In the concilium deorum (212–247)21 Jupiter, the executor of Fatum, has resolved to punish the royal house of Thebes, for he can no longer tolerate their endless sins. He commands Mercury to raise the ghost of Laius from the underworld to appear to Eteocles in a dream to provoke him into abrogating the terms of his agreement with Polynices (292– 302). This episode marks the first in a series of supernatural secret activities in the Thebaid. Such grisly and gross incidents had much appeal to Statius’s colleagues. The first century saw a growing interest in hermetic cults, supernatural rites, and arcane sciences.22 Statius embraced the supernatural and the spiritual as a recurrent component in his epic. Mercury discovers the ghost of Laius in the underworld; it still bears the wound that Laius suffered at the hands of Oedipus. Their arrival in Thebes happens to be a day of festival and celebration. That night the Thebans, sleeping after their revelry, are oblivious to the arrival of Laius with his message of blood and war. To such a city and at such a time, Laius comes to haunt the dreams of his grandson. He finds Eteocles asleep, enjoying to the full the pleasures of monarchy: “pro gnara nihil mortalia fati / corda sui. Capit ille dapes, habet ille soporem” (92–93; “for mortal hearts that know not their destiny! He feasts and he slumbers”). Statius relates how Laius assumes the image of the seer Tiresias to give added weight to his words (94–97).23 He then speaks, upbraiding Eteocles for indolence, mixing truth with falsehood. Laius’s speech plays upon Eteocles’ fears and adds to the truth those nuances of error that are best able to sting him to hatred and treachery. The dream ends in terror. Laius finally reveals his true identity, and a river of blood streams from his throat toward the couch of the sleeping Eteocles. Eteocles is roused from sleep at once, shakes off the phantom blood, and is filled

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with a fury of horror and hate for his brother. Statius compares him to a furious tigress that captures a living man to feed her young (2.132–133). The mission of the ghost of Laius has been an absolute success. But ira is victorious as the tyrant dreams of war against his brother. In the Inferno, canto 20, 33–36, and Paradiso, canto 4, 103–105, Dante alludes to the legendary story of Amphiaraus, a Greek seer and one of the seven kings against Thebes, which echoes Statius’s epic theme of nekyomanteia (lightwave) in book 4 of the Thebaid and the katabasis or the dramatic descent of Amphiaraus in a chariot from the field of battle into hell in books 7 and 8. Amphiaraus was reluctant to partake in the battle of the seven against Thebes because the seer knew that none of the seven except Adrastus would return from it alive. Yet his wife, Eriphyle, was bribed by Polynices with the necklace of Harmonia to disclose his hiding place. Amphiaraus reluctantly joined the seven, but first commanded his children to avenge his death by killing their mother. Prior to his disappearance from the battlefield, Amphiaraus controls the battle and experiences his “moment of martial glory” (aristeia). Here Statius describes a major change in the seer’s attitude. It is a change in his moral perspective that always occurs in the presence of death in war. Incited by his awareness of doom, the priest becomes obsessed with an dominant lust for war that overtakes his normally kind character. At this final moment of his aristeia, Amphiaraus is as uncontrolled as his comrades with respect to furor belli. “The man who was once an instrument of salvation and redemption is metamorphosed into a savage dealer in death.”24 ardet inexpleto saevi Mavortis amore, et fruitur dextra atque anima flagrante superbit, hicne hominum casus lenire et demere Fatis iura frequens? quantum subito diversus ab illo qui tripodas laurusque sequi, qui doctus in omni nube salutato volucrem cognoscere Phoebo. innumeram ferro plebem, ceu letifer annus aut iubar adversi grave sideris, immolat umbris ipse suis. (7.703–711) [He glows with an insatiable love of savage war and revels in his might, and his fiery soul exults. Is this he who so oft alleviated the lot of man and made the Fates powerless? How quickly changed from him who was skilled to follow the guidance of tripod and of bay, to salute Phoebus and learn the import of the birds in every cloud. Like some pestilence or adverse ray of baleful star, his sword offers up to his own shade a host innumerable.]

Statius illuminates in these lines a fundamental emotional process in the war in books 7–8 of the Thebaid. That is, the start of furor, in this case

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“saevi Mavortis amor,” always precedes the death of the chief warriors; each of the heroes becomes in turn obsessed by the evil force that must be followed by disaster.25 Amphiaraus’s reception into the underworld, described by Statius at the beginning of book 8, is considered to be his own addition to the myth.26 It allowed the poet more occasion to describe the regions of the underworld than he did in book 4 in which Statius was able to include the epic theme of nekyomanteia; in books 7 and 8, the disappearance of Amphiaraus provides an opportunity for a kind of katabasis. The myth of Amphiaraus’s disappearance into a chasm is an ancient one.27 Statius retells it briefly. When the earth begins to shake and tremble, a chasm opens wide, and rocks and dust begin to fly, the battle suddenly stops and men no longer fight in the face of a new and strange terror (7.794–8.126). The poet’s conjecture on the cause of the happening is, in part, characteristic of Stoic curiosity about cosmic phenomena or the influence of a higher power (e.g., Neptune’s trident) or a tribute to the seer (7.809–817). In the aftermath of his katabasis, a grieving council appoints Thiodamas as successor and a confidant of Amphiaraus. Thiodamas decides to hold a ceremony to mollify and pacify the earth, whose anger was seen in Amphiaraus’s disappearance (8.271–294). Here again I point out Statius’s interest in religious ritual and ceremony, which had Roman parallels. As evidence of his priestly office, Thiodamas prepares to appease the earth with offerings of flowers and fruit and the libation of milk (8.298–299). He then prays: “ergo simul tot gentibus alma, tot altis / urbibus ac populis” (8.313–314; “therefore art thou bountiful to so many races, so many lofty cities and peoples”). Omne homininatal solum, nec te, optima, saevo Tamque humili populous deceat distinguere fine Undique ubique tuos; maneas communis et arma Hinc atque inde feras. (8.320–323) [All soil is human birthright, nor doth it beseem thee, worthiest one, to distinguish by a test so cruel and so mean peoples who are everywhere and in every land thine own: abide thou common to all alike, and bear alike the arms of all.]

Appropriately, Thiodamas concludes his petition with a personal prayer for help in his own priestly ministry, promising to be a prophet of earth as well as of Apollo (8.329–335). After the prayer ends, offerings of black sheep and dark-hued herds are cast into the ground, and their living bodies are covered with sand, performing the ritual of a real funeral for the soul of Amphiaraus (8.339–341). Meanwhile in the colorless regions of the underworld, Amphiaraus, priest, prophet, and king, still armed for battle, pleads for mercy before

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the Court of Judgment in which the souls of men are arraigned. Dis, the Lord of Erebus, and the other judges preside in a solemn court in which man’s sins undergo cruel examination. In an ornate style, Dis, who appears as a tyrant, and the other judges, his trusted helpers, have little or no pity for the long lines of sinners before them. In his petition, Amphiaraus notes that sin is not the reason for his descent (101) and that he reluctantly joined the seven against Thebes, betrayed by his wife and well aware of his doom (104). It would be far better for Dis to punish Eriphyle and allow the seer, whose prophecy has lost its power, to go in peace (114). Reluctantly, Dis, the infernal Jupiter, grants the seer’s prayer. This powerful scene illustrates that the rule of moral law is pertinent and relevant below as well as above. The code of law determines man’s guilt or innocence. By the guiltless life of Amphiaraus, priest, prophet, and king, he avoids punishment and human madness. Statius here makes explicit his view of infernal judgment and moral cosmology that was implicit in the previous books. The aristeia and the katabasis of Amphiaraus in books 7 and 8 have a structural unity, offering an “allegorical representation of life and death, of righteousness and sin, of reward and punishment.” Statius’s treatment of the gods, the ghost of Laius, and the katabasis of Amphiaraus clearly demonstrate his empathy for the supernatural and the spiritual in the Thebaid.

Slothful Souls As Virgil, at the request of Dante, continues his discussion of Love in canto 18 of the Purgatorio, Dante allows his thoughts to wander. Suddenly a group of Slothful souls rush by them from behind like horses: “E quale Ismeno già vide e Asopo” (18.91; “And as Ismenus and Asopus saw”). The suffering of the Slothful souls is compared to the rush and rage of Theban bacchanalia along the Ismenus and Aesopus, two famous rivers of Bretia near Thebes known in ancient times for the orgiastic celebrations of the god Bacchus that took place there at night. Dante seems to be indebted for the idea to the Thebaid (9, 434), where the river Ismenus is similarly described. The comparison of the frenzied Slothful souls galloping by to the bacchants of the river Ismenus is appropriate, as is pointed out in the glossed manuscripts of the Thebaid and by several commentators who note that it was a moonlit night, late and lurid. At the end of canto 20, as Dante and Virgil take leave of Hugh Capet (940–996), who was elected king of the French dynasty in 987, they

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suddenly feel the entire mountain shake and hear voices singing “Gloria in excelsis Deo.” quand’ io senti’, come cosa che cada, tremar lo monte; onde mi pres un gelo qual prender suol colui ch’a morte vada. (20.127–29) [when, suddenly, I felt the mountain shake as if about to crumble, and I felt my body numb, seized by the chill of death.]

Why the Mountain Shook At the beginning of canto 21, as Dante and Virgil walk along the terrace of Avaricious, Dante is quite concerned with the cause of the mountain’s tremor at the end of canto 20, the need to make haste, and the sight of the prostate penitents. Suddenly a shade appears and begins to speak to them. The shade identifies himself as Statius, the author of the Thebaid and the Achilleid, who just has been released after more than five hundred years of purgation. It is noteworthy that Virgil, who cannot answer Dante’s question, defers it to Statius. Beginning in an ornate and Scholastic style, Statius explains that the mountain of Purgatory is not like earthly mountains subject to climate and change, to rain, wind, and lightning, but is unchangeable. But when a soul completes its purification and is ready to journey to heaven, the mountain of Purgatory shakes and trembles, and voices sing praises to God. Ironically, the shade who is speaking is Statius, who has just been released after more than five hundred years of purgation. This discussion of why the mountain shook seems to recall the famous storm scene in the Thebaid (1.336–89), in which Statius inserts a passage describing a storm of supernatural dimensions through which Polynices made his way. Ille tamen, modo saxa iugis fugientia ruptis miratus, modo nubigenas e montibus amnes aure pavens, passimque insano turbine raptas pastorum pecorumque domos: non segnius amens incertusque viae per nigra silentia vastum haurit iter; pulsat metus undique et undique frater. (1.364–369) [Yet he, now marveling at the rocks down-hurled from the cloven mountains, now listening in terror to the cloud-born torrents dashing from the hills, and the raging flood whirling away home of shepherd and stall of beast, slackens not his pace, though distraught and uncertain of his way, but through the dark silences devours the lonely stretches of his road; on every side the thought of his brother assails his heart.]

Though storms and their descriptions were an epic convention in Statius’s day, this one is inserted for more than simple aemulatio; the universe

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is involved in the unfolding conflict and mirrors the extreme confusion in the brothers’ hearts.28 The shaking of the mountain and the voices crying out at the end of canto 20 do not seem to disturb Virgil, whose keener insight has liberated him from “fearful doubt,” but they terrify Dante: “un gelo / qual prender suol colui ch’a morte vada” (20.129–130; “and I felt my body numb, seized by the chill of death”). The description of the sudden appearance of the shade of Statius to Dante and Virgil in canto 21 has biblical significance. Ed ecco, sì come ne scrive Luca che Cristo apparve a’ due ch’erano in via, già surto fuor de la sepulchral buca (21.7–9) [when suddenly—just as we read in Luke that Christ, new-risen from the tomb, appeared to the two men on Emmaus road]

The allusion here is to “Et ecce duo ex ilis ibant ipsa die in castellum” in Luke 24:13–17, which narrates the encounter of the two disciples with the risen Lord on the road to Emmaus. Like the puzzled disciples, Dante and Virgil do not recognize the shade that draws near and talks to them. That the poet Statius is compared to the risen Christ stresses the fact of his rebirth and his own purgatorial sojourn and gives his words important and symbolic meaning. As we learn later, in lines 91–93, the shade is the Roman poet Publius Papinius Statius (ca. a.d. 45–96), author of the Thebaid and the Achilleid.29 Dante depicts him as having converted to Christianity. Though there may be no historical or factual basis to Dante’s claim of Statius’s conversion to Christianity, there is ample evidence, as we shall see later, in a careful reading of the Thebaid and his other works, that Statius may have been a secret Christian, as he says, or at least sympathetic to Christian thought. Apparently, Dante was aware of the rumor. Until Dante introduces Beatrice, Statius serves as auxiliary guide, indicating a transition from the reason and classical tradition of Virgil to the grace and Christian theology of Beatrice. Thus Statius appears as a Christlike figure who now points the way to the top of the mountain and to Paradise.

Statius’s Poetic Spark Furthermore, in his encounter with Virgil and Dante in canto 21, Statius asserts that he has received his poetic calling from the Aeneid (“Al mio ardor fuor seme le faville, / che mi scaldar, de la divina fiamma / onde sono allumati più di mille”; 21.94–96; “The spark that kindled my poetic ardor came from the sacred flame that set on fire more than a thousand

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poets: I mean the Aeneid”) and ardently wishes to have lived at the time of Virgil and to have met the great poet. Dante smiles knowingly, and with Virgil’s reluctant permission, reveals to Statius that he is in the presence of his mentor. Overcome by joy, Statius attempts to embrace Virgil’s knees but is gently reminded by Virgil: “Frate, / non far, ché tu se’ ombra e ombra vedi” (21.130–132; “Brother, no! You are a shade; it is a shade you see”). Statius’s response to Virgil’s reminder has a touch of nostalgia: “Or puoi la quantitate / comprender de l’amor ch’a te mi scalda, / quand’ io dismento nostra vanitate / trattando l’ombre come cosa salda” (21.133–136; “Now you understand how much my love for you burns deep in me, when I forget about our emptiness and deal with shadows as with solid thing”). This meeting and identification of Statius in book 21 introduces the themes of poetry and poet that will be critical in the following cantos. Statius admits he had the title of poet, which in his day almost inspired religious veneration, but he could not declare his Christian faith: “‘col nome che più dura e più onora /era io di là,’ ripouse quello spirito, / ‘famoso assai, ma non con fede ancora’” (21.85–87; “‘I bore the title that endures the most and which is honored most,’ that soul replied; ‘renown had not yet the Christian faith’”). Virgil’s Aeneid inspired Statius’s poetic desire, as well as Dante’s and many others’. This powerful scene of literary influence of Virgil and Statius may have led Dante to prevail over any rivalry he may have previously felt. The subtext of rivalry in this canto is resolved by the appearance of a circle of poets, united by their mutual knowledge and love of divine justice and their skill to express it in beautiful verse.30

Religious (Auto)Biography It is noteworthy that Statius’s religious biography is introduced in canto 22 by Virgil’s response to Statius’s expression of his affection and reverence for Virgil at the end of canto 21. “Amore / acceso di virtù, sempre altro accese, / pur che la fiamma sua paresse fore” (22.10–12; “Love, kindled by virtue, always kindles love, if the first flame is clearly visible”) celebrates “love at a distance,” a favorite topos of medieval love poetry. Virgil takes the liberty to raise the question of Statius’s sin, avarice. However, Statius responds that his sin was not avarice but prodigality, which is the opposite of avarice and is punished on the same terrace in Purgatory, and that whenever “the vice of any sin is the rebuttal of its opposite, the two of them wither together here” (22.49–51).31 It is uncertain why Dante specifies the sin as prodigality, which is not generally recognized

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as a mortal sin, unless it refers to the mannerism or style of the first-century poet or to Statius’s elaborate and gratuitous style as he himself notes in the prose prefaces to his Silvae, which scholars claim were unknown in the Middle Ages. Statius relates his change to virtue to meditating on a passage in the Aeneid, book 3, when Virgil cries out against greed and the lust for gold in human nature as he narrates the legend of Polymestor and Polydorus, in which the latter murders Priam’s son and seizes part of the father’s treasure. Shocked by the result of avarice, Statius came to understand that his sin of prodigality, the exact opposite of avarice, was also a sin and repented of it and all his other sins (22.37–41). It seems that Dante accepts and wants us to accept these two sins as different aspects of the same thing.32 Moreover, Virgil has another question for Statius, a more personal one: how can a pagan, like Statius, who sang about the bitter strife of the twin sources of Jocasta’s grief, be a Christian and be allowed into heaven (22.55–60)? His question implicitly reveals the cause for his own damnation: his lack of faith, despite his good works during life, did not reward him with salvation, for “the virtuous pagans are like light surrounded by shadows.”33 Statius replies (22.64–123) that Virgil not only directed him to poetry (and morality) but also that it was Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue that eventually led him to God (Christianity), connecting the two and implying the “sacred role with which Dante invests poetry.”34 According to Dante, “it is the role of poetry in connecting the rare individual with the divine and with divinely inspired poets who follow.”35 quando dicesti: “Secol si rinova; torna giustizia e primo tempo umano, e progenie scende da ciel nova.” (22.70–72) [for you once wrote: “The world is born again; Justice returns, and the first age of man, and a new progeny descends from heaven.”]

In this tercet, Statius alludes to lines 5–7 in Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, which the Middle Ages interpreted as a prophecy of the new Christian age and the birth of Christ: “e progenie scende da ciel nova” (22.72; “and a new progeny descends from heaven”). Lactantius and Augustine seem to suggest this interpretation, Constantine expressed it, and it was generally believed during the Renaissance. Though the probable identity of the newborn child (“nova progenie”) that Virgil mentions is puzzling— suggestions have included the son of Octavian or Antony or Asinius Pollio—Virgil’s poem proclaims the return of a Golden Age that can be viewed as occurring with the age of Christianity and the birth of Christ. I suspect that Dante would find particularly attractive the idea that Virgil

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is prophesying the birth of Christ and not the son of a Roman official. Yet Virgil does ambivalently refer to the age of Saturn (the Roman god of agriculture and the seven-day festival, ambivalent symbol for the succession of kingdoms). Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo. Iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna; iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto. (Fourth Eclogue, 5–7) [the great line of the centuries begins anew. Now the Virgin returns, the reign of Saturn returns; now a new generation descends from heaven on high.]

But Dante’s Statius describes this happening in words that imply the coming of the new progeny, renewal, and the return of justice and innocence as simultaneous events. Già era il mondo tutto quanto pregno dello vera credenza, seminata per li messaggi dell’ eterno regno; E la parola tua sopra toccata sì consonava ai nuovi predicanti, ond’ io a visitarli presti usata. By then, the world was laboring in the birth of the true faith, sown by the messengers of the Eternal Kingdom; and your words, which I just quoted now, so harmonized with what the new preachers were saying then, that I would often go to hear them speak. (22.76–81)

As previously noted, in line 64 in the words of Statius (“Tu prima m’inviasti / verso Parnaso a ber ne le sue grotte, / e poi, appresso Dio, m’alluminasti”; “It was you who directed me to drink Parnassus’s waters—it was you whose radiance revealed the way to God”), Dante’s argument of the implicit connection between poetry and Christianity is now made explicit in line 73 (“Per te poeta fui, per te cristiano”; “Through you I was a poet, through you, a Christian”), where “a chain of poets carries on a chiliastic message heralding the birth of a new civilization.”36

Secret Conversion to Christianity In his personal religious history, at a time when Christianity had spread very little and was confined to small pockets of well-defined activity, Statius first heard the Christian message of the apostles that seems to harmonize with Virgil’s predictions. It was during the reign of Emperor Domitian, who is described by contemporary historians (Tertullian, Eusebius, and Orosius) as a relentless persecutor of Christians. Domitian himself was

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murdered in a.d. 96, and Statius dedicated the Thebaid to him. As a secret Christian, he says “he devoted himself to good works and to the study of Christian ethics.”37 “Statius says he became a Christian before the Greeks draw near to the Theban rivers Ismenus and the Asopus, in book VII of the Thebaid.”38 And after that, he kept his faith a secret out of fear, pretending to be a pagan for many years, working under the veil of paganism. For this lack of zeal he was forced to spend more than four hundred years on the fourth terrace, among the Slothful.39 He says he became a secret Christian like many others at that time, like Nicodemus, the Jewish leader and likely member of the Jewish council who came to Jesus for instructions at night (John 3:1–21). As Statius was a secret Christian, it is understandable that there is no historical record of his conversion to Christianity. But as we have seen so far—and shall see again—a careful reading of book 12 of the Thebaid will reveal allusions to Christianity, in particular to the Altar of Mercy and the return of Theseus.

Discourse on the Soul and the Body As the three poets climb to the next terrace in canto 25, Dante, who first witnessed the thin, hungry shades in canto 23, now finally has the courage to ask how the Gluttonous could have been so thin, since they are only shades and have no food. Virgil attempts to answer by alluding to classical mythology, but appropriately turns to Statius, who offers a long discourse on the relationship of the soul to the body, addressing the generation of the body, the soul breathed into the embryo by the Creator, and finally the nature and formation of the diaphanous body. Virgil addresses Statius: “Ma perché dentro a tuo voler t’adage ecco qui Stazio, ed io lui chiamo e prego che sia or sanator de le tue piage.” (25.28–30) [“But now to set your anxious mind at ease; we have here Statius: I shall call on him to be the doctor for your open wound.”]

Critics have been puzzled why Dante assigns this discourse on the soul and its relationship to the body to Statius. His explanation, influenced at first by Aristotelian physiology, will deal with one of the most important teachings of Christian doctrine, that is, the breathing in of the soul by God (70–72). In Aristotelian doctrine, the First Mover is the generating cause that gives movement and potentiality to form. In Christian teaching, God imprints form created by Nature and breathes movement into it; that is, the intellective soul is given life in the fetus. It is indeed fitting

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that this discourse be made by the Christian Statius, because it would, in part, surpass Virgil’s knowledge and understanding. Thus Virgil introduces Statius as the appropriate doctor or teacher for the wound of doubt, or not knowing. As Statius graciously accepts Virgil’s invitation to lecture on the relationship of the soul and the body, he now becomes a translator for both Dante and Virgil, despite his earlier admission that he was Virgil’s disciple. “Se la veduta etterna gli dislego,” rispuose Stazio, “là dove tu sie, discolpi me non potert’ io far niego.” (25.31–33) [“If, in your presence, I explain to him,” Statius replied, “God’s view of things, it is because I can deny no wish of yours.”]

It is appropriate and in Dante’s interest that Statius as translator makes the connection between Classical and Christian traditions.40 Statius begins his discourse on the formation on human reproduction by addressing Dante as his figurative “son”: “Se le parole mie / figlio, la mente tua guarda e riceve, / lume ti fieno al come che tu dìe” (25.34– 36; “Son, let your mind take in / and ponder carefully these words of mine; / they will explain the ‘how’ that troubles you”). The act of receiving and pondering knowledge will mirror impregnation. He provides a three-part lecture on the body and soul: creation and development of the embryo (37–60) based on Aristotle, development and creation of the soul (61–78) according to Christian doctrine, and after death the formation of the aerial body (79–108), apparently Dante’s invention. Interestingly, Statius describes the relationship of the soul to the aerial body with respect to rays and reflection, indicating the categories of imitation and separation. Though there is no visible connection between body and soul after death, the aerial body can imitate the movements of the soul. Freed of its body, the soul continues to possess vegetative and sensitive faculties as well as the divine. Furthermore, according to Dante’s Statius, while the vegetative and sensitive faculties remain dormant, the intelligence, will, and memory are keener and more active than before. This theory of the relationship of the soul to the aerial body after death seems to answer Dante’s query regarding the emaciation of the Gluttonous shades. However, this theory is not found in Christian doctrine. According to Christian theology, the soul is separated from the body at death until Resurrection Day, when it will receive a post-resurrection body sensitive to punishment. Yet Thomas Aquinas says that the liberated soul has the potential for suffering pain by fire; and St. Augustine notes that such a soul has the potential to experience and remember the pain of fire.41

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Although Statius’s discourse on the formation of the soul and the body may seem “abstract,” “clinical,” and “detached” to a recent modern critic who attempts to engage an ancient Latin auctores and to seek “existential reality” and “erotic” sensualism, Dante does not undercut, exploit, or restrict Statius in any way. To make such a claim is to have overlooked Aristotle, Avicenna, Averroës, and Latin commentaries on the subject.

The Thebaid as “Nutrice” of Christian Poet To understand and appreciate how the Thebaid might have appealed to Dante as “nutrice” of the Christian poet, I direct the reader’s attention to book 12, the fourth and final section of the epic, which is short and swift-moving. It narrates the arrival of the suppliant women at Athens (12.464–479), the Altar of Mercy (12.480–518), and the return of Theseus and Evadne’s plea (12.519–611), and concludes with Theseus’s promise of aid, the march to Thebes, the cataloging of Athenians, the confrontation of Theseus and Creon, the end of gens profana, the coming of peace, and the burial of the Argives. Book 12 tells of Theseus’s role in bringing the Theban wars to their final bloody conclusion. Theseus, heroic prince of Athens, is mentioned in Inferno IX, 54, as having once descended into Hades to rescue Proserpina. The Thebaid concludes with the victory of virtue over sin. Warmongers prevailed in books 7–11 in the exercise of madness and ira, as well as human degradation and folly without any restraint. Eteocles and Polynices are dead, Oedipus is in exile, and cruel Creon is king of Thebes. Some early twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century critics claim that Statius should have ended his epic with book 11.42 But to have ended the narrative with the death of Oedipus and the accession of Creon would have negated some of Statius’s major themes and left the Thebaid as a statement of extreme skepticism. In book 12, a higher vision of man and his fate is exposed and made explicit. It has been prefigured in the darkest moments of the story and in the midst of apparently universal depravity by those who followed pietas. Statius’s epic is a story of redemption, renewal, and the triumph of good over sin and evil.

The Altar of Mercy Juno leads the suppliant women at Athens, who are mourning not only the loss of their husbands and warriors but Creon’s refusal to grant them

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proper burial rites, sacred rites in antiquity and in Christianity. Statius juxtaposes this pathetic scene with an elaborate description of ara clementia, the Altar of Mercy at Athens. Urbe fuit media nulli concessa potentum ara deum; mitis posuit Clementia sedem, et miseri fecere sacram; sine supplice nunquam illa novo, nulla damnavit vota repulsa: auditi quicumque rogant, noctesque diesque ire datum et solis numen placare querellis. (12.481–486) [There was in the midst of the city an altar belonging to no god of power; gentle Clemency had there her seat, and the wretched made it sacred; never lacked she a new suppliant, none did she condemn or refuse their prayers.]

Those who approach the shrine of Clementia need bring nothing but their wretchedness and pain. They will find no statue of the goddess, for she has her habitation in the hearts and minds of men: parca superstitio: non turea flamma, nec altus accipitur sanguis: lacrimis altaria sudant, maestarumque super libamina secta comarum pendent et vestes mutata sorte relictae. mite nemus circa, cultuque insigne verendo vittatae laurus et supplicis arbor olivae. nulla autem effigies, nulli commissa metallo forma dei, mentes habitare et pectora gaudet. (487–494) [no costly rites are hers; she accepts no incense flame, no blood deep dwelling; tears flow upon her altar, sad offerings of severed tresses hang above it, and raiment left when Fortune changed. Around is a grove of gentle trees, marked by the cult of the venerable, wool-entwined laurel and the suppliant olive. No image is there, to no metal is the divine form entrusted, in hearts and minds does the goddess delight to dwell.]

These lines make explicit what the epic has implied throughout, that is, that man’s salvation lies within himself. Gentle Clementia is not a goddess of power but represents the supreme virtue that can encourage man in a dark and distressed world. Around her altar crowd those in need, in pain, in grief, seeking a cure; only the prosperous are absent (495–496). There, mankind may find sanctuary from passion and tyranny, and from the cruel caprice of fortune: “sic sacrasse loco commune animantibus aegris / confugium, unde procul starent iraeque minaeque / regnaque, et a iustis Fortuna recederet aris” (12.503–505; “so now sanctified in this spot a common refuge for travailing souls, whence the wrath and threatenings of monarchs might be far removed”). Not only her Altar but her gift is available to all; there is no crime, grief, or suffering that cannot be given relief and consolation at the

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Altar. Oedipus himself and “funus Olynthi” will shortly experience its redemptive and holy power as noted by Lactantius Placidus.43 At the Altar of Mercy the works of evil and darkness are excluded, and all mankind is renewed. Clementia’s universal power exceeds time and place. The “Ara Clementia” is indeed essential to the denouement of the epic. Early scholars of Statius recognized in his noble definition of Clementia “a spirit akin to that of Christianity”: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).44 In these lines, if anywhere, we can see why Dante saw in Statius a convert to the Christian faith and therefore why he assigned him the role in the Commedia as guide, translator, and instructor of the development of the human soul.45 Clementia is not a warrior, though she prepares us for the victory of Theseus; she is not always associated with the defeated; and her active achievements are compassion and consolation in human hearts.46 Statius’s description of Clementia became a locus classicus in the Middle Ages, commented upon extensively by Lactantius Placidus47 and others, and led J. H. Mozley, editor of the Loeb Classical Library edition of Statius, to note: “the poet gives beautiful expression to the old Athenian ideal of humanity, lines that breathe the spirit of a purer religion than any known to the ancient world and may well have given rise to Dante’s belief that Statius was a Christian.”48 If not a public Christian because of his role as court poet in the reign of Domitian, perhaps he was a secret Christian like Nicodemus, a Pharisee, a marginal Jew, and ruler of the Jews, who comes to Jesus at night (John 3:1:21). Moreover, Statius describes Athens as a welcoming land, blessed by the gods, and as the home of the Eleusinian cult (501–502) and the seat of the Altar of Mercy. The reference to Eleusis is foreshadowed at the end of book l in the allusion to frugifer Osiris, who represented the god of agriculture; and the use of the words hominem novum (501) is particularly noteworthy when we consider the term homo novus and its political associations. The term new man, according to Statius, refers to the renewed and transformed humankind,49 with respect to the Stoic notion of recurrence, of the recreation of the world in its “antiquus ordo”; the old inhuman order, he predicts, will vanish and a new variety of men will appear.50

Return of Theseus The coming of Theseus, the great peacemaker, just and merciful, at the end of book 12 marks the climax of the whole poem and puts an end to

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the bloody Theban wars. C. S. Lewis wrote that “the consequent cutting away of all the tangled foulness of Thebes . . . is told rapidly, as it ought to be . . . because it is essential that we should have the impression, not of new wars following upon the old, but of awaking from nightmare, of sudden quiet after storm, of a single sword-stroke ending forever the abominations.”52 Statius represents Theseus as a model of a merciful and just king, a Roman triumphator, worthy to rule over Thebes, the home of Clementia. The Argive widows who are mourning the death of their husbands and warriors and the lack of their burial rites see him returning to Athens in triumphal procession after his victory over the Amazons accompanied by Hippolyte, the Queen of the Amazons and now his Queen. Ironically, perhaps satirically, Statius describes her as barbara (538) and notes that she attracts the attention of everyone, especially the Attic dames, who gaze at her with sidelong glances and hushed whispers for having broken her country’s austere laws. Through the marriage bond she has become friendly and patient, her hair has been trimmed, her bosom covered by robe. She converses with Athenian society and comes to bear an offspring to her mighty lord (532–539). Like the Scythians and Thracians, the Amazons serve to represent lawless societies and primitive violence. By conquering them, Theseus has become a champion of order and civilization, and as such only he can bring to an end to the history of crime and sin at Thebes. It is appropriate and noteworthy that it is Evadne, the widow of Capaneus, the most impious of the Argives, who now represents the suppliants (545) and pleads with Theseus, the most pious of kings, for help against Creon’s savagery. She says that Creon’s order not to bury the bodies of slain Theban warriors offends Nature and divine law and demands vengeance (561); the time of hatred and passion has come to an end: “nam quis erit saevire modus? bellavimus esto; / sed cecidere odia et tristes mors obruit iras” (573–574; “For what limit will he set to his fury? We made war, I grant it; but what hatred is assuaged, and death has put an end to sullen wrath”). She finally declares “Theseus a second Hercules, a true replica of the greatest vindicator of good in the world” (584). “Just as he once liberated Athens from the impious demands of the Cretan tyrant and in the killing of the Minotaur, the image of unnatural violence, so now Theseus will free Thebes from Creon” (668–671). Theseus is persuaded by Evadne’s plea and is moved immediately by just anger (“iusta mox concitus ira”; 589), and he commits to undertake the mission to help the dead and the oppressed. Yet he first dispatches Phegeus, a messenger, to plead with Creon: “aut Danais edice rogos aut proelia Thebis” (598; “the Danais must burn or Thebes must fight”).

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The tyrant is first offered a chance to repent and change his mind. But when that offer is foolishly rejected, the destruction of Creon and Thebes becomes inevitable (681). Theseus is the prince of mercy, but he is also devoted to justice. The intervention of Theseus may be viewed as the time of renewal, the beginning of a new cycle of history. Statius now compares Theseus, King of Athens, with Jupiter, King of the Gods (650–655), and so implies that Theseus, in his true devotion to justice and to law, is an earthly reflection of the supreme god. Statius rapidly narrates Theseus’s promise of aid, the catalog of Athenians, the march to Thebes, the confrontation of Theseus and cruel Creon, the defeat of Creon, the end of strife, the restoration of law and order, the coming of peace, and the burial of the Argives. The beauty of the ending of the poem raises the question of the structure of the epic, which has been fraught with difficulties; similar controversies exist concerning the epics of Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Silius.53 In general, scholars seem to conclude that “the epic is divided into four sections (I.49–720; II.1–743; III.1–721; IV.1–498) and that each section contains subdivisions, correspondences, responsions and subtle contrasts which enable Statius to create a single, cohesive epic.”54 A structural tension binds together the “subordinate unity” of book, episode, and section to the “total unity” of the complete narrative. In summary, “the Thebaid must be appreciated as an unified epic in which nothing is otiose or redundant.”55 The philosophical basis of the poem—a mutual interdependent chain of events bound together and to the whole— reflects Stoic harmony or sympatheia or the all-inclusive unity of the Stoic mundus. Thus the Thebaid is a representation of the cosmos.56 Dante has good reasons to assign Statius the roles he plays in the Purgatorio. As we have seen, from his careful reading the Thebaid in a glossed manuscript with notes, he believed that Statius was a secret Christian—not an fictional invention on his part—and thus an appropriate lecturer on the discourse on the formation and relationship of the soul and the body. As a Christian, Statius is a perfect model of Dante’s argument of the sacred connection of poetry and Christianity, and a careful reading of the Thebaid may serve as “nutrice” of the Christian poet. The interpretation of Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue and the coming of the progeny had already happened in the time of Statius, which is implied in lines 70–72 of canto 22. It is appropriate that he witnessed the preaching and teaching of the disciples, which would surpass Virgil’s knowledge and understanding. It is also appropriate that Statius serve the roles of translator and interpreter of the Slothful and of the distinction between

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avarice and prodigality in purgatory. Dante found Statius’s empathy for the supernatural and the spiritual appealing and useful. Furthermore, the more able we are to refrain from reading our own conventions in earlier literature, especially the writings of ancient Latin auctores, and from engaging them as “creatures like ourselves,”57 the better we shall be able to understand and, actually, to appreciate their literature and to understand the peculiar appeal of the literature of our own time.

Notes 1. See Cesare Vasoli, Otto saggi per Dante (Florence: Le Lettere, 1995). See also Giorgio Padoan, L’ultima opera di Giovanni Boccaccio: le Esposizioni sopra il Dante (Padua: Cedam, 1959). Jan M. Ziolkowski, Nota Bene: Reading Classics and Writing Melodies in the Early Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 30. 2. Webster’s New World Dictionary, 4th ed. For more detailed discussion, see Frank Kermode, The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983); and J. M. Coetzee, “What Is a Classic?” Nationalism vs Internationalism: (Inter)National Dimensions of Literature in English, ed. Wolfgang Zach and Ken L. Goodwin (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1996), 63–75. 3. See Ziolkowski, Nota Bene, 29–32. For further information on this important distinction, see Birger Munk Olsen, I Classici nel canone scolastico altomedievale, Quadderni di cultura mediolatina 1 (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 1991); and Günter Glauche, Schullektüre im Mittelalter: Entstehung und Wandlungen des Lektürekanons bis 1200 nach den Quellen dargestellt, Münchener Beiträge zur Mediaevistik und Renaissance-Forschung 5 (Munich: Arbeo-Gesellschaft, 1970); see also Silvia Walli, Melodien aus mittelalterlichen Horaz-Handschriften: Edition und Interpretation der Quellen, Monumenta Monodica Medii Aevi: Subsidia 3 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2002); and Gundela Bobeth, “Vergil, Statius, Lucan und Terenz in der Vertonung des Mittelalters, Interpretatorische Erschliessung von Neumierungen in Handschriften des 9.-12. Jahrhunderts,” 2 vols. (Ph.D. dissertation, Universität Basel, 2004). (A revised form has been announced as forthcoming as Monumenta Monodica Medii Aevi: Subsidia 5.) 4. Ziolkowski, Nota Bene, 30. 5. Aldo Scaglione, “The Classics in the Middle Ages,” The Classics in the Middle Ages: Papers of the Twentieth Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, ed. Aldo S. Bernardo and Saul Levin (Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1990), 343–362, 352. 6. Ziolkowski, Nota Bene, 30. 7. C. S. Lewis, “Dante’s Statius,” Medium Aevum 25 (1956), 133–139. 8. Lactantius Placidus, In Statii Thebaida Commentum, ed. Robert Dale Sweeney, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1997); Fulgentii ut Fingitur Planciadis super Thebaiden Commentariolum, ed. Robert Dale Sweeney (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1997); Anonymi in Statii Achilleida Commentum, ed. Robert Dale Sweeney (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1997). 9. Jacques Boussard, “Le classement des manuscrits de la ‘Thébaïde’ de Stace,” Revue des études latines 30 (1953), 223–228; P. Papinius Statius, P. Papinio Stazio

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11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

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L’Achilleide, ed. Silvia Jannaccone (Florence: Barbera, 1950), 6–15; Paul M. Clogan, ed., The Medieval Achilleid of Statius (Leiden: Brill, 1965). In this study, I use the following glossed manuscripts of the Thebaid, which I have examined in situ: Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurentiana, plut. 38, 6, s.XI. (Some of the folios are in the hand of Boccaccio, who once owned it.) Bamberg, Staatliche Bibliothek, MS. Class. 47, of the eleventh century, fol. 1a-92b. Bern, Bürgerbibliothek, MS. A 91, fr. 6. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliotek, clm 18059. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat 9344. See L. Legras, Étude sur la Thebaide de Stace (Paris,1905), 44–45. See Harry Snijder, P. Papinius Statius, Thebaid: A Commentary on Book III with Text and Introduction (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1968), Thebaid III, 82; Chaim Wirszubski, Libertas as a Political Idea at Rome during the Late Republic and Early Principate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), 146–147, 164–165; Ramsay MacMullen, Enemies of the Roman Order: Treason, Unrest and Alienation in the Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 64–65; David Vessey, Statius and the Thebaid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 113–116. See A. Reussner, “De statio et Euripide” (diss., Halle, 1921). See A. J. Gossage, “Virgil and the Flavian Epic,” Virgil, ed. D. R. Dudley, Studies in Latin Literature and Its Influence (London: Routledge, 1969), 79–81. See Gossage, “Virgil,” 81–82. See Gossage, “Virgil,” 81–82. See Vessey, Statius, 75. See Petronius, Satyricon, 118; on Lucan’s anthropocentric approach, see Ugo Piacentini, Osservazioni sulla Tecnica epica di Lucano (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1963), 18ff. See Roger P. Hinks, Myth and Allegory in Ancient Art, Studies of the Warburg Institute 6 (London: Warburg Institute, 1939), 108ff. See C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1936), 56. See H. Heuvel, Publii Papinii Statii Thebaidos Liber I versione Batava commentarioque exegetico instructus (diss. Groningen; Zutphen: Nauta, 1932), 130–31. See Vessey, Statius, 230. See H. M. Mulder, P. Papinii Statii Thebaidos Liber II commentario exegetico aestheticoque instructus (diss. Groningen, 1954), 90–91. Vessey, Statius, 260. Vessey, Statius, 261. Ettig, G. “Acheruntica, sive descensuum apud veteres enarratior,” Leipz Stud. 13 (1891), 251–415. See Apollodorius 3.77 and Propertius 2.34.39. Statius was influenced by the storm in Aeneid I. See W. H. Friedich, “Episches unwetter,” in Festschrift Bruno Snell (Munich: Beck, 1956), 85–87; see also Lucan’s remarkable storm in 5.504ff; and Brooks Otis, Virgil: A Study in Civilised Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), 241. Dante in line 89 confuses Stazio with Lucius Statius Ursulus, a rhetorician of Toulouse, a confusion also made by Boccaccio and Chaucer. Lucius Statius Ursulus is also the author of the Silvae, a miscellaneous collection of occasional poems that scholars claim was unknown in the Middle Ages until Poggio discovered it in the Renaissance. Although Statius says in his

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31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

Medievalia et Humanistica religious biography in the Pugatorio that he converted to Christianity and Dante and Virgil seem to believe him, as I shall discuss later literary critics continue to claim there is no historical factual evidence of his conversion. See, for example, Winthrop Wetherbee, The Ancient Flame: Dante and the Poets (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 163. Mark Musa, Dante’s Divine Comedy: Purgatory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), where he notes that “the correlation ‘mamma-nutrice’ was traditional, appearing in Augustine, Isidore of Seville, and Brunetto Latini” (223). Manfredi Porena, La Divina Commedia di Dante Alighieri, vol. 2, Purgatorio (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1964), suggests “that Dante invested in him his own measure of the sin in order to confront it” (219). But Umberto Bosco and Giovanni Reggio, eds., La divina commedia (Florence: Le Monnier, 1979), argue that “it is more likely that Dante read of Statius’s failing in a source unknown to us,” probably a gloss in Dante’s manuscript of Statius. Thomas Aquinas defines prodigality: “secundum se considerate, minus peccatum est quam avaritia” (Summa theologica I–II, question 19, a. 3)—a “less serious but nonetheless culpable form of behavior” (Musa, Dante’s Divine Comedy, 229). See Inferno II, 28–30, and IV, 32–42. See Paradiso I, 33–36 (Dante’s invocation to Apollo); and Porena, La divina commedia, who notes that according to Virgil it is poetry, not God, that comes first. Musa, Dante’s Divine Comedy, 231. Musa, Dante’s Divine Comedy, 231. Musa, Dante’s Divine Comedy, 232. Musa, Dante’s Divine Comedy, 232. Musa, Dante’s Divine Comedy, 232. See Musa, Dante’s Divine Comedy, 255. See Summa theologica suppl., q. 70, a. 1–3; and De Trinitate X, xi, 18. Harold Edgeworth Butler, Post-Augustan Poetry from Seneca to Juvenal (Oxford: Clarendon, 1909), 210; and Wetherbee, Ancient Flame, who notes the equivocal treatment of its narrative of historical disaster, ending with a sense of loss (168), and that “it is with a sense of loss, rather than hope, that the poem ends” (181). Vol. 1, p. 654. A. W. Verrell, “Dante on the Baptism of Statius,” Collected Literary Essays: Classical and Modern, ed. M. A. Bayfield and J. Duff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), 181–203, 219–235. See also Vessey, Statius, 311; C. S. Lewis, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 99; and J. H. Mozley, “Virgil and the Silver Latin Epic,” PVS 3 (1963–1964), 21. For a contrary view, see Wetherbee, Ancient Flame, 180. Lactantius Placidus, 651–654. Weatherbee, The Ancient Flame, p. 190. P. Papinis Statius, Statius, vol. 1., ed. J. H. Mozley, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1928), xvii. On the idea of salvation at Eleusis, see E. O. James, Sacrifice and Sacrament (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962), 179–182; see also Seneca, NQ 3.30.7–8. Vessey, Statius, 310. Butler, Post-Augustan Poetry, 210; and Wetherbee, Ancient Flame, 168, 181. Lewis, Allegory of Love, 55.

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53. See Otis, Virgil, 217–218, 313–315; P. Venini, “Studi sulla Tebaide di Stazio: la composizione,” RIL 95 (1961), 55–88; B. Kytzler, “Beobachtungen zu den Wettspielen in der Thebais des Statius,” Traditio 24 (1968), 1–15; and B. Kytzler, “Imitatio und aemulatio in der Thebais des Statius,” Hermes 97 (1969), 209–232; Vessey, Statius, 317–328. 54. See Vessey, Statius, 328. 55. See Vessey, Statius, 328. 56. For a contrary and unconvincing view of the structure and unity of the Thebaid, see Wetherbee, Ancient Flame, 168. 57. See, for example, the English Romantic critic Walter Savage Landor, “To Chaucer” (1863), The Complete Works of Walter Savage Landor, ed. T. Earle Welby, 16 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1927–1936).

Review Notices Laura Ashe, Fiction and History in England, 1066–1200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 244. 4 b/w illustrations.

In recent years, one of the most productive areas of research in the languages, literature, and social history of medieval England has been the idea of Englishness itself—that is, of English nationhood. The Anglo-Saxons certainly had it, but was there continuity after the arrival of the Normans, or was Englishness only reinvented later? If the latter, when did this happen, and how was it expressed, and by whom, during the century that followed the calamity of 1066, when the ruling elite looked to French, not English, poets, storytellers, and chroniclers for their entertainment and the validation of their cultural identity? In her Fiction and History in England, 1066–1200, Laura Ashe asserts that a sense of Englishness was in fact being reestablished remarkably soon after the Conquest, expressed not in the English language but in Anglo-Norman and Latin works, in which contemporary writers asserted English nationality and effectively refuted Normanitas itself. This is not, of course, a new idea; R. H. C. Davis noted thirty years ago that the Normans were calling themselves English well before the end of the twelfth century, and evidence of a national consciousness has been evinced by other scholars, such as Susan Crane, in her important work on the insular Anglo-Norman romance. But Ashe argues effectively, with a wide range of reference, for the speed and universality of the phenomenon. For her, the key to the continuity of national feeling lies in the land itself and in the “loving ownership” of its historical identity by successive occupiers. Conquered England “offered a cultural and political inheritance of astonishing force, which eradicated the identity of the Normans, making them Engleis within decades.” Ashe garners her evidence in four substantial chapters, dealing with various clusters of texts. In chapter 1, “The Normans in England: A Question of Place,” these include the Bayeux tapestry, in her interpretation of which Ashe endorses recent tendencies to see it, not as a partisan text, supporting either the Norman or the English cause, but as politically neutral. Made in England, probably within two years of the Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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Conquest, it deliberately presents its account of recent history as fact, without need of interpretation, and, on the basis of an “ideology of the real,” it projects a conciliation between English and Norman and a concept of nationhood that is not Anglo-Norman but Engleis. Ashe contrasts with this a historical poem, the Roman de Rou by Wace, which remained unfinished and little read, she suggests, because it was out of step with cultural conditions in giving prominence to the Normans and emphasizing the rupture of the Conquest. In the same writer’s immensely popular Brut, on the other hand, the most important emphasis is on the land of Britain (which Wace calls Engleterre), not on the fluctuating ethnic groups of the people who inhabit it. As noted, the “transhistorical” value of the land is one of Ashe’s central themes, and in chapter 2, “‘Nos Engleis’: War, Chronicle, and the New English,” she illustrates it with an examination of Fantosme’s chronicle of Henry II’s war of 1173–1174. Here Fantosme develops “a new and fundamental cultural value . . . a collective self-definition not by ethnicity and class but by land and a people’s bond with the land.” In chapter 3, “Historical Romance: A Genre in the Making,” Fantosme’s chronicle is compared with the Romance of Horn, and Ashe surprisingly finds common ground: the romance signals a new and distinctively insular subgenre that mirrors the chronicle’s national consciousness. It is prompted in part by the success of the English king, Henry II, in the 1170s, which is contrasted with the relative failures of his French counterparts. In a thoughtful final chapter, “The English in Ireland: Ideologies of Race,” Ashe uses a variety of clerical and lay texts in French and Latin (including notably those of Gerald of Wales) to suggest the almost accidental way in which an optimistic English nationalism was put at the service of a colonizing program in which that nationalism ultimately defined itself in terms of difference and promoted itself through discrimination, with results that were to endure tragically. Students of the concept of medieval English nationhood, and its literary expression, will find much of value in this stimulating book and will be obliged to engage with its arguments and with the texts that it highlights. One of the most positive side effects of reading it is exposure to texts that too many of us rarely look at, despite their exceptional interest. Richard Marsden University of Nottingham

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Fatemeh Chehregosha Azinfar, Atheism in the Medieval Islamic and European World: The Influence of Persian and Arabic Ideas of Doubt and Skepticism on Medieval European Literary Thought. Bethesda, Md.: Ibex, 2008. Pp. 271.

In her 1999 Harvard Ph.D. dissertation, now translated into a book publication, Fatemeh Chehregosha Azinfar addresses a highly intriguing and challenging topic, atheism both in medieval Islam and in the European Middle Ages. We can be certain that the Catholic Church had to struggle for a long time to achieve absolute dominance, yet it might be doubtful whether this goal was ever fully achieved. Paganism, hereticism, and all kinds of religious deviance continued throughout the entire period, if not until today (see, for instance, Ludo J. R. Milis, ed., The Pagan Middle Ages, n.p.: Boydell Press, 1991). Atheism, however, is a very different matter, and scholars have mostly regarded it as a concept that emerged not before the modern age. Granted, there was the famous condemnation of 219 statements allegedly uttered by Paris university professors, announced in 1277 by Bishop Tempier in order to mute the rebellious philosophers, but these were polemical statements and reflections of a growing concern with rationality within the Christian universe (see Kurt Flasch, Aufklärung im Mittelalter? [Mainz: Dieterich], 1989, 22). Azinfar, however, believes that she can detect clear indications of atheism long before the eighteenth century, and she discovers it in all kinds of Arabic and medieval European texts. She examines, above all, A Thousand and One Nights, the Chanson de Roland, Dante’s Divina Commedia, the Pearl Poem, and Chaucer’s The House of Fame. Unfortunately, with only two or three exceptions, she does not work with the original texts and draws most of her primary information from secondary sources. A quick perusal also reveals that her entire study is mostly built on quotations culled from older scholarship published up to the late 1980s, whereas the really relevant studies on this topic seem to have been neglected (Friedrich Niewöhner et al., eds., Atheismus im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance, [Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz], 1999). Surprisingly, Azinfar reveals a tendency to read specific interpretations into her lengthy quotations, which have no clear bearing on her larger argument concerning the development of atheism. For Azinfar, the rediscovery of Aristotle in the twelfth century (the specifics of the whole translation process at that time are not discussed here) meant the development of atheistic thought, which, as she believes, can be identified primarily in literary texts. It remains unclear how Aristotle’s texts might have influenced literary texts in concrete Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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terms. It seems most problematic to jump to the claim that because the Persian epic of Wis and Ramin was the basis for Béroul’s Tristan et Yseult—certainly an intriguing idea, but it has never been proven, not even by the few, hardly trustworthy scholars cited here—and because there we find some expressions of doubt about the lovers’ fidelity, this would be evidence for atheism. Citing (but I think misinterpreting) the famous Peter Dronke, Azinfar claims that the rise of medieval love poetry implied that “the position of God was replaced by that of lovers” (21), which cannot be really supported by internal evidence. Just a little further, Azinfar opines that Saint Paul had sanctified “celibacy over marriage” (23), yet she ignores his important emphasis on marriage as a better solution than to burn with carnal lust (1 Corinthians 7:9). She cites Georges Duby’s observation of the population growth in the early Middle Ages as support for her claim that there were significant contacts between East and West (23), although the one does not have anything to do with the other, and Duby does not even suggest that! Of course there were many economic, political, and religious contacts, and also literary ones (see Sabine Obermaier, Das Fabelbuch als Rahmenerzählung [Heidelburg: Winter], 2004). But most of the evidence adduced here regarding specific exchanges on an intellectual level remains rather elusive and has hardly any bearing on the larger issue at stake—atheism. For this reviewer it often remains rather mysterious what the author has in mind and how she intends to establish connections between individual historical aspects. I find passages such as the following one most astonishing: “In subsequent periods the plague and the resurgence of the fear of the unknown reinforced the power of religion. In the East, the attack of the Mongols in the thirteenth century proved fatally devastating. When the poetic tradition was resurrected from the ashes of destruction, mysticism, the idea of total surrender to God, and the rejection of rationality and the Aristotelian philosophy followed. Hence the joint and uniform ‘renaissance’ that the East and the West underwent came to a halt” (29). I cannot make much sense out of it. One serious problem consists of the most eclectic combination of references, whether it is John F. Kennedy, Rabelais, Gabriel Marcel, Foucault, Habermas, and, without any preparation, suddenly Jean de Meun, and then also Shelley. Whenever any of these authors refers to an inner truth, or to a conflict in our understanding of reality per se, she equates their opinions with the strategy by Shaharazad to “oppos[e] the myth of creation” (44), which for Azinfar seems to be the basis of atheistic thinking.

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The author builds her case of alleged atheism in the East mostly on A Thousand and One Nights, which should be the closest to her heart considering her study of Persian literature at Harvard. Disappointingly, her arguments are badly marred by many non sequiturs and syllogisms, for instance, when she correlates Shaharazad’s narrative strategy with Milton’s examination of virtue (1644) and Swift’s criticism of the Church. Azinfar has no hesitation to equate a female rape victim’s words in the literary text with Abelard’s thesis on the nature of sin (47) and then to conclude from this that “we find an acrid and critical series of comments against the persona of God” (48). I suppose that for her any satirical, critical, or sarcastic statement about religion or God proves to be tantamount to atheism, and hence A Thousand and One Nights suddenly turns out to fall into this category because “an artistic void is created in which the status of the Creator as the organizer of events is modified” (63). Examining medieval French literature, the author comments that “irony is the primary literary tool used in . . . ” (121) and then rattles off a whole list of some of the major texts, including Christine de Pizan’s La Cité des Dames, where I cannot find much irony at all, nor any interest in a debate on the existence of God. Not enough, Azinfar then claims that the Chanson de Roland “was the basis for all the subversive arguments found in the French tradition and that the more obviously sarcastic writers, such as Villon and Rabelais, found their legitimate expression in La Chanson de Roland” (121). How could Dante’s Divina Commedia be “profane” in its nature (154)? It strikes me as a fundamental misreading to view Dante the pilgrim as a spokesperson for those who do not believe at all. Even citing Michel Foucault in this context, who only addresses the treatment of pain and torture in hell (154–155), does not lend any strength to the author’s attempt to detect atheism here. Neither her examination of Abelard’s philosophy nor of the Pearl poem, not to speak of that of Chaucer in the last chapter, offers any support for the thesis of atheism. This does not mean that doubt about the existence of God did not exist in the Middle Ages, but the evidence assembled here does not carry the desired weight at all. There is no bibliography, and the few footnotes sprinkled throughout the book reflect a dearth of scholarship. But there is, at least, an index for all names. Atheism in the Medieval Islamic and European World does not convince this reader and actually deeply disappoints even in some of the most fundamental aspects of scholarship. Albrecht Classen University of Arizona

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Cammy Brothers, Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008. Pp. xi, 259.

This book offers an interpretation of Michelangelo’s architectural drawings, not in the traditional sense of identifying the authoritative blueprints from which the buildings spring, but as a body of work in itself, with an internal dynamic—the creative process—that sets Michelangelo apart from almost any other architect of his time. Brothers argues that the relatively new practice of sketching on paper combined with Michelangelo’s habit of conceptualizing in terms of fragments to result in a type of free-associative technique. For example, although like his contemporaries Michelangelo studied ancient buildings, he did so largely secondhand, relying in particular on the drawings from the so-called Codex Corner, Bernardo Volpaia’s volume of studies compiled around 1515. Moreover, he was happily selective and untroubled that his eventual formulations might seem incorrect to an antiquarian: as Brothers aptly puts it, Michelangelo “took advantage of existing research by pursuing it as little as possible” (48). Disassembling fragments, Michelangelo made them whole again by reference to the formal language of their components, following not the guide of archaeology but the judgment of the eye and the manual rhythm of pen and chalk. Brothers proposes that much of Michelangelo’s architecture derived from thinking on the page, what today’s art teachers might call drawing as research, which resulted in innovative compositions—hence the “invention” of the title. This was unexpected, as her interest in rhetoric had me anticipating that “invention” would be the inventione found in rhetorical manuals, that is, the initial conceit. The surprise was nevertheless welcome, for Brothers’s use of the word is in tune with what occurs, then and now, in an actual studio. Indeed, threaded through the book is her general interest in the sense of drawing as creative thinking. She is also sensitive to its practical demands, often noting how pen produces affects different from those of chalk. For example, she notes of Michelangelo’s life drawing that “he used soft black chalk to render the body as if it possessed the sheen of polished marble, while he returned to cross-hatching to suggest the scraping motion of his chisel across a marble surface” (144; although the point is vitiated by the fact that the two supporting drawings cited are both chalk). Later, she applied the idea to architectural drafting: “[In the Medici Chapel] he used pen for the swift expression of an idea and red chalk to study effects of light” Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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(163). The implication is that Michelangelo’s architecture comes to life on the page, before it is built. No less significantly, the way Michelangelo handles his implements goes to her general thesis of invention; rarely using square or compass, almost all Michelangelo’s drawings, even those detailed studies normally depicted as combinations of geometrical forms, are drawn freehand, which limits their value as templates for masons, while maximizing their value as expressions of the hand. Here Brothers might have invoked the critique of Michelangelo as a champion of the irregular. Vincenzo Scamozzi likely had Michelangelo in mind when in L’idea del architettura universale (1615) he railed against architects who think “they can design [in free-hand] the details and limbs of their figures just like painters, thus producing [works that are] deformed . . . those who want to achieve close to perfection in matters of mouldings and profiles . . . must not form them with any other rule and method, nor hope to find a more perfect theory, than that of provided by the compass and the square” (6:147). In contrast, in a 1701 book on turnery, Charles Plumier praised Michelangelo for designing with the eye, which ensured that his génie was invested in the work (in J. Connors, “Ars Tornandi, Baroque Architecture and the Lathe,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtald Institutes 53 [1990], 226). His drawing practice would thus become a touchstone in the eventual contrast between romantic and mechanical approaches to classical design, the one prioritizing the supple line of the body, the other the rigorous line of geometry. The book’s content is also unexpected. Instead of a monographic account of Michelangelo’s architectural drawings, from the studies of San Lorenzo’s facade in Florence to the Porta Pia in Rome forty years later, Brothers delivers a four-part essay. Chapter 1 examines, in reference to the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the narrowness of his sculptural and pictorial figures, how all too frequently they are variants of each other, differing (rotated, reassembled, reversed) manifestations of a singular graphical vision. Chapter 2 transfers this pictorial approach to the composition of architectural details, particularly profiles, which he drew with the same restless obsessiveness that animated his figural studies. Chapter 3 explores, via San Lorenzo and the Medici Chapel, how the graphic dialogue between sculptural body and architectural frame gradually resulted in the dissolution of the boundary between the two, by which she means that architectural members increasingly operate as part of a pictorial display, a dissolution achieved more emphatically in the drawings than the executed buildings. Chapter 4 applies the results of the earlier chapters to the library of San Lorenzo, providing an uncommonly illuminating account of the building’s bizarre and enthralling energy: Brothers conveys how the library engages the whole body of the

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viewer, how its ornamental parts “act out” their roles of architectonic representation, and indeed how the vestibule wakes you up, forcing you to see (on which point she quotes Cellini). Chronologically, the book ends in the early 1530s, just in fact as Michelangelo’s architecture was beginning to take off. Brothers’s justification is that by this stage Michelangelo has found his method and she has made her point; fair enough, even rather bold, yet still I craved to see how her thesis might play out over the Campidoglio, St. Peter’s, and other late masterworks. The text is of uniformly high quality and in several respects makes major contributions to Renaissance architectural history. For example, the account of profiles, assemblages of moldings comprising the base and cornice of the orders, offers a much-needed discussion of a vastly important but little understood topic, one that would eventually be commonly cited as the mark of architecture. Brothers argues that Michelangelo took little interest in discovering a canon of profiles, as his moldings are rarely annotated (torus, scotia, astragal, etc.) nor provided with measurements. Instead, he treated them as visual compositions, assembling and reassembling them in novel arrangements until he achieved the right contour and/or shadowing. Thus while having negligible influence on theory, compared to those, say, of Vignola or Palladio, Michelangelo’s profiles raised the expressive potential of such details. Perhaps on this subject the comparison with the drawings of Peruzzi (80–81) could have been developed further. I would also have liked to hear more about Michelangelo’s exploitation of shadows, mentioned elsewhere (172) but not explored at length. Michelangelo was a master of defining lines with shade, which perhaps owed something to the sculptor’s practice of working in sharply directional light; this aspect of profiles would later be known as skiagraphy, becoming one of the principal justifications of moldings. Similarly, although Brothers avoids symbolic interpretations, her reading of Michelangelo’s renowned profile with eye sketched onto a fillet above the scotia (Casa Buonarroti, inv.10Ar; figure 92 in Brothers) might have done more with the root Greek meaning of scotia as obscurity. Scotia as mouth/shadow suggests Michelangelo’s desired conceit was that of death, at least its grotesque representation, which would fit the tomb context for which the profile was destined. Brothers, like Peter Hicks, Vaughan Hart, David Hemsoll, Alina Payne, and Caroline van Eck, is one of a number of architectural historians who have emerged since the mid-1990s with a marked interest in rhetoric. Such scholars demonstrate how Renaissance theory is imbued with concepts derived from classical rhetorica, while also exploring the perspective of buildings as culturally articulate, mainly via decoration

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(elocutio), perhaps a new variation of the old architecture parlante. Such scholarship has tended to find a middle ground, blending traditional approaches with the revisionist views developed in art history at large over the last thirty years, especially the attentiveness to linguistics and intertextuality. Brothers, however, has a distinctive voice, with just a hint of formalism; although she makes, for example, good ground analyzing the Petrarchan motifs of Michelangelo’s poetry, I was struck by the repeated references to overinflated interpretations of the staircase in the vestibule of the Laurentian library (on page 185 she refers to “hyperbolic descriptions” of the stairway; on page 189 it becomes “outlandish descriptions”). It revealed a sensibility impatient with those who do not put the physical/visual reality of architecture before other levels of meaning, who think, perhaps, that architecture is above all a matter of embodied concepts. This is a fine book. The color illustrations are excellent, the text is clearly written, and the nuance and complexity of the argument suggest it has been honed over many years. It will provide a new perspective on Michelangelo and perhaps on architectural drawing generally. Michael Hill National Art School, Sydney

Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xxv, 296. 9 b/w illustrations.

You have to take a crow’s-eye view of Patrick Cheney’s publications to appreciate his full achievement. Cheney’s big picture affords an extraordinarily thorough account of early modern authorship. He has mapped Spenser’s, Marlowe’s, and, most recently, Shakespeare’s literary trajectories, and each case is enriched by complex reference to the others. What emerges is a vision of authorship as strenuously negotiated and achieved and yet also ultimately inimitable. Cheney’s is a tough-minded humanism that celebrates sheer literary labor and the more delicate singularity that is sometimes its paradoxical fruit. These strangely twinned qualities of dogged perseverance and sensibility are as characteristic of Cheney’s work itself as they are of the careers he analyzes. Thus to read Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship is to admire the Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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patience and commitment with which its author assembles his case while at the same time savoring its moments of passionate insight. Cheney wanted to call his book Shakespeare’s Counter-Laureate Authorship, and it would have been a more suitably combative and singular title. For this book has a specific case to make about the nature of Shakespeare’s genius. Cheney’s “counter-laureate authorship” returns the power to “negative capability.” In this book, Shakespeare’s disappearance into the plurality and ambiguity of his medium is vindicated as all-pervading presence, a strange and paradoxical triumph that effects nothing less than a sea change in the history of Western authorship. For the genius of Shakespeare does not, according to Cheney, develop in a vacuum. Instead, it involves the strange and calculated eclipse of the transcendent self-display characteristic of the line of laureate authors stretching from Homer to Spenser. The counter-laureate authorship baptized by Shakespeare involves an alternative ontology of authorship and an alternative aesthetics. Given that it is a form of self-concealment, it is necessarily elusive, but fortunately for us, according to Cheney, it unveils itself in strange epiphanies throughout the Shakespearean canon. This is a heady hypothesis, but it pays off in a series of extraordinary readings of Shakespearean figures and moments. Among them is Cheney’s reading of the curious “Achilles stanza” in the Rape of Lucrece (1422–1428). These peculiar lines require us to extrapolate the full presence of the unseen hero from his outthrust fist and spear. Cheney argues that Shakespeare thereby “presents Achilles as a personal figure for the nature of his self-concealing authorship” (59). He further contends that Achilles’ “mailed fist . . . becomes the visible metonymy standing for this author’s ‘unseen’ epic,” “the black hole of his counter-laureate authorship” (57, 60). In other words, a subversive refusal to write epic is an early sign of Shakespeare’s radical departure from the previous canons of authorship. And yet, Cheney’s vision of Shakespeare’s counter-laureate authorship emerges even more strangely when the raped, muted, and dismembered Lavinia takes a stick between her teeth to scratch her message in the dirt: Lavinia becomes Shakespeare’s poignant counter-laurel icon. Initially, she exhibits not self-presentation but the loss of presentation, masculine literary authority mapped on to the traumatized body of the female. Yet, when she takes up the staff to perform the Ovidian book, she becomes Shakespeare’s figure for a counter-laureate career transposing page to stage. (72)

Meta-dramatic revelation got a bit routine in recent Shakespeare criticism, but Cheney’s passionately reinvested notion of authorship ensures that something—someone—really shows through the moments of creative reflexivity he identifies. This has the effect that some hoary critical clichés

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are startlingly renewed in his book. To give just one example, Cheney’s illumination of Ariel’s embattled and agonized orientation toward pure freedom in terms of the vocation of poetry seems fresher and more moving than much fashionable materialist scholarship on the play. Cheney locates his work in the dialectical space between seeing Shakespeare as either literary or theatrical. He calls Shakespeare a “hendiadysauthor, for whom the boundary between conjunction and disjunction virtually disappears” (145). This seems a major advance, more in tune with the pleasures and demands of Shakespeare’s open, labile, and oscillating art as we actually experience it than is much modern criticism. For we have forgotten how plastic and omnivorous Shakespearean form is. Indeed it is even more so than Cheney demonstrates here, for Shakespeare’s prose necessarily gets short shrift in this valuable investigation of the complex interrelations of poem and play in his work, and it is not always clear that song should be so simply co-opted into the category of poetry. It seems possible that we should think of Shakespeare in terms of playful, experimental aspiration toward the category of total art or Gesamtkunstwerk (a term Wagner coined in his 1849 essay “Art and Revolution”). Readers drawn to this aspect of Shakespeare’s achievement would also do well to consult Simon Palfrey’s suggestible and suggestive account of his myriad language in Doing Shakespeare (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2005). We forget how flexible Shakespeare’s art was because we forget how young it was in its own moment, and for the simple reason that, to paraphrase The Tempest, it is not so for us. But it should be. Cheney’s invigorating book takes us some way toward recognizing that, and toward seeing Shakespeare’s transgressive creativity as that of a truly multimedia artist. Ewan Fernie Royal Holloway, University of London

Marios Costambeys, Power and Patronage in Early Medieval Italy: Local Society, Italian Politics and the Abbey of Farfa, c. 700–900. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 4th ser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xvi, 388, 11 b/w illustrations.

This wide-ranging book continues the recent interest in the abbey of Farfa ranging from archeology, music, and liturgy to politics. It is the Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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first study to focus on the early Middle Ages, and is required reading for anyone wishing to understand the politics of central Italy during this time. Located in the Sabina on the doorstep of Rome, Farfa was part of the Duchy of Spoleto and the Kingdom of Lombardy, and, after 774, of the Carolingian empire. Such a concatenation of features ensured that the papacy and the empire would be deeply involved in its fate. Costambeys reveals how it operated as a channel for these two powers as well as for the aristocratic elite. The book contains two very helpful maps, several figures and tables, and an extensive bibliography of sources and literature. The only mistake I noticed was a reference to Nicholas II instead of Nicholas I, a small oversight in this meticulously documented and thoughtful book. Costambeys uses his deep and subtle understanding of the sources and literature to construct a comprehensive description of the changing society and politics of these two critical centuries. When warranted, he respectfully challenges interpretations of even the most eminent historians. Farfa was founded at the beginning of the eighth century by the Frank, Thomas of Maurienne. For centuries it was a barometer of social and political change in central Italy. Much less well known than Montecassino, by the ninth and tenth centuries it nevertheless controlled property in an astonishing compass stretching from the Sabina to central Rome and on to the cella of Santa Maria on the Mignone river in the Marittima of South Tuscany near Corneto, the present-day Tarquinia. Gregory of Catino, who in the twelfth century compiled a Regesta of charters and a Chronicon that are the basic sources for our knowledge of Farfa, noted that it was Charlemagne who conferred Santa Maria on the abbey. It would be interesting to know why. Farfa enjoyed the patronage of the emperor and survived many tribulations until 1123 when its abbot, Guido, succumbed to Calixtus II and placed the abbey under the patronage of the papacy. Costambeys charts the process by which Farfa originally developed its wealth from the patronage of successive dukes of Spoleto largely in the form of extensive estates. He describes the degree to which ducal control over such lands, and ducal control in general, were dependent upon local officials. He scrutinizes records of court hearings in detail to see how power was negotiated, what the role of leading aristocratic families was, and what changed when the Carolingians took power in the late eighth century. He observes that Farfa embodied the interests of the Lombard rulers and the local elite families. He investigates the origin of the monks and examines the lay aristocratic society in the Sabina, pay-

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ing particular attention to the role of women and to the significance of property and inheritance. He devotes his last two chapters to an analysis of the politics of central Italy in the eighth and ninth centuries. Starting with the Sabina’s role in Lombard relations with Rome up to 774, he then turns to the Frankish conquest. He shows how the dukes of Spoleto and the aristocrats in the late eighth century were threatened by Roman aristocrats generally considered to be led by the papacy. Faced with this situation, Charlemagne and his successors initiated privileges of protection, immunity, and exemption. Costambeys develops a new perspective questioning the strength of the link between the papacy and the Frankish rulers. He rejects any lingering conception of an institutional power for the papacy separate from the Roman aristocracy. The papacy was dependent upon the aristocracy, he argues, just as Farfa was dependent upon the elite in the Sabina. He concludes that the response of the Carolingian to a clash between local elites determined the political shape of central Italy. His analysis sweeps along in his last two chapters. He observes that the sources were Frankish and papal, and may not have given an accurate portrayal of the last Lombard kings. Their defeat, he notes, exposed the Sabina, its landholders, and its abbey to the ambitions of its Roman neighbors, who had longstanding aspiration to the region. For those interested in the relationship between Farfa, the papacy, and the nobility, his evidence and insights are intriguing. Mary Stroll University of California at San Diego

Jerrilyn D. Dodds, María Rosa Menocal, and Abigail Krasner Balbale, The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008. Pp. xiv, 416. 10 b/w, 200 color illustrations.

Handsomely produced and lavishly illustrated, The Arts of Intimacy is hard to classify. Its numerous and beautiful illustrations, displaying examples of Arabic-Christian architecture and art, give it almost the feel of a coffeetable book, albeit a scholarly one. Its textual sidebars resemble those of the best available textbooks. Its almost exclusive attention to Toledo and its culture imitates a monograph’s focus. The earnest attempt to create Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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a truly multidisciplinary book—with emphasis on the intertwining of art and literature—embraces the kind of hybridity that is at the book’s thematic core. Yet, although the word is seldom or never invoked, this is a book written in the spirit and advocacy of convivencia, with all the promises and difficulties inherent in such an approach. Here the intimacy of the title stands as a synonym for convivencia. Arguing for a history that sees religious minorities in Spain (Jews and Moors) and their interaction with the Christian majority not as a history of margins or of cultural borrowing but as one of hybridity, the authors begin with a broad chapter that traces the history of Spain—by which they mean essentially Castile— from its pre-Roman past to the central Middle Ages, chapter 1 serving as context for what follows. Chapter 2, “Dowry,” shifts the perspective from the Castilian realm to Toledo. As the capital of Visigothic Spain, and with a large Mozarabic population (Christians who had embraced Arabic culture and language), Toledo was the epicenter for the integration of Christian and Muslim cultures. Chapter 3, “Others,” describes the social, cultural, and political consequences of Alfonso VI’s conquest of Toledo in 1085. Succeeding chapters explore the coexistence and growing antagonisms between Christians and Muslims with sporadic forays into Jewish culture. The focus remains fixed on Toledo with occasional incursions into other regions of Castile. This is certainly the case in chapter 5, “Babel,” where we follow the Christian expansion into western Andalusia, and chapter 6, “Adab,” which, centering on Alfonso X and his cultural program, emphasizes that sense of hybridity or “intimacy” between the two cultures. The final chapter, “Brothers,” points to those instances, even in the late Middle Ages, when Christians and Muslims became allies as well as enemies, and to the enduring power of artistic forms created within that melange of cultures so peculiar to the peninsula. A postscript indicts the Catholic Monarchs as the rulers responsible for, in the authors’ formulation, the betrayal of intimacy. There is much to praise and celebrate in this book. Its singular commitment to providing excerpts of literary works in their original language and in translation reinforces the sense of the complexity of Spanish culture in the Middle Ages. The wonderful asides and explications provided in the textual boxes range from discreet discussions of buildings to material culture, poetry and prose, and representatives of Spain’s mosaic of cultures. They all provide unusual richness to the text and are guides to further inquiries into some of these fascinating topics. Numerous vivid photographs, chosen with great taste, offer a stunning visual guide to the artistic achievements and legacy of Christian-Muslim

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hybridity. And then, there are luminous moments when one cannot help but be moved by the presentation and the manner in which information has been conveyed. One of those instances is the fate of a beautiful “honeycombed crystal” presented by the Muslim ruler of Saragossa to William of Aquitaine, the “Eleanor vase,” that ended up among the treasures gathered by Abbot Suger at St. Denis (109). There is also a superb architectural tour of Toledo’s Mudejar monuments (a style adroitly defined here as part of a cultural process of hybridization; 140). Many such moments make this book worthwhile and enchanting. Yet others raise questions as to the book’s overall intent, and its often single-minded argument for intimacy while neglecting to mention conflicting evidence and/or interpretations. Whether we name it intimacy or convivencia, the history of the relations between Spain’s medieval Christians and Muslims—since Jews play only a small role in this account—was as fraught with conflict as it was with cooperation. Violence between religious groups, though often tempered by ritual and custom, was, as David Nirenberg has famously shown, part of the quotidian. The image of Alfonso X, one of the most important protagonists in this story, as the ruler of a multiconfessional society clashes with the reality of a king who could acquiesce with the slaughter of the Muslim garrison at Salé and with selling into slavery those captured in the Christian raid in North Africa. He also sponsored vitriolic legislation against Jews and Muslims in his Siete partidas, while supporting a multicultural scriptorium. While he allied himself with Muslim rulers against his own son, he could also banish Murcia’s Muslim inhabitants from their homes and lands, or expel all Muslims from western Andalusia after the mid1260s Mudejar rebellion. Much is also made of Ferdinand III’s epitaph (written in Latin, Castilian, Arabic, and Hebrew) at the cathedral of Seville. It serves in the book as an iconic signifier of the intertwined relations between Christians and Muslims, as well as to the growing importance of Castilian. Nonetheless, Ferdinand III’s conquest of Seville differed greatly from Alfonso VI’s conquest of Toledo. If the Muslim population was allowed to remain in the latter, that was not the case in Seville. Ferdinand III did not enter the city until the entire Muslim population had been forcefully removed and the mosque had been sacralized as a Christian church. Similarly, the Latin version of the epitaph includes pejorative language about the Muslim population (pagans) and emphasizes sectarian filiation. The use of Arabic and Hebrew may also be read not as intimacy but as a willful appropriation of the other’s language and a demonstration of superiority. While the Castilian version of original Arabic story of Calila

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e Dimna may have been “at the very inception of Castilian culture,” this reifies literary texts, ignoring that the use of Castilian in the epitaph only reaffirmed Alfonso X’s decision to shift all royal documents to the vernacular. In fact, Castilian was the vehicle for vigorous cultural production—in everyday life documentation, in the chronicles and legal codes, in the ordinances of the Cortes, and in the royal chancery—by the mid-thirteenth century, and its early linguistic hegemony serves also as a point of departure for Castilian culture. But most of all: can we read the entire cultural history of the peninsula and of Christian-Muslim relations singly through a Toledan lense? Can Toledo stand for the whole? While I admit that Toledo’s experiences and cultural impact played a significant role throughout the Castilian realm, the history of both art and sectarian relations needs to be problematized and complicated. Intimacy is a laden term, but it is also a double-edged sword. Intimacy implies close and warm proximity, hybridization. It may also mean the “enemy in the mirror,” to borrow Barkay’s formulation. As I write this, Gaza has just been invaded. There is close intimacy there, but it is a fatal one. Finally, there are numerous annoying mistakes in which historical accuracy is neglected or ignored. A few examples may illustrate this. When Abd-al-Rahman, the Caliph of Cordoba, is said to have been “irrevocably Spanish” (22), we enter the kind of essentialism present already in Simonet and that Glick rightly chastised when discussing Sánchez Albornoz and Castro’s works. Burgos was not settled from León (30). The discussion of the Cid on pages 40 to 43 ignores the anti-Jewish elements in the Poema. It is also hard to take seriously the assertion that “hundreds perhaps thousands of nubile female performers from Barbastro” influenced the development of troubadour poetry (106), unless most of Barbastro’s population consisted only of nubile female performers. Ferdinand III did not incorporate Castile into his kingdom (185). He became king of Castile in 1217 when his mother resigned the throne and then incorporated León in 1230; nor was Seville the capital of Castile in 1248 (192). Similarly Ferdinand III did not conquer Valencia; James I did (193). Peter I did not kill his two younger brothers and his half brother Fradrique. All three were half brothers. Most of all, the idea that “intimacy was betrayed” during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs is untenable. If there was intimacy at all, it had been betrayed much earlier. It was put to severe and damaging tests in the wake of the IV Lateran Council, in the punitive edicts of the Cortes in the midthirteenth century and afterward, in the expulsion of Muslims from the lands or their semi-enserfment in the Crown of Aragon, and in the fre-

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quent pogroms against the Jews, culminating in 1391. Ironically, though the provisions of the settlement were utterly ignored, the treaty leading to the surrender of Granada harkened back to Alfonso VI’s conquest of Toledo rather than to the harsh policies of the mid-thirteenth century. Having written all of this, I would still praise this book for its optimism, its desire to see the past through a lens of hope, but most of all for the sheer beauty, conveyed so eloquently here, of what Muslims and Christians could indeed build and write together, in spite of conflict, violence, and mutual distrust, in Spain a long time ago. Teofilo F. Ruiz University of California, Los Angeles

Eglal Doss-Quinby and Samuel N. Rosenberg, eds. and trans.; Elizabeth Aubrey, music editions and commentary, The Old French Ballette: Oxford Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308. Geneva: Droz, 2006. Pp. clxii, 546. 1 illustration.

Oxford Bodleian MS Douce 308, a 286-folio composite codex produced in Lorraine around 1310, contains a variety of works including Jacques de Longuyon’s Voeux du paon, Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’Amours, Jacques Bretel’s Tournoi de Chauvency, Huon de Méri’s Tournoiement Antéchrist, and a fragment of La prophétie Sebile. It is, however, the inclusion of an important chansonnier containing some 530 trouvère lyrics, the majority of which are unica, that has attracted the lion’s share of critical interest. A number of the songs, here organized exclusively (and unusually) by named genre, have been published previously in partial, often highly interventionist, editions. A complete edition of the chansonnier was published by Mary Atchison in 2005; her vue d’ensemble, a revised version of her doctoral dissertation, has helped focus renewed attention on this intriguing songbook, one of only three extant French chansonniers devoid of musical notation. In the present, handsome volume, Eglal Doss-Quinby, Samuel R. Rosenberg, and Elizabeth Aubrey offer in-depth analysis of one group of songs, the so-called ballete, a term that appears uniquely in this codex, where it is used to designate 188 songs. It is the largest lyric category in the manuscript, which includes, in order, grans chans, estampies, jeus partis, pastourelles, balletes, and sottes chansons contre amours. The contents Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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of these six groupings are listed in an abecelaire at the beginning of the chansonnier; in all but one instance, the relevant generic designation is repeated at the start of each section of songs, accompanied by a miniature. A final group of 111 songs composed of rondels and motets (or motet-related texts) concludes the chansonnier; these are neither indexed nor designated by generic title within the codex. The editors’ exclusive focus on the ballete allows them to examine a number of “vexed” questions, most importantly the still-disputed meaning of the term itself. Their substantial introduction, almost seventy pages, opens with a “Justification of the Edition,” then moves quickly to an overview of the term. Here the editors analyze the principal characteristics of the genre, chief among them the presence of various refrain types; they also consider the function of the songs in relation to dance. A detailed analysis of versification and metrical forms and a discussion of the widely varying thematic content found in these balletes follows. The editors conclude that ballete is a fairly general rubric, encompassing not only what became the later, fixed form “ballade,” but also such genres as the vireli, a term that may justifiably be applied to forty-eight of the songs anthologized here as “balletes.” The third part of the introduction provides a history and description of the manuscript and its relation to other chansonniers. The different song types included in Douce 306 are discussed, along with the visual presentation of them (two columns, prose format, alternating blue and red initials). The chief dialectal features of the poems are also inventoried. The fourth and final section of the introduction is devoted to the music for these songs, recoverable, in part, from other contemporary sources. The editors note that most of the relevant musical notation “is for refrains which are found in longer poetic works, monophonic songs, or motets” (lxxxix); six complete melodies for songs included in Douce 306 have survived. It has therefore been possible to provide at least partial editions of the music for twenty-six of the 188 songs. Appended to the introduction are seventy-one pages of tables, graphically summarizing the structural features of the songs and listing variants and concordances of ballete numbers with the standard bibliographies. The edition and translation of each song is accompanied by an identification of the song type, a note on the placement of the text on the given folio, and a list of manuscript sources and of preceding editions (where applicable), along with textual notes, lists of variants and rejected readings, notes on versification, and musical commentary. The relevant concordance numbers are also given for each song. The prose translations are graceful and accurate, conveying for the nonspecialist

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reader a sense of the charm of the originals. A bibliography and an index of first lines follow the edition and translation. It is difficult to find fault with such a thoroughly researched and beautifully produced volume, though I did find myself wishing that a few illustrations might have been included to help the reader visualize some of the more interesting features of page layout described by the editors (e.g., the difference in the hands of the two scribes, the appearance of the refrains, the use of pen-flourished initials). This cavil aside, one can only applaud the contribution made by this volume, which offers important new insights into one of the most well-represented, yet still imperfectly understood, categories of trouvère song and which makes a significant corpus of lyric verse readily available in a highly accurate bilingual edition. Nancy Vine Durling Berkeley, California

Matthew Giancarlo, Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xiii, 289. 8 b/w illustrations.

Matthew Giancarlo has written a splendid and important book on parliament and literature in late medieval England. While the book will prove to be mandatory reading for scholars of late medieval English literature, the title might understate the significance of this work for historians of the period. Giancarlo’s approach to his subject is truly interdisciplinary, and he is as well-versed in the history of the period as he is in the poetry. Moreover, this book clearly demonstrates that such an interdisciplinary approach is the best way to understand the development of medieval parliament, and Giancarlo has provided a model that will rekindle interest in the history of the institution, the study of which has been in decline for some time among historians in this country. However, Giancarlo’s book is not so much about parliament per se as it is about the larger (and perhaps more important) question of representation, or of who can speak for the community as a whole. By looking at representation in both its political and poetic guises, Giancarlo offers a more complete explanation as to why authors such as Langland were interested in parliament, offering the compelling observation that Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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“parliaments in literature are representations of representation.” Indeed as Giancarlo states the question, “how could writers of the period not be influenced by parliament?” The subject of how representation worked in the broader cultural imagination of the period has been touched on by others, most notably Emily Steiner in her essay “Commonality and Literary Forms.” In Giancarlo’s book the subject at last receives the fuller treatment it deserves, and his analysis emphasizes the relationship between parliamentary representation and the emergence of the public as a political force to be reckoned with in late medieval England. His discussion throughout the book of “the public” is admirable, and certain historians might envy the way this category was made acceptable for literary scholars by Anne Middleton’s essay “The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II.” The time has come for historians to stop fussing over whether there really was a public or public sphere in late medieval England. The first chapter, on parliament and voice in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, offers a careful and clear explanation of what parliament was and how it worked in the early years, tracing the shift from a forum where the baronial class spoke for the realm to one that invoked broader communal forms. At certain points this chapter might leave the reader with the impression that the institution’s development was well ordered, and that medieval parliament was predestined to be precisely the institution that it did in fact become. However, accounts of parliament from the later fourteenth century, such as the Good Parliament account found in the Anonimalle Chronicle, suggest that the parliamentary Commons were often making it up as they went along, and as Giancarlo observes in the second chapter, the grandeur of the vision articulated in the Modus Tenendi Parliamentum offers further evidence of improvisation and wish-fulfillment on the part of later medieval parliamentarians. The late fourteenth century is exceptional for the public’s willingness to imagine parliament’s potential and in so doing come to realize this potential for a brief moment. This is perhaps the true magic of representation. Giancarlo’s portrait of the evolution of the institution in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries is followed by a sharp discussion of the idea of vox populi as vox Dei as located in the parliamentary Commons by the mid- and later fourteenth century. Here he uncovers the key to the force and fire of late medieval parliamentary challenges to the crown, for as he says parliament had become a “form of civic spiritual ritual.” The heart of the book lies in the central three chapters, on each of the three major poets, Gower, Chaucer, and Langland. Giancarlo examines not so much what they say about parliament in their work, nor simply how Chaucer and Gower were involved with the institution

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at various points in their lives, but rather the specific parallels between how representation functioned in certain parliamentary assemblies and how it appears in the various works of these writers, each chapter serving to strengthen Giancarlo’s thesis about the connection between political and poetical representation. The chapter on Langland offers a subtle and insightful reading of the poet’s oft-debated take on parliament, suggesting that Langland was not so much critical of the Commons as he was interested in exploring the problems implicit in a group “speaking with one voice.” As Giancarlo concludes, Langland understood the inevitability that the common voice would devolve into common voices, but that this devolution is a more “realistic talking of the community itself,” and not simply a conservative critique. This is probably not the last word on the infamous rat parliament, but it should be. The last chapter offers an important contribution to our understanding of the transition from the Ricardian to the Lancastrian government. Here Giancarlo considers the Langlandesque poetry of Henry IV’s reign. Frank Grady’s essay began an important discussion of the Generation of 1399, but few have picked it up as successfully as Giancarlo, who turns the problem of parliamentary fatigue evident in Richard the Redeless and Mum and the Sothsegger on its head. In Giancarlo’s reading, the obsession with documentary instruments in both of these poems reflects the concern that the “showing” of public grievances in parliament, specifically in the form of petitions, is absolutely necessary for the health of the realm and offers a counterpoint to the evident frustration with the Commons’ ultimate failure to represent the public voice and ensure good governance. It is precisely the enticing nature of Giancarlo’s analysis here and elsewhere that makes this book at once a readable and admirably complex treatment of the intertwined development of parliament and English literature. Clementine Oliver California State University, Northridge

Guy Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376–568. Cambridge Medieval Textbooks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xvii, 592.

Halsall’s book, the first comprehensive English-language account of this subject in a long time, has three parts subdivided into chapters and Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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sections. It begins with a topical survey of Romans and barbarians before the entrance of the Goths into the Empire in 376. After a moment with ethnicity theory, Halsall evokes a Roman world and juxtaposes it with a barbarian one, then deals with their preinvasion interactions. Part 2, the heart of the book, with its best pages, is a narrative of relations between Romans and barbarians from 376 to 476/550 (but reserving Justinian). Complementary chapters concern fifth-century societies within and outside the imperial boundaries. Part 3 features discussions of migration, the accommodation of barbarians, and ethnogenesis. The final chapter considers Justinian’s wars and associated “failures.” The book leaves aside the east Roman empire, excludes the Lombard invasion of Italy, and confines Christianity to two pages. The ethnogeographic maps are novel and interesting in design. The index is very poor. Following German usage, Halsall’s title prefers “migration” to the more dramatic “invasion.” The opening, historiographic pages (10–19) imply that older accounts of the barbarians are obsolete; one looks in vain for relevant historians such as Mascov, Hodgkin, L. Schmidt, M. Bloch, and Stroheker. Recent writings are privileged. It seems as though the subject came alive with Reinhard Wenskus in 1961 and especially with the popularization of Wenskus by Herwig Wolfram’s Geschichte der Goten (Munich: Beck, 1979). Yet the past needs to be heeded. The “Romanist” and “Germanist” interpretations of the Migration Age that have opposed each other for well over two centuries still live. The currently dominant school, based in Vienna with fervent English support, advocates an unavowed but hard-line return to Germanism, a tacit reincarnation of the germanische Kontinuität extolled by one of Wolfram’s teachers, the philologist Otto Höfler (1901–1986). Barbarian Migrations acknowledges that an embattled minority contests the heavy guns from Vienna and England, but does not identify what the debate is about, or why it matters for our understanding of the late Roman Empire and early Middle Ages. Some of the early history in Barbarian Migrations might also have been expanded. Older narratives used to remind us of the Cimbri and Teutons, Arminius slaughtering Varus’s legions, the Marcommanic war of Marcus Aurelius, the barbarian raids of the third century, and the efforts of the Tetrarchs to pacify the frontiers. This background has often been inflated out of proportion; one can make it look, falsely, as though “the Germans” had long thrown themselves against the Romans. Yet such accounts should not be entirely ignored, if only as a matter of recognizing tradition. Halsall concludes the chapter on interactions by saying, “It is not unlikely that there was increased pressure on the imperial frontiers

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in the late Roman period” (161). This observation is made, like the entire chapter, in localized, fourth-century terms, and refers to general conditions rather than dynamics. Perhaps the “migrations” in the title needed attention, pro or con, earlier than in part 3. Halsall’s forte is political and military history, especially in the period 421 to 476. Seen in a Roman perspective and sufficiently linear to make sense, these decades are handled with skill and authority. There are all sorts of stumbling blocks, and Halsall cannot be definitive in all details; but he reports the latest problems, and his performance is deft and persuasive. The account of Frankish origins is particularly new. The earlier span, 395–421, involves some of the most tangled and intractable years of history, full of blank spots and blurred chronology. In limited space, Halsall has a hard time with these intricacies, which defeated even the sources and have given rise to multiple modern conjectures. What follows, though, is done masterfully—an original contribution to fifth-century history. Halsall intimates that the West “went down kicking, gouging and screaming” (291); and though this characterization is too vivid, he does convince us of the seriousness and determination of the actors in contending over matters that continued to the end—and afterward!—to be worth fighting for. The complementary survey of provincial society in the long fifth century gives the impression of a university seminar hesitantly mulling over interpretations of archeological sites and artefacts. The governing mandate is plain: Rome falls with a thump in the western provinces; it seems that the fateful year 476 is even archeologically confirmed (352). Fora turned into waste pits are a recurrent image. A recent tendency in English early medieval studies is to “primitivize,” an approach set in motion by the conviction of Rome’s “demise.” No matter that, inter alia, the very abundant literature of the age qualifies this lesson (see Courcelle’s great Histoire littéraire [Paris: Hachette, 1948], and even Dill on the last century of the Western empire). Literature is simply left out; Africa has the Tablettes Albertini, not Augustine. So conceived, chapter 11 seems to overdetermine its exposition of the age. An awareness of when to keep silent, or to accept the silence and inadequacy of the informants (of whatever kind), is indispensable to an account of the Migration Age. Earlier, for example, Halsall gets high marks from me for doing without a Vandal prehistory. He is more discursive in “Beyond the Old Frontier” (chapter 12), a survey of such lands mainly after 476. In a book that trimming would help, the Irish, Picts, Scandinavians, and Moors add little to the main discussion. The introduction in Ireland of Christian priests and monks, Latin books and

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literacy—an astounding innovation—takes up half a page, rather less than Ogham inscriptions. The centerpiece of the chapter is a mighty Thuringian kingdom. Almost all the written evidence for it is examined in a page. Six nondocumentary pages follow, including a few lines of the Vita s. Severini about a band of Thuringian robbers that are cited three times in ever grander interpretations. What one detects here, as elsewhere in chapter 12, are the methods and ambitions of the study of German antiquities (deutsche Altertumskunde)—take quantities of disparate information and combine with many conjectures. Halsall writes ably about needed topics, such as the Anglo-Saxon migration, but he does not convince me that almost wholly peripheral lands and peoples merit as much attention as they get. Except for the last chapter, Barbarian Migrations changes character in part 3. It focuses on a series of recent debates and often sets out Halsall’s original take on these subjects. No fewer than thirty-three pages concern my own arguments about barbarian accommodation and offer Halsall’s courteous handling of the issue. The section on kingship wisely focuses on the Roman sources of this institution. On the other hand, the attention given to ethnicity, ethnogenesis, and barbarian law testifies to the success of Vienna in (re)channeling the Migration Age toward the (Germanic) newcomers and away from the Christian church and Latin literacy, books, and charters. Halsall is no “Germanizer,” but that is the terrain to which he unintentionally draws us in much of part 3. Other sections incline more deliberately to current concerns; one hears, for example, of Roman constructions of masculinity, renegotiations of this and that, the fluidity of identities, and gender-centered views such as that “on the whole, female power was much more closely related to sex and childbearing than male” (483). Little of this has to do with source material; its appeal is to an audience that, in a preference for “theory,” may well skim the factual part 2. Chapter 15 brings to a close, with Justinian, one of Halsall’s continuing themes, namely, that the core of Roman policy in these centuries was the retention or recovery of the full extent of imperial territory; Justinian “failed” in this (150, 234, 243, 257, 517). I’m not certain that the existence of such a policy should be taken for granted. In a similar vein, a critical moment in the book involves the claim that the Goths’ only possible role was to reanimate the empire (whether the remark comes from Athaulf or Orosius does not matter). Halsall believes that Athaulf “seems more likely to have been making a joke” (225). The truth of the comment—that the barbarians’ only option was to work directly or indirectly for Rome—eludes him. In these instances, both Rome and migrating barbarians might have been better understood.

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This is a serious, important, and often original book, one man’s summation of very active decades of studies of the Migration Age. (Where Halsall’s bibliographic cutoff date falls is an interesting question; for example, he lists Michael Kulikowski’s weighty Rome’s Gothic Wars [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007] but, because of its late date, could profit little from it if at all.) There is much to say about the views expressed on a host of subjects. To take one instance, the decision to fix on 476 as a crucial year—not Halsall’s solitary opinion by any means—is very disputable. The efforts to integrate archeological material, too little mentioned in this review, are commendable even if uneven in results. Barbarian Migrations will have to be often consulted. Walter Goffart University of Toronto (emeritus) Yale University

Barbara A. Hanawalt and Anna Grotans, eds., Living Dangerously: On the Margins in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Pp. vii, 173.

To approach the social structures of the Middle Ages and the early modern times from the point of view of those on the margins represents a bold and innovative move. Indeed, despite the traditional perspective toward the premodern world focusing on feudalism with its rigid class structures and a predominant immobility for most people, there were actually many people who lived on the margin or were marginalized and ostracized. As Michel Mollat demonstrated a long time ago, medieval society faced a considerable percentage of poor people who were homeless or were forced to beg. Moreover, the Christian Church did not succeed at all in imposing its absolute dominance, as the numerous conflicts with non-Christians (Jews and Muslims) and a variety of deviant individuals and religious groups, normally condemned as heretics, indicate. The contributors to the present volume investigate some of those marginal groups and deviant individuals. For instance, Richard Firth Green studies, in the introductory chapter, the role of the poor in Piers Plowman who are identified as the needy who do not obey any laws out of necessity. Vickie Ziegler examines how much the Middle High German poet Konrad von Würzburg elucidated in his Engelhard the drive of Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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low-ranking, impoverished aristocrats to climb the social ladder through marriage and deceptive strategies. Whether Engelhard, however, can really be identified as a marginalized figure who pushes his way up to the highest position through illegal means, or whether the romance does not rather exemplify the true value of friendship that bridges all social differences, remains debatable. In particular, Ziegler does not take into consideration the much more radical marginalization of Engelhard’s friend Dietrich because of his leprosy, although he belongs to the highest social class. A comparison with Hartmann von Aue’s Der arme Heinrich, the title character of which suffers a very similar destiny, would have been very useful here. Dyan Elliot explores the fairly comparable experience of medieval mystical women (Marguerite Porete), alleged witches, and prostitutes, all suffering from male, clerical persecutions. But it seems too simplistic to view Beguines (not at all automatically identifiable with mystics) necessarily as marginalized. On the contrary, as we have learned recently, many of them, along with anchorites, could easily enjoy the highest authority in their urban communities, depending on their personal situation. Finally, prostitutes were not simply ostracized; rather, their social status depended very much on the specific contexts and historical conditions in a city. The most exciting and far-reaching study proves to be the one by Anne J. Cruz on gypsy (actually Roma or Sinti) women and morisca women in late medieval Spain, who were constantly marginalized but managed to survive and settle in various parts of Spain other than Andalusia far into the early modern world. Ian Frederick Moulton proposes a rather surprising argument regarding true marginalization as far as the early modern world was concerned. Investigating how homosexuals were viewed, he suggests, though I find this rather hard to believe, that they were less marginalized than males who submitted excessively to females in heterosexual relationships. Moulton tries to illustrate his thesis primarily in light of his reading of The Isle of Dogs, written by Jonson together with Thomas Nashe. The fact that some sixteenth-century English literature strongly advocated sexual language and even transgressed the border to pornography with an obvious dose of violence neither means that homosexuality found general approval nor that heterosexual men were marginalized. We can agree with Moulton’s interpretation of Antonio Vignali’s La Cazzaria, or The Book of the Prick, as an expression of support for a most aggressive form of sexual intercourse. Indeed, it might have been one of the filthiest pieces of sixteenth-century Italian literature, but there were many precursors,

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not mentioned here, commonly identified as priapeia (see my chapter in Albrecht Classen, ed., Sexuality in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Times [New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008]). It remains rather intractable how this study addresses the issue of marginalization. The volume concludes with a certainly interesting article by Mary Lindemann on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century economic speculation and fraud in northern Europe. She discusses major bursts of economic bubbles. However, why this study was included in this volume remains a mystery to me. Looking at the introduction, it seems that the editors themselves were not quite clear about the goal of their approach, though the term margin proves to be fascinating and possibly very fertile for further investigation. But Hanawalt identifies medieval society as “one of social change” (4), which seems rather odd, if not downright erroneous. Moreover, her summaries of the individual contributions do not always correctly address the points raised, or at least seem rather confusing. Her comments on Lindemann’s chapter reveals that the term marginal serves only as a loose concept without much validity here because she treats the early modern speculators as “marginals” (6) although they dominated the economic and financial markets. As valuable as the individual chapters prove to be on their own, I find the theoretical framework rather inadequate and much too broad to help us in furthering our understanding of premodern society. Albrecht Classen University of Arizona

Barbara A. Hanawalt and Lisa J. Kiser, eds., Engaging with Nature: Essays on the Natural World in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. Pp. 248.

Even though this collection of seven papers does not live up to the expectations set by the praises on its back cover, readers of this journal should take note of this volume because several essays offer valuable lessons. As a whole, rather than an “essential collection” slated to become “a landmark . . . in the field,” as Rita Copeland prognosticates, this volume is significant precisely because, by being more like “a run of the mill,” it proves that the study of nature within medieval and Renaissance studies is an interdisciplinary field that now stands on secure grounds. Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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Although not a detailed or definitive statement in matters of historiography and methodology, the editors’ short introduction may serve well as a ready reference for graduate students to gather basic information on this field, which very likely will continue to blossom for the next two decades. Fittingly, the editors discuss also the challenges presented by the study of the medieval and Renaissance notion of nature, including the fact that nature itself is a very problematic actor category in the premodern period, as “in the visual and written records of the time, nature appears to be both everywhere and nowhere” (1). In the essay that opens the volume, Richard C. Hoffman makes two important points about nature being not a passive but an active—in fact, interactive—participant in human history. First, scholars should become acquainted with the paleoscientific data published in the past two decades, as it sheds light on significant climatic conditions and environmental changes with unprecedented precision—Hoffman also calls for testing the scientific conclusions against the historical records. Second, in discussing how change in diet habits transformed the environment and the landscape, he describes the medieval social structure in terms of diet, subdividing it into carnivores (aristocracy) and herbivores (grain-growing peasants), offering an approach to the description society and its engagement with the natural environment that may be aptly integrated in undergraduate surveys of Western civilization. Susan Crane’s “Aspects of the Hunt à Force” is surely the volume’s most rewarding essay and the one that should appeal to the widest audience. In her study of hunting as a ritual that asserted the superiority of the aristocracy, Crane considers hunting cries and fumets “analysis.” In spite of the fact that prima facie these are unlikely subjects of historical research, Crane demonstrates that they epitomize the aristocracy’s claim to the “natural” social hierarchy that they head. Hunting cries reveal the nobles’ ability to communicate with the animal world; their fumetassaying skills confirm their expert knowledge of nature. Both support the aristocracy’s social leadership by displaying their special knowledge of nature and, therefore, their ability to master nature. Pamela Smith’s “Collecting Nature and Art” underscores that artisanal craft and applied knowledge were integral elements of Renaissance princely collecting. She substantiates the claim by studying the case of Wenzel Jamnitzer, a goldsmith whose machines were mentioned by Samuel Quiccheberg in his 1565 treatise on the organization of princely collections. Revealing an important element of the practice of natural philosophy in the Kunstkammer, this aspect of collecting contributes to explaining both the “applied” activities of an aristocratic astronomer

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such as Tycho Brahe, as well as the “technical” approach pursued by mechanical philosophers in the seventeenth century. Noteworthy points from other chapters in the volume are the following. In “Inventing with Animals in the Middle Ages,” Jeffrey Jerome Cohen presents the hypothesis that “the medieval concept of race derived from a discourse of animality rather than a vocabulary of human variation” (50). In “The (Re)Balance of Nature, ca. 1250–1350,” Joel Kaye asserts that in this period “nature was radically reconceived within the discipline of scholastic natural philosophy . . . from a static world of discrete points to a world of [interacting] lines” (105). In “Human Nature: Observing Dutch Brazil,” Julie Berger Hochstrasser presents a wealth of material concerning the widespread interest in exotica in early modern Europe, material that reaffirms that in the seventeenth century “pictures are science” (a subject also discussed inter alia by David Freedberg), and that graphic representations of the observation of nature reflected the viewer’s visual and intellectual culture (a point made in more general terms by Ernst Gombrich long ago). Renzo Baldasso The Newberry Library

G. A. Loud, The Latin Church in Norman Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 577. 5 maps.

Professor Loud’s studies have dominated Anglophone scholarship on the Normans in southern Italy for some time now, and this volume is the culmination of decades of his research into the ecclesiastical structures of the regno. It is an important book, chiefly because it provides a firm empirical foundation for future studies. Loud has painstakingly located and analyzed the narrative and documentary sources for southern Italy and Sicily in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and carefully sifted the evidence to reconstruct a general picture of “the growing predominance of the Latin Church” in the south. This is the principal focus of the volume and, according to Loud, a fundamental theme in the history of Norman rule in the region. What complicates the narrative is that the character of the “Latin Church” was itself changing radically across these centuries, and thus Loud’s book also contributes Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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to our understanding of this more broadly experienced transformation in medieval Europe. The volume opens with a chapter on Latin ecclesiastical institutions in the south before 1050. In Muslim Sicily, of course, Christians were a Greek-speaking minority, and Greek institutions also dominated much of the south: Latin Christianity was a minority faith. Its institutions, moreover, lacked “organization and coherence” (35). Bishops, although numerous, were relatively poor and politically weak, their cathedrals more important as cult centers than as foci of clerical governance. No system of baptismal churches was discernible in the countryside, and private churches predominated. Monastic observance was diverse and when communal, rather than eremitic, was not clearly distinct from communities of secular clerics attached to churches. By the end of the twelfth century, cultural and religious diversity was still evident in the regno, but Sicily had been re-Christianized and ecclesiastical institutions throughout the south were organized into provinces and subject to the pope. Bishops exercised greater control over the institutions within their dioceses and were establishing more systematic care of souls through networks of subordinate churches. The Benedictine rule dominated the organization of religious life, and monastic institutions were established throughout the realm. One might expect that the Normans would be the chief facilitators of Latin Christendom’s expansion in southern Italy. The conclusion that Loud reaches in this study, however, is that the conquerors played only a limited role: it was the papacy that transformed ecclesiastical life and institutions in southern Italy and Sicily. This thesis merits further interrogation, but Loud deserves credit for having laid the groundwork and framed the terms of what should be a fertile historical discussion. An overview of the volume reveals the conceptual underpinnings of this work of history. The author’s approach is thematic and unabashedly top-down. After a chapter assessing the impact of the Norman conquest, Loud gives us two chapters on the papacy. The first sets out relations between the papacy and the Norman rulers of southern Italy in admirably clarifying detail and argues for a key shift in these relations from the pontificate of Calixtus II (1119–1124). The second analyzes the more pastoral relations of the curia with the south, considering papal councils held there, interventions in ecclesiastical organization, and efforts at reform. Chapters 5 and 6 return to the Normans, first broadly considering the kings of Sicily and their relations with ecclesiastical institutions and then more narrowly focusing on military obligations. In both of these chapters Loud emphasizes the limitations of Norman influence but also its

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salutary effects. Evidence of direct royal intervention in episcopal and abbatial elections is meager, according to Loud, while the monarchy’s role as generous benefactor is amply documented. The mid-twelfth-century Catalogus baronum does reveal royal demands that churches contribute to the defense of the realm, but many ecclesiastical institutions already had military dependents and resources. Loud chiefly credits the Normans with bringing stability to southern Italy, and this, he argues, was good for the church. Chapter 7 cogently surveys the condition of the secular church and the uneven impact of reform upon it, while chapter 8 traces the development of monastic institutions. A final chapter argues for a de facto religious toleration among Latins, Greeks, and non-Christians. Institutions and relations among them dominate and, frankly, flatten the narrative; individuals and their religious experiences make only brief and fleeting appearances, mainly through hagiographical sources. This is, in sum, highly traditional ecclesiastical history. Its limitations must be noted. First, the emphasis on the Norman rulers of southern Italy and on the papacy might suggest that these were the only possible forces that could explain the changes Loud charts. To his credit, the author repeatedly underscores the indigenous presence: Lombard nobles continued to be prominent patrons of monastic institutions (104), for example, and even houses patronized by Normans “remained fundamentally native, Lombard institutions, with only a small admixture of Norman/French monks” (118). Local initiatives are acknowledged in the creation of new sees (192) and local candidates in filling them (277, 364– 365). Even when a Latin bishop was installed, Loud underscores that the clergy he directed could be largely Greek (499). These actors, however, drop out of the final analysis: Loud concludes that a striking transformation occurred in the Latin church in southern Italy and that the papacy’s impact was greater than that of the Norman conquerors. Are these really the only two possibilities? Future studies should consider the alliance of the papacy, not just with Norman rulers, but with local ecclesiastics and with local non-Norman/French elites. Valerie Ramseyer’s study of this transformation in the archdiocese of Salerno has already demonstrated the value of such an approach, and those interested in the ecclesiastical history of the south should not neglect her 2006 monograph Transformation of a Religious Landscape [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press]. Another limitation of Loud’s top-down, traditional approach is that we learn little in this volume about lived religion in southern Italy. The author is correct that spiritual and sacramental aspects of clerical life are not well documented in charters: one would have to study liturgical sources to begin to assess these subjects, and hopefully the next generation of

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scholars will do so. But charters do reveal the choices of donors across time, and these choices are never taken as the focus of analysis. Loud gives impressive examples of how Norman patronage could totally reorient the patrimony of a monastery, such as Santa Sophia in Benevento, and make it suddenly prosperous. But he does not ask why one institution in the spiritual landscape rather than another attracted patronage. Why did these Normans choose Santa Sophia, and why might the inhabitants of coastal towns in northern and central Apulia have been moved to support the Abbey of the Holy Trinity on Monte Sacro? Loud’s careful reconstruction of patterns of change is extremely valuable, but there are more questions to be considered through these sources. The strength of this book is Loud’s thorough analysis of Norman and papal relations with ecclesiastical institutions in southern Italy and Sicily. Some very interesting patterns are richly documented. Royal donations of real property to ecclesiastical institutions, for example, were rare and mainly on the island of Sicily; usually the crown granted shares of their income in a particular territory or specific revenues (313–324). These included revenues from bridge and port tolls in Aterno, from a new bathhouse in Messina, or from the Jews and the dye-works of Palermo (317– 318). Exemptions from royal taxes and the right to exercise certain regalian rights were also conceded, but the latter were more often licenses to operate fisheries than privileges to exercise judicial powers. Loud notes the difficulties ecclesiastical institutions could face in trying to collect revenues (319), but the effects on the ecclesiastical institutions and administration of having these kinds of fiscal resources certainly merits further study. Another significant development that Loud documents is the changed nature of papal relations with the south from the pontificate of Calixtus II. While the number of cardinals drawn from southern Italy decreased, the presence of bishops from southern sees in Rome, not only attending councils but also witnessing papal acts, increased. Meanwhile, popes relied less frequently on local prelates to represent their interests, sending cardinals instead, and deployed new notions of lordship in their relations with Norman rulers. This sea change in papal policy also offers numerous opportunities for further research, especially in the broader context of changes in papal reform efforts after Worms. Such opportunities for future work merit emphasis here because the magisterial tone adopted in this volume might give readers the mistaken impression that nothing remains to be done on the ecclesiastical history of southern Italy and Sicily in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Loud directly engages the interpretations of other scholars only very rarely (examples on 396, 495), but he does provide the inquiring historian a

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rich map of the relevant historical work and sources on an important array of subjects. The Latin Church in Norman Italy provides an extremely valuable foundation for the study of the ecclesiastical history of southern Italy and Sicily in the Middle Ages. Maureen C. Miller University of California, Berkeley

William Lyster, ed., The Cave Church of Paul the Hermit at the Monastery of St. Paul, Egypt. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008. Pp. xx, 395. 60 b/w, 250 color illustrations.

Yale University Press is one of the few remaining presses producing noteworthy books with superb illustrations. The present volume is a splendid example of scholarship furthered by valuable and cogent images of high quality. A comprehensive wall-painting conservation project was sponsored by the American Research Center in Egypt at the monastery church of St. Paul, one of the most remote of the Coptic desert monasteries, at the base of the South Galala Plateau, overlooking the Gulf of Suez. This monastery, one of the oldest functioning Christian monasteries, grew up around the spring, cave, and grave of the first Christian hermit, Paul, whom Anthony of Egypt in arduous travel managed to meet toward the end of Anthony’s life (a.d. 251–356) and finally to bury. Nine years of conservation work on wall painting and structures, mainly on the thirteenth-century iconographic program together with paintings from the eighteenth century, have eventuated into a magisterial study of many aspects of this unusual site. The relationship between the monastery of St. Paul and that of St. Anthony, on the other side of the mountain from Paul’s cave, is set forth through the centuries. The Life of Anthony, so influential upon St. Jerome, led ultimately to the latter’s composition of a Vita Pauli correcting the Antonine life and asserting Paul as the first desert anchorite. Attention is paid to promotion of Egyptian monasticism, as well as to late antique pilgrimages to Paul’s cave. Stephen J. Davis persuasively examines Jerome’s skillful use of intertextuality in his Life of Paul, using classical, biblical, and early Christian sources to build up not only the figure of the saint but a discursive topography of the Egyptian desert as an epic, Virgilian landscape, in aid of Jerome’s own promotion of Egyptian monasticism in the West. Textual studies are continued by Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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Mark Swanson and Alastair Hamilton, who examine the Coptic context and travelers’ accounts between the late fourteenth and early twentieth centuries, providing valuable information about the site. Febe Armanios examines the larger picture of the revival of Coptic society in the eighteenth century, when the site, deserted since the early fifteenth century, was repopulated and three of its monks in turn became the Coptic patriarch. The final study of texts is that of Gawdat Gabra, who presents fascinating and important discoveries from the manuscript library at the monastery of St. Paul, not least new Arabic-language sources for the medieval and eighteenth-century history of the monastery. When fuller access to the monastic library collection is granted, as one hopes it will eventually be, doubtless more light will be thrown on a number of obscurities in the history of St. Paul’s site. From text to building fabric: the Cave Church itself, in its multiple enlargements from hermit’s cave to chapels and community buildings, is the subject of Peter Sheehan’s archaeological studies. Conservation issues are addressed in a chapter by Michael Jones on the steps taken to conserve the interior and exterior of church, refectory, and mill; Luigi De Cesaris and Alberto Sucato present the sequence of plaster layers bearing different stages of painting, whose conservation is carefully explained. Much of art historical value results. The thirteenth century saw two phases of painting sixty years apart, which are studied by Elizabeth Bolman, who illuminates the progress of professional Coptic painting in this site. William Lyster provides insight into the iconography and style of early eighteenth-century paintings, situating them in an energetic general revival of Coptic art as well as in their political and social background. Gawdat Gabra in the final chapter provides a postconservation reading for all the inscriptions in the church, Coptic, Arabic, and some European graffiti, with transcriptions and translations. This book will be of considerable interest in the study of the beginnings of Egyptian monasticism and its diffusion, the evolving Coptic culture and society, and not least the stunning paintings now reliably preserved at this site and superbly presented in these pages. Pilgrims in late antiquity to Egypt and its holy places have now been joined by modern visitors motoring to this site, no longer so inaccessible. The twoand-a-half day journey with camels and bedouin guides following St. Anthony’s route from his monastery to St. Paul’s cave now takes forty-five minutes by car to reach the visitor center. As this valuable book shows us, the destination is incomparable. Charles Witke University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

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Laurence W. Marvin, The Occitan War: A Military and Political History of the Albigensian Crusade, 1209–1218. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. 328. 10 maps.

Laurence Marvin’s year-by-year narrative of the Albigensian Crusade provides a fluid and readable account of the military campaigns of Simon of Montfort and the crusaders he led for nine years against Languedoc. Marvin argues that the crusade has not received a detailed military study; other accounts discuss the crusade within the larger social, cultural, and political developments, and thus by necessity relegate the events of the crusade itself to a chapter or two. Marvin, in contrast, devotes a chapter to each year of the war and discusses in lucid detail the battles and sieges from the beginning of the crusade in 1209 to the end of the second siege of Toulouse and the death of Simon of Montfort in 1218. Marvin certainly makes good on his goal “to understand one distinct crusade as it unfolded over a couple of years without compressing the information and losing nuance” (xiii); rarely have I read a sustained description of a military campaign that was so readable and vivid. Marvin, for the most part, restricts his attention to events in Occitania itself, and largely from the perspective of the crusaders. His careful attention to geography, the many maps provided, and his clear prose render the description and analysis of battles and sieges engaging and easy to follow. The author, however, takes military history to concern only the acts of war themselves. While Marvin makes clear that Simon of Montfort relied on the crusaders from northern France coming every summer to staff his army, he spends little time discussing this aspect of the war. Soldiers from the north arrive, fight, and depart with obedient regularity (with the exception of the year 1216); their recruitment, motivation, and impact receive little attention. The role of Innocent III receives more attention; Marvin argues that Innocent “not only failed to solve a single problem but caused far more” (236). The pope’s vacillation between the goals of the crusade and the rights of Occitanian lords (particularly youthful heirs untainted by the laxity of their fathers) prolonged the crusade and was responsible for the havoc it visited upon Occitania. At times the book’s specificity is too narrow. Restricting his narrative from 1209 to 1218, the author argues that after the death of Simon of Montfort, the crusade fundamentally changed into a “more purely secular political struggle” (xiv). Yet Marvin, despite the frequent use of the Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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terms “crusade” and “crusader,” presents even the first phase of the war as driven by military and political strategy rather than religious motivation. In the military terms that he himself has set out, little distinguishes the crusade of Montfort from the crusade of the Capetians. Justification for ending his account in 1218 is the death of Simon of Montfort, the military leader of the crusade and the hero of the book. Resourceful, brave, honest, and forthright, Montfort, in Marvin’s eyes, embodied the ideals of the thirteenth century, a status reinforced by Marvin’s sometimes discomfiting habit of referring him to as “the athlete of Christ.” As Marvin acknowledges, the Albigensian Crusade has become a cipher for contemporary concerns and conspiracies about Catholicism, oppression, and colonization. Marvin clearly sees his study as a corrective to romantic notions about the Cathars (“the darlings of those who study the ‘other’” [xiv]) and Occitanian culture. While he is right to show the ways in which Simon and his supporters believed themselves justified in their actions, the books is almost apologetical. The narrators of the crusade, on whom Marvin depends, are also obscured in Simon’s shadow. Given that his account relies almost exclusively on four sources (Peter des Vaux de Cernay, William of Tudela, his anonymous continuator, and William of Puylaurens), Marvin might have briefly discussed the nature of their accounts, their audience, and their goals. His own approach to the crusade might at times mirror the biases of his sources. The Occitan War provides an unrivaled account of Simon of Montfort’s crusade in terms of readability and detail, and is recommended for anyone interested in military history or the Albigensian Crusade. Christopher H. MacEvitt Dartmouth College

Lynette R. Muir, Love and Conflict in Medieval Drama: The Plays and Their Legacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xvi, 294. 10 b/w illustrations.

From 1339 to 1382 in Paris, the St. Eloi confrérie of the Goldsmiths’ guild staged a play in honor of the Virgin Mary at its annual fraternal meeting, a daylong affair that would have included a range of activities from conducting the group’s business and attending Mass to holding a banquet and viewing the play.1 Accounting for lapses in performances in 1354 Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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and 1358–1360 when Paris was besieged, the St. Eloi confrérie produced forty plays during this period, all of which survive in the Cangé manuscript (Paris, BN, f., fr. 819–820) and are now referred to as Les Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages. Nearly all of these plays have a sermon on the Virgin Mary at or near the beginning, a staged appearance of the Virgin, and a concluding verse in Mary’s honor. Aside from these set pieces, however, playwrights freely developed a given play’s main story, and as a result the collection presents a range of subjects falling under four categories: miracles, saints’ lives, romance and hero stories, and historical stories.2 The collection Les Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages not only provides a site for examining confrérie -produced drama and the role of guilds in theatrical productions in fourteenth-century France but also offers an epitome of late medieval, nonbiblical plays.3 This collection and its history illustrate well the three aspects of drama that Glynne Wickham argues are the heart of medieval theater: religion, recreation, and commerce.4 In the book under review here, Love and Conflict in Medieval Drama: The Plays and Their Legacy, Lynette R. Muir—formerly a reader in French at the University of Leeds—draws on the categories of plays found in the Cangé manuscript to frame her presentation of serious, nonbiblical Latin and vernacular drama in Europe from the tenth through the mid-seventeenth centuries. In doing so, Muir offers in one volume a useful survey of the range and multitude of such plays throughout medieval and early modern Europe. In a brief introduction, Muir lays out the scope and subject of her survey, declaring that “no attempt has been made to measure the relative quality of the plays—that is a task for the reader” (1). She then outlines in general the kinds of groups that staged this drama: religious communities, civic groups, trade guilds, literary guilds, Chambers of Rhetoric, schools, professional troupes, and the like. While she does not historicize specific groups, such as the St. Eloi confrérie, she orients readers to a general overview of this drama and its production. Readers whose understanding of medieval theater rests largely on biblical plays will benefit from this brief overview. The rest of the book is a survey of specific plays presented in four general sections, each with chapters organized topically and chronologically and concluding, in the main, with a glance at early modern revisions of the plays—the legacy of the book’s title. The book’s chief merits lie in Muir’s survey and categorical organization of the plays. In part 1, “War in Heaven: Saints and Sinners,” Muir surveys in three chapters the ubiquitous medieval saint play, a genre that stages Christian heroism. Chapter 1, “The Noble Army of Martyrs,” examines plays

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drawn from the lives of early saints, including female virgin martyrs; Sts. Stephen, George, and Eustace; and, perhaps most interesting in this book on drama, St. Genesius, the Roman actor whose mid-performance conversion in front of the Emperor Diocletian leads to his death. Chapter 2, “White Martyrdom—the Hermits,” shifts to plays on monastic saints ranging from desert fathers such as St. Anthony to later hermits such as St. Guillaume d’Aquitaine. Chapter 3, “Soldiers of Christ: The Church Militant,” focuses on later reformer saints such as Francis, Dominic, and Ignatius of Loyola as well as John Huss, a proto-Protestant reformer. In summaries ranging from a sentence to several paragraphs, a pattern repeated throughout the book, Muir surveys some fifty-five saint plays from Hrotswitha von Gandersheim’s Callimachus (tenth century) to Pujet de la Serre’s Thomas Morus (1642). Closely related to the heroic saint play are plays that stage miracles, often within the context of a saint play but not necessarily. Part 2, “Miracles of Salvation,” encapsulates the book’s next four chapters. Chapter 4, “Miraculous Conversions of Jews (And a Few Pagans),” begins with a number of St. Nicholas and Virgin Mary plays in which the saint performs postmortem miracles leading to the conversion of Jews or other non-Christians, while chapter 5, “Sacrament Plays,” takes up the motif of the profaned host as staged in France, Italy, England, and the Netherlands, a story that in most cases leads to retribution rather than conversion. Chapter 6, “Your Adversary the Devil: The Saved and the Damned,” discusses a number of plays in which devils actively intervene in characters’ lives, leading many to damnation, and chapter 7, “Who Sups with the Devil: The Rash Bargain,” explores the Theophilus story and others, including Dr. Faustus, in which a character sells his soul. From Hilarius’s Ludus super Inconia Sancti Nicholai (twelfth century) to Tirso de Molina’s El mayor desengano (1627), Muir again surveys some fifty plays in this section. Part 3, “Conflicting Relationships: Love, Hate, and Marriage,” covers the next nine relatively short chapters. Here, Muir moves from saints and miracles to plays staging secular subjects drawn from romance and bourgeois literature. Beginning with an extended treatment of comic plays on the “happily ever after” motif in chapter 8, Muir moves through a series of short chapters on plays that stage a range of domestic issues: “Premarital Problems” (chapter 9), “The Falsely Accused Queen and Other Suffering Wives” (chapter 10), bourgeois “Domestic Dramas” (chapter 11), “The Wager” over a wife’s virtue (chapter 12), “The Woman Scorned” (chapter 3), and inheritance problems in “Family Feuds” (chapter 14). In chapter 15, “The Theatre of Cruelty,” she again

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extensively treats her subject, in this case plays about rape and seduction, before concluding the section with chapter 16, “Le coeur mange and Other Culinary Surprises,” where she reviews plays in which husbands or wives seek vengeance on an errant spouse. In part 4, “Power, Politics, and Patriotism,” Muir shifts to the final large category of plays treated in the book: those based on legendary and historical events and persons. Beginning with “The Siege of Troy” in chapter 17, Muir moves through history, taking up in turn plays dealing with the siege and destruction of Jerusalem (chapter 18), the history of Constantine and finding the Holy Cross (chapter 19), and the conversion of Europe and the crusades (chapter 20). She then examines sets of plays focusing on the nine worthies of medieval culture and on Joan of Arc at Orleans (chapter 21) before moving to a general treatment of politics in plays about “Pride and the Wheel of Fortune” (chapter 22) and “Affairs of State” (chapter 23). Muir closes with “Patriots and Popular Heroes” (chapter 24), looking at figures such as William Tell, Robin Hood, and St. George yet again. Though not intending an exhaustive treatment of serious, nonbiblical drama, Muir nevertheless manages to survey some 337 plays in the book. Seeking to pull this diverse and wide-ranging material together, Muir concludes the book by examining “the changing fortunes of the Virgin Mary” (203) from dramatized agent of the miraculous in the medieval period to her near absence in the early modern period. Not until a later revival of interest in traditional stories, Muir argues, do we find a return of the miraculous, but only in “that unique combination of Christian and secular helper-in-need, the Fairy Godmother” (203), and, taking a cue from Graham Greene, perhaps in the form of the female detective of modern mysteries. Not surprisingly for a book of this scope, there are a few issues worth noting here. Considering that this book surveys texts in several medieval languages, I am surprised at what seems an inconsistent method for handling translations. Sometimes translations are provided in notes, sometimes in parentheses following the original, and sometimes not at all. This issue will be minor for scholars, but for students—I am thinking here of my undergraduate theater-history students and of beginning graduate students—this issue could prove frustrating. Similarly, I was struck by an irregular use of dates to set contexts for plays. In many cases, Muir uses dates where appropriate, but occasionally—for example, when discussing Rutebeuf’s Le miracle de Theophile (66)—she assumes her readers know the given playwright and his time. This kind of slip is easy enough to make (especially when one is as familiar with a

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subject as Muir is with medieval French literature), but readers unfamiliar with the playwright or text will be left wondering. Finally, Muir provides a series of fifteen illustrations distributed in two groups between parts 1 and 2 and between parts 3 and 4. While I find the illustrations fascinating, I wish Muir would discuss them in the text: a comment or two explaining each in relation to the drama it illustrates would be helpful. Again, I am thinking here of the student reader. Other than these three issues, I have only a few quibbles here and there; for example, the Fleury playbook (Orléans MS 201) dates from the twelfth century, not the thirteenth (46); the St. Eloi confrérie staged the plays in Les Miracles de Nostre Dame par personages beginning in 1339, not 1349 (2); and the apparent cause and effect between the Council of Trent (1545–1563) and the Swedish play “Of a Sinner Who Found Mercy” (circa 1492) is confusing as expressed. Such quibbles are minor, though, and do not detract from the book’s usefulness. Conceived as a companion volume to Muir’s Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), Love and Conflict in Medieval Drama joins the earlier book to form a diptych of sorts: between the two, Muir succinctly surveys serious medieval European drama. Though one would not go to Love and Conflict in Medieval Drama for a discussion of stagecraft or production issues, the book is a sound starting point for understanding the various genres and sheer volume of nonbiblical plays, and Muir’s helpful notes and bibliography point to further research. This book should join its companion volume on the shelf of every library, undergraduate and up, that serves theater and literature programs. William F. Hodapp The College of St. Scholastica

Notes 1. Susan Stakel, “Skeptical Takes on Courtly Culture in Les Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages,” in Courtly Arts and the Art of Courtliness: Selected Papers from the Eleventh Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, ed. Keith Busby and Christopher Kleinhenz (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 623. 2. G. Paris and U. Robert, eds., Miracles de Notre Dame par personnages, 8 vols. (Paris: SATF, 1876–1893). 3. See Graham Runnells, “Mediaeval Trade Guilds and the Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages,” Medium Aevum 39 (1970), 257–287. 4. Glynne Wickham, The Medieval Theatre, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

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Jenni Nuttall, The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship: Literature, Language and Politics in Late Medieval England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. ix, 187.

Here is another thoughtful contribution to the resurgence of scholarship on fifteenth-century literary culture, which has been a conspicuous feature of medieval English studies for two decades. The genealogy of Jenni Nuttall’s book might be described as “by Pocock out of Strohm.” Following Strohm, she develops intricately close readings of Lancastrian writings, viewing them as interactive explorations of a field of discourse conditioned by the politics of the succession. And following the theories of political historian J. G. A. Pocock, she urges that political events and debates typically appropriate and sensitize certain preexisting vocabulary, certain topoi. The vocabulary and the topoi thereby become temporarily “politicized” and exert a distinctive political thrust within ensuing texts of all kinds—while at the same time being susceptible to being recycled in divergent ways unanticipated by those who were responsible for their politicization. The overall thesis is that the key terms of public discourse at the start of the fifteenth century were established by the specific justifications disseminated by the Lancastrians for their deposition of Richard II: his alleged extravagance and immaturity, displayed in a self-indulgent royal household resistant to sound advisers or “truth-tellers,” and his alleged misuse of public finances. However, what began as propagandist critique soon mutated within public discourse into a set of criteria by which the new regime itself could be measured, namely prudence, maturity, openness to advice, and creditworthiness. The Lancastrian cause found itself hoist, as it were, with the petard of its own propaganda. Nuttall divides her exposition into two parts. The first, “Household Narratives,” focuses on hostile Lancastrian stereotyping of Richard’s familia. In the wake of the articles of deposition, chronicles, sermons, letters, and clerkly satire (e.g., Richard the Redeless) developed a retrospective view of Richard’s court as intemperate, imprudent, arrogant, and ripe for a fall. We see here the politicization of various inherited topoi—notably, that of de casibus collapse and that of shallow fashionable courtliness preempting the wise counsel proper to a royal household. Nuttall convincingly shows how the concept of the sober household then reemerges as an anxiety about Henry’s reign, in both Mum and the Sothsegger and parliamentary debate. She argues that in yet more complex ways, the old propaganda against Ricardian immaturity modulates into anxiety about Henry in the shape of discourse on wise truth telling and on the intemperance of Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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youth, in Hoccleve’s Male Regle and (with special reference to the Old Man) the Regiment of Princes. Indeed, one of Nuttall’s subtlest and most absorbing claims is that “much of what seems . . . idiosyncratic or charmingly autobiographical in Hoccleve’s poetry is in fact in dialogue with the paradigms and topoi recently prioritized by the deposition” (68). Hoccleve is again a key player in the book’s second part, “Credit and Love.” Here the analysis commences from the vexed issues around Ricardian expenditure—taxation, prodigality, and capricious reward— that Henry was readily imagined to have come to remedy. Expectations were unrealistic and were thwarted by such expediencies as Henry’s suspensions of crown annuities. Nuttall contrives a sophisticated (or is it sophistic?) argument that Hoccleve maneuvers to temper one representation of himself as victim of the withholding of his annuity, with an alternative representation as a person whose recovery from prodigal youth might touch the compassion of a prince. Finally, the burning issue of the Crown’s literal creditworthiness (its fiscal credibility) is seen to be bound up with the figuring of loyal but penniless subjects as a king’s “treasure.” This configuration is diagnosed as the key to the exemplum of John of Canace in Hoccleve’s Regiment, of which Nuttall’s discussion is an absolute tour de force (113–119). Nuttall is a subtle expositor of Hoccleve, and I believe that her book especially sets new challenges for his modern readers. However, she leans overinsistently on the thesis of “temporary politicization of discourse,” which allows her to claim that “the repetition of seemingly timeless satiric formulae” is “itself a specific political gesture” (67). If, a generation before the deposition, Langland wrote about the marginalization of wise truth-tellers, and Chaucer and others wrote about youthful indulgence and “riot,” were they or were they not using “politicized” language? In a sense, The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship presupposes another book proving that they were not. Alcuin Blamires Goldsmiths, University of London

Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004. Pp. xiv, 362. 66 b/w illustrations.

The poor witches of southern Germany have been prodded and poked from every conceivable historical angle—demographics, religious geogMedievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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raphy, climate change, gender, anthropology, and psychoanalysis (see Roper’s own classic Oedipus and the Devil [New York: Routledge, 1994]). The present book has a deceptively simple aim, to explore the dynamics of witch persecution at the level of primal human emotion, of “fantasy, envy and terror”—in short, to enter territory where few historians dare to tread. The author seeks to humanize the experience not only of the witches—often middle-aged women, widows, spinsters—but of their neighbors and kinsfolk, their accusers and persecutors. After the horrors of her chapter on interrogation and torture, we may not agree with Roper that the “witch-hunters were not psychological monsters” (21), but we may at least concede that many acted in good faith, that they were concerned for the eternal souls of their victims, and that the witch trials were not cynical Stalinist show trials (on the other hand, the perverse meticulousness of the interrogations puts one in mind of Nazi record keeping). Roper brings out the homely qualities of the accused witch-cannibal, whose confessions obliquely reveal an intimate world of maternal longing and grief, bodies and fluids, baking and birthing, child deaths and premature resurrections (the alleged exhumation and consumption of infants is a reverse delivery—midwives are frequent suspects). Women’s bodies are also shown to be at the mercy of sexually exploitative men, and in many confessions the devil takes the form of a dandy, feathered seducer, promising to save his victim from an unhappy marriage and to bring her “good things” in exchange for her favors. As in many real marriages of the time, no doubt, the diabolical lover/husband turns out to be a cold deceiver (in fact, his member is icy and provides neither pleasure nor issue). The misogyny of the southern German culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both Protestant and Catholic, is well illustrated through literary and visual sources. Women past their childbearing years are depicted as shriveled-up old hags, terrifying in their lust as they literally (according to the medical theory of the day) dessicate their youthful beaus. One of the most disturbing parts of the book (chapters 8 and 9) records a shift, in the middle of the seventeenth century, from the mass persecution of postmenopausal women to a more systematic and scrupulous (from the documentary perspective) inquisition of alleged witch children and youth. There are disturbing shades here of our own prurient fascination with child killers. Witch Craze is a well-written, thoroughly researched, and thoughtful survey of the European (primarily German) persecutions of the early modern period, one that can be confidently recommended to students and the general reader alike. Roper supplies ample translations from

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the primary sources that are always riveting, sometimes darkly humorous, and frequently horrifying. Ironically, this virtue of vividness perhaps constitutes the book’s one minor flaw. Roper immerses us so deeply in the witch world—a miasmic dream continuum between the paranoid obsessions of the demonologists, the broken spirits of the suspects, and the anxieties of popular imagination—that it is sometimes difficult to draw a line between fantasy and reality, and to see where Roper intends to draw it. We are left wondering, for example, to what extent barren or unmarried women may really have been prey to murderous envy in a culture that set such a premium on marriage and fertility; or whether Anna Moll did smear poisonous salve on the eggs of her assumed victims, even if this made “psychological sense” in terms of her family history (94). More explicit speculations such as a connection between the flight of the witch and psycho-physiological response to torture, or between the cannibalism accusations in Nördlingen and intergenerational political struggle, are thought provoking but may not convince all. One of the most suggestive chapters is the last, on the (disconcerting) continuities and pregnant differences between the trials of an eighteenth-century witch, Catharina Schmid, and her sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sisters: Roper detects a new interest in psychological motivation, and an almost superstitious reliance on religious ritual—and “medical” expertise—in Schmid’s case. Above all, Roper is to be commended for her brave attempt to make human sense out of a phenomenon that still mystifies in its savagery. Indeed, one suspects that the witch hunters themselves were fundamentally mystified as they confronted their victims’ (apparent) hatred of Christian community and deeply cherished cultural values; it may well have been their uncomprehending outrage at the witches’ imagined offenses that spurred them to the worst excesses of sadism and fueled their compulsion to explain the inexplicable by “loosening the tongue.” Yasmin Haskell University of Western Australia

Philip de Souza and John France, eds., War and Peace in Ancient and Medieval History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xi, 247.

War, alas, has been one of the engines of human history, though it would be erroneous to assume that it was a continuous process. As many wars Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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have been waged, we might say, as peace treaties have been drafted and signed. Whether those treaties then held is a totally different question. To address the larger issues involved, but focusing on special aspects, the contributors to this volume examine relevant topics ranging from Greek antiquity to twelfth-century Europe. As P. J. Rhodes illustrates right from the beginning, peace treaties were broken as many times as they were drafted and signed, and this already in the Greek world. Eduard Rung examines the relationship between war, peace, and diplomacy in the Graeco-Persian world from the sixth to the fourth centuries b.c. Most importantly, he discovers that diplomacy played a major role already at that time, but changed according to the political and military constellations. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to the world of the Romans in the fourth and third centuries b.c., though they pursued a rather imperialistic approach in Italy, as J. W. Rich discusses, focusing on their use of treaties to expand and solidify their power base. Philip de Souza investigates how much the Roman emperors pursued the goal of being regarded as peacemakers, whereas they also served quite successfully as military leaders. This balancing act found vivid expression in honorific inscriptions, on coins, and in chronicles. Treaty making, however, as A. D. Lee emphasizes, required careful preparations and skills, and successful treaties depended on a wise consideration of location, a good personnel, and the delicate handling of the complex process itself. In a way, this finds great illustration in the study by Michael Whitby on the Byzantine approach, which involved resorting to good faith, trust, and cooperation in their diplomatic efforts to handle the relationship with the Huns, the Persians, and the Arabs. But whereas the diplomatic relationships with the Arabs are only touched upon here, Catherine Holmes investigates those specifically in her chapter, in which she outlines how much the Arabs utilized treaties from the earliest time of their expansion for securing their power base and to further their imperialistic goals. Only with John France’s contribution do we finally reach the Middle Ages. He investigates the practical side of sieges and illustrates that castles were the only sites that were fairly easily conquered by siege, whereas cities represented a completely different problem for the besiegers. Surprisingly, ignoring the infantry and mercenaries who were usually slaughtered if caught, the aristocratic elite relied heavily on the principle of mutual mercy and the practice of ransom. Richard Abels adds the interesting perspective of how the Anglo-Saxons dealt with the Vikings in practical terms, often paying them a ransom, the so-called “Danegeld.” But the Vikings normally acted like pirates—they did not operate as a national force—and

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took whatever they could gain out of their looting expeditions. If the ransom was the most expedient result, they were happy to accept it; otherwise they plundered, murdered, and burned. Finally, Esther Pascua discusses the development of major peace treaties in twelfth-century Europe, when kings increasingly tried to acknowledge each other and to determine the power base and frontiers of each country, leading to a considerable centralization process in political and military terms. By contrast, these treaties did not imply vassalic subordination; instead they led to “reciprocal obligations” (201). The volume concludes with a comprehensive bibliography and an index. It covers a wide range of topics and a huge swath of time from Greek antiquity to the twelfth century. In light of that, I would have liked to see also some in-depth studies on how peace was regarded and how chroniclers commented on war, on broken treaties, and on the endless peace negotiations, not to mention the enormous suffering of the civil population in wars. Albrecht Classen University of Arizona

Barbara R. Walters, Vincent Corrigan, and Peter T. Ricketts, The Feast of Corpus Christi. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. Pp. xviii, 562. 16 tables and 8 indexes.

The feast of Corpus Christi was added to the temporale of the church’s calendar by Pope Urban IV in 1264. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 had proclaimed the doctrine of transubstantiation, and various strands of theological and philosophical thought lay behind the Council’s definitive statement. Texts for the Offices, Mass, and homily of the new feast, generally attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas and put in place sometime after 1261, set forth the tensions and resolutions of literal physical presence and spiritual presence of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist. What the present book presents is the detailed background to the growth and final acceptance and promulgation of the feast, an introduction to the liturgical manuscripts together with critical editions of them, and an introduction and critical edition of a group of thirteenth-century psalters from the Diocese of Liège bodying forth Eucharistic piety surrounding the feast. Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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The fictional account of the role played by the “Miracle of Bolsena” in impelling Urban IV to promote the feast is familiar to all visitors to the Raphael Rooms in the Vatican (where the event is a fresco, not a painting as stated on pages 32 and 429). Walters gives two accounts of the so-called miracle on these pages, at variance with each other; the correct account is the latter one, wherein the host bleeds on the corporal. Walters in the chapter “The Feast and Its Founder” directs considerable attention to Juliana of Mont Cornillon, a religious leader and prophetess from Liège, born around 1192–1193. Instructed by visions to bring about the institution of a yearly feast in honor of the Holy Sacrament in addition to the observance of its Maundy Thursday inception, she succeeded in recruiting a plethora of religious and clerical supporters, involving herself in musical compositions as well as texts for the formation of such an observance. Diffusion of the feast began through Juliana’s multifaceted social network, presented in almost bewildering detail, including lay women, beguines and nuns, whose role in the area and the time period is exhaustively portrayed. Likewise St. Thomas Aquinas appears as connected to Juliana indirectly through mutual associates. This introduction with its mass of evidence raises a few questions: what is a cemetery reserved for saints (11)? Was the feast originally on the Thursday after Pentecost or Trinity (33, 41)? A “rhymed numerical office” is mentioned on page 25, and the reforms Gregory VII had by the twelfth century resulted in “a compulsory government under a royal priesthood” (36), an unusual way to describe prince-bishops. Something called “Popular Latin” is mentioned on page xvii, and while the Latin is for the most part carefully edited, there are errors, for example, pedem for pedum (6). A highly detailed introduction by Walters prefaces critical editions together with musical notation of the relevant liturgical manuscripts by Vincent Corrigan (54–425). The vernacular poems known as the Mosan Psalters are introduced also by Walters (429–444), who sees them as a bridge between lay vernacular religious practices and “the intellectual theology exalted by priests in the Latin liturgy” (430). These interesting books were often illuminated, and the poems in the set of them edited by Peter T. Ricketts (445–531), intended for devout women around Liège, were surrounded by material such as calendars, litanies, health rules, Mass devotions, and abbreviated breviary offices such as those for the Blessed Virgin Mary’s feasts. A few slips can be found in this introduction to Ricketts’s work: the prophetess Anna in the Jerusalem

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Temple (440) did not record Simeon’s song Nunc dimittis, as can be seen in the translation of “Bea Sire, Deus” (457). The once-and-for-all sacrifice of Christ on the cross is overthrown by translating operatus est as “works for our salvation” (436), and the tree of life quod amisi wasn’t lost; rather “I have lost it” (443), through sin, tort, as in the parallel vernacular version. Seven indexes of manuscripts, a comprehensive bibliography, and a general index complete this vast undertaking. Charles Witke University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Carl S. Watkins, History and the Supernatural in Medieval England. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 4th series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 271.

From the works of Alexander Murray, Benedicta Ward, Ronald Finucane, Jonathan Sumption, and Peter Brown in the 1970s and early 1980s to current studies by Robert Bartlett and Nancy Caciola, Anglophone historians have been fascinated by accounts of miracles and marvels and the problems they raised for medieval theologians, natural philosophers, and chroniclers. In this tradition, Carl S. Watkins gives us a thoughtful scholarly study of accounts of the supernatural in English writers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Fairies, green men, witches, night riders, and wonder-working stones abound, but the treatment is neither titillating nor merely encyclopedic. Watkins tells us that his book has been long in the making, and this shows in the amount of attention he devotes, especially in his first two chapters, to rejecting earlier assumptions about elite versus popular or pagan versus Christian practices and to contesting a tendency in some French scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s to characterize the assumptions and practices of ordinary people as resistance to clerical control. His arguments against such oversimplifications are impeccable, but he seems to be fighting a battle that has already been won. Addressing more recent methodological issues, Watkins’s reservations about literary or narratological analysis of chronicles, exempla collections, otherworld journey narratives, and literature of entertainment by scholars such as Monica Otter, or studies of history writing as a tool Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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for creating a politically and socially useful past by theorists such as Gabrielle Spiegel, lead to a complex and convincing view of the variety of contexts—practical and lived as well as textual—in which such writing should be situated. But here there is a different problem. The description of context sometimes becomes such a general account of twelfthand thirteenth-century religious culture that one loses sight of key questions about the texts themselves. One can, after all, query certain literary, structural, political, or ideological analyses without rejecting all attention to how accounts are constructed, and one of the pressing questions about this distinctively English enthusiasm for marvelous and miraculous tales is why it is so often embedded in chronicles and histories. Watkins deals admirably with the new attention to the regularities of nature and empirical investigation in twelfth-century writing generally but does not raise the issue of what ideas of reporting and witnessing history-writing in particular seemed to require. To take merely one example: many of these authors frame their material in layers of witnesses that add more distance to accounts than Watkins admits. Moreover, although Watkins is quite correct that the texts he treats—which range from almost ethnographic descriptions to moralizing stories and collections of amusing oddities—do not make up a single genre, it is precisely for this reason that the reader needs a fuller explanation of what sorts of writing he has chosen to include in his study and why. Watkins sees a shift from authors such as Ordericus Vitalis, who situate the marvelous or preternatural in a didactic context, to writers such as Gervase of Tilbury, who reflect a naturalizing tendency acquired from the schools but do not so much desacralize the world as turn the wondrous to new pastoral uses. This is a convincing argument and one of considerable nuance. Furthermore, in his treatment of saints, spells, and attitudes toward magic, as in a superb summary (in chapter 5) of changing theories of the afterlife and their connection to a developing sacramental system, he provides both a guide through much recent work on medieval culture and a collection of terrific stories about local practice. Nonetheless, it is hard not to think that authors such as Walter Map and even Gerald of Wales were sometimes more playful and even tongue-in-cheek than Watkins’s account suggests. But no one, after reading this book, will be tempted to see the bizarre tales told in twelfth-century England as simply bizarre. Rather Watkins makes them a window onto both ordinary life and the efforts and intentions of those who reacted to, and tried to reform, it. Caroline Walker Bynum Institute for Advanced Study

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Logan E. Whalen, Marie de France and the Poetics of Memory. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008. Pp. xii, 208.

One of the most intriguing aspect in the works by Marie de France proves to be her appeal to her readers/listeners to learn from the experiences of her protagonists, whether we think of her lais, her fables, or her two hagiographical texts (La vie seinte Audree can now be certainly attributed to her), in both emotional and religious terms. Logan E. Whalen here adds the significant correlation between “the representations of these visual descriptions [images, books, belts, shirts] and the faculty of memory” (4), suggesting that Marie fundamentally intended to elaborate a comprehensive plan to develop strategies of memory. There are many specific words throughout her texts that emphasize, indeed, how much the poet was concerned with the concept of memory, and this well before the vernacularization of the classical rhetorical texts on memory (Priscian, Cicero, etc.) in the thirteenth century. She wants to be remembered by posterity, and she has her protagonists make many efforts to remember the teachings contained in the narratives. This is very much the case in the fables, but in the lais memory also plays a significant role, such as in Guigemar where the lovers try hard to ensure that they will clearly remember, or at least recognize, each other at a later time. And in the hagiographical texts the message for the audience is unmistakable: remember the religious teachings for the salvation of your soul. Of course, every medieval poet referred to his or her sources, and demonstrated through the display of the new text or poem his or her knowledge of poems from the past, certainly a process of memory. I wonder, however, whether Marie truly focused on this process as intensively as Whalen insinuates. Indeed, there are repeated references to the narrator’s mnemonic capacities, but the focus mostly seems to rest on teachings about true love (lais) and on moral and ethical aspects (fables). Undoubtedly, there is always an element of memory involved, as in all teaching situations, which finds explicit support in the manuscripts (fables), which Whalen has examined in impressive detail as to mnemonic devices (initials, different color schemes, etc.). And the respective prologues and epilogues underscore how much Marie was concerned with proving her ability to transmit ancient oral (or written) sources for her own audience. In this sense, Whalen is certainly correct to identify this as a reflection of the rhetorical trope of inventio, but to Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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claim that Marie predicated most of her narratives on the theoretical issue of “memory” stretches the thin evidence almost to the breaking point. Marie likes to refer to herself, but this does not make her a strong advocate of memory theory, even in face of her clear attempt to convey moral lessons in her fables, a characteristic feature of this genre. There are numerous objects, indeed, that remind protagonists of past events and people, yet these do not support the general argument developed by Whalen because they are simply markers to connect the past with the present, as is commonly seen in medieval literature (including, e.g., the Chanson de Roland). Even though the central aspect of this study does not fully convince me, Whalen succeeds in offering fine readings of specific passages throughout Marie’s oeuvre, particularly in Guigemar, then in the Espurgatoire and Audree. His comparisons between Marie’s fables and her sources uncover specific and important differences, highlighting Marie’s original contributions. In the hagiographical context this also concerns the expression of merveillie in face of the horrors in hell and purgatory, but this is simply an essential part of all teaching strategies, as later to be used by Guillaume de Lorris, Richard de Fournival, Chaucer, and Dante (179). Whalen discusses an interesting aspect of Marie’s approach to writing, and his readings are sensitive, careful, and meticulous, based both on a solid knowledge of the manuscript tradition and the actual texts, but he seems to overemphasize memory as a central concern for Marie. Apart from chapter 2, all others have been published in previous venues, though Whalen expands on them to some extent. Albrecht Classen University of Arizona

Jan M. Ziolkowski, trans., Letters of Peter Abelard: Beyond the Personal. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008. Pp. lii, 232.

This present collection of certain letters of Abelard begins with a comprehensive and helpful introduction to his life, works, and controversies. The Latin text followed is that of Edmé Smits (1983). Each letter is presented along with an introduction providing more detail about its time of writing, recipient, contents, and apologetic and other situating material. Correspondences in word and subject to matter in Abelard’s Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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sermons and other works are duly noted. The problems of dating are thoroughly addressed. Close attention is paid throughout to the manuscript and, in certain instances, the printed sources for the texts. Copious footnotes provide secondary and other sources for each letter, and an extensive bibliography, general index, and index of scriptural references make this a splendid and learned access to the letters of Abelard beyond the correspondence with Héloise (Letters One through Eight in the Patrologia Latina edition) and the Historia Calamitatum. The collection is divided into three parts: the first pertains to Héloise and the nuns of the Paraclete. Letter Nine, to those nuns, might actually be a continuation of Letter Eight. Letter Nine is concerned with the educational curriculum for the nuns gathered around Héloise, drawing on earlier ideas about women s education, particularly those of Jerome. Next, the prefaces to each of the three books of The Paraclete Hymnal, numbering 133 hymns, are translated, basically epistolary-type compositions in their own right. The Dedication Letter to Abelard’s The Commentary on the Six Days of Creation follows. Letter Sixteen, the Prologue to The Sermons, concludes this first part. The second part moves to the struggles of Abelard in the last two years of his life with Bernard of Clairvaux. Letter Ten disputes minutiae of Scriptural word use and liturgy, particularly the adjective describing bread in the Lord’s Prayer, in Luke quotidianum, in Matthew supersubstantialem, in Jerome’s translations. Abelard defends supersubstantialem against its alternative’s universal use in liturgy in analysis not unlike that displayed in his Sic et non. It is regrettable that the Greek word in both Gospel passages, epiousion, is incorrectly spelled in this otherwise superbly edited book (81). Letter Fifteen, “To His Comrades,” against Abbot Bernard, relates to the famous dispute between the two at the Council of Sens. Ziolkowski admirably sorts out the problems attendant on the chronology and intricacies of this conflict. This section of the collection concludes with Abelard’s Apologia against Bernard, surviving only in fragments. Part 3, “Other Controversies,” sets forth Letter Eleven, “To Abbot Adam and the Monks of St. Denys,” centering on the hornet’s nest Abelard stirred up by denying that Denys was Dionysius the Areopagite. Letter Twelve, “To a Regular Canon,” reveals Abelard obsessing over the rivalry between monks, who have religio, religious life or order, and canons, who have officium, a charge or duty. Monk and abbot, Abelard could have pursued his teaching career, not as a monk, but as a canon. Here he defends the superiority of the monk in no uncertain terms. Letter Thirteen, “To an Ignoramus in the Field of Dialectic,” in its excursus

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on logic, presents Abelard’s most sustained statement on philosophy’s potentials. In Letter Fourteen, “To Bishop G[ilbert] and the Clergy of Paris,” Abelard complains that he has been falsely accused of heresy by an unnamed antagonist, who is actually Roscelin of Compiegne, unnamed because he, in Abelard’s view, is the actual heretic. This welcome and judicial translation presents Abelard in readily accessible English, behind which the reader who knows Latin can see the original sentence structures and pacing. It is a valuable contribution to deeper awareness of Abelard in his many dimensions. Charles Witke University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Jan M. Ziolkowski, trans. Solomon and Marcolf. Harvard Studies in Medieval Latin 1. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008. Pp. xvii, 452. 15 b/w illustrations.

Solomon and Marcolf is an entertaining medieval Latin text that is now accompanied by a lively, modern English translation. The medieval work contains two brief parts. Part 1 has a prologue presenting King Solomon and his visitor Marcolf, unforgettable for his eloquence and hideous look. Marcolf’s face is like a donkey’s, his beard is dirty, and his smock does not extend to his buttocks. Marcolf’s wife has the face of a snake and the beard of a goat, and she decorates her chest with a lead fly. Part 1 continues with a debate of 142 pairs of proverbs. King Solomon begins each couple of pairs with a lofty moral observation, and Marcolf regularly strives to deflate Solomon. At the start of the entire pointcounterpoint debate, Marcolf (3b) rebuffs Solomon by saying that the beginner is the one who sings badly: “Qui male cantat, primus incipit.” Marcolf’s proverbs can be contemptuous or demean authority. And he says (4b), “Promittit presbyter sanitatem unde non habet potestatem” (“A priest promises well-being over which he does not have power”). Toward the end of the debate Solomon is fed up with the contest (“Fessus sum loquendo”). Twelve stewards of Solomon want to smash Marcolf, but Solomon prefers that Marcolf should go in peace. Part 2 has twenty chapters of narratives. King Solomon, on returning from hunting, stays at the home of Marcolf. Solomon asks about Marcolf’s family, and Marcolf replies that his father puts thorns on a path to Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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block passengers; Marcolf’s mother closes the eyes of a dying neighbor; Marcolf’s brother sits outside the house and kills whatever lice he finds; and Marcolf’s sister is pregnant because she frolicked with a young man. Marcolf explains that he himself acquired his cleverness from a vulture’s heart on a crust of bread. Part 2 tries to prove by stories that nature prevails over nurture. One of these stories is that a cat, which had been trained with a candle, ignores the candle and pursues mice. Much of part 2 also discusses whether women are good or bad. Marcolf disfavors women and even rebukes Solomon about women: “Non bene sapis” (“You are not very clever”). Marcolf promotes a false rumor that husbands should have seven wives: after a riot among the women appears in Jerusalem, the falsehood is revealed. In the penultimate chapter, Marcolf disrespectfully reveals his buttocks at Solomon. In the final chapter, Solomon commands that Marcolf be hanged from a tree. Marcolf gains his request that he be allowed to choose whichever tree he prefers. But after Marcolf cannot find a likable tree for the hanging, Solomon permits him to go free. The reader instantly appreciates the differences in personality between the formal, authoritative style of Solomon and the boorish peasantry style of Marcolf, or perhaps (as the new editor suggests [p. 32]) like the contrast between the educated university scholar from high class and the uneducated, rough character. But whatever the status, the work occasionally expresses anachronism, such as when Solomon refers (p. 59, 38a) to the Four Evangelists. And the reader may be horrified by the occasional references of Marcolf to human bodily functions, such as when, after (38a) Solomon’s mention of the Four Evangelists, Marcolf directly remarks (38b) that a latrine is held by four posts. Despite the contents and tone, it is impossible to learn whether parts 1 and 2 of Solomon and Marcolf were written by the same person or when and where they were written. Still, Notker III Labeo (d. 1022), William of Tyre (about 1130–1185), and Serlo of Wilton (d. 1181) were aware of Solomon and Marcolf. And the work must have been very popular, though the known twenty-seven manuscripts are late. All of them are from the fifteenth century (except that the Alba Julia manuscript is denoted as “fourteenth-fifteenth century” [p. 248]). And nearly all the manuscripts are found today in Germany, Austria, or Poland. The new edition of Solomon and Marcolf displays elaborate material. The fifty-page introduction discusses genre, contents, date and place of composition, proverbs, manuscripts, and editions. The Latin text is followed by a commentary, textual studies, four appendixes, bibliography,

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and four different indexes. Apart from literature and philology, the commentary touches on other areas, even on strange lore, such as cow saliva’s efficacy against hair loss (p. 223). Appendix 2 gives full citations of sources, analogues, and testimonia, with no fewer than thirty-four entries, reaching with extracts from the Old Testament to John Lydgate (about 1370–1449): the Latin and other early vernacular expressions are put into modern English. Jan M. Ziolkowski, who is the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Medieval Latin at Harvard, improves Walter Benary’s edition of 1914. The new book uses, but with few changes, Benary’s base Latin manuscript, Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek MS M.ch.F. 65 (dated 1434). Ziolkowski’s translations in English are very frank, not bowdlerized: for a decade his classes have already tested the translations. Furthermore, the book is enhanced by charming cartoon-like reproductions, with full descriptions, of fifteen woodcuts published by Johann Weissenburger (Landshut, 1514). Jan M. Ziolkowski’s work marks triumphantly the inauguration of the Harvard Studies in Medieval Latin series. Marvin L. Colker University of Virginia

Books Received Alford, Stephen. Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008. Pp. 432, 16 b/w illustrations. $45.00. Beecher, Donald, and Grant Williams, eds. Ars Reminiscendi: Mind and Memory in Renaissance Culture. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2009. Pp. 440. Bornstein, Daniel, ed. Medieval Christianity. Vol. 4, A People’s History of Christianity. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009. Pp. 409. $35.00. Brosens, Koenraad, et al. European Tapestries in the Art Institute of Chicago. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008. Pp. 408, 138 color + 159 duotone illustrations. Brothers, Cammy. Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008. Pp. 270, 200 b/w + 40 color illustrations. $65.00. Campbell, Lorne, Miguel Falomir, Jennifer Fletcher, and Luke Syson. Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. 304, 190 color illustrations. $70.00. Costambeys, Marios. Power and Patronage in Early Medieval Italy: Local Societies, Italian Politics and the Abbey of Farfa, c. 700–900. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 4th ser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xvi, 388, 11 b/w illustrations. $115.00. De Souza, Philip, and John France, eds. War and Peace in Ancient and Medieval History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xi, 247. $99.00. Dodds, Jerrilynn D., María Rosa Menocal, and Abigail Krasner Balbale. The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008. Pp. xiv, 416, 10 b/w + 200 color illustrations. $40.00. Eisenbichler, Konrad, ed. Renaissance Medievalism. Essays and Studies, 18. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2009. Pp. 360. $29.50 (paper). Flanagan, Sabina. Doubt in an Age of Faith: Uncertainty in the Long Twelfth Century. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2008. Pp. xiv + 216. =C60.00.

Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 35 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.

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Haller, Rudolf. Grazer Philosophische Studien: Internationale Zeitschrift für Analytische Philosophie, vol. 78. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. Pp. 323. $60.00 (paper). Halsall, Guy. Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376–568. Cambridge Medieval Textbooks. Cambridge Medieval Textbooks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xvii, 592. $41.99 (paper). Husband, Timothy. The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the “Belles Heures” of Jean de France, Duc de Berry. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. 388, 378 color illustrations. $65.00. Laiou, Angelike E., and Cécile Morrison. The Byzantine Economy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. 282. $32.99 (paper). Marvin, Laurence. The Occitan War: A Military and Political History of the Albigensian Crusade, 1209–1218. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. 328, 10 maps. $110.00. Monnas, Lisa. Merchants, Princes and Painters: Silk Fabrics in Italian and Northern Paintings, 1300–1550. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. 408, 100 b/w + 150 color illustrations. $75.00. Peterson, David S., and Daniel E. Bornstein, eds. Florence and Beyond: Culture, Society and Politics in Renaissance Italy: Essays in Honour of John M. Najemy. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2008. Pp. 518, 8 b/w + color plates. Rosello, Lucio Paolo. Il Ritratto del vero governo del principe (1552), ed. Matteo Salvetti. Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2008. Pp. 228. =C21.00. Ruys, Juanita Feros, ed. What Nature Does Not Teach: Didactic Literature in the Medieval and Early-Modern Periods. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008. Pp. xiv, 530, 3 b/w illustrations. =C90.00. Silver, Larry, and Elizabeth Wycoff, eds. Grand Scale: Monumental Prints in the Age of Duer and Titian. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008. Pp. 176, 62 b/w + 45 color illustrations + 2 gatefolds. $50.00. Syros, V. Die Rezeption der aristotelischen politischen Philosophie bei Marsilius von Padua. Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions 134. Leiden, 2007. Pp. x, 366. =C99.00, $148.00. Turner, Nicholas, with contributions by Jean Goldman. Drawn to Italian Drawings: The Goldman Collection. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. 336, 162 b/w + 158 color illustrations. $65.00. Turner, Ralph V. Eleanor of Aquitane: Untangling Myths, New Biography Seeks Truth as about the Most Famous Queen of the Middle Ages. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. 395, 16 b/w illustrations. $35.00.

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Wiesner-Hanks, Mary E. The Marvelous Hairy Girls: The Gonzales Sisters and Their Worlds. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. 250, 40 b/w illustrations. $30.00. Ziolkowski, Jan M., trans. Solomon and Marcolf. Harvard Studies in Medieval Latin 1. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008. Pp. xvii, 452, 15 b/w illustrations. $40.00.