Medievalia et Humanistica, No. 37: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Culture: Literary Appropriations (Volume 37) (Medievalia et Humanistica Series, 37) 9781442214279, 9781442214286, 1442214279

Table of contents :
Contents
Editorial Note
Manuscript Submission Guidelines
Articles for Future Volumes
Preface
The Oldest Manuscript Witness of the First Life of Blessed Francis of Assisi
Ironic Patterning and Numerical Composition in the Vie de saint Alexis: Form and Effect/Affect
Rewriting Paternity: The Meaning of Renovating Westminster in La Estoire de seint Aedward le rei
Boccaccio’s Three Venuses: On the Convergence of Celestial and Transgressive Love in the Genealogie Deorum Gentilium Libri
Dante’s Justinian, Cino’s Corpus: The Hermeneutics of Poetry and Law
Dante’s Appropriation of Lucan’s Cato and Erichtho
Review Notices
Alberico di Montecassino, Brevarium de dictamine
Anlezark, Daniel, ed. and trans. The Old English Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn
Averroes (Ibn Rushd) of Cordoba, Long Commentary on the De Anima of Aristotle
Bailey, Lisa K. Christianity’s Quiet Success: The Eusebius Gallicanus Sermon Collection and the Power of the Church in Late Antique Gaul
Beechy, Tiffany, The Poetics of Old English
Collins, David J., Reforming Saints: Saints’ Lives and Their Authors in Germany, 1470–1530
Dodds, Jerrilyn D., María Rosa Menocal, and Abigail Krasner Balbale, The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture
Ebbesen, Sten, Topics in Latin Philosophy from the 12th–14th Centuries: Collected Essays of Sten Ebbesen, Volume 2
Fossier, Robert. The Axe and the Oath: Ordinary Life in the Middle Ages, Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane
Howard, Deborah, and Laura Moretti, Sound and Space in Renaissance Venice: Architecture, Music, Acoustics
Magennis, Hugh, and Mary Swan, eds., A Companion to Ælfric
Oswald, Dana M., Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature
Rasmussen, Ann Marie, and Sarah Westphal-Wihl, Ladies, Whores, and Holy Women: A Sourcebook in Courtly, Religious, and Urban Cultures of Late Medieval Germany
Silver, Larry, and Elizabeth Wyckoff, eds., Grand Scale: Monumental Prints in the Age of Dürer and Titian
Books Received

Citation preview

MEDIEVALIA ET HUMANISTICA

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M ED I E VA L IA E T H U MA N ISTICA Editor Paul Maurice Clogan University of North Texas B OOK RE VIE W E DITORS Lisa Bansen-Harp Ashland University

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

Wolfgang Polleichtner Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Adriano Prosperi Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa Francesco Stella Università di Siena E DITORIA L BOA RD

David Bevington University of Chicago

Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski University of Pittsburgh

Daniel Bornstein Washington University, St. Louis

Christopher S. Celenza American Academy in Rome

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

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M E D I E VA L I A E T HUMANISTICA S T U D I E S I N M E D I E VA L A N D R E N A I S S A N C E C U LT U R E NEW SERIES: NUMBER 37

Literar y Appropriations EDITED BY PA U L M A U R I C E C L O G A N

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

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

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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 © 2011 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 catalogued 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: 978-1-4422-1427-9 eISBN: 978-1-4422-1428-6 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.

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Contents

Editorial Note

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Manuscript Submission Guidelines

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Articles for Future Volumes

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Preface The Oldest Manuscript Witness of the First Life of Blessed Francis of Assisi Jacques Dalarun, Institute de recherché et d’histoire des texts

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Ironic Patterning and Numerical Composition in the Vie de saint Alexis: Form and Effect/Affect Lisa Bansen-Harp

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Rewriting Paternity: The Meaning of Renovating Westminster in La Estoire de seint Aedward le rei Nicole Leapley, St. Anselm College

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Boccaccio’s Three Venuses: On the Convergence of Celestial and Transgressive Love in the Genealogie Deorum Gentilium Libri David Lummus, Yale University

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Dante’s Justinian, Cino’s Corpus: The Hermeneutics of Poetry and Law Lorenzo Valterza, Rutgers University

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Dante’s Appropriation of Lucan’s Cato and Erichtho Paul M. Clogan, University of North Texas

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review notices Alberico di Montecassino, Brevarium de dictamine (Ronald Witt, Duke University) Anlezark, Daniel, ed. and trans. The Old English Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn (Robert Boenig, Texas A&M University)

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Averroes (Ibn Rushd) of Cordoba, Long Commentary on the De Anima of Aristotle Translated with an introduction and notes by Richard C. Taylor, with Thérèse-Anne Druart, sub-editor (Philip Neri Reese, O.P., Dominican House of Studies, Washington, DC) Bailey, Lisa K. Christianity’s Quiet Success: The Eusebius Gallicanus Sermon Collection and the Power of the Church in Late Antique Gaul (Charles Witke, University of Michigan) Beechy, Tiffany, The Poetics of Old English (Valeria Di Clemente, Cevolani Cento, Ferrara) Collins, David J., Reforming Saints: Saints’ Lives and Their Authors in Germany, 1470–1530 (Albrecht Classen, University of Arizona) Dodds, Jerrilyn D., María Rosa Menocal, and Abigail Krasner Balbale, The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture (Teofilo F. Ruiz, UCLA) Ebbesen, Sten, Topics in Latin Philosophy from the 12th–14th Centuries: Collected Essays of Sten Ebbesen, Volume 2 (Justin Marie Brophy, O.P., Dominican House of Studies, Washington, DC)

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Fossier, Robert. The Axe and the Oath: Ordinary Life in the Middle Ages, Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Teofilo F. Ruiz, UCLA)

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Howard, Deborah, and Laura Moretti, Sound and Space in Renaissance Venice: Architecture, Music, Acoustics (Seth J. Coluzzi, Brandeis University)

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Magennis, Hugh, and Mary Swan, eds., A Companion to Ælfric (Robert Boenig, Texas A&M University) Oswald, Dana M., Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature (Maik Goth, Ruhr University, Bochum)

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Rasmussen, Ann Marie, and Sarah Westphal-Wihl, Ladies, Whores, and Holy Women: A Sourcebook in Courtly, Religious, and Urban Cultures of Late Medieval Germany (Albrecht Classen, University of Arizona)

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Silver, Larry, and Elizabeth Wyckoff, eds., Grand Scale: Monumental Prints in the Age of Dürer and Titian (Jenny Spinks, The University of Melbourne)

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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–xii. 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.

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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 8½-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, 3½-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 Richard Marsden, Professor of English, School of English Studies, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK xi

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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

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Preface

This volume, the thirty-seventh in the new series, offers six original articles and fourteen reviews. The articles focus on the art of appropriation in medieval literature. Jacques Dalarun’s study of “The Oldest Manuscript Witness of the First Life of Blessed Francis of Assisi” appropriates to English readers significant findings of the writer, to be found in expanded form in an Italian church publication of probably limited circulation. The appropriation is sound, the conclusions of importance for Franciscan studies. Lisa Bansen-Harp in “Ironic Patterning and Numerical Composition in the Vie de saint Alexis” argues persuasively that numerical and ironic structural patterns in the Vie de Saint Alexis have complex functions. One of the most important is the appropriation of the Alexis to help the audience identify with the saint’s family who is clueless as to their son’s true destiny. The author defines both ironic and biblical irony clearly and places her analysis into a rich critical tradition, which she uses and evaluates with authority. M&H readers will enjoy reading this piece very much and appreciate its wide range. Particularly interesting are the author’s remarks linking the Vie’s paratactic structure to the experience of following a story in medieval stained glass windows. Nicole Leapley in her article, “Rewriting Paternity: The Meaning of Renovating Westminster in La Estoire de seint Aedward le rei,” argues that in Matthew Paris’s great life of King Edward, dedicated to Henry III and Queen Eleanor of Provence, the political objective of relegitimizing the embattled Angevin dynasty is achieved by a strategy of appropriation that rewrites royal genealogy as spiritual rather than biological. To this end, the author maintains, Henry III’s renovation of Westminster Abbey plays “a pivotal role” in the way that it links Henry to Edward’s earlier building project. This article raises extremely interesting questions: Is Matthew Paris dispensing with genealogy altogether or at least relegating it to a minor role and substituting other strategies of royal legitimation for it, or is he reconceiving genealogy as spiritual in such a way that it becomes his principal strategy for royal legitimacy. David Lummus’s article, “Boccaccio’s Three Venuses: On the Convergence of Celestial and Transgressive Love in the Genealogie Deorum Gentilium Libri,” examines the three different Venuses that Boccaccio xiii

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delineates in his Genealogie Deorum Gentilium Libri, and appropriates this work and the Decameron, illustrating how Boccaccio’s theory of celestial and transgressive love can be applied more specifically to the Decameron, problematizing the relationship of the Decameron to Boccaccio’s minor works. Lorenzo Valterza’s article, “Dante’s Justinian, Cino’s Corpus: The Hermeneutics of Poetry and Law” is an intriguing, even ingenious, thesis that contrasts and appropriates Dante’s understanding of law with that of his friend, Cino da Pistoia. In addition, fourteen reviews examine recent publications in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. I am grateful as ever to the editorial board for their expert advice and to the staff of Rowman & Littlefield, Inc., for their production of the annual volume. P. M. C.

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The Oldest Manuscript Witness of the First Life of Blessed Francis of Assisi JACQUES DALARUN

Written by Thomas of Celano, the First Life of Blessed Francis of Assisi is a text of primary importance, for at least two reasons.1 On the one hand, it provides the first developed biographical testimony about the saint of Assisi, and, thus, the closest source for our historical knowledge of Francis. On the other hand, the first hagiographer defined what would become the established icon of Francis. As Raimondo Michetti wrote: “Brother Thomas of Celano, author of the Life of Blessed Francis, can be considered as the inventor of saint Francis of Assisi.”2 We know that the First Life was commissioned by Pope Gregory IX,3 and written not only after Francis’s death (4 October 1226),4 but also after his canonization (16 July 1228).5 Since the translation of Francis’s corpse (5 May 1230) is not related in the First Life, we can guess it was completed before this event. The most recent critical edition of this text, published by Michael Bihl in 1941, is based on twenty-one manuscripts, of which five come from the Friars Minor, one from the Poor Clares, eight from the Cistercians, three from the Benedictines, and three others from cathedral chapters.6 The weakness of the manuscript tradition—and above all the weakness of this tradition within the Franciscan Order—is obviously related to the decision of 1266, when Bonaventure, and the general chapter of Paris ordered to destroy all the legends prior to the Major Legend of the same Bonaventure.7 Until now, the oldest manuscript of the First Life for which we have a confirmed date (15 October 1253) is from the Catalan abbey of Ripoll.8 Until now, the oldest manuscript for which we have had firm dating is the xxx ms of 1253. Another manuscript witness, Bibliothèque nationale

Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 37 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011.

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de France in Paris, lat. 3817, has attracted scholarly attention because of the mention drawn at the end of the hagiographical text: At Perugia, the happy lord Pope Gregory IX, in the second year of his glorious pontificate, the 5th day of the Calends of March, received this legend, confirmed it, and decided that it should be kept. Thanks be to the omnipotent God, and our Saviour for all his gifts, now, and for every age. Amen!9

Obviously, such a report (of confirmation, and not of approval, as often claimed) should have resolved all problems about dating the achievement of the First Life. Yet it has been the target of an embarrassing debate, carrying two elements of uncertainty: first, about the dating of the manuscript; second, about the dating of the report of the confirmation itself. For the manuscript, the old Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum Bibliothecae Regiae (1744) gives fourteenth century,10 the same dating as in the Catalogus codicum hagiographicorum latinorum antiquiorum saeculo XVI qui asservantur in Bibliotheca nationali Parisiensi of the Bollandists (1889).11 Édouard d’Alençon (1906) and Maurice Beaufreton (1925) suggested thirteenth century.12 In 1926, Michael Bihl was the first to distinguish between the first part of volume, a homiliary that he dated thirteenth–fourteenth centuries, and its second part, the copy of Francis’ Life that he dated thirteenth century.13 In 1937, the same scholar offered fourteenth century for the homiliary, and about 1300 for the First Life.14 In 1941, he came back to thirteenth–fourteenth centuries, and thirteenth century respectively for the two parts of the volume.15 Meanwhile (1940), John Moorman claimed that “the Paris MS. cannot be placed earlier than the end of the thirteenth century,”16 a dating repeated by Bihl in 1946,17 which is nowadays commonly accepted in the Franciscan studies. None of these scholars tried to demonstrate this paleographically or codicologically. Bihl was the only one to identify two codicological unities, but with a new difficulty: How could the second part of a volume, usually presumed to be added to the previous one, be earlier than its first part? The report of the confirmation is mentioned as an addition by the Bollandists (1889), but without dating.18 According to Édouard d’Alençon (1906), and Maurice Beaufreton (1925), it could be dated end of the fourteenth century.19 In 1937, 1941, and 1946, Bihl expressed his certainty that the final mention was written by the same scribe who copied the First Life, who nevertheless changed his textual script in chancellery script.20 But in 1940, Moorman affirmed: “the appended note, which is in a different handwriting, is probably nearly a hundred years after,” thus end of the fourteenth century.21

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First Life of Blessed Francis of Assisi

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More psychological than scientific, the debate could seem unresolvable. Thus, one of the very rare scholars who recently (1999) evoked the Parisian witness, and its mention concluded: “Currently, there do not exist decisive reasons either to accept or to deny the information which offers to us by such an addition, which would be precious to identify the terminus ante quem of the Life of Blessed Francis.”22 This kind of conclusion—or rather, this absence of conclusion—is surprising, since the manuscript lat. 3817 was completely, and perfectly described in 1988 by Jacqueline Sclafer in the tome VII of the Catalogue général des manuscrits of the Bibliothèque nationale.23 According to the expert librarian, the first part of the volume (fol. 1r-254v) is a twelfthcentury lectionary of the Office from the Languedoc, covering the summer part of the liturgical year, for a secular rather than monastic use, since there are nine readings, not twelve, for each office. In her opinion, the second part of the volume (fol. 255r-82v), dedicated to the First Life, was copied in the second quarter of the thirteenth century. She recalls that this manuscript entered the Library of Colbert in 1680, before joining the Royal Library. My personal examination of lat. 3817 allows clarification of only a few points of this exemplary description. 1. The two codicological unities of the Parisian volume have been linked for a long time, given that the external outside angle of the parchment folios is wasted in the same way, but not the binding of Colbert’s Library. 2. The two parts were written in two different centuries, but they were conceived to constitute a single volume. The second part was planned, and made as a complement of the first one: same size, same ruling, and same use. In fact, the First Life is also partially (and in a very chaotic way) divided into readings, but the Roman numbers, added by another hand, never go beyond VIIII, excluding a monastic use. 3. Before entering Colbert’s Library, the copy of the First Life lost its beginning. Since a complete quire is missing, there must have been another text copied before Francis’s First Life. 4. If we focus now exclusively on the second part of the volume (First Life), I agree with Jacqueline Sclafer’s dating (second quarter of the thirteenth century), but need to provide more detail. Obviously, the terminus post quem of the copy is 1228, year of Francis’s canonization. But since all the script lines are written above the top line of the ruling, and not below, according to Neil Ker’s genial observations,24 we can guess the text was copied in the 1230s, not after.

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5. If we focus now on the report of the confirmation, we can notice that the size of the letters is smaller than in the copy of the legend; the addition is written only on one of the two ruled lines; the superior parts of the letters become longer; but I agree with Bihl in claiming that the scribe is the same as for the legend, or at least someone of the same generation. The change of script mirrors the typology of text, reflecting its model: first a textual script, then a chancellery script, which means that the direct model of lat. 3817 was very likely the original of Thomas of Celano, with the official mention of confirmation that the Roman curia apposed on it. 6. Not only was 1229 the second year of Gregory IX’s pontificate, not only did the pope stay in Perugia from 19 July 1228 to 22 February 1230, but four days before the date of the confirmation, 21 February 1229, he sent again the letter ordering all prelates to celebrate Francis’s feast.25 In this bull, the way of quoting place, and date is exactly similar to the way followed in the citation in lat. 3817. 7. I have tried to find some textual parallels with the final sentence of the confirmation: “Thanks be to the omnipotent God, and our Saviour for all his gifts, now, and for every age.”26 I was already surprised to discover that the words ‘Thanks . . . God . . . for all his gifts’ are present in the Sacrum commercium sancti Francisci cum domina Paupertate (now SC);27 but very more surprised to observe that the words ‘our God for all his gifts . . . thanks,’ among the entire classical, and medieval literature, are only present . . . in the First Life of Blessed Francis of Assisi.28 Did Thomas of Celano take part in the redaction of the confirmation? Was it written by someone who just read Thomas’s work? Was this man the pope Gregory IX himself? Anyhow, it does not change the main result of our investigation: the confirmation of Francis’s First Life in 1229, February 25, is absolutely authentic; it is codicologically, paleographically, and textually linked with the First Life itself. At this point, we can claim that the First Life, ordered by Gregory IX from Thomas of Celano, was not only completed but already read, and confirmed by 25 February 1229, and we can add that its oldest known witness is not posterior to the 1230s. Since, until now, the oldest dated witness was dated 1253, the doubt existed that Thomas’s text could have been changed in the meantime. Comparing the text of lat. 3817, and the text published by Michael Bihl in 1941, we can check that it is the exact content, and form of Thomas’s original redaction. The text of lat. 3817 differs from all other witnesses only on one point, permitting further investigation. In a famous episode, Thomas of Celano reports that a chapter of the Friars Minor was held in Provence

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under the rule of the provincial minister, John of Florence.29 Thanks to Bonaventure, we know that this chapter happened in the city of Arles.30 The core of the tale is when Francis appears with his arms in cross to Brother Monaldo, while Antony of Padua is preaching in the chapter. At the beginning of the episode, Thomas writes: “When, in a certain time, Brother John of Florence was constituted by Francis minister of the Friars in Provence.”31 But at this point, the scribe of lat. 3817 adds: “and so he was a man of great fervour, taught in the regular disciplines, and teaching usefully the others who were committed to him.”32 This singular interpolation can only have one explanation: the scribe knew personally John of Florence, likely deceased when he added this praise. In 1680, Boudon, treasurer at a monastery in Montpellier, sent to Colbert’s Library a batch of manuscripts from different cities of southern France, among them the future lat. 3817.33 According to the best specialists, the volume was originally made in southern France, very likely in the scriptorium of a cathedral chapter.34 It is true not only for the twelfthcentury lectionary, but also for Francis’s First Life, clearly conceived as a complement of the old lectionary; and it is not so surprising since, through many bulls sent between 1228 and 1230, pope Gregory IX ordered all the archbishops, bishops, abbots, deans, archdeacons, and other prelates of the churches to celebrate Francis’s feast on 4 October.35 It is likely that this copy was done in Franciscan style. Covering the whole southern France, the Franciscan province of Provence was instituted in 1217, and confirmed in 1219.36 Designated by Francis, the first provincial minister of Provence was the Florentine Giovanni Bonelli (John of Florence). Likely present at the Assisi general chapter in May 1230, he was witness of an act emitted by the archbishop of Arles on 7 December 1230.37 He must have died shortly after that, and it is because of his death that the scribe of lat. 3817 added a personal praise in his copy during the 1230s. In my opinion, the best hypothesis to explain the story of the copying is the following: in 1228, Gregory IX ordered Thomas of Celano to write Francis’s Life. The redaction was achieved between the end of 1228 and the beginning of 1229. The confirmation happened 25 February 1229. The legend was copied in a hurry in Assisi in order to give a copy to all the provincial ministers. The best opportunity for this was the General Chapter of May 1230. As a matter of fact, through Jordan of Giano, we know that, “during the same General Chapter were sent to the provinces the breviaries, and antiphonaries according to the ordo.”38 John of Florence received the original Life by Thomas of Celano, with the papal confirmation, which was likely useless since an archetype had been produced. John copied the legend for his province, and gave the original to a cathedral chapter

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with which he established links of friendship. As someone who lived in Arles at the central convent of the Franciscan province, he most likely gave it to the cathedral chapter of his own city. All churches of Latin Christendom were obliged to celebrate Francis’s feast. But they were not obliged to keep a copy of his very long legend, too long for the normal readings of the daily office. Thus, there was a specific interest in a secular church of southern France for Francis’s model. The only purpose of all the churches in the region, in these decades, was the struggle against the Albigensian heresy. In his many writings, in his several Lives, Francis never speaks against heresy. But his life is in itself a very strong counter-model against dualism, and dissidence. In the bull Sicut phialae aureae, first sent to the archbishops, and bishops of the Kingdom of France in July 1228, and repeated in February 1229, the pope underlined that Francis’s example was able to reinforce the faith of the Church, and win the heresy.39 Once taken to southern France, Francis’s Life would have been used in the same way as the Life of Blessed Mary of Oignies, written by James of Vitry shortly after 1213, and dedicated to Bishop Fulco of Toulouse, who was fighting against heresy.40 It is not only a satisfaction to present the oldest known witness of the First Life of Blessed Francis of Assisi. It is also useful to remind that each manuscript tells its own story, and, in so doing, reveals a piece of the great history.

Notes I thank Constant Mews who kindly corrected my English writing. I have published a longer study of this topic, “Le plus ancien témoin manuscrit de la Vita beati Francisci de Thomas de Celano,” in ‘Arbor ramose.’ Studi per Antonio Rigon da allievi, amici, colleghi, ed. Luciano Bertazzo, Donato Gallo, Raimondo Michetti, and Andrea Tilatti (Padova: Centro Studi Antoniani, 2011), pp. 129–51. 1. Thomas of Celano, Vita prima S. Francisci [hereafter referred to as 1C], in Legendae S. Francisci Assisiensis saeculis XIII et XIV conscriptae (Quaracchi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1926–1941), pp. 1–117. 2. Raimondo Michetti, Francesco d’Assisi e il paradosso della “minoritas.” La “Vita beati Francisci” di Tommaso da Celano (Roma: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 2004), p. 353: “frate Tommaso da Celano autore della Vita beati Francisci può essere considerato l’inventore del san Francesco d’Assisi.” 3. 1C Prol 1. 4. 1C 89. 5. 1C 121–126. 6. Michael Bihl, “Praefatio,” in Legendae S. Francisci Assisiensis (Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1941), pp. ix–xvi.

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7. Cesare Cenci, “Le Definizioni del Capitolo generale di Parigi nel 1266,” Frate Francesco 69 (2003), 307–11 (311). See Jacques Dalarun, “Comment détruire les légendes franciscaines? Une ingénieuse application de la définition de 1266 dans le manuscrit Reg. lat. 1738 de la Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana,” in Miscellanea Bibliothecae apostolicae Vaticanae (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2007), XIV, pp. 219–20. 8. David Flood, “The Barcelona Manuscript containing 1 Celano,” Archivum franciscanum historicum 65 (1972), 496–497. 9. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, lat. 3817 (now P), fol. 282vb: “Apud Perusium felix dominus papa Gregorius nonus II gloriosi pontificatus sui anno quinto kal. marcii legendam hanc recepit, confirmavit et censuit fore tenendam. Gratias omnipotenti Deo et Salvatori nostro super omnia dona sua nunc et per omne seculum. AMEN.” 10. Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum Bibliothecae Regiae (Paris: Bibliothèque royale, 1744), III/1, pp. 505–508. 11. Catalogus codicum hagiographicorum latinorum antiquiorum saeculo XVI qui asservantur in Bibliotheca nationali Parisiensi ediderunt hagiographi Bollandiani (Bruxelles: Société des Bollandistes, 1889), I, pp. 362–64. 12. Édouard d’Alençon, “Prolegomena,” in S. Francisci Assisiensis vita et miracula additis opusculis liturgicis auctore Fr. Thoma de Celano (Roma: Desclée, Lefebvre et soc., 1906), p. LVI; Maurice Beaufreton, Saint François d’Assise (Paris: PlonNourrit et Cie, 1925), pp. 269–70, note 3. 13. [Bihl], “Prolegomena,” in Legendae S. Francisci Assisiensis saeculis XIII et XIV conscriptae (Quaracchi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1926), I, p. viii. 14. Bihl, “De codicibus Vitae I S. Francisci Assisiensis auctore fr. Thoma Celanensi,” Archivum franciscanum historicum 30 (1937), 3–30 (20). 15. Bihl, “Praefatio,” p. xi. 16. John R.H. Moorman, The Sources for the Life of S. Francis of Assisi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1940), p. 67. 17. Bihl, “Contra duas novas hypotheses prolatas a Ioh. R.H. Moorman,” Archivum franciscanum historicum 39 (1946), 3–37 (22). 18. Catalogus codicum hagiographicorum, I, pp. 362–64. 19. Édouard d’Alençon, “Prolegomena,” p. LVI; Beaufreton, Saint François d’Assise, pp. 269–70, note 3. 20. Bihl, “De codicibus Vitae I S. Francisci Assisiensis,” p. 20; Bihl, “Praefatio,” p. xi; Bihl, “Contra duas novas hypotheses,” p. 22. 21. Moorman, The Sources for the Life, p. 67. 22. R. Paciocco, “Come ho potuto e con parole improprie,” in R. Paciocco, and F. Accrocca, La leggenda di un uomo chiamato Francesco. Tommaso da Celano e la “Vita beati Francisci” (Milano: Edizioni Biblioteca francescana, 1999), pp. 83–84: “Invero, non esistono argomenti decisivi né per accettare né per rifiutare le notizie forniteci da tale aggiunta, che sarebbero preziose proprio per individuare il termine ante quem della Vita beati Francisci.” 23. Bibliothèque nationale. Catalogue général des manuscrits latins, 7. (Nos. 3776 à 3835) Homéliaires (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1988), pp. 367–82. 24. Neil R. Ker, “From ‘above Top Line’ to ‘below Top Line’: A Change in Scribal Practice,” in Books, Collectors, and Libraries. Studies in the Medieval Heritage, ed. Andrew G. Watson (London: Hambledon Press, 1985), pp. 71–74. See also Maria Careri, Françoise Féry-Hue, Françoise Gasparri, Geneviève Hasenohr, Sylvie Lefèvre, Anne-Françoise Leurquin, and Christine Ruby, Album de manuscrits français du XIIIe siècle. Mise en page et mise en texte, preface by Jacques Dalarun (Roma: Viella, 2001), p. xxii.

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25. Bullarium franciscanum Romanorum pontificum constitutiones, epistolas ac diplomata continens, ed G.G. Sbaraglia (Roma: Typis Sacrae Congregationis de Propaganda Fide, 1759), I, pp. 48–49. 26. Thanks to the Library of Latin Texts. CLCLT-5, ed. Paul Tombeur (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2002). See the table in note 28. 27. Sacrum commercium sancti Francisci cum domina Paupertate, XXX, ed. Stefano Brufani (Assisi: Edizioni Porziuncola, 1990), p. 172. 28. The common words are in bold in the following table. P, fol. 282vb Gratias omnipotenti Deo et Salvatori nostro super omnia dona sua

1C 28 Domino Deo nostro super omnia dona sua fratres gratias referamus

SC XXX gratias agentes Deo super omnia dona sua

29. 1C 48. 30. Bonaventure, “Legenda maior S. Francisci,” IV, 10, in Legendae S. Francisci Assisiensis, p. 576. 31. 1C 48: “Cum tempore quodam frater Ioannes de Florentia esset a sancto Francisco minister fratrum in Provincia constitutus.” 32. P: “et sic erat homo magni fervoris, regularibus disciplinis instructus, et alios sibi commissos utiliter instruens.” 33. Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 9364, fol. 53r-54r. 34. According to the description of Jacqueline Sclaffer; Raymond Étaix, and Jacques Lemarié, Chromatii Aquileiensis Opera (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 1974), p. xxxix; plus the oral advice of Marie-Pierre Laffitte and MarieThérèse Gousset. 35. Bullarium franciscanum, I, pp. 42–55, and 48–49. 36. Arnald of Sarrant, Chronica generalium ministrorum ordinis fratrum minorum, in Chronica XXIV generalium Ordinis minorum cum pluribus appendicibus inter quas excellit hucusque ineditus Liber de laudibus S. Francisci fr. Bernardi a Bessa (Quaracchi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1897), pp. 229–30; Mariano of Florence, “Compendium chronicarum fratrum minorum,” Archivum franciscanum historicum, 1 (1908), 98–107 (102); Pierre Péano, “Ministres provinciaux de Provence et Spirituels,” in Franciscains d’Oc. Les Spirituels (ca. 1280–1324) (Toulouse: Privat, 1975), pp. 41–65; Péano, “Aux origines du spiritualisme franciscain dans la Province de Provence,” Archivum franciscanum historicum, 75 (1982), 97–125 (102–3, 108, and 112–19); Péano, “Les ministres provinciaux de la primitive Province de Provence (1217–1517),” Archivum franciscanum historicum, 79 (1986), 3–77 (8–12); Péano, “Jean Bonelli,” in Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1997), XXVI, coll. 1317–318. 37. Marseille, Archives départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône, B 320; Gallia christiana novissima. Histoire des archevêchés, évêchés et abbayes de France. Arles (archevêques, conciles, prévôts, statuts), ed. Joseph-Hyacinthe Albanès, and Ulysse Chevalier (Valence: Imprimerie valentinoise, 1901), coll. 375–76. 38. Jordan of Giano, Chronica fratris Jordani, 57, ed. H. Boehmer (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1908), p. 49: “In eodem capitulo generali breviaria et antyphonaria secundum ordinem provinciis sunt transmissa.” 39. Bullarium franciscanum, I, pp. 44–45, 49. 40. James of Vitry, “Vita B. Mariae Oigniacensis,” in Acta sanctorum, Iun. 5 (Paris: Victor Palmé, 1867), 547–72.

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Ironic Patterning and Numerical Composition in the Vie de saint Alexis Form and Effect/Affect LISA BANSEN-HARP

Opposition is fundamental to the structure of medieval saints’ lives.1 In the Hildesheim Vie de saint Alexis (VSA),2 patterning by opposition is doubled by a symmetrical numerical composition that has been the object of numerous studies.3 Literary scholars have considered the multiple oppositions between the saint and his family thematically and in terms of narrative technique: heavenly vs. earthly orientation, clairvoyance vs. spiritual blindness, pilgrimage vs. stasis, saintly transgression vs. social norm, enigmatic impassivity vs. emotional and dramatic interest, iconic representation vs. believable characterization.4 The oppositions in the VSA have led to contrasting evaluations of the function of the poem. Some critics have concluded that its main function is to exalt the ascetic imperative and encourage identification with and emulation of the saint by a select few. A frequently invoked example of this type of literal ascetic emulation is Christina of Markyate, a twelfth-century recluse who defied her family’s wishes that she marry. There is evidence that she possessed the St Albans Psalter at one time, and thus would have been familiar with the Old French poem.5 The suggestion in this approach is that the poem kept non-monastic audiences at a respectful, admiring distance.6 At best they were recuperated at the end of the narrative with the promise of intercession and with the offer of comfort inherent in the redemption of the saint’s imperfect family. For those who could not directly imitate the saint’s ascetic program, the poem taught them who Alexis was and why they should venerate him. For other scholars, the affective pull exercised by the family was intended to involve a variety of medieval audiences emotionally in the Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 37 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011.

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story.7 However, their analyses do not consider how an identification with the family’s plight might have functioned to bring diverse audiences to a fuller understanding of the saint’s vocation. While these studies all contribute in vital ways to discussions of the Old French poem, an aggregate reading of the scholarship could leave one with the impression that the Hildesheim poet failed to integrate the two stories—that of the austere saint and that of his suffering family—into a larger, unified vision accessible to a range of audiences. A reevaluation of the structural principles that govern the oppositions between the saint and his family suggests otherwise. The VSA is in fact structured to lead audiences toward a deeper understanding of the saint’s ascetic vocation and to an active engagement with the poem’s larger message. This message concerns the relative importance of earthly and heavenly values. It was a message germane to monastic and non-monastic audiences alike. The early version of the Old French Vie de saint Alexis was composed in the latter half of the eleventh century, probably in Normandy.8 The Hildesheim manuscript is the oldest extant copy, produced in AngloNorman England at St Albans abbey between 1120 and 1150.9 This period and these regions were marked by two major religious movements. On the one hand was the austerity of the Gregorian reform. On the other hand was the emotionally intense affective piety developed and encouraged by Anselm of Bec, archbishop of Canterbury (1033–1109) and Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153). The early Old French poem is imbued with the spirit of these movements and should be read in light of their double influence, at once morally austere and affectively fervid. It stands at the beginning of another crucial development in this period: the dissemination of Christian models and ideals through hagiography in the vernacular languages. This linguistic mediation was meant to make the saints’ lives directly accessible to the laity as well as to non-Latinate cloistered audiences such as women’s communities. The VSA, like other truly poetic hagiography in Old French, did not simply “teach” basic Christian truths. It involved its medieval audiences both intellectually and emotionally in a demonstration of the validity of those truths.10 The goal of this article is to suggest how the Hildesheim poet structured his work to encourage this type of participation on the part of those who read and heard the saint’s story.

Irony as Structural Principle In the Vie de saint Alexis audience participation depends largely on the extended use of irony, a mode based on oppositions. This is somewhat

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ironic, since irony is more often associated with detachment than with emotional participation. The structural use of irony by the Hildesheim poet perhaps helps open the VSA to readers today, for it allows us to maintain some of our comfortable postmodern distance even as we attempt to place ourselves in positions once occupied by medieval readers and listeners.11 Previously, literary critics have identified only isolated instances of irony in the Hildesheim Alexis. Studies of the compositional principles used by the poet have instead emphasized the numerically based construction of the poem as the source of its unity and as the mechanism behind its poetic effect.12 While number is crucial to the poem’s composition, it is at the service of ironic patterning. Irony is the primary force that informs and unifies the poem at two crucial levels: 1) the poem’s narrative framework depends on the dramatic irony inherent in the family’s plight; 2) the deep structure of the poem is based on the biblical principle of ironic fulfillment: earthly notions of power, prestige, and pleasure are inverted and realized at a superior level in transmuted spiritual form. While irony in literature generally creates a sense of critical distance between audience and “characters,” the Hildesheim poet never employs verbal irony, the biting surface mode that results in the sharpest distancing effect. He uses dramatic irony—a means “of thinking about the relationship between human intent and contrary outcomes”13—in a fashion that invites a sympathetic, rather than a detached critical distance. To bring the audience to an acute awareness of the existence of and tensions between different levels of Christian understanding, the poet places the saint’s virtuous family in a situation that verges on cosmic irony: they suffer even though they live according to Christian precepts. Irony is a mode that generates tensions based on “the unsuspected dissimilarity or contrast between one dimension and another” of a statement or situation.14 The dramatic irony associated with Alexis’s family throws into high relief the distance between the ideal and the common practice of Christianity. Long barren, Alexis’s parents pray parfitement (perfectly) for a child, asking only that the child be according to God’s will: “E reis celeste par ton cumandement / Amfant nus done ki seit a tun talent” (vv. 24–25) (“Oh, Heavenly King, by your authority / give us a child who is to your desire!”). This formula is original to the Old French poem: in the Latin antecedents that mention a prayer, the parents ask for a son qui succederet eis (who might succeed them).15 The Hildesheim poet grounds the dramatic irony that pervades his work in the parents’ pious but uncomprehending consecration of their son to God. The divergence between what this consecration meant in the parents’ minds and what it means in divine terms becomes evident in the Old

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French poem as Alexis reaches adolescence. In the Latin prose vita, the saint is quite naturally engaged to be married. In Pater deus ingenite and the Old French poem, however, this engagement is motivated specifically by paternal concerns for temporal succession: Quant veit li pedre que mais n’aurat amfant Mais que cel sul que il par amat tant, Dunc se purpenset del secle an avant. Or volt que prenget moyler a sun vivant. Dunc li acatet filie d’un noble franc. (str. 8; vv. 36–40) [When the father sees that he will never have a child / other than this only son whom he so loves, / then he contemplates the future that awaits. / Now he wants to see his son wed while he lives. / Thus he arranges a marriage for him to the daughter of a nobleman.]

Euphemian subscribes to the principle of genealogical transmission, a central tenet in a social order based on inheritance.16 In evoking this principle, which the medieval audience would have taken for granted, the poet is concerned not with its important role in the maintenance of social and political stability, but with its dubious value as a means of answering the fundamental human need for continuity. Because Alexis is an only child, his father is anxious to ensure the survival of the lineage into the next generation as soon as possible. In developing Euphemian’s concern, the poet not only stresses the temporal orientation of the saint’s father, but, more important, demonstrates how the whole genealogical construct ironically carries within itself an admission of the brevity and precariousness of earthly life. Alexis’s story makes explicit the uncertainty of the prospect of regeneration through the physical means of this world and offers a surer, spiritual alternative, an alternative already suggested by the poet in his emphasis on the regenerative power of baptism (vv. 29–31) and which will be underscored in Alexis’s exhortations to his bride (vv. 66–70).17 The Old French poem intensifies the theme of genealogical succession that it inherited from the Latin poem Pater deus ingenite. In stanza 9, we are told that the prospective bride is also an only child. The fate of two powerful families is at stake in this union. Intent on concentrating the temporal power of their lines, the two patriarchs will ironically end with no descendants at all. Alexis goes through with the marriage, but we learn that he does so against his will, for he is entirely devoted to God: “De tut an tut ad a Deu sun talent” (v. 50) (“Entirely turned toward God is his desire”). This line echoes the parental prayer of line 25, “amfant nus done ki seit a tun talent,” even as it foreshadows its fulfillment in a manner unforeseen by the saint’s parents. To the verbal symmetry (a tun talent / a sun talent)

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correspond a numerical symmetry and a numerological significance that underscore the content of these lines. The uncomprehending parents formulate their request in line 25 (= 5 x 5). Five was associated in medieval exegesis with worldliness (humans’ attachment to the material world through the five senses), with spiritual blindness, and with earthly marriage. The son’s vocation is enunciated not only in stanza 10 (ten being the number of perfection), but in line 50 (a number associated with penitence and forgiveness of sin).18 Each of these stands out further because it comes at the end of one of the five-stanza narrative units used by the poet to organize his material (see below for the organization in narrative tableaux). Strophes 11–15 are devoted to the celebrated bridal chamber scene. Their essential theme is the contrast between earthly and eternal life. This contrast is first expressed in the divergence between the father’s and son’s understanding of God’s plan. Euphemian exhorts his son: “Filz, quar t’en vas colcer / Avoc ta spuse al cumand Deu del ciel” (vv. 52–53) (“My son, go now and lie / with your wife, as God has ordered it”). This is the same divine cumandement that the parents invoked in their prayer for a child. The father has a worldly understanding of marriage and its place in the Christian context. He is not wrong in believing that marriage is good and that procreation is licit. The Old and New Testaments, as well as the Church Fathers, confirm such an interpretation. But the son is inspired by a different, higher understanding of God’s cumand when he enters the bridal chamber: Cum veit le lit, esguardat la pulcela, Dunc li remembret de sun seinor celeste Que plus ad cher que tut aveir terrestre. “E deus !” dist il, “cum fort pecet m’apresset. Se or ne m’en fui mult criem que ne t’em perde.” (str. 12; vv. 56–60) [When he sees the bed and looks upon the girl, / then he remembers his celestial Lord, / whom he holds dearer than all earthly possessions. / “Oh God!” he cries, “how heavily sin presses upon me. / If I do not leave now, I greatly fear to lose You.]

Alexis already loves God above all else. For him, the bride represents an earthly desire that would distract him from his celestial talent. One is reminded of the recurrent admonitions concerning marriage in the New Testament epistles: marriage is good for those who need it to avoid falling into the sin of concupiscence, but for those who are capable of resisting temptation, celibacy is more perfect. The marriage that would bring many into closer conformity with common Christian morality represents a step away from the path toward perfection upon which Alexis already stands.

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He urges his bride to embrace Christ as her true spouse: “Oz mei, pulcele! Celui tien ad espus Ki nus raens de sun sanc precïus. An ices secle nen at parfit amor. La vithe est fraisle, n’i ad durable honur. Cesta lethece revert a grant tristur.” (str. 14, vv. 66–70) [“Hear me, maiden! Take as your spouse the one who redeems us with his precious blood. In this world there is no perfect love. This life is frail, there are no lasting goods or honors. This joy reverts to great sadness.”]

This lesson that earthly ties are ephemeral and end only in sorrow will be illustrated repeatedly by the family from this point on in the poem. Irony invites recognition: the poem’s audiences are led to see the contrasts between the different levels or dimensions of Christian faith. The way in which the poet manipulates information and time frames serves to give the audience a heightened sense of its superior knowledge of the situation vis-à-vis the family. In lines 101–102 he places the family’s response in juxtaposition to the saint’s activities: “Or revendrai al pedra et a la medra / Et a la spuse qued il out espusethe” (“Now I’ll return to the father and the mother / and to the spouse whom he had wed”). Because we have heard Alexis in the bridal chamber and seen his actions in his self-exile, we know his motivations and what has become of him. The patterns of sainthood hidden from the family are already discernable to us. The saint’s parents understand Christian precepts at a level where these principles are compatible with life in the temporal social order. Alexis understands them in a more absolute sense that is related not to society, but to the teachings of the New Testament. The poem’s audiences can acknowledge the spiritual superiority of the saint’s position, even as they identify with the pious family that suffers due to its lack of knowledge and vision. The ironic failure of the servants’ search (str. 23–25, esp. vv. 116–117) foregrounds the theme of non-recognition that plays such an important part in the saint’s story and highlights the audience’s superior knowledge of the situation: Dunc prent li pedre de se meilurs serganz. Par multes terres fait querre sun amfant. Jusque an Alsis en vindrent dui errant. Iloc truverent danz Alexis sedant, Mais n’an conurent sum vis ne sum semblant. Des at li emfes sa tendra carn mudede, Ne·l reconurent li dui sergant sum pedre. A lui medisme unt l’almosne dunethe. Il la receut cume li altre frere. Ne·l reconurent ; sempres s’en returnerent.

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Ne·l reconurent ne ne·l unt anterciét. Danz Alexis an lothet Deu del ciel D’icez sons sers qui il est provenders. Il fut lur sire, or est lur almosners. Ne vus sai dire cum il s’en firet liez. (str. 23–25; vv. 111–125) [Then the father chooses his most able men. / Through many lands he has them search for his son. / As far as Edessa two of them came travelling. / There they found Sir Alexis sitting, / but they did not recognize his face or his bearing. The youth had altered so his tender flesh / that his father’s two servants did not recognize him. / To Alexis himself they gave alms. / He took them as the other brethren did. / They did not recognize him; they turned back. They did not recognize or notice him. / Sir Alexis praises the God of heaven / for these his servants by whom he is fed. / He was there lord, now is their almsman. / Words cannot tell the fullness of his joy.]

In line 111 we are told that the servants “find” Alexis. They then repeatedly fail to recognize him. In the space of seven lines, three hemistiches are devoted to the anaphoric repetition of ne·l reconurent (they recognized him not), a fourth to the nearly identical n’an conurent, and a fifth to a variant, ne ne·l unt anterciét (nor did they notice him). The audience not only knows more than the servants: we are, as it were, witnesses to their blindness. In strophes 27–29, the mother gives voice to her grief in a plaint that the poet charges not only with pathos, but with dramatic irony and with paradoxical formulations that point to the truth of Alexis’s understanding of la mortel vithe (mortal life) (v. 63) as a condition characterized by imperfection and loss: “Filz Aleïs, pur quei portat ta medre? Tu m’ies fuït; dolente an sui remese. Ne sai le leu, ne n’en sai la contrede U t’alge querre: tute en sui esguarethe. Jamais n’ierc lede, kers filz, nu·l ert tun pedre.” (str. 27, vv. 131–135) [“Alexis, son, why did your mother bear you? / You’ve fled from me; I’m left behind to grieve. / I do not know the place, nor do I know the country / where I might go to search for you. I am completely lost. Never again will I be happy, dear son, nor will your father.”]

“Why did I bear you?” she asks in bitter disappointment. The true answer to her rhetorical question should be clear to all who recognize Alexis as a saint: she bore this son that he might become an intercessor for all Christians. In the references to place, movement, and knowledge that follow the mother’s question, the poet translates the existential disorientation caused by her loss. Although left grieving where she has always been, it is she who is figuratively lost. This sense of disorientation could be cured, she believes, if she only knew where to go to find her

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son. She does not understand that she must seek him not in a different geographical location, but in a different spiritual realm.19 Her spiritual distraction will later be confirmed when, like the servants in strophes 23–25, she does not recognize Alexis even when he stands before her. This is because she does not recognize the promise he represents, a promise that far transcends her hopes for a narrow, familial felicity. Because she seeks in her son a worldly, ephemeral type of fulfillment, she condemns herself to a perpetual sense of loss. She affirms that her husband does likewise: “Jamais n’ierc lede, kers filz, nu·l ert tun pedre” (v. 135) [“Never again will I be happy, dear son, nor will your father”]. Through the use of dramatic irony, the poet emphasizes the gap between the perspective available to the audience and the limited vision of various members of Alexis’s former household. He simultaneously establishes the audience’s sympathetic identification with the family, an identification necessary for the realization of the cathartic potential of the familial drama. On a fundamental level, we can understand the family. Faced with the disappearance of a loved one, we know that we would respond with similar confusion, grief, and uncertain hope. Yet as audience members who have access to perspectives unseen by the family, we can follow the saint’s unwavering progress with a sense of certitude that his choices are ultimately the right ones. As a result of this wider view afforded the audience, any perception of the ironic dimension of the family’s reactions becomes tinged with an implicit admission of our own usual lack of insight. The familial drama is intensified after the anonymous return of the son to his parents’ home. In bringing the saint and the family together under one roof, unit ten (str. 47–50) brings the tension between them to its highest pitch. The poet concentrates the effect of the family’s reunification by focusing on the motif of failure to see that which is in plain sight. He multiplies its effect by implying the scene’s manifold repetition: Sovent le virent e le pedre e le medre E la pulcele quet li ert espusede. Par nule guise unces ne·l aviserent, N’il ne lur dist, n’els ne·l demanderent Quels hom esteit ne de quel terre il eret. Soventes feiz lur veit grant duel mener E de lur oilz mult tendrement plurer, E tut pur lui, unces nïent pur eil. Danz Alexis le met el consirrer Ne l’en est rien ; issi est aturnét. (str. 48–49; vv. 236–245) [Often the faither and the mother saw him, / as did the maiden whom he had wed. / In no way did they ever recognize him. / He did not tell them, nor did they ask him / who he might be or from what land he came.

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Oftentimes he sees them overwhelmed with grief / and sees their eyes fill tenderly with tears. / All this for him and not for other cause. / Sir Alexis reflects upon all this: / it is nothing to him; thus is he disposed.]

This scene, or rather summary of many similar scenes, has the effect of a sustained crescendo. The poet has been building toward it since unit five (str. 21–25), the first familial planctus and the failure of the servants’ search, with his variations on the themes of sorrow and non-recognition. Here the two themes are fused and repeated in the mutual silence and the reciprocal but oblique regards that pass repeatedly between the saint and his grieving family.20 The paradoxical nature of the family’s blindness is doubly stressed. They see (virent), but fail to recognize (ne l’aviserent). Worse yet, they do not seek enlightenment: they neglect to ask the most obvious questions of this pilgrim who had invited those very questions by coming to them in the name of their son and husband.21 Their failure is not only compounded, but is multiplied as well, for it is frequently (sovent) repeated. The family’s affection for Alexis is certainly sincere (vv. 241–243), but it is of a worldly—and therefore necessarily superficial—nature. Because they seek only the familiar, external traits of their estranged loved one, the family members do not recognize the holy man he has become. In other words, in their preoccupation with the mutable, they not only remain incognizant of the higher truth that the saint represents; they also ironically fail time and again to penetrate even the physical changes worked by time and circumstance. Nevertheless, the family’s constantly renewed mourning continues to touch us, just as the saint’s impassivity retains its power to disturb us. The poet does not try to minimize this uncomfortable tension or to resolve it. Instead, he underscores it. Once again, he uses verbal parallelisms to translate the simultaneous opposition and interrelatedness of the two sides: “Sovent le virent . . . Soventes feiz lur veit . . .; n’il ne lur dist, n’els nel demanderent ” (vv. 236, 241, 239) (“they saw him often . . . he saw them many times . . .; he told them not, they asked him not”). The actions— and the words used to narrate them—are nearly identical, yet they demand divergent interpretations because they refer to two very different levels of understanding. The family’s regard does not penetrate the beggar’s appearance, for their insight is limited by their earthly perspective. Alexis recognizes his family’s very real suffering, but does not allow his actions to be influenced by it.22 From his divinely oriented perspective, he is able to apprehend it on an abstract level as the inevitable result of temporally defined joy. Rather than weakening his resolve, their grief strengthens it. Lines 244–245 simultaneously echo and contrast with lines 156–157: “Ne poet estra altra turnent el consirrer / Mais la dolur ne

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pothent ublier” (“They have no choice and so resign themselves, / but they cannot forget their misery”), where the mother and wife resign themselves to Alexis’s disappearance but live in enduring grief because of it. The saint is turned toward God, while the family’s attention is fixed on their loss. The family members cannot recognize the spiritual dimension represented by Alexis, and so are blind to higher Christian truths. Alexis cannot sacrifice the greater value to the lesser, and so must allow his family to suffer. A space is opened for audience members to reflect on their own values and assumptions. Through the use of dramatic irony, the poet challenges audience members to examine their level of Christian understanding and commitment. But he balances this disconcerting challenge with an offer of comfort. The dramatic irony inherent in the family’s situation is doubled by another form of irony: the biblical principle of ironic fulfillment. The two ironic structures work together to translate not only a profound sense of the paradoxes of Christianity, but also the certitude that these paradoxes will find their ultimate resolution in a transcendent truth. All Christian saints’ lives are, on some level, an imitatio Christi. As such, they are predicated on the principle of ironic fulfillment that undergirds the New Testament. Christ fulfilled the expectations built upon the prophecies, but not in a literal or worldly sense. The saints likewise realized their high destiny in ways that were often inscrutable to the societies in which they lived. Inversion and transposition of worldly values is a pattern constantly repeated in hagiography. Indeed, the very necessity of the saints in the course of salvation history is explained by the stubborn resistance of temporal values to revealed Christian truth. Through their multiform, historically bound repetition of fundamental Gospel patterns, the saints serve not only as links in the intercessory chain connecting humankind to God, but also as reminders of the continuing validity and inescapability of the difficult ideals incarnated in Christ. One of the functions of hagiography was to assure that the faithful who venerated the saints would recognize the patterns of imitatio in the lives of these holy people. Another function was to underscore the connections between the saints and those who heard or read their stories. From the opening stanzas of the Hildesheim VSA, the audience has been reminded of its place in the chain of salvation. In strophe 3 the poet conflates four different time frames—that of Christ, that of “our” Christianized ancestors, that of Alexis and his family, and that of the audience’s own time—to convey to the audience a sense of its fundamental personal and hereditary implication in salvation history:

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Puis icel tens que Deus nus vint salver Nostra anceisur ourent cristïentét. Si fut un sire de Rome la citét; Rices hom fud de grant nobilitét. Pur hoc vus di d’un son filz voil parler. (str. 3; vv. 11–15) [Since that time when God came to save us / our ancestors had Christianity. / There was a nobleman of the city of Rome; / he was a powerful man of high nobility. / I tell you this because I wish to speak about his son.]

Christ’s sacrifice is offered directly to the audience—“us”—in the present, just as it was offered to “our” ancestors. Likewise, the filz who imitated the Son has direct significance for the medieval audience; this is why the poet wants to tell “us” about him. We are thus told to seek patterns from the Gospels in this story. The triptych constituted by Alexis’s childhood, saintly life, and apotheosis provides the framework of the ironic fulfillment in the Vie de saint Alexis. To these three divisions correspond three stages of definition and redefinition, during which Alexis goes from being Danz Alexis (Sir Alexis), son of Euphemian, to ume Deu (Man of God), to saintismes hom . . . Sainz Alexis (most holy man . . . Saint Alexis).23 Childhood and adolescence establish the positive terms of Alexis’s expected earthly career—power, riches, prestige, dynastic continuity. But even as the poet presents the virtuous and powerful family from which the young Alexis derives his identity, he begins to undermine the validity of their worldly expectations, as we have seen above. The saint will take an alternate path. In the second stage, the positive terms of Alexis’s expected earthly career are inverted with the future saint’s flight into the ascetic ideal. His virginal marriage will produce no heirs, thus bringing to an end not one, but two powerful families. He abstains from active participation in the social order, leaving his sword belt, the symbol of his social station, with his virgin bride. Once in Edessa (called Alsis in the poem) he renounces riches, regarding them as an encumbrance (v. 95). He seats himself among the poor after having distributed to them all the wealth he had brought with him. There he waits for alms, living passively in anonymous poverty on the margins of a society that he should have actively helped to govern. The saint’s transformation is tested in the encounter with his servants (str. 23–25); it is proven when they unknowingly become his benefactors. The importance of this moment is stressed in the reiteration of the paradoxical formulation of the lord who is the almsman of his own servants (vv. 123–124). Alexis reacts with thanksgiving and joy to the confirmation of the mutability of his flesh (v. 116), of his complete material

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dependence (vv. 123–124), and of his utterly humble condition (vv. 123–124). Through his full acceptance of human vulnerability, he has succeeded in breaking with temporal priorities and has reoriented himself toward God. As with the Christ he imitates, Alexis’s transcendent strength is based upon what the society around him interprets as weakness. The poet does not need to recount the detail of Alexis’s seventeen years in exile. It suffices to note that the saint is unwavering in his devotion to God: Dis e seat anz n’en fut nïent a dire: Penat sun cors el Damnedeu servise. Pur amistét ne d’ami ne d’amie, Ne pur honurs ki l’en fussent tramise, N’en volt turner tant cum il ad a vivre. (str. 33; vv. 161–165) [For seventeen years there’s little more to say. / He mortified his body in service to the Lord God. / Not for the love of any man nor woman, / nor for honors that one could have given him / would he turn back as long as he should live.]

“There’s little more to say” does not translate a lack of interest, but rather expresses the perfection of the saint’s commitment. This recognition that the saint has realized the ascetic ideal in practice and in attitude comes in stanza 33, a number doubly associated with the Trinity. It is followed by divine recognition of Alexis’s achievement in stanza 34 (the number often given as Christ’s age at his death). Upon his return to Rome, Alexis lives in his family’s home as an anonymous pilgrim. He regularly witnesses the grief of those who love him. While this situation uncomfortably challenges conventional notions of familial relations and responsibilities, it is in keeping with certain passages from the Gospels. In Matthew 10:36–38, Christ teaches: “a man’s foes will be those of his own household. He who loves father or mother . . . son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.”24 In Matt. 12: 48–50, Christ rejects a narrow definition of the family: “‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?’ And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in Heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother.’”25 Alexis conforms to this larger definition of Christian affiliation, rather than to the usual norm. In the third stage, the inverted values of Alexis’s saintly career take on a positive charge that is finally obvious to those around him. This comes after the holy man’s death. The emperors he was born to serve humble themselves before him and ask for his counsel (str. 72–73). In place of the temporal influence he was born to exercise, Alexis’s

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superior spiritual power is recognized by the pope as well as by the emperors. The once anonymous pilgrim receives universal recognition as a valuable intercessor by rich and poor. Having embraced poverty in this life, Alexis will enjoy glory in heaven. The people’s understanding of this invisible treasure is translated by two metaphors. In the first, the common people ignore the riches strewn before them by the powerful who wish to distract them so that Alexis’s body can be carried away (str. 105–107). In the second, his sodden cot is exchanged for a rich resting place: a gem-encrusted sarcophagus is prepared to house the saint’s remains. The renounced physical union with his bride is replaced by the ineffable joy of the union of souls. Instead of leaving behind to mortal offspring an inheritance of material goods, he offers to all the miracle of physical healing and an enduring spiritual legacy. In the Vie de saint Alexis, as in the Gospels, worldly expectations and values are constantly challenged by semantic inversion: the positive terms of earthly existence are realized by the saint, but as redefined by transposition into a different, superior register. The saint retains the attributes of power, prestige, and riches that were his birthright. He does so, however, in a spiritual sense that is not immediately recognizable to those enmeshed in the temporal order around him, even though that society professes the Christian faith.26 To the extent that the audience members were able not only to accept Alexis as an imitator Christi, but also to recognize themselves in the family, and at the same time to recognize the irony inscribed in the family’s actions and language, they were able to feel the distance between their own compromise-laden Christianity and the ideals they admired and professed. Ideally, in acknowledging the spiritual blindness of the family, the audience members acknowledged their own. The poet exhorts them to see this connection and to use their new awareness as a basis for the renewal of their faith, “Las malfeüz cum esmes avoglez. . . . par cest saint home doüssum ralumer” (“Alas! How blinded we unhappy creatures are. . . . Through this saint we should regain our sight”) (vv. 616, 620). This call to reassessment of the worldly perspective, which the poem has demonstrated to be the source of the family’s vain grief and pain, comes directly before the prayer for intercession. The poet thus suggests that the pain endemic to life in this imperfect world can be alleviated not only through the direct aid of the saints, but also through an awareness of the relativity of earthly values and of earthly suffering. In provoking recognition of the divergent definitions of Christian virtues, the use of ironic patterning affects the poem’s potential for external reference—that is, audience participation—as well as its internal

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literary workings. This is why it is important to recognize the primacy of irony, rather than numerical symmetry, as the governing principle of the poem. Numerical symmetry alone cannot explain the poem’s effect and affective power. The long-admired balance of the Hildesheim Alexis depends upon finely controlled tensions created by irony, tensions that operate to reveal the opposition of the saint and the family, even while underscoring their fundamental interrelatedness.

Numerical Composition and Numerical Symbolism The double irony—dramatic irony and ironic fulfillment—that shapes the narrative of Alexis’s life is crystallized in a numerical structure that would have been perceived by most audiences on an intuitive rather than on a conscious level. Like with architectural or musical proportions, this structure is fundamental to the impression the work creates. It is also suggestive of the artistic and symbolic intentions of its creator. This is why scholars have returned repeatedly to the question of number in the poem. If my attempts here succeed in illuminating some of the connections between numerical form and its effect and meaning in the Vie de saint Alexis, it is thanks largely to Anna Granville Hatcher and Heinrich Lausberg, whose analyses have provided models upon which to elaborate as well as schemas against which to react (see note 3). Hatcher’s analysis hesitates between bipartition and tripartition as the basic structural principle of the poem. Lausberg insists on the number five as the fundamental compositional unit. I believe that the poem’s ironic design is realized in a compound structure in which two, three, and five are vital, meaningful numbers that govern the proportions of the poem’s shifting symmetries. Contained and controlled within this multifaceted structure, the different perspectives juxtaposed in ironic tension led medieval audiences—and today lead us—to an appreciation of the message of the poem. Hatcher sought to account for the symmetry that she and many other critics had sensed in the Life of Saint Alexis by elaborating parallel schemas that allowed her to put the saint’s death at the numerical center of the poem. In one of these schemas, she posited the following strophic disposition: 58 stanzas: Alexis’s earthly life 9 stanzas: the coming and occurrence of Alexis’s death 58 stanzas: the aftermath of the saint’s death

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In the other schema, Hatcher emphasized what she felt was a symmetry of frame and narrative core: 2 stanzas of exordium 8 stanzas of “prelude to life” 56 stanzas of earthly life 1 stanza of death 56 stanzas of recognition on earth and reward in heaven 2 stanzas of conclusion Within this second structure, Hatcher identifies the poem’s narrative core as the portion from Alexis’s entry into the bridal chamber until the end of his burial. This Vie proper is preceded by a necessary prefatory section that recounts the saint’s early life. The poem’s core is framed by two stanzas each of exordium and conclusion. Hatcher’s article is seminal in its insistence on the symmetrical and numerically based nature of the poem’s composition. The details of her mathematical analysis and the interpretations she draws from it invite questions, however. In outlining two schemas that suggest separate— rather than complementary—approaches to the poem’s composition, Hatcher seeks to impose structure from the outside. Recognizing that her schemas hesitate between bipartition and tripartition as the basic structural principle, she finally surmises that the poet dealt simultaneously with the requirements of two separate categories.27 On the one hand, the demands of the “physical unit” or narrative unity of the poem dictated the tripartite 58-9-58 schema. Here the whole story of the saint’s life is recounted, including the time before his vocation became apparent. On the other hand, Hatcher’s “spiritual unit” demonstrates the deeper meaning of the saint’s life and is thus concerned with the narrative core found at the center of the strophic schema 2, 8, 56-1-56, 2. Hatcher’s attempts to explain away the irregularities in the muchemphasized symmetry of the second schema—for example, the 8-stanza “prelude to life”—are somewhat forced. The “spiritual unit” operates according to principles of bilateral symmetry and opposition. At the numerical center of the text, Alexis’s death neatly separates his earthly life from his influence in the afterlife. Hatcher invokes the symmetrical principle in stressing the opposition of the saint and his family and the dualism of their respective heavenly and earthly orientations. Simply put, Hatcher’s exposition leads her to the conclusion that Alexis is right and his family is in error. The audience is to condemn their reactions, not sympathize with their suffering.28 While Hatcher’s

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analysis brings out the primacy of the ascetic imperative that informs Alexis’s undertaking, it also limits the polyvalence of the text. In insisting on a flat glorification of asceticism, her approach assumes one of two reactions to the saint’s story: a coldly intellectual understanding or a passive, uncomprehending acceptance of the validity of the ascetic model presented.29 It denies the incontestable emotional appeal of the text, ignores the structural, narrative, and symbolic significance of the family’s struggle, and refuses the possibility of a participatory understanding of the meaning of Alexis’s story on the part of diverse audiences. The problems in Hatcher’s analysis point to the need for a more synthetic approach to the poem’s composition. Such an approach would encompass bipartition and tripartition. It would also consider the possibility of two common uses of number in medieval composition that are excluded by the somewhat arbitrary nature of Hatcher’s numbers: that is, numerical symbolism and numerical structuring that favored recall for recitation from memory. In short, such an approach would suggest how the poet used the structure of the whole poem for the expression of its spiritual meaning. Heinrich Lausberg pays greater attention than Hatcher to the structural significance of the family, but like her, he treats the family only in its relation to the saint, ignoring its role in the overall, audience-directed message of the L text. This perspective is a natural consequence of his thesis that the poem is the literary rendering of a pictorial cycle. He believed that the Vie could have provided a narrative to explain a stainedglass or miniature cycle of the saint’s life that may once have existed, but for which we have no documentation.30 This idea was suggested to him by the item that fills out the folio on which the Hildesheim Alexis ends: a copy of a papal letter discussing the didactic use of religious images. It is remarkable that Lausberg sought an external referent to explain the presence of this letter on the use of images, given that the Hildesheim Vie de saint Alexis is part of the St Albans Psalter, an exceptionally richly illustrated codex in which the earliest known Romanesque miniature cycle of the life of Christ precedes the Old French poem. Whether or not an Alexian pictorial cycle existed, Lausberg’s hypothesis draws our attention to the relationship between visual and verbal art forms. For example, an extension of Lausberg’s idea would point out the stylistic parallels between the serial presentation of scenes in medieval stained glass windows and the paratactic style of the L Alexis, where short statements are juxtaposed with little recourse to subordinate clauses of an explanatory nature. Another important area of contact be-

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tween the visual and the verbal has been highlighted in recent research on devotional practices and visionary culture in the Middle Ages. There was a vital relationship between visualization—with or without the aid of actual images—and textual practices.31 More pertinent still would be an exploration of how viewing the art in the St Albans Psalter could have influenced the reading of the Old French poem. The Christ cycle miniatures that precede the Alexis poem do not encourage mere cursory recognition of scenes in Christ’s life; rather, they invite a meditative, emotionally participatory type of viewing. This manuscript that also includes the Psalter was not meant to be read in the modern, linear sense. It was a devotional text meant to be lived with. The Christ cycle miniatures draw the viewer into their vivid narrative scenes. Through visual parallels, they encourage the viewer to constantly connect and cross-reference the highly stylized images. The reader/viewer of the St Albans Psalter is invited to extend this practice to the process of reading and re-reading the Vie de saint Alexis. Alexis’s imitatio is doubly underscored by association with the Christ cycle miniatures and by the textual echoes of the Bible embedded in the VSA text itself. In this codex, the Alexis story begins not with the opening lines of the poem, but with an illustrated prologue page depicting and commenting the bridal chamber scene. The theme of mystical marriage with Christ is thus underscored. Scenes depicting the Emmaus story immediately follow the Alexis text. In these images and the inscription that accompanies them, the use of dramatic irony again invites the reader/viewer to recognize what participants in the scene cannot see even though it is in front of them, just as readers are invited in the VSA to see what the saint’s family does not recognize.32 On the final pages of the Alexis quire, a marginal gloss on spiritual battle repeatedly exhorts the reader/listener to see with the spirit rather than with the eyes (spiritualiter vs. corporaliter). The visual context of the Hildesheim poem thus encourages an approach to the poem that includes ironic understanding and symbolic interpretation.33 To return to Lausberg’s study: its principal interest lies not in his reconstruction of a hypothetical Alexis pictorial cycle, but rather in the broad lines of his structural analysis. His schema gives a convincing outline of the technical devices used by the Hildesheim poet to control and order the poem’s composition. In Lausberg’s view, the poem, with its 125 strophes of five lines each,34 is structured at every level on units of five.35 He focuses particularly, however, on the twenty-five “tableaux” that constitute the narrative skeleton of the poem. These scenes are grouped in five blocks. Each of the blocks presents five tableaux in the space of

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twenty-five strophes (=125 lines). For example, Lausberg suggests the following images corresponding to the first five poetic units: Unit 1 (str. 1–5): Euphemian and his wife praying Unit 2 (str. 6–10): Composite scene of the saint’s early life: infantia, pueritia, adolescentia Unit 3 (str. 11–15): Alexis’s leavetaking from the bride Unit 4 (str. 16–20): Alexis as pilgrim Unit 5 (str. 21–25): Alexis unrecognized by the servants Note that each of the above scenes is presented in five strophes (=25 lines). Lausberg remarked that the larger blocks of twenty-five strophes are organized according to a pattern in which order, structurally translated by the presentation of single tableaux in regular, five-strophe units (in blocks one, three, and five), alternates with affective disorder, signified by the controlled breakdown of this smaller five-based system (in blocks two and four). Blocks two and four, not surprisingly, are dominated by the family’s confusion. Lausberg’s five-based schema has important implications for an analysis of the structure of the Vie. It provides the basis for a cogent approach to the composition of the poem. One can without difficulty imagine a poet mentally organizing a narrative in these blocks based on the easily manipulated number five. This type of organization would have facilitated recitation as well.36 The five large blocks of twenty-five stanzas each form the essential compositional units in which the narrative and thematic lines of the poem are blended together. They play an important role in structuring the tensions between the saintly and worldly perspectives represented by Alexis and his family, even as they regulate the progression of the larger salvation story in which the saint, his family, the Roman community, and the medieval audience participate. Stanzas 1–25 establish Alexis as a holy man and create links between the audience and the saint and family. In stanzas 26–50 the poet narrates the first seventeen years of Alexis’s ascetic existence and develops the tension between the worldly orientation of the family and the spiritual orientation of the saint. The third large block (st. 51–75) recounts the second seventeen-year period of testing. It includes the family and the Roman community in the trial. Upon his death, the spiritually clairvoyant saint receives his reward while the family and community move anxiously toward enlightenment. Stanzas 76–100 bring the revelation of the saint’s identity and the family’s humanly comprehensible but spiritually shortsighted rejection of the

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meaning of that revelation as they give themselves over to grief for their earthly loss. In the fifth and final block (str. 101–125) the family’s sense of tragedy is overwhelmed by the larger community’s joyful reaction. Material goods are spurned as the collectivity responds to the hope of salvation represented by the saint. A message of redemption and spiritual responsibility directed at the medieval audience closes the poem. Lausberg’s structure allows for the existence of two concurrent principles of balance: one based on tension, the other on symmetry. The blocks of five alternate between order and disorder, translating on a structural level the tension inherent in the balanced alternation between saintly and earthly perspectives. At the same time, the poem divides symmetrically around the center of the third block, where the events surrounding Alexis’s death are narrated. The whole poem participates in this balanced design: there is no prelude to explain away, as in Hatcher’s second schema. In hagiography, the saint’s death always receives special attention, for it marks his or her passage from the order of the contingent to that of the immutable. By virtue of this passage, the personal effort of the saint becomes significant to and for the Christian community at large. In the Hildesheim Alexis, the centrality of this event is literal as well as figurative. This kind of symmetry is unusual in hagiographical narratives; typically the saint’s earthly life is accorded much more space than the period after his or her death. Alexis’s death is drawn out in the three central units of the poem. Announced as imminent in unit 12 (str. 56–60), it is deferred by unit 13 (str. 61–66), and finally occurs in unit 14 (str. 67–70). The special significance of this portion of the poem was obvious to the Hildesheim scribe: in the manuscript it is the only part set off by a definite break between stanzas in the otherwise continuously written text. Lausberg’s analysis concentrates chiefly on the more technical aspects of the five-based structure. However, his detailed examination and catalogue of the poet’s “obsession with five” lead us to seek the reason behind the pervasive use of this number. They thus lead to another aspect of medieval numerical composition, one that goes beyond the levels of organizational and aesthetic use of number and into the domain of the symbolic. In the medieval context, numbers were invested with symbolic meaning. By using numbers to shape and ornament their artistic creations, religious poets imitated and referred to the numerical form of God’s creation. Form and meaning coincided in their poetry. The correspondence between any given number and its meaning was never simple,

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however. St. Augustine, a fountainhead of medieval numerical analysis, noted the polyvalence of numerical symbols while insisting on the necessity of pursuing their meaning: “Different people will arrive at different views on the reasons for these numbers, but no one would be so foolish and absurd as to argue that they were set down without purpose.”37 This variation in interpretation was due in large part to the fact that the symbolic associations attached to numbers were inherited from different sources, including Classical philosophy, the Hebrew tradition, and the New Testament.38 Furthermore, as Gerhart Ladner has pointed out, symbolism is inherently complex and, “if it fulfills all its potentialities, includes unification beside polarity.”39 We have seen that the same is true of the Hildesheim poet’s use of ironic patterning. Nor was any one number used alone: just as the cosmos was an intricate set of proportions, so also was the poetic work that referred to it. In the Vie de saint Alexis, with its five-line strophes arranged in fivestrophe tableaux forming five narrative blocks, five is organized by three.40 Three governs the stages of the saint’s career: childhood, saintly life, apotheosis. Alexis’s itinerary—Rome, Edessa, Rome—is at once tripartite and circular, and is thus doubly invested with divine symbolism. Alexis’s soul ascends to heaven in line 333. Three is the number of the Trinity and of perfection. Five was associated with the five senses, with earthly marriage, with spiritual blindness. Three and five: the saint belongs to both the divine and human orders. His sanctity has meaning only within this double frame of reference. It implicates his fellow mortals at the same time that it refers to God. The underlying bipartition of the poem underscores this: death separates the saint’s contingent, earthly existence from his real, eternal life. During Alexis’s life on earth, his relationship to God is established; after he takes his place in paradise, the saint’s connections to and importance for the Christian community are at issue. Through this chiastic structure are expressed the paradoxical but unbroken connections between the earthly and heavenly orders. The dramatic irony of the family’s situation doubles and, as it were, translates the larger New Testament pattern of non-recognition and ironic fulfillment into the idiom of a specific, engaging narrative. Three, the number of God, is present in the tripartition that governs this ironic structure at all levels. The saint’s Rome—Edessa—Rome itinerary allows intensification of the situation with the return of the anonymous son to the parental home. The family expresses its uncomprehending grief three times, in threefold lamentation by the father, then the mother, and finally the bride. Five pervades the family’s drama with its multivalent symbolism. Five, the number of worldliness and spiritual blindness

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was also associated with Christ’s five wounds, leaving open its possible use here as a symbol for Alexis’s imitatio Christi alongside its connection to the family’s blindness.41 The members of Alexis’s family, whose understanding is limited by their temporal perspective, participate in a divine plan that they do not recognize. Condemned in this world by their blindness, the family members experience earthly loss and despair. Through the grace offered them by their association with the saint, they know the joy of reunion and salvation in the next life. As the above analysis suggests, the Vie de saint Alexis presents the phenomenon of structural layering. At its deepest level, the underlying hagiographical structure is binary, with death separating the saint’s contingent earthly existence from his real, eternal life. The structure of the narrative line, ultimately inherited from the Latin tradition, is dominated by threes.42 Alexis is born in Rome, becomes a holy pilgrim, returns to Rome to complete his earthly career and die a saint. The compositional principle is five-based. Original to the Old French text, it provides a framework for the development of the familial drama. These layers are fused together in the poem by numerical symbolism and ironic patterning that stress the sometimes seemingly paradoxical connections between saint and family, God and humankind. The whole invites audience participation through recognition and sympathy, intellectus and affectus. The poet implicated the faithful in Alexis’s story as he sought to lead them to a sense of their participation in salvation history and to an acknowledgement of their responsibility to imitate the saint’s perfect model of detachment from earthly distractions, however imperfectly they might do so.43

Notes The author gratefully acknowledges NEH support for research on the Vie de saint Alexis in the form of a dissertation grant and a summer research grant. 1. Charles Altman defines the two essential types, diametrical and gradational, in his seminal article, “Two Types of Opposition and the Structure of Latin Saints’ Lives,” Medievalia et Humanistica 6 (1975), 1–11. In the one pattern, the saint is diametrically opposed to a non-Christian order; in the other, his or her opposition is gradational—the saint represents not a radically different, but a higher form of Christian life than do those with whom he or she is in conflict. The VSA follows the gradational model. 2. The base text for most editions of the Vie de saint Alexis is the earliest and most complete manuscript, the Hildesheim or L version, which is part of the St Albans Psalter. A virtual facsimile of the entire St Albans Psalter, including the VSA, is available through the St Albans Psalter Project at the University of

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Aberdeen at http://www.abdn.ac.uk/stalbanspsalter/english/index.shtml. Quotes in this article are from my own unpublished edition of the L manuscript rather than from the critical editions widely in use (Gaston Paris, La Vie de saint Alexis: Poème du XIe siècle [1908]; reprint, Paris: Champion, 1980) and Christopher Storey, La Vie de saint Alexis: Texte du manuscrit de Hildesheim (L) (Geneva: Droz, 1968). Dating respectively from the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century, Paris and Storey’s editions are products of a philological age that was comfortable correcting and regularizing scribal errors that are increasingly accepted today as orthographical, lexical, and morphological variations commonly used by medieval scribes and understood by their readers. I have likewise avoided quoting from the recent edition by Maurizio Perugi, La Vie de saint Alexis: Edition critique (Geneva: Droz, 2000), which, though a philological tour de force, presents a reconstructed, hypothetical version of the VSA as it may have existed prior to the production of the Hildesheim copy. F. Zufferey has recently challenged the use of L as a base manuscript and has asserted the need for a more radically reconstructed edition of the lost Urtext (François Zufferey, “La tradition manuscrite du Saint Alexis primitif,” Romania 125 (2007), 1–45 and “L’Archéologie alexienne: Le Scriptorium de Saint Albans,” Romania 128 (2010), 1–28). My concern here is not whether the Hildesheim manuscript presents a faithful copy of a hypothetical Urtext, but with the discernable structure of the very real poem that exists in the St Albans Psalter. In quoting, I have used line numbering that corresponds to those of the published critical editions. I have used modern stanzaic form, resolved abbreviations, separated words, and marked enclitics and proclitics to aid the flow of reading. I hesitate to go further in modifying the language of the Anglo-Norman scribe. The translations, which give a literal rendering of the text, are my own. 3. E.R. Curtius, “Zur Interpretation des Alexiusliedes,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 56 (1936), 113–137; A.G. Hatcher, “The Old French Poem Saint Alexis: A Mathematical Demonstration,” Traditio 8 (1952), 111–158; Heinrich Lausberg, “Zur Altfranzösischen Metrik,” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen un Literaturen, 191 (1955), 202–213. Eleanor Bulatkin, “The Arithmetic Structure of the Old-French Vie de saint Alexis,” PMLA 74 (1959), 495– 502. James Atkinson, “Triplet Sequences in the Vie de Saint Alexis,” Romance Notes 11 (1969–70), 414–419. 4. The bibliography of Alexis studies is extensive. For pre-1985 scholarship see Christopher Storey, An Annotated Bibliography and Guide to Alexis Studies (Geneva: Droz, 1987). For more recent bibliography, see Louk J. Engels, “The West European Alexius Legend, with an Appendix Presenting the Medieval Latin Text Corpus in its Context (Alexiana Latina Mediki Aevi, I),” in The Invention of Saintliness, ed. A.B. Mulder-Bakker (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 93–144; Samuel Fanous and Henrietta Leyser, eds., Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth-Century Holy Woman (London and New York: Routledge, 2005); Emma Campbell, Medieval Saints’ Lives: The Gift, Kinship and Community in Old French Hagiography (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008); Molly Robinson Kelly, The Hero’s Place: Medieval Literary Traditions of Space and Belonging (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 2009). 5. The possible connections between Christina of Markyate and the St Albans Psalter have been a popular subject for historians and art historians in the past two decades. For bibliography, see Jane Geddes, The St Albans Psalter: A Book for Christina of Markyate (London: British Library, 2005). Kathryn Gerry has recently pointed out some of the limitations of viewing the contents of

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6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

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the St Albans Psalter through a narrowly biographical lens in “The Alexis Quire in the St Albans Psalter and the Monastic Community of St Albans” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2007). Critics with this orientation include Hans Sckommodau, “Zum altfranzösischen Alexiuslied,” Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie 70 (1954), 162–203, and “Das Alexiuslied: Die Datierungsfrage und das Problem der Askese,” in Medium Aevum Romanicum: Festschrift für Hans Rheinfelder (Munich: Hüber, 1963), pp. 298–324; Hatcher, “A Mathematical Demonstration”; Howard Robertson, “La Vie de saint Alexis: Meaning and Manuscript A.” Studies in Philology 67 (1970), 419–438; Phyllis Johnson and Brigitte Cazelles, Le vain siècle guerpir: A Literary Approach to Sainthood through Old French Hagiography of the Twelfth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979). Neil Cartlidge seems, on the one hand, to embrace this perspective in emphasizing certain “narcissistic” modes of identification with the saint: Medieval Marriage: Literary Approaches, 1100–1300 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 76–118, see esp. p. 89. On the other hand, he treats the VSA as romance and sees the deferred “romantic love” of Alexis and the bride as the main point of identification for lay audiences. Emma Campbell’s Lacanian and Butlerian analysis places Alexis’s ascetic program in a liminal zone beyond immediate apprehension: Campbell, Medieval Saints’ Lives: The Gift, Kinship and Community in Old French Hagiography (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2008). Patrick Vincent was the first to emphasize the affective importance of the family, which he views through the lens of theatrical effects of various kinds (“The Dramatic Aspect of the Old French Vie de saint Alexis,” Studies in Philology 60 [1963], 525–541). His article has been a point of reference for others interested in the emotive and dramatic aspects of the VSA, including a number of art historians (see note 5). He does not, however, emphasize dramatic irony. Evelyn Birge Vitz underscores the opposition between the static saint and the dramatic family in the context of performance: “Performing Saintly Lives and Emotions in Medieval French Narrative,” in The Church and Vernacular Literature in France, ed. Dorothea Kullmann (Toronto: PIMS, 2009), pp. 201–213. For a summary of theories on dates of composition and for arguments in favor of Norman provenance, see Perugi, pp. 46–48 and pp. 44–45. A summary of arguments for the different dates proposed for the creation of the St Albans Psalter can be found on the St Albans Psalter Project site at http://www.abdn.ac.uk/stalbanspsalter/english/essays/debate.shtml. On literary saints’ lives from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, see Duncan Robertson, The Medieval Saints’ Lives: Spiritual Renewal in Old French Literature (French Forum, 1995) and “The Inimitable Saints,” Romance Philology 42 (1988–89), 435–446. Robertson has argued that “an emotional, participatory understanding . . . is what [vernacular] hagiography is designed to deliver . . . The purpose is to elicit precisely the response described by Bernard: the complete conversion of intelligence into feeling (affectus) and action (opus),” Spiritual Renewal, p. 14. Later Old French versions of Alexis’s life tend to spell out some of the lessons of the saint’s story, at the cost of attenuated poetic effect. See especially Alison Goddard Elliott, The Vie de Saint Alexis in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: An Edition and Commentary (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). As Claire Colebrook formulates it: “The idea of past contexts that are meaningful in themselves but which are no longer ‘ours’ requires the

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12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

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Medievalia et Humanistica ironic viewpoint of detachment. Through irony we can discern the meaning or sense of a context without participating in, or being committed to, that context.” Irony (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 3. See especially A.G. Hatcher, E. Bulatkin, and H. Lausberg, “Zum alfranzösischen Metrik.” Colebrook, Irony, p. 15. D.H. Green, Irony in Medieval Romance, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 6. This formulation is notably found in the “official” version, BHL 286: Bollandists, eds., “De S. Alexio Confessore,” in Acta Sanctorum Bollandiorum (Julii, vol. IV), pp. 238–270. There were probably two Latin sources for the Old French VSA: see Manfred Sprissler, Das rhythmische Gedicht ‘Pater deus ingenite’ (11. Jh) und das altfranzösische Alexiuslied. Forschungen zur romanischen Philologie 18 (Münster: Aschendorf, 1966). Nancy Vine Durling explores the importance of the genealogical construct to the VSA in “Hagiography and Lineage: The Example of the Old French Vie de saint Alexis,” Romance Philology 40 (1987), 451–469. Alexis’s life is only one of many medieval exempla that are centered on this theme. Pierre de Poitiers, for example, told the story of a young noble who became a Cistercian against his family’s will. His father threatened to storm the abbey in order to recover his heir. The young monk reasoned with him thus: “My father, it is possible that I could die before you do. Why, then, do you expect me to succeed you in your domains?” The father, overcome by the truth of these words, gave up his worldly possessions and joined his son in the monastery. (Cited by Paul Rousset, “Recherches sur l’émotivité à l’époque romane,” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 2 [1959], 62). These are primary early medieval glosses for these numbers, which can have different symbolic meanings in other contexts. Cf. Gawain and the Green Knight, an example from the domain of romance, in which Gawain’s pentangle is glossed using positive associations for five that were typical of a later period. See Heinz Meyer and Rudolf Suntrup, Lexikon der mittelalterlichen Zahlenbedeutungen (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1987), col. 403–442 and col. 735–748. For more bibliography on number symbolism, see note 38. The mother’s (unreliable) sense of stabilitas loci is based on a self-centered understanding of space; Alexis’s is centered in God. Cf. Molly R. Kelly’s review of philosophical approaches to space/place, The Hero’s Place, pp. 16–21. In the Latin antecedents, there is no such reciprocity. The prose vita mentions only that the father had the pilgrim installed in the atrium in order that he might see him frequently. Pater deus ingenite, on the other hand, mentions only Alexis’s impassive view of his family. The motif of the critical question that goes unasked reappears in other medieval narratives, most notably in the story of Perceval at the Grail Castle. The saint’s decision to seek lodging in the familial palace was based on his acknowledgement of his family’s pain and longing, an acknowledgement given in a moving formulation: “Mais ne pur huec mun pedre me desirret, / Si fait ma medra plus que femme qui vivet, / Avoc ma spuse que jo lur ai guerpide” (vv. 206–208) (But nonetheless my father yearns for me, / my mother too, surpassing woman’s force. / So does my wife, whom I left here with them). Vv. 15, 48, and passim; v. 170 and passim; vv. 360, 372, and passim. Cf. Luke 14:26–27 for a similar formulation. Cf. Mark 2:31–35 and Luke 8: 19–21.

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26. D.H. Green has identified an analogous phenomenon in the context of medieval romance which he terms irony of values. He locates the source of this irony in the contrast between a true understanding of the chivalric ideal and an aberrant notion of it. This divergence is often expressed through the use of terms that have both religious and secular connotations. The religious meaning represents the ideal; the secular understanding of the term shows an inferior apprehension (Irony in Medieval Romance, pp. 287–288). 27. Hatcher, “Mathematical Demonstration,” pp. 154ff. 28. This binary approach recalls the epic formula from the Oxford Song of Roland, where the pagans are in the wrong and the Christians are in the right. It does not recognize a fundamental pattern in hagiography: gradational rather than diametrical opposition. In fact, Alexis’s family is good; the saint is better. 29. That some medieval readers and listeners reacted to Alexis’s legend in precisely these ways is almost certain, given the way the story is recast in other versions, for example the M manuscripts. In my view, however, the Hildesheim version does not invite these reactions. 30. Lausberg, “Zur altfranzösischen Metrik,” pp. 205–210 provides a complete description of the hypothetical narrative Bilderzyklus (picture cycle). 31. See, for example, Barbara Newman, “What Did It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’? The Clash Between Theory and Practice in Medieval Visionary Culture,” Speculum 80 (2005), 1–43; Rachel Fulton, “Praying with Anselm at Admont: A Meditation on Practice,” Speculum 81 (2006): 700–733; Jane Geddes, The St Albans Psalter, pp. 102–104. See Kristine Haney on the type of devotional reading encouraged by the historiated letters of the psalms that follow the Hildesheim text (The Saint Albans Psalter: An Anglo-Norman Song of Faith [New York: Peter Lang, 2002]). 32. The inscription with the first image identifies “our savior” and the two disciples for the viewer, then recounts the exchange between them. The disciples ironically reproach Christ for being the only one in Jerusalem who does not know about the Crucifixion. In the following image, Christ gazes directly out of the frame while giving the bread to the disciples, creating for the viewer a sense of connection with and superior knowledge of the situation. 33. The Christ cycle miniatures and the other illustrations accompanying the VSA can be viewed in Jane Geddes, The St Albans Psalter: A Book for Christina of Markyate (London: British Library, 2005), or at http://www.abdn.ac.uk/ stalbanspsalter/english/index.shtml. 34. The Hildesheim Alexis has four strophes with fewer than five lines. As the poem is otherwise very regular, it is likely that the scribe inadvertently dropped several lines when copying from the exemplar. This is all the more plausible due to the form in which L is written: the stanzas are marked off by capitals rather than by regular, blank space in this continuously written text. Based on common lessons in the A, V, P, S, and M copies, editors have reconstructed the following lines: vv. 255, 274–75, 349, and 472. 35. Lausberg at times pushes his five-base principle to unconvincing extremes, as when he insists on iambic pentameter verse as the basic unit. Bulatkin also emphasized the use of five in the composition of the poem. Her analysis supposes the composer to have been more mathematician than poet, however, and his use of number to have been beyond the perception of the medieval audience in its “perfect expression of the immateriality of the divinity,” which Alexis sought to imitate through denial of the senses (p. 502). Her division of the poem into “major section” (vv. 1–500) and “coda” (vv. 501–625)

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36.

37.

38.

39. 40.

41. 42.

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Medievalia et Humanistica seems more motivated by the needs of her arithmetical analysis than by the narrative, thematic, or symbolic structure of the poem. For other critiques of Bulatikin’s method, see Tony Hunt, “The Structure of Medieval Narrative,” Journal of European Studies 3 (1973), 308–315, and A. Kent Hieatt, “Numerical Structures in Verse: Second-Generation Studies Needed,” in Essays in the Numerical Criticism of Medieval Literature, ed. Caroline Eckhardt (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1980), pp. 65–78. Mary Carruthers notes that the use of five for mnemonic purposes dates back at least to Cicero’s Rhetorica ad Herennium, a work well-known in the Middle Ages: The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 72. For more on compositional and recall techniques in the Middle Ages, see Jeux de mémoire: aspects de la mnémotechnie médiévale, ed. B. Roy and P. Zumthor (Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1985). “Et horum quidem numerorum causas . . . potest alius alias indagare, frustra tamen eos esse positos nemo tam stultus ineptusque contenderit.” St. Augustine, De Trinitate, 4.6.10 (PL, vol 42, col. 895), cited by Patrick S. Diehl, The Medieval European Religious Lyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 298. The most complete reference works for number symbolism are Heinz Meyer, Die Zahlenallegorese im Mittelalter: Methode und Gebrauch (Munich: Münstersche Mittelalterschriften 25, 1975) and Heinz Meyer and Rudolf Suntrup, Lexikon der mittelalterlichen Zahlenbedeutung (Munich: Fink, 1987), which include copious examples from the Patristic period through the twelfth century. The standard overview of the subject in English remains V.F. Hopper, Medieval Number Symbolism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938). For other essential bibliography on medieval number symbolism in English and German, see R.E. Kaske, Medieval Christian Literary Imagery: A Guide to Interpretation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), pp. 164–172. The following works have also served in the preparation of the present article: Guy Beaujouan, “Le symbolisme des nombres à l’époque romane,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 4 (1961), 159–169; E.R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), pp. 501–509; D.R. Howlett, The English Origins of Old French Literature (Dublin and Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 1994), pp. 1–11; Russell Peck, “Number as Cosmic Language,” in Essays in the Numerical Criticism of Medieval Literature, pp. 15–64; Jacques Ribard, Le Moyen Age: Littérature et symbolisme (Paris: Champion, 1984); Edmund Reiss, “Number Symbolism and Medieval Literature,” Medievalia et Humanistica, N.S. 1 (1971), 161–174; Nigel Hiscock, The Symbol at Your Door: Number and Geometry in Religious Architecture of the Greek and Latin Middle Ages (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); M.-M. Davy, Essai sur la symbolique romane (XIIe siècle) (Paris: Flammarion, 1955). Gerhart Ladner, “Medieval and Modern Understanding of Symbolism,” Speculum 54 (1979), 229. Jacques Ribard notes an analogous symbolic use of three and five in Chrétien’s work, concluding: “Le trois et le cinq, c’est . . . dans le Perceval, les mystérieuses retrouvailles de l’homme et de Dieu,” In Le Moyen Age: Littérature et symbolisme (Paris: Champion, 1984), p. 30. See esp. Meyer and Suntrup, col. 405; E.R. Curtius, European Literature, pp. 503–504 and R. Peck, “Number as Cosmic Language,” pp. 59–61. The original Syriac legend of Mar Riscia, from which the Alexis story evolved, did not include the son’s return. See Arthur Amiaud, La légende syri-

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aque de saint Alexis, l’homme de Dieu (Paris: Vieweg, 1889). Amiaud’s French translation is translated into English in Carl Odenkirchen, The Life of St. Alexius in the Old French Version of the Hildesheim Manuscript (Brookline, MA and Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1978). 43. Duncan Robertson argues that “the saints model perfect behavior on a heroic scale. But their stature by no means precludes imitation. They personify the imperative moral teaching of the church; in imperfect imitation of this model, the believer acknowledges that perfection is possible . . . and so takes responsibility for his own shortfall” (“The Inimitable Saints,” p. 445). In Charles Altman’s formulation, the confessor saint is “the man of exceptional spirituality who paradoxically stands as an exemplum for all others” (“Two Types of Opposition,” p. 4.)

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Rewriting Paternity The Meaning of Renovating Westminster in La Estoire de seint Aedward le rei NICOLE LEAPLEY

The Old French saint’s life, La Estoire de seint Aedward le rei, written by one of England’s most prolific authors, Matthew Paris, between 1236 and 1245 and dedicated to the Queen of England, Eleanor of Provence, had a political objective: to relegitimize the embattled Angevin dynasty and thus the rule of her husband, King Henry III (r. 1216–1272).1 Françoise Laurent has demonstrated Matthew Paris’s attachment to showing the genealogical filiation linking King Henry III to King Edward the Confessor. While Laurent is right to emphasize genealogy, blood kinship constitutes only the most literal instance of how genealogy operates to authorize dynastic reign in this text.2 Matthew Paris’s text overwrites the biological with the spiritual without fully erasing the former. He links Henry III to his illustrious Anglo-Saxon predecessor by suggesting an alternative understanding of genealogy, carefully representing Henry as Edward’s spiritual descendant.3 Westminster Abbey plays a pivotal role in the construction of this privileged relationship. Both kings undertook major, reign-defining renovations of the abbey. This shared patronage institutes a relationship based not on biological succession, but on common spiritual concern and performance. Once it has been defined as legitimating, this dedication to Westminster Abbey can continue to be passed from king to heir, further strengthening the dynasty. Most scholars believe the Estoire de seint Aedward le rei was undertaken to commemorate an important event held at Westminster, and date the text to before 1245.4 Possibilities include the wedding of Eleanor and Henry (1236), the baptism of their son Edward (1239), the start of the restoration of Westminster (1245), or perhaps even the arrival Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 37 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011.

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of the relic of the Holy Blood on the feast of Saint Edward (1247). The commissioning of the Estoire for any of these events would have made perfect political sense.5 Just as the restoration of Westminster recalls in material terms Edward the Confessor’s holiness while deepening Henry III’s association with him, the Estoire serves to refound and relegitimize the Angevin line by revealing that the source of Edward’s authority and success was not primarily genealogical but spiritual, expressed through his special link with Saint Peter. Matthew Paris further naturalizes linguistically the idea that Peter represents a spiritual progenitor for Edward. The Anglo-Norman pere, used eighty-one times in the text, is the term for both father and Peter. It is also the word for stone, thus reinforcing the metaphor and intensifying the link between biological genealogy, spiritual fatherhood, and foundation (or restoration). Furthermore, by naming his son and heir apparent after Saint Edward, Henry continues this “line” and consolidates his association with the saint.6 The Angevins are thus legitimized as Edward’s descendants on multiple levels—in word, image, stone, and flesh. Matthew carefully creates continuity, linking Eleanor and Henry III with Edward, establishing a spiritual dynasty but one that also functions biologically, since Eleanor and Henry want their son to become king.7 By examining the Estoire’s depiction of alternative genealogies, I hope to elucidate more fully the text’s careful fashioning of the link between the Angevin and Wessex dynasties in order to demonstrate how it functions as an authorizing and foundational text within the wider context of northern European dynastic attempts to garner authority through association with sanctity during the thirteenth century.8 Christiane Klapisch-Zuber maintains that the “genealogization” of a catalog of rulers was one of the most constant preoccupations of chroniclers from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries.9 I would add that the sacralization of these royal lines of descent was increasingly important in the thirteenth century. What I want to examine here is how metaphor functions in this text to merge these two regimes of authority in order to redesign and re-present the past in ever more powerful ways. The interpretation of Henry III as Edward the Confessor’s descendant relies on a rejection of literal reading (associated with the Old Testament) in favor of a spiritual reading (associated with the New Testament). Genealogy organizes the text as a metaphor, a mental construct, which has less to do with biology than with providing a way to conceptualize relationships.10 The importance of this kind of reading, of interpreting descent spiritually instead of solely biologically, is exemplified in the Vie de saint Alexis (eleventh century), in which the eponymous saint

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rejects the world of his father on earth for that of his father in heaven. Not only do both the Vie de saint Alexis and the Estoire de seint Aedward le rei prize the spiritual over the literal, they also both do so by sounding out the nature of paternity, descent, and foundation. Both texts are associated with St Alban’s Abbey11 and both draw their central metaphor from Matthew (16:15–19): “But what about you?” [Jesus] asked. “Who do you say I am?” Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”

Peter’s answer to Jesus’ question reveals that his knowledge is not restricted to the physical world, that he understands who Jesus is (“the Christ . . . the Son of the living God”) on a spiritual level. Peter understands Jesus’ true nature and answers correctly because, through divine revelation, he goes beyond thinking that is limited to concrete, biological, earthly terms—Jesus says that Peter’s understanding is not based on “flesh and blood” but comes from the “Father who is in heaven.” Jesus continues to use the same kind of layered metaphor to elucidate Peter’s identity, calling him “Simon son of Jonah”—a name that signals not only the apostle’s earthly lineage but also links him to the Old Testament Jonah—before proclaiming his new identity and role “And I tell you, you are Peter and on this rock.” Paradoxically, this spiritual or abstract understanding of Christ’s identity is revealed to Peter—who is also a rock, the most concrete thing of all. It is upon this rock, upon a foundation of spiritual interpretation over simple physical understanding, that Jesus will build his church.

Angevin Anxieties The Angevin dynasty had been ruling England for over sixty years when Henry III ascended to the throne in 1216. As the grandson of the house’s founder, King Henry II, and as the eldest son of the previous king, his claim was undisputed. Why, then, would his rule need to be legitimized? Why would the Angevin’s dynastic authority need any further support? The answer is threefold. First, despite the best efforts of Henry III’s predecessors to cultivate an association with Edward the Confessor,12 the Norman conquest

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constituted a profound political and cultural rupture. The anxiety occasioned by this rupture was aggravated under the reign of Henry III’s father, King John, with the devastating loss of the symbolically significant Norman lands. John also lost Anjou, Maine, and Touraine. His authority was challenged on several fronts—by the French king, by papal interdict, and by his own barons. Kingly power was again set back in 1215 when John signed the Magna Carta, and dealt a final blow when a portion of his barons offered the English throne to King Philip of France’s son, Louis. With the French attacking from the south and the unhappy barons attacking from the north, John died, leaving his nine-year-old son, Henry, to pick up the pieces. Moreover, the English monarchy was competing for power and prestige, not just with nobility and clergy in England, but also with foreign rulers and the papacy. During the thirteenth century, claims of holy relatives played an increasing role in the authorizing strategies of royal houses. Henry III employed many of the same strategies as his contemporary, King Louis IX of France, to emphasize the sacrality and legitimacy of his reign. Foremost among these was his decision to rebuild Westminster Abbey, which paralleled Louis’s construction of the Sainte Chapelle.13 The Estoire reinforces Henry’s claims to holy relatives by emphasizing Edward’s privileged relationship with Saint Peter and his consequent patronage of Westminster Abbey, underscoring Edward’s sanctity. The text presents Henry’s renovation of Westminster Abbey as the ultimate imitation of his saintly forebear. For all these reasons, the royal couple would have gladly welcomed a text that carefully tied the reigning king to the founding Anglo-Saxon and Norman lines, depicted an English monarchy at peace with Rome, and legitimized the Norman dynasties—all while grounding the reign in a spiritual tradition.14 In addition, because Edward functions as a surrogate father for Henry III, the Estoire effectively rewrites Henry’s past by going back to his spiritual origins, glossing over closer and less illustrious genealogical forbears—specifically his own dreadfully human father.15

Father Figures I will explore the varieties of genealogical arguments deployed in the Estoire to show that Henry III was the legitimate successor of Edward the confessor. Far from dispensing with genealogy, Matthew Paris redefines it in a way that allows him to construct and organize a variety of relationships, all of which emphasize continuity between Edward the Confessor and the reign-

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ing dynasty. Chief among these is the careful construction of a spiritual genealogy connecting the two reigns, but a variety of alternative genealogies are elaborated, further supporting the idea that relationships are not just constituted in blood. To trace this new, enriched sense of genealogy, I will be guided primarily by its unfolding in the text. This will also reveal how Matthew Paris weaves these alternative genealogies together to create a totalizing picture of how Henry III renews and continues Edward’s reign. Edward’s sanctity is affirmed from the very first lines of the text, through genealogy: Eu mund ne est, ben vus l’os dire, Païs, rëaume, ne empire U tant unt esté bons rois E seinz cum en isle d’Englois, Ki aprés regne terestre Ore regnent reis eu celestre: Seinz, martirs e cunfessurs, Ki pur Deu mururent plursurs. (1–8)16 [There is no country, realm, or empire in the world, I dare say, where there have been so many good and saintly Kings as in the isle of the English, kings who, after their earthly reign, now reign in heaven. Some were saints, martyrs, and confessors, many of whom died for God.]

The poem opens with the assertion that England can claim more virtuous kings than any other land. Successive generations of English kings have been saintly. It is no surprise therefore, that Edward shares their qualities, expressed especially in his spiritual strength to overcome worldly temptation. Hence, the prologue firmly establishes Edward’s personal legitimacy. Because it demonstrates the special status of England and its kings, who are predisposed to sanctity, it also lays the groundwork for England’s contemporary dynasty. This saintly genealogy is, not surprisingly, immediately complicated. The holy kings demonstrate strength, like their more bellicose brethren, but do so by vanquishing “lur char, dïable e mund” (21) (“the flesh, the devil, and the world”). Edward shares his forebears’ qualities, Sa char venqui par chasteté, Le mund par humilité, E diable par ses vertuz, (29–31) [He conquered the flesh through his chastity, the world through his humility, and the devil by his virtues,]

making explicit the link between sanctity and chastity. Edward’s physical purity creates the need for alternative genealogies, including spiritual ones. As we shall see, however, Matthew Paris does not abandon the biological argument. He will go on to show that not only were

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successive generations of English kings saintly, but also that they were closely tied by blood. Before detailing the dynastic lineage, Matthew Paris dedicates his text to England’s current rulers: Queen Eleanor and her husband, Henry III. The text accordingly shifts focus from the dynasty’s historic sanctity to bonds of affinity and duty: En vostre garantie met Ke pur vus ai fait cest livret, Noble dame de haute orine, Alianor, riche reïne D’Engletere. . . Ki funtaine es d’afeitement A vus faz cest petit present. (49–53, 63–64) [Noble, well-born lady, Eleanor, rich queen of England, flower among ladies by virtue of your qualities and honors, I who have prepared this book for you put it in your care . . . To you, a fountain of comeliness, I give this little gift.]

But also includes Henry: Kant k’eime reis Henris tes sires, Cheris, bein sai, e desires, E cel amur fait a preiser D’aver en beins commun voler. Ke vout amis, ço voile amie, Dunt est bone la cumpainie; Ke veut amie e amis voile, Tesmoine nus en porte Toile. (65–72) [I know that whatever your lord King Henry loves, you cherish and desire. A will toward shared goals renders love praiseworthy: whatever the lover wants, so should his sweetheart want, which makes the match a good one. And whatever the lady wants, so should her beloved; of that, Cicero brings us testimony.]

Matthew introduces a line of reasoning based on the ideal of harmony between two partners: What Henry loves and wants, Eleanor—as a good wife and companion—wants as well and whatever the lady wants, so should her beloved. Integrated into the presentation of the book, these lines make clear that the book is for the royal couple, not just Eleanor. Two lines later, this affection and common desire is further reinforced by another kind of love, the love Henry feels for Edward and that Eleanor should also share, connecting feelings of love more directly to the object being presented: Pur seint Aedward le di e cunt Ke li rois Henris eime, dunt Vus escrif numeëment Amer et cherir vus apent, Kar il fu reis e seinz pruvé K’en amur vus ad enbracé. (73–78)

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[I tell you this for the sake of Saint Edward, whom King Henry loves, and I write in particular that it befits you to love and cherish Edward, for he was a king and proven saint who has embraced you in his love.]

Henry loves Saint Edward; it is therefore Eleanor’s duty to love him as well. Ciceronian friendship is transformed into something more like spiritual friendship with the addition of this third, holy, presence.17 The argument is based not on blood, but on fellow feeling. The presence of Edward’s love is made explicit here too. By addressing his words to Eleanor rather than to Henry, 18 Matthew avoids making a claim that Henry is the direct descendant of Edward, eliding the genealogical distance between his king and King Edward the Confessor, while still managing to construct a strong link between Henry and Edward. In the following couplets, Eleanor is further encouraged to cherish Edward’s memory because of the rewards she will reap. She is reminded of Edward’s power, Il fu li druguns seint Pere. Par ses vertuz e sa preiere Il vus guverne e vus cumforte, Uvrir vus fra du cel la porte. (79–82) [He was the beloved friend of Saint Peter, who by his deeds and his prayers governs and comforts you, and he will make heaven’s door open to you.]

Matthew explains that thanks to Edward’s dedication to his patron, Saint Peter, Edward has earned the title of standard-bearer to the first apostle and Bishop of Rome; he can even influence Peter’s special ability to open the gates of heaven. Thus, Eleanor can earn her salvation through her association with Edward and her devotion to him. Throughout the text, Matthew Paris shows that Edward’s power is spiritual in nature, derived from his special relationship with Peter. While avoiding the biological distance between King Edward and the reigning couple, the author emphasizes what connects them, setting up Eleanor and Henry as the staunchest—and in fact, only—defenders of Peter’s house: Avüez de sa meisun Estes, n’a si vus deus nun, Le roi e vus, ki sa moiller Estes, s’en devét saver; Ne vus deit failir par dreit, Puis ke feintise en vus ne veit. (83–88) [You are the protectors of Peter’s house, you, the king’s wife, and the king, and no one else, as you must know. Since Peter sees no falseness in you, he has no reason to fail you.]

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Matthew’s portrayal of the relationship among Eleanor, Henry, and Edward can be read as either descriptive or prescriptive. Depending in part on where one situates the writing of the Estoire within Henry III’s reign, Matthew Paris could be describing a relationship and practice of imitation he recognizes as already in place, or suggesting a practice he believes should be carried out by the royal couple. Either way, he makes the case that, from a variety of points of view, Eleanor and Henry are the true successors of Saint Edward the king, in ways that go beyond blood descent. While in no way questioning Henry III’s biological descent from Edward the Confessor, Matthew builds an argument for continuity and legitimacy, of which biology is only one independent pillar. In engineering, redundancy is the duplication (or triplication) of critical components of a system in order to increase that system’s reliability. Like a good engineer, Matthew provides redundancies to guarantee the integrity of his work. Once Matthew has entrusted the care of the poem and Edward’s memory to the royal couple, he returns to the subject of England’s virtuous kings, introducing a botanical metaphor with biblical resonance:19 Quant racine est de bone ente, Droiz est ke li fruz s’en sente. Bon greife, quant de bon cep crest, Bon fruit par raisun en nest E mau fruit de la mauveise. (97–101) [When the root is from good stock, the fruit should rightly taste of it. When a good graft grows from a good trunk, it stands to reason that good fruit comes from it; and bad fruit comes from the bad.]

This image signals a new attention to biological generation, and indeed Matthew focuses on descent, tracing the blood connections of the successive generations of saintly English kings mentioned at the outset, starting of course with Edward: Ki de l’un e de l’autre part Gentilz e natureus ere Par pere seint e seinte mere. Du roi Auvré, le seint, le sage, Fu seint Aedward sist en lignage, Si a droite ligne d’engendrure De pere au fiz enpernét cure. (104–110) [who was noble by birth on both sides of his family, through his sainted father and his sainted mother. If you take account of his birth line directly from father to son, King Edward was sixth in descent from the saintly and wise King Alfred.]

Thanks to his holy parents, Edward is both noble “gentilz” and “natureus.” Both Edward’s royalty and native status are emphasized early on in the discussion of his lineage here and again: “Ke l’un fu de sanc

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rëal, / L’autre d’un lin natural” (140–144). Being “natural” is key in this text (the word is used seventeen times, many times occupying the rhyme position)—pointing not to illegitimacy (as in fils naturel) but precisely to legitimacy based primarily on a link to the land—on being native-born or a national, as opposed to alien or foreign.20 Edward is emphatically English. Blood descent was of course central to establishing royal legitimacy and Matthew Paris does not neglect it in his text. In fact, biological genealogy is central, as indicated by Françoise Laurent, who shows it to be a source of “biological capital,” saintly predisposition, and legitimacy. Indeed, throughout the text, attention is brought to bear on Edward’s royal forebears, and his Norman mother, Emme, is no exception. She is described as “mut bele, / [b]en entetchee damaisele” (129–130) (“very beautiful, well mannered”) and as providing the link, through her marriage, between her father, Duke Richard of Normandy, “[k]i flur fu de chivalerie” (128) (“the flower of chivalry”) and the Anglo-Saxon King Edgar “Rois peisibles cum Salamun” (124) (“the peaceable king, like Solomon”). Bone fu de la reïne E seinte tute la orine. Ceo pruva li niés e frere La reïne ke bone ere. Ceo fu Richardz e duc Robertz (145–149) [Those of the queen’s entire ancestral line were good and saintly, and the queen’s brother and nephew also proved that she was good]

Emme’s fine bloodline not only reaffirms Edward’s purity and that of his descendants, but also establishes a historical and genealogical link between the English and the Normans. Edward’s lineage is shown to be fundamentally enhanced by his Norman mother and her illustrious Norman relatives, implicitly, as Laurent notes, solidifying the legitimacy of Edward’s Norman and Angevin successors and validating the Norman invasion and its beneficiaries—who of course include Henry III. What’s more, this emphasis on Edward’s maternal ancestry provides a precedent for Angevin dependence on female filiation. In Henry III’s case, women play a particularly significant role, given that one cannot trace him back to Edward without considering two women as links. Henry I’s wife, Edith of Scotland, ties the House of Normandy to Wessex, while his daughter, Matilda, connects the Houses of Plantagenet and Normandy. Matthew Paris initially evokes Edward’s father and other forebears in order to establish Edward’s genealogical legitimacy as part of the Wessex dynasty. Their textual presence benefits Edward as he shares their positive attributes—they are described as holy and effective monarchs.

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Establishing the subject’s genealogical credentials and underlining his hereditary legitimacy are indispensable steps in any text about a king, but especially in this text, as what has so far seemed a straightforward ascent to the throne is suddenly problematized when the invading Danes defeat Edward’s family. His accession to the English crown is thrown into question in 1016 when the dynastic continuity of the House of Wessex is drastically broken by Cnut, King of Denmark. Compounding the obstacles separating Edward from the throne is his mother’s marriage to the new king. By the time Edward rises to power in 1042, the House of Denmark has ruled England for twenty-six years. From this point of rupture on, Edward’s father is evoked in the negative—only his absence is referred to. It is this absence that allows Cnut to ascend to the throne, which Cnut points out to Edward’s older brother, Edmund Ironsides, reminding him that he is alone and without aid, as his father Aelred has died, and his brothers, Edward and Alfred, are in Normandy (308–311). While Edmund’s lineage entitles him to be called King of England, the death of his father and absence of his brothers keep him from making good his claim and lead to his own demise. Edward finds himself in the same situation when it is his turn to come to power; he too is characterized by a lack of male family—his father and brothers are all dead. Thus, he too is “saunz aïe” (649) (“without help”). He survives this hardship and manages to reclaim the throne only with the help of a new, spiritual father: Saint Peter.21 The substitution of spiritual for earthly father is reinforced by the author’s careful use of the word pere. As stated earlier, the Anglo-Norman word pere in this text is a multivalent noun, meaning father, Peter, and rock. This homophony, which makes the author’s punning on pere throughout the text possible, is due to several linguistic developments.22 Of course, Matthew Paris, as a good Latinist (and monk, well acquainted with one of the founding metaphors of Christianity), would have known the pere homophone belied etymological differences and, I believe, chose knowingly to use pere in this particular and significant way. It also seems likely that someone who was conscious that language was spoken and written differently in England and in France, as Matthew was, would have recognized the use of pere over pierre not only as resonant with stone and father, but also as particularly “English,” and thus may have also chosen to emphasize this term in order to further appropriate Saint Peter for England by “anglicizing” his very name.23 Saint Peter, or Pere, is thus the semantically overdetermined replacement for Edward’s father. The paternal shift plays out in visions and prayers. After the death of King Harthacnut, England’s situation is de-

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teriorating, and the Bishop of Winchester, Brittewold, prays to Peter for help, ending his prayer with these two lines: “Seint Pere, guvern e justise / Nostre nef, ço est seint’ iglise” (627–628) (“Saint Peter, steer and govern our ship that is Holy Church!”). The bishop then sees a vision in which Peter appears to a young English noble named Edward. Edward tells Peter about the decimation of his land and lineage and then asks the heavenly figure for help: ‘Nunsage sui, e jovne e tendre— Ma terre est mis a flambe e cendre— Saunz aïe e decunseilez. Mais, beau pere, ki ben semblez Sires de grant dignetez, E estes, m’est vis, seint Pere, Kë entendez ma preiere, Ke cunsailez cest povre Aedward. Dist li prudum: “Fiz, Deus te gard!” (647–655) [I lack wisdom, and I am Young and untried, without help and unprovided for, and my land has been put to the flame and burnt to cinders. But, fair father, you who indeed seem a lord of great dignity and who are, I believe, Saint Peter, hear my prayer, and counsel this poor Edward. The worthy man said: “Son, may God keep you!”]

Edward addresses Saint Peter as beau pere and finally as seint Pere, once he understands who he is. The audience here is being sensitized to the importance and multivalence of the word pere. The foundation of the shift from earthly to spiritual father was laid at the beginning of line 627, when pere referred to Saint Peter for the first time since line 79. Pere appears midline in line 650, setting up its repetition and correction in the powerful rhyme position two lines later. The significance of the word is reinforced still further by the fact that this use of pere does not rhyme with the end of the preceding line, dignetez, which the listener, after having heard 650 lines of rhyming couplets, expects to be its pair, making the word ring out.24 Peter answers Edward’s prayer, encouraging him to imitate John the Evangelist in his chastity, and calling him fiz (655). Responding to Edward this way shows he accepts this familial bond and that the spiritual has indeed displaced the earthly. After this passage, the reader/listener is immediately transported across the Channel to Normandy, where this move toward spiritual surrogacy continues through Edward’s own prayer, an echo of Brittewold’s. Edward begins his prayer with the generative power of God, whose word created air, earth, and sun. God also makes kings: Ki sul ad droit es Rois dé Rois, Ki regne ne faudra jamois Ne sai dire par quel raisun

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Est apelez rois si vus nun. . . . Regnes dunes a pleisir E toilez quant te plest tolir. (742–745, 750–751) [God alone is rightfully King of Kings, whose reign will never falter: I cannot say by what right anyone is called king except you. . . . You give kingdoms as you please, and you take them away when that pleases you.]

Matthew Paris reminds the reader that kingly authority ultimately derives from God, not genealogy. The heavenly source of authority is reinforced by the next line, a reference to the Old Testament example of God replacing Saul with David as King of the Israelites: “Saul le fer tu l’enguttas, / En liu ki Davi eshauças” (752–753) (“You cast out proud Saul from the place to which you then raised David”). Edward’s situation echoes David’s: his path is not prepared by earthly genealogy; instead, he puts his trust in God and patiently waits for Him to prepare his ascension to the throne. Edward makes explicit the destruction of his lineage and his need for a new father: Regar, duz Deu, a tun frarin, Ki sul es pere a l’orfanin. Jhesu fiz Marie, gard En moi tun sergant Aedward. Jhesu, n’ai pere si vus nun. Mis est ja a confusïun Le meuz de mun lignage Par estrange gent sauvage. Après grantz perilz e dulurs, Mes pere est morz n’i a gueres jurs. (754–763) [Behold your poor creature, sweet God, you who alone are father to the orphan. Jesus, son of Mary, preserve me as your servant, Edward. Jesus, I have no father but you. The best of my lineage has been scattered by the foreign, savage people. After great suffering and sadness my father died a short time ago.]

Edward’s prayer repeats and amplifies Brittewold’s vision. Here too Edward’s request is validated, and we see that Peter has given his support to Edward, this upon the arrival of a messenger, who: L’en fait tut de fi seür Ke seint Pere l’a feit sucur [. . . saying] “Deu t’a [a] nostre roi choisi.” (828–829, 833) [assured [him] beyond a doubt that Saint Peter had helped him . . . God has chosen you as our king.]

Edward’s earthly family, who failed to help him secure his birthright, has indeed been replaced by a spiritual one that has succeeded.25 Edward’s kingship and sanctity are thus directly connected with his early prayers and vow to Saint Peter and Saint John.26 At the same time, his rise to the throne of England is shown to be completely dependent upon the aid

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they granted their devotee; his biological legitimacy is insufficient by itself. Edward’s ascension is due to this spiritual guidance; his legitimacy and authority is vetted more powerfully by Peter than by blood or kinship. While blood kinship has created obstacles, these two saints, and the promises Edward made to them, have become inseparable from Edward’s rule and sanctity, as have their tangible results: the end of the Wessex dynasty and the creation of Westminster Abbey. Matthew Paris thus makes clear that the way for the Plantagenets was prepared by God.

Spiritual Interpretation Once Cnut’s line is exhausted and Edward becomes King of England, a new successional difficulty emerges—his own childless marriage. What would pose a straightforward dilemma for another king is in this text interpreted in a positive light, as Edward’s wife, Edith, has her own problematic genealogy. Her father, Godwin, collaborated with the Danes, and is therefore implicated in the downfall of Edward’s family. To deal with this predicament, Edith is distanced from her family. This point is developed at length in the text, but can be summarized by citing one line: “Du pere ne siut pas les traces” (1152) [(She) did not follow in her father’s footsteps]. Edith too benefits from the idea that earthly fathers are imperfect, but that their children can be redeemed through dedication to the father in heaven. Their childless marriage completes the erasure of Edith’s suspect ancestors. Choosing chastity acts as a final symbolic repudiation of biological genealogy, an attempt to break the link with sexual generation, reinforcing baptism’s erasure of original sin.27 The ultimate beneficiaries of this story of purity are, of course, the Plantagenets. Edward’s ascent to the throne of England is based on promises made to his spiritual benefactors—not through paternal aid—effectively showing the power of alternative, particularly spiritual, genealogies. The childless marriage also fulfills Edward’s vow to remain chaste:28 Par veintre charnel desir / Bein deit estre clamez mart[i]r . . . / Sa char, diable e mu[n]d venqui (1255–1256, 1259) (because he vanquished carnal desire, he must indeed be called a martyr. [. . .] He overcame his flesh, the devil, and the world).

Edward marries to please his people, but by choosing to reject the marital bed, he both fulfills the promise made while still in Normandy and precludes the continuity of the House of Wessex. The end of the Wessex line is thus brought about by Edward’s own choice, a choice coupled

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with his sanctity and selection by Peter. Thus, the rise of a new dynasty in England is shown to be part of a divine plan. Through his “spiritual” marriage to Edith, Edward’s vow of chastity is handled in a way that is consistent with his royalty and his sanctity. Once married, Edward must fulfill another promise: to make a pilgrimage to Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. When Edward explains his vow to the English, he does so again in terms of lineage.29 He begins by situating himself as a youth living in exile with relatives in Normandy, receiving nothing but devastating news from England. Quant sujurnai en Normendie Of le duc ki m’ert äeus, Richardz, e ere juvenceus, Nuveles me vindrent suvent Ki mut me rendirent dolent. (1410–1414) [when I was a youth in Normandy, sojourning with Duke Richard, who was my grandfather—news often reached me that made me terribly sad.]

The anaphora (nuveles begins five lines) underlines the devastation of Edward’s family by accumulation, while at the same time highlighting his situation as an exile, as a passive recipient of news, powerless to do anything to stop it. At lines 1421–1422, the rhyme pair, pere/mere, is used to recall the loss of his father through death and his mother through remarriage: Nuveles de la mort mun pere, Nuveles des noces ma mere, Nuvele de Aedmund mun frère – Ki pire fu ke la premere – Nuveles de mes nevusz, K’ocis furent par Daneis gluz, Puis d’Aufré, mun frère, ki Asorbez muruit en Heli. (1421–1428) [There was the news of my father’s death, the news of my mother’s marriage, the news of Edmund my brother (which was worse than the news of my father’s death), the news of my nephews, who were murdered by the greedy Danes, and then the news of my brother Alfred, who died, blinded, in Ely.]

It is not just Edward’s father who is displaced, but his entire family. Edward’s human family, his tie to the throne of England, is largely destroyed and can be of no help to him. However, his human family is replaced by a holy family, specifically Jesus and His mother, in addition to Saint Peter and Saint John. The repetition of the rhyme pair pere/mere in Edward’s speech where he is consoled by his holy family emphasizes the substitution: N’oi, fors de Deu e sa Mere, Cumfort, e mun seignur seint Pere,

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E s[e]int J[ohan] l’Ewangelliste. . . . A ceus quatre m’abaundunai Ma vie tute a ordener, E fus un wu, nel dei celer, Pur moi e pur mun heritage E pur vus k’estes mun barnage D’aler a Rumme en ureisuns. (1431–1433, 1436–1441) [I had no comfort, except for God and his Mother, my lord Saint Peter and Saint John the Evangelist. . . . I gave my life to those four to command, and I cannot hide the fact that I vowed for my sake, for my heirs and for you, my baronage, to make a pilgrimage to Rome with my prayers.]

The Holy Family, along with Edward’s patron saints, fills the void created by the destruction of his earthly family and, later, acts as a model for his own chaste, yet productive, marriage. Edward is the savior of England through his good acts, but also in the long term, thanks to his repudiation of generation. His chastity promotes the fullness of his imitation of Christ. Spiritual reading resolves several problems in the text, creating alternative genealogies in the process. These genealogies, like biological ones, have legacies. Edward’s pilgrimage vow is one. Itself a result of spiritual interpretation, the pilgrimage vow will be settled by spiritual rereading. Fulfilling his pledge to Saint Peter not through a literal pilgrimage to Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome as originally promised, but through the edification of a new abbey dedicated to Saint Peter, this one in London, allows Edward to be a good father to his people while keeping his vow to his spiritual father. This transformation, like those before it, is facilitated and naturalized by the recurring use of the polyvalent term pere. The pope, Saint Peter’s earthly counterpart, approves of the substitution: E maunderez a vostre pere, K’en terre est en liu seint Pere. (1563–1564) [make that request of your Father, who represents Saint Peter on earth.]

Like Saint Peter in Edward’s first vision, the pope echoes Edward’s filial language by calling Edward his “dear son” three times (1626, 1682, 1702). The pope’s approval of the substitution, as well as the absolution of Edward’s sins, is repeated and amplified by Saint Peter himself when he appears in a vision to a hermit and makes two new promises: to dedicate Westminster with his own hands and to reward its patrons by opening the gate of heaven to them. The spiritual interpretation of Edward’s promise to Saint Peter is thus approved by the English people, pope and, most important, Saint Peter himself. Because Saint Peter visits London to dedicate the church instead of Edward going to Rome, the act of pilgrimage is effectively reversed.30

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This reversal was hinted at early in the text with Saint Peter’s visit to Edward and other Englishmen in visions that did not require the faithful to visit the saint’s relics or cult place.31 Through this reinterpretation of Edward’s vow, Matthew Paris represents London as the new Rome, with King Edward’s abbey dedicated to Saint Peter replacing the basilica dedicated to him in Rome.32 As the substitution of foundation for pilgrimage plays out, pere refers at once to the father figure (variously Edward, Saint Peter, the pope) and to Saint Peter by name. Further, pere signifies the very stone used to found the church. Matthew draws the listener’s attention to this creative use of pere by juxtaposing the homonyms at the semantically overdetermined end of the line, “Un muster en l’onur seint Pere / Rëal frez, de chauz e pere” (1705–1706) (“You will build a royal Church of limestone and rock to the honor of Saint Peter”). Westminster’s stones are the physical evidence marking the fulfilled promise and aligning Edward’s words and deeds. The church itself is a physical manifestation of Edward’s word—his prayers and vows to Saint Peter made stone. Westminster is thus woven into the notion of genealogy, a monument to and legacy of spiritual fatherhood that will benefit Edward’s kingdom, his ancestors, and his successors. The second time pere is used to signify stone, it is again in the rhyme position paired with seint Pere, this time emphasizing Westminster Abbey’s rich royal history. Originally built by King Sebert, it was associated with the institution of Christianity on the island. In other words, Edward, like Henry III, was himself refurbishing a church already founded by an English king in honor of Saint Peter: Un muster fist de seint Pere, Vers occident, de chauz e pere. (2063–2064) [King Sebert undertook the building of a church to Saint Peter, which was made of limestone and rock and faced west.]

By this act of stewardship and patronage, Edward and Henry III imitate their predecessors and continue the line of Westminster’s patrons. The third time pere is used to mean stone, it does not simply describe the church as “de chauz e pere” (“made of limestone and rock”) but appears in a much longer passage describing Westminster and detailing its stones as “grantz qureus,” “bise,” “mut fort e dur,” and “[e]ntaileez” (“great, hewn, brown stones . . . the building stones were very hard and strong . . . the stones were sculpted”).33 As Fenster and Wogan-Browne point out, this precision is an addition of Matthew Paris’s—this level of detail is not found in Aelred.34 This protracted and concrete evocation evokes more directly Henry III’s renovation of Westminster Abbey and

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reminds the reader that Henry III is connected to Edward on a material level—by their foundation of a church in rock. Indeed, Westminster Abbey is the material evidence of Henry III’s imitation of King Edward. Because we are unsure of the exact date of the text, it is impossible to know if at the time the text was consumed, Henry III’s renovation was on-going, planned, or simply being prescribed. The beginning of this passage emphasizes not only pere (stone) but also foundation, Atant ad fundé sa iglise De grantz quareus de pere bise, A fundement lé e parfund. (2290–2292) [He built his church of great, hewn, brown stones on a wide and deep foundation],

The passage thus recalls the underlying metaphor from Matthew 16 cited at the beginning of this article, where Jesus establishes his church, based on spiritual interpretation, by saying to Peter, “And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” Truly, the death of its original patron has not prevailed against Westminster. It is protected by a succession of English kings, who have shown themselves to be, like Peter, true vicars of Christ. They too bind together and safeguard a community of Christians, the body of Christ that is the church. These kings also parallel Peter in that they are, like stones, stable and deathless. Consequently, Westminster symbolizes the incorruptible kingly body, demonstrating that the King never dies. Just as genealogy is not limited to flesh and blood, the body is not just biological, as Kantorowicz shows so elegantly in The King’s Two Bodies.35 Further consolidating the notion of Westminster’s stones with the sempiternal institution of the English monarchy, Edward donates his own body to Westminster, effectively making the future patrons of Westminster the stewards of both his church and his holy bones: Sun cors i grante e devise E sepulture en cele iglise. (2278–2279) [He instructed that his body be placed in a sepulcher in the church.]

Edward’s body is twice double—not only as king, but also as saint. Both human and divine, his earthly remains prove to be incorruptible and therefore are also a holy relic. While Edward’s chaste body serves as a keystone of Westminster’s foundation, biological reproduction has not been forgotten. The best-known

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metaphor of the Estoire, this one vegetable instead of mineral, shows that Edward’s family tree has indeed left a trace. Matthew Paris’s interpretation of Edward’s famous deathbed vision of the green tree36 is in fact the only place in the text where Henry III’s biological link to Edward is confronted directly. In his vision, Edward foresees the disastrous future of England— which cannot be averted by any penance. It will however come to an end: L’arbre vert ke du trunc nest, Quant d’iluec serra severee E atrois arpenz eloigné, Par nuli engin umein Au trunc revendra premerein E se joindra a la racine Dunt primes avoit orine. Li ceps receveera verdur, Fruit portera aprés sa flur. Dunc purrez vus certeinement Espeir aver d’amendement. (3766–3776) [If the green branches that are born from the trunk of a tree are severed and taken the distance of three arpents, no human ingenuity will return them to their original trunk and join them to the root that was their source. But the trunk will produce new green growth and bear fruit after flowering. Thus you may certainly hope for things to be put right.]

Matthew’s presentation of the allegory makes biological sense. Most plants can grow back after severe pruning—if they have a strong root stock.37 After relating Edward’s prophecy, Matthew interprets it, explaining what causes the green shoots to reappear on the stump. The re-greening or reverdie of Edward’s family tree was brought about by Henry I: ben reverdi Au premer cep ki reverti Quant par sa volunté demeine Mahaud espusa, ki pleine De duçur fu e de bunté, De franchise e de beuté, Fille la nece roi Aedward. A la racine out dunc regard E a sa veez racine aërt. Fluri, fruit fist en apert Quant l’emperiç Mahaud nasqui, E fruit quant li terz Henri. (3835–3846) [caused the original stock to leaf out when through his own free will he married the good and gentle, noble and beautiful Matilda, daughter to King Edward’s niece. He thus had the lineage in mind when he attached himself to his ancestral roots. The tree flowered and its fruit appeared with the birth of the Empress Matilda, and again with Henry III.]

According to Matthew, the tree gave flowers and fruit with Matilda and again with Henry III. The tree trunk, like Westminster, is a solid foun-

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dation symbolizing succession, but this one is a living (though temporarily dormant) storehouse of authority and stability. The propagative source had been there all along, it is simply waiting for spring’s arrival to flourish anew. When Aelred interprets the same prophecy, the horticultural process reviving Edward’s family tree is grafting rather than coppicing—the emphasis is on the uniting of stock and scion over new shoots burgeoning forth from an ancient stump. The tree “returns to its stump” when the glorious King Henry, in whom was concentrated the whole honour of the Kingdom, took for his wife Matilda, the great-niece of Edward . . . Thus he joined the English and Norman lines, and by the consummation of his marriage made the two one. The tree “blossomed” when the Empress Matilda was born from the two lines, and it “bore fruit” when from her arose our own Henry, like the morning star, like the corner stone joining together the two nations. (107–108)38

The metaphor of the green tree, which both texts present as given by Edward himself, envisages the revival of his biological genealogy and affirms biological generation and succession, underlining the legitimacy of Angevin rule and the biological fatherhood of Henry III. While Aelred emphasizes Henry II’s body as locus of Saxon and Norman reconciliation,39 Matthew extends the metaphor, locating this communion not only in the body of King Henry III (who, as Henry II’s grandson, embodies and continues the reconciliation of Anglo-Saxon and Norman bloodlines and peoples), but also in his church—Henry III’s physical body is only one aspect of his connection to Edward and only one aspect of how he creates community. Through careful use of metaphor, Matthew establishes the king’s body as both biologically productive and incorruptible. King Edward’s body is also, as Fenster and Wogan-Browne note, emphatically whole. It is in fact his corporeal integrity—that is his chastity40—that makes him holy (prompting us to recall that the root of the word holy is whole). Edward’s sanctity is not grounded in literal bodily suffering, instead his martyrdom is figural: Par veintre charnel desir Bein deit estre clamez mart[i]r . . . Sa char, diable e mu[n]d venqui. (1255–1256, 1259) [because he vanquished carnal desire, he must indeed be called a martyr. . . . He overcame his flesh, the devil, and the world.]

Rather than his bodily integrity, Edward’s great sacrifice is the destruction of his earthly family.41 What must be “re-membered” or put back together by the Estoire in order to commemorate Edward’s life is not his body, but rather memorializing Edward involves the repair of a ruptured genealogy.

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Establishing Edward as Henry’s father by revealing the variety of genealogies that link them finally heals the body politic and sacralizes the lineage. As caretaker of the repository housing Edward’s bones, Henry III has a special connection to Edward’s body.42 Henry further enriches the reliquary that is Westminster by receiving the Holy Blood, the relic most highly resonant both with incarnation (the word made flesh) and the establishment of royal bloodlines. Matthew relates that on the feast of Saint Edward in 1247, after having spent the night in fasting and in prayer, Henry III—dressed in a simple cloak without a hood—personally welcomed the Holy Blood and “carried it above his head publicly” in his own hands, from Saint Paul’s to Westminster Abbey where he bestowed it to Edward.43 In the presence of all of the nobles of the realm and all of the priests of London, Henry III enacts his dedication to Edward through this bodily performance. Henry definitively aligns himself with these holy bodies by dedicating his own body to Westminster. By establishing Westminster as his ultimate resting place and that of his successors, he finally heals the genealogical break caused by the Danes and the sinfulness of the Godwins. Even more than a reliquary, Westminster is a place for “re-membering” Edward’s legacy—the church itself heals the broken continuity by finally reuniting the fragmented genealogies of biological fatherhood, spiritual fatherhood, and physical patrimony. Westminster, in part by making visible a line of dead kings’ bodies, paradoxically proves that the king never dies. Because of its association with the New Testament, spiritual reading justifies spiritual fatherhood and chaste marriage, on the one hand, and evokes incarnation, on the other hand (the promise made stone in Westminster, the word made flesh in the Holy Blood). This paradox is, of course, at the very heart of Christianity’s foundational metaphor. Matthew Paris shows that by renovating Westminster, Henry III enacts the defining characteristic of a true follower of Edward the Confessor, imitating Edward’s ultimate practice of devotion to his spiritual father and benefactor, Saint Peter. While Edward is Henry’s spiritual father, Henry will be a father of Kings of England in the flesh. By avoiding an overly literal imitation of his patron saint and instead interpreting spiritually the text that is Edward’s life, symbolized by his support of Westminster, Henry will make the English monarchy whole again. Thus, in recorded word and image (the Estoire), carved stone (Westminster Abbey), and embodied flesh (Edward I); Matthew bolsters Angevin legitimacy by styling the Angevins, Henry III and his successors as principally descendants of Saint Edward the Confessor, himself

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a descendant of Saint Peter. This trans-dynastic link carefully creates continuity and builds a spiritual dynasty, an English beata stirps.

Notes 1. The Estoire survives in a single, extraordinarily illustrated manuscript: Cambridge University Library MS. Ee iii 59, which has been dated to the 1250s (and can be viewed at Cambridge University Library, Digital Library, “The Life of King Edward the Confessor,” 2003, http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/cgi-bin/ Ee.3.59/bytext). Art historians have accordingly devoted much attention to it, closely studying the sixty-four mostly three-column-wide pen and wash images, as well as its architectural pendant, the renovation of Westminster Abbey by Henry III. See, for example, Paul Binski, “Reflections on La Estoire de seint Aedward le rei: Hagiography and Kingship in Thirteenth-Century England,” Journal of Medieval History 16, no. 4 (1990); Paul Binski, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets: Kingship and the Representation of Power, 1200–1400 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 77–92; Victoria B. Jordan, “The Multiple Narratives of Matthew Paris’ Estoire de seint Aedward le rei,” Cambridge, University Library MS. Ee.Iii.59,” Parergon: Bulletin of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies 13, no. 2 (1996); Cynthia J. Hahn, Portrayed on the Heart: Narrative Effect in Pictorial Lives of Saints from the Tenth through the Thirteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 2. While Laurent emphasizes genealogy in the text, she does not mention spiritual kinship. Françoise Laurent, “‘A ma matere pas n’apent de vus dire . . .’: La Estoire de seint Adeward le rei de Matthieu Paris ou la ‘conjointure’ de deux écritures,” Revue des sciences humaines 251 (1998). Fenster and Wogan-Browne agree with the weight Laurent places on genealogy, observing that many elements of the poem point to the possibility of Henry as Edward’s “real, lineal, blood son,” but add the point that I would like to further explore here, namely that Henry III is Saint Edward’s “metaphorical son.” Matthew Paris, The History of Saint Edward the King, trans. and ed. Thelma S. Fenster and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies (Tempe: ACMRS/Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2008), 20. It seems that confirming the genealogical link was not sufficient to quell the dynasty’s anxieties—perhaps because their relationship was not traceable exclusively through males. 3. See Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee, Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History from Antiquity through Early Modern Europe (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 1. As Finucci points out in her introduction, “many discourses . . . inform constructions of genealogies, whether we speak of genealogy in the biological sense of procreation and reproduction or in the metaphorical sense of heritage and cultural patrimony.” The narrative functions largely within the paradigm of an empowered male saint king and both spiritual and biological genealogies are gendered masculine. It is important, however, to note that the Estoire text itself is dedicated to a woman who plays the role of custodian of the genealogical scroll. 4. For a discussion of the authorship and dating of the Estoire, see Richard Vaughan, Matthew Paris (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press,

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5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

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Medievalia et Humanistica 1958); Binski, “Reflections on La Estoire de seint Aedward le rei: Hagiography and Kingship in Thirteenth-Century England”; Fenster and Wogan-Browne, The History of Saint Edward the King, 26–27. While the critical consensus is that the text was written for one of these events, there does not appear to be enough evidence to make a definitive argument. Further supporting this reading, it has also been convincingly advanced that the Cambridge manuscript was made between 1250 and 1260 for Eleanor of Castile upon her marriage to Prince Edward. See, for example, Binski, “Reflections on La Estoire de seint Aedward le rei: Hagiography and Kingship in Thirteenth-Century England,” 340. For further discussion on the idea of holy lineage or beata stirps, see André Vauchez, La sainteté en occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Age: d’après les procès de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques, Bibliothèque des Écoles Françaises d’Athènes et de Rome. Fasc. 241 (Rome, Paris: Ecole française de Rome; Diffusion de Boccard, 1981), 209–215; Robert Folz, Les saints rois du Moyen Age en Occident (Vie -XIIIe Siècles), Subsidia Hagiographica. No. 68 (Bruxelles: Société des Bollandistes, 1984), 144. On sanctity and kingship, see Vauchez, La sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Age: d’après les procès de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques; Folz, Les saints rois du Moyen Age en Occident (Vie–XIIIe Siècles). On the role of hagiography in the construction of royal authority, see Sean L. Field, Isabelle of France: Capetian Sanctity and Franciscan Identity in the Thirteenth Century (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006); Daisy Delogu, Theorizing the Ideal Sovereign: The Rise of the French Vernacular Royal Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, L’ombre des ancêtres: Essai sur l’imaginaire médiéval de la parenté, Esprit De La Cité (Paris: Fayard, 2000). The notion of meaning itself was couched in genealogical terms in the Middle Ages, as Bloch notes, adding that the association between signification and generation operated at every level of culture, effectively constituting a “mental structure.” R. Howard Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 34. While Spiegel emphasizes genealogy’s biological aspect, she also identifies genealogy as a conceptual metaphor, a social and intellectual “perceptual grid” that influences how medieval chroniclers perceive and recount events. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Genealogy: Form and Function in Medieval Historical Narrative,” History and Theory 22 (1983): 48, 50. Stahuljak explores the idea that filiation is not synonymous with blood and procreation, but is rather socially constructed. Developing this idea, she reads the Roman d’Eneas and Roman de Thebes as legitimizing the story of Henry II’s ascent to England’s throne (Zrinka Stahuljak, Bloodless Genealogies of the French Middle Ages: Translatio, Kinship, and Metaphor [Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005]). I am thinking of the version of the Vie de saint Alexis contained in the St Albans Psalter (the Hildesheim manuscript) and edited by Gaston Paris, La vie de saint Alexis: Poème du XIe siècle, Classiques français du Moyen Age. 4 (Paris: H. Champion, 1980). King Henry I married a descendant of the confessor and Osbert de Clare wrote his version, the Vita beati eadwardi regis Anglorum, to promote canonization under King Stephen. It was Henry II who finally obtained Edward’s canonization in 1161 and who, two years later, attended the translation of Edward’s remains where Aelred of Rievaulx presented his Vita S Eduardi Re-

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13.

14.

15.

16.

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gis et Confessoris: Aelred of Rievaulx, The Life of St. Edward, King and Confessor (Southampton: Saint Austin Press, 1997). It was also for Henry II that the nun of Barking wrote her Anglo-Norman Vie d’Edouard le Confesseur: Östen Södergård, “La Vie d’Edouard le Confesseur; Poème anglo-normand du XIIe Siècle” (Thesis, Uppsala, Almquist and Wiksells, 1948). The first version of Edward’s Life, the Vita Aedwardi Regis, was written by an anonymous author shortly after Edward’s death: Frank Barlow, The Life of King Edward, Who Rests at Westminster, Medieval Texts (London: Nelson, 1962). As Gouttebroze points out, “Le culte de St Edouard forme une constante de la politique religieuse de la monarchie anglaise du XIIe siècle” [Saint Edward’s cult constitutes a constant in the religious policy of the English monarchy during the twelfth century]. Jean-Guy Gouttebroze, “Structure et sens des textes de prières contenus dans La Estoire de seint Aedward le rei,” La prière au MoyenAge: Littérature et civilisation (1981): 312. Emma Mason traces early attempts by Anglo-Norman rulers to stabilize their dynasty through patronage of religious houses, including Westminster Abbey, in her piece, “Pro Statu Et Incolumnitate Regni Mei: Royal Monastic Patronage 1066-1154,” in Religion and National Identity : Papers Read at the Nineteenth Summer Meeting and the Twentieth Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. Stuart Mews, Studies in Church History (Oxford: Published for the Ecclesiastical History Society by B. Blackwell, 1982). Matthew Paris chronicled Henry’s ceremonial reception of the relic of the Holy Blood and compared the event to Louis IX’s then-recent procession of the Crown of Thorns (1239), later housed at the Sainte Chapelle (for a detailed examination, see Nicholas Vincent, The Holy Blood: King Henry III and the Westminster Blood Relic (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Henry surely hoped this comparison would show his rule to be rooted in the same divine approbation as the French king’s. Henry’s policy of self-representation, however, cannot be reduced to a mere imitation of Capetian practices. The Westminster project is quite different from the Sainte Chapelle, which was built specifically to house Louis’s impressive relic collection, and bespoke that king’s special relationship to crusade. The rebuilding of Westminster instead indicates the nature of Henry III’s pious practices, namely his dedication to Saint Edward the Confessor. Neither was the influence one-way. Klaniczay, citing Le Goff, characterizes Louis IX’s building of Saint Denis and Royaumont as reactions to Henry III’s establishment of Edward the Confessor’s shrine. Gábor Klaniczay, Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe, Past and Present Publications (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 343. Furthermore, if the Estoire were written earlier rather than later (which Carpenter argues and Fenster and Wogan-Browne allow) it would have come near the beginning of Henry’s personal reign, a time when a monarch would pay special attention to firmly establishing his authority. D.A. Carpenter, “King Henry III and Saint Edward the Confessor: The Origins of the Cult,” English Historical Review 122, no. 498 (2007). The past, of course, is constantly deployed to legitimize the present; see, for example, the preface to the recent volume Pierre Chastang, Le passé à l’épreuve du présent: appropriations et usages du passé du Moyen Âge à la Renaissance, mythes, critique et histoire (Paris: Presses de l’Université ParisSorbonne, 2008). Matthew Paris, La Estoire de seint Aedward le rei, Anglo-Norman texts no. 41, ed. Kathryn Young Wallace (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1983). All

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17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

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Medievalia et Humanistica references are to lines of this edition. All translations are from Fenster and Wogan-Browne’s translation of Matthew, The History of Saint Edward the King. “For friendship is nothing other than agreement in all things divine and human with benevolence and charity.” Cicero’s De amicitia 6.20 quoted in L.C. Braceland and M.L. Dutton, Aelred of Rievaulx: Spiritual Friendship (Collegeville, Minn.: Cistercian Publications, 2010). Aelred of Rievaulx, the author of the Vita Sancti Edwardi Regis et Confessoris, Matthew’s primary source, wrote Spiritual Friendship Christianizing Cicero’s definition of friendship, emphasizing the idea that friendship begins and ends with Christ, that Christ is there as a third. As Fenster and Wogan-Browne note, Cicero’s idea of friendship as “accord in all things” indicates political agreement. According to Margaret Howell, the “perception that a queen should be at peace with her husband” separated Eleanor of Provence from such queens as Eleanor of Aquitaine and Isabella of France. Margaret Howell, Eleanor of Provence: Queenship in 13th-Century England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 66. Henry commissioned a number of representations of a king and queen in his palaces that are thought to have represented their partnership (Howell, Eleanor of Provence, 24). For Matthew’s manuscript representations of Henry III (including Eleanor), see Suzanne Lewis and Matthew Paris, The Art of Matthew Paris in the Chronica Majora, California Studies in the History of Art. 21 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 201–239. For more on women’s role in remembering the past, especially through genealogy, see Elisabeth M.C. Van Houts, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe, 900–1200 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). Matthew 7:17, Romans 11:16–24, and more distantly Isaiah 11:1. Both Edward and his older brother, Alfred, are called “seignur natruel.” The people are referred to as the king’s “natureus.” The English also very much want Edward to have an “eir naturel.” Natural is rhymed with “real” and “desnatureus” with “crueus.” This recurring emphasis stems not only from the long and disastrous reign of conqueror kings before Edward, but also reflects lingering anxieties about the Norman invasion and contemporary concerns about the powerful roles foreigners played in the courts of King John and King Henry III. This idea of a spiritual father redeeming us from our earthly (and thus tainted) generation is, of course, fundamental to Christianity and is performed through the first sacrament, baptism, through which original sin is removed, and the baby is reborn a child of God. Emma Campbell, building on Howard Bloch’s assertion that genealogy informs the conception and representation of a variety of relationships in medieval discourse, shows that in hagiography human genealogy is disrupted in order “to establish an alternative genealogical model based on kinship with God . . . to produce an altogether different symbolization of genealogy, a genealogy which runs parallel to and parodies that of the secular family while attempting simultaneously to displace it.” This idea that the rejection of human kinship reinforces an alternative kinship with God is already present in the New Testament and La Vie de Saint Alexis discussed above, but Campbell goes further, positing that aberrant practices (like chastity) trigger a “social death” that frees the saint to pursue his desire for union with God in ways that go well beyond human kinship limitations (up to and including incest). Emma Campbell, Medieval Saints’ Lives: The Gift, Kinship and Community in Old French Hagiography, Gallica (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008).

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22. The move from Latin patrem to French pere follows the standard evolution of Latin -atr to French -er. The move from Pierre and pierre to pere occurred later and was due to the reduction or leveling of the tonic diphthong /ie/ to /e/ in Old French. The phoneme /ie/, as in pierre, was originally pronounced as a diphthong with the accent on the i. Later it was pronounced /e/ as in pere. The representation of the sound varied greatly, especially in later Anglo-Norman, and included the graphies: e, ea, eo, ie, and eo. When, where, and to what extent this change took place is not precisely known, but it seems this process happened later in the east of France than the west, with the Norman dialect being one of the first to witness the reduction from /ie/ to /e/. Pope points out that this reduction became a marked feature of Anglo-Norman especially, due to the fact that in English the j sound did not commonly follow consonants and so the diphthong was leveled more quickly in England than elsewhere. Mildred Katharine Pope, From Latin to Modern French, with Especial Consideration of Anglo-Norman; Phonology and Morphology, 2nd ed., Publications of the University of Manchester, No. 229. French Series, No. 6. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1952). 23. In the prologue of the Estoire, the author writes: “Language par pais varie / Si language de France die, / N’en doi estre a droit repris / De gent de veisin païs” (93–96) [Language varies from land to land; if I speak the language of France, let me not be reproached for it by the people of a neighboring country]. For other details emphasizing “Englishness” in the Estoire, Binski observes the “Old Englishness” of the medium of embroidery (when Queen Edith’s embroidery skill is alluded to)—noting that in the thirteenth century “rich English ecclesiastical embroidery, opus Anglicanum, was gaining a European-wide reputation,” adding that the manuscript drawings themselves were in done in pen and wash, a long-standing English technique. Binski, “Reflections on La Estoire de seint Aedward le rei: Hagiography and Kingship in Thirteenth-Century England,” 343. Engel also traces what he sees as particularly English forms from the Bayeux Tapestry through the Harley, Eadwine, and Great Canterbury Psalters, to Matthew Paris’s chronicles and saint’s lives, including the Estoire. Ute Engel, “The Bayeux Tapestry and All That: Images of War and Combat in the Arts of Medieval England,” in War and the Cultural Construction of Identities in Britain, ed. Barbara and Ralf Schneider Korte (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002). 24. Line 651 constitutes one of the two triplets of the poem, as Kathryn Young Wallace points out in her introduction to the text (xxxii). 25. In her article “Public Displays of Affection,” Daisy Delogu shows how at the end of the fourteenth century Philippe de Mézières creates a new kin network for Richard II of England and Charles VI of France, “a spiritual kinship in which St Louis becomes the new father of the two kings” who “constitute a new holy family that will lead God’s chosen people back to the promised land.” Daisy Delogu, “Public Displays of Affection; Love and Kinship in Philippe De Mézières’s Epistre au roi Richart,” New Medieval Literatures 8 (2006): 122. 26. Binski points out that Saint Peter is linked to institutional power and to the conferral of that power and thus represents the public and formal, while Saint John incarnates private attributes. Binski, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets: Kingship and the Representation of Power, 1200–1400, 63, 67. 27. Stahuljak differentiates between religious and secular genealogies, pointing out that women are visible in religious genealogies and erased in secular

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28.

29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

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Medievalia et Humanistica ones. She claims women are excluded from secular genealogies to preserve them from their “bloodlessness” (their grounding not in biology but in language), emphasizing that if the woman is included in secular genealogies the effect is spiritualizing. The role of Edith in the Estoire seems to confirm this hypothesis. She, like the Virgin Mary, provides a transition from blood lineage to spiritual kinship where affinity replaces consanguinity. Joanna Huntington discusses the issue of Edward’s virginity at length in her article, “Edward the Celibate, Edward the Saint: Virginity in the Construction of Edward the Confessor,” in Medieval Virginities, ed. Anke Bernau, Ruth Evans, and Sarah Salih, Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). Edward’s marriage is discussed in Dyan Elliott’s Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). Citing these scenes of parlement, Binski interprets the text as advancing the barons as the king’s natural councilors and Edward as “a skilled capitulator to their will,” concluding that the Estoire presents Westminster as a symbol of cooperative monarchy and Edward as a paradigm of constitutional monarchy. Binski, “Reflections on La Estoire de seint Aedward le rei: Hagiography and Kingship in Thirteenth-Century England.” While Edward’s consideration of counsel is certainly a kingly exemplum, this is mitigated, I would argue, by the consistent representation of King Edward as endowed with special powers of perception—depicted through his divine visions, his ability to restore sight to the blind, along with his ability to interpret the deeper messages present in everyday events (see, for example, the wrestling scene contrasting the insight of King Edward with the moral blindness of Godwin, England’s most powerful baron and anti-example in the text (3157–3160, 3165–3170). In another context, Matthew Paris referred to Henry III as “‘the lynx penetrating all’ foretold by Merlin.” Henry Summerson, “Kingship, Government, and Political Life: C.1160–C.1280,” in The Short Oxford History of the British Isles. The Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: 1066–C.1280, ed. Barbara F. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 235. Given the constant recourse in the text to the importance of interpretation, another possible take-away is increased authority for the king in situations of legal interpretation. Binski too notes that Edward’s building of Westminster served as a surrogate journey in his discussion of Westminster as the heart of a new royal “capital,” claiming the abbey created for the first time a locus of monarchical government outside the persona of the king. Binski, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets: Kingship and the Representation of Power, 1200–1400, 6. In England, Peter appears to Brittewold (640), to a hermit (1795), and to a fisherman (2105). This move would have appealed to the desires of both the English clergy and king given contemporary English frustration over papal appointments and taxation. “Atant ad fundé sa iglise / De grantz quareus de pere bise, / A fundement lé e parfund. / Le frunt vers orient fait rund. / Li quarrel sunt mut fort e dur. / En mi liu dresce une tur / E deus en frunt de l’occident, / E bons seinz e grantz i pent. / Li piler e li tablementz / Sunt reches defors e dedenz. / A basses e a chapitraus / Surt l’ovre grantz e rëaus. / Entaileez sunt les peres, / E a estoires les vereres; / Sunt faites tutes a mestrie, / De bone e leau menestraucie. / E quant ad achevé le ovre, / De plum la iglise ben covre. / Clostre i fait, chapitre a frund / Vers orient vousé e rund, / U si ordené ministre / Teingnent lur secrei chapitre, / Refaitur e le dortur, / E les ofi-

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Rewriting Paternity

34.

35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

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cines entur. / Beus maneres, terres e bois / Dune, cunferme demanois, / E sulum sun grant sen, devise / A sun muster rëau franchise. / Moinnes i fait acuillir / Ki bon quor unt de Deu servir, / E met l’ordre en bon estat / Suz seint e ordené prelat, / E nunbre de cuvent receit / Sulum l’ordre de seint Beneit” (2290—2323). [He built his church of great, hewn, brown stones on a wide and deep foundation. The east-facing façade was rounded. The building stones were very hard and strong. A tower was placed in the middle and two more at the west end, and images of great and holy saints hung there. The pillars and the entablature were rich inside and out, and the great and regal workmanship stood in relief at the bases and on the capitals. The stones were sculpted and the windows held stories. Everything was done masterfully, with good and faithful craftsmanship, and when the work was finished, they covered the church with a roof made of lead. They built a cloister and a vaulted and rounded chapter house at the east front, where six ordained priests maintained their private lodgings, refectory and dormitory, with the offices round about. Edward gave them fine dwellings, land and woods, confirmed immediately, and in keeping with his great wisdom, he designated a royal exemption for his church. By his instruction, monks whose hearts served God were welcomed there. He placed the order under the good care of a holy and ordained prelate, and it received a number of convents of the order of Saint Benedict.] The Vita Aedwardi regis qui apud Westmonasterium requiescit gives a more detailed account of the building’s stones than does Aelred, as indicated in Fenster and Wogan-Browne, The History of Saint Edward the King, 135–136, n. 71. The Vita Aedwardi, however, focuses less on Westminster than on Queen Edith’s edification at Wilton. Barlow, The Life of King Edward, Who Rests at Westminster, 44–46. Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). Edward’s prophecy concerning the green tree appears in the earliest Lives— in both the anonymous and Osbert, as well as in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum. Several scholars have noted that Aelred is the first to interpret the vision positively, emphasizing that the prophecy foretold not just disaster, but recovery. This severe pruning back of a tree to a stump or stool in order to encourage new growth, called coppicing, is a traditional method of forest management. The metaphor is fitting—just as renovations benefit an old church, pruning reinvigorates a plant—encouraging vigorous regrowth from the stump when it breaks dormancy in the spring. Vegetative propagation (reproducing plants from part of a whole plant rather than from a seed) further aligns with the metaphor in that it results in a clone of the original plant, retaining the fundamental nature of the genet (the parent plant) rather than in a new and different individual. Coppicing was widely understood and practiced in the Middle Ages and by 1250 was almost universally practiced in England. G.P. Buckley, Ecology and Management of Coppice Woodlands (London: Chapman & Hall, 1992), 18. The image alludes to Psalms 118:22 and Ephesians 2:14–22. Robert Stein discusses Aelred’s version of the prediction as it pertains to Henry II, concluding thus: “In the body of Edward, England was already Norman before William’s arrival; in the body of Henry, England again becomes English through Mathilda, herself Norman and English. . . . Thus the Conquest is undone. With Harold’s disappearance, Henry has become

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40. 41.

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Medievalia et Humanistica Edward’s son and heir.” Robert M. Stein, Reality Fictions: Romance, History, and Governmental Authority, 1025–1180 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 2006), 74–75. Fenster and Wogan-Browne, p. 20. Angela Hurworth’s discussion of the biographical text as one that “remembers” a person, that puts back together a destroyed body, can be productively applied to the Estoire. Hurworth shows the biographical text to create a space that effectively constructs a sepulcher for the body and a commemorative monument to the subject’s glory. Angela Hurworth, “Le corps ‘remembré’: Historiographie et hagiographie dans La prise d’Alexandrie,” in Guillaume de Machaut: 1300–2000 [Actes du colloque de la Sorbonne, 28–29 Septembre 2000; 700e Anniversaire de la naissance du poètecompositeur] (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2002). Laurence Hélix sees a similar affirmation of deeds and words over the body and of the book over the reliquary in Joinville’s Vie de saint Louis, noting that Joinville is the “spiritual son” of Louis who continues Louis’s lineage on a literary and symbolic level. Laurence Hélix, “Démembrements et remembrance dans La Vie de saint Louis de Joinville: Le livre reliquaire,” in Jean de Joinville: de la Champagne aux royaumes d’outre-mer, ed. Danielle Quéruel, Collection hommes et textes en Champagne (Langres: Dominique Guéniot, 1998), 232. In their introduction to the translated text, Fenster and Wogan-Browne make the point that “Westminster had now become Edward’s living, incorrupt body, containing and protecting his other body, the sacred remains that lay within” (23). Matthew Paris notes that the relics, including “[s]ome of Christ’s blood, and a stone bearing his footmarks, were brought to England and placed at Westminster as a gift from the king (408),” who “presented and made an offer of it, as a priceless gift . . . to his beloved Edward” (241). Matthew Paris’s English History: From the Year 1235 to 1273, trans. J.A. Giles, vol. II (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853).

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Boccaccio’s Three Venuses On the Convergence of Celestial and Transgressive Love in the Genealogie Deorum Gentilium Libri D AV I D L U M M U S

Transgressive love is a familiar commonplace in the works of Giovanni Boccaccio, in which he constantly pushes the boundaries of the morally and socially acceptable with his representations of erotic desire. The playful stories of debauchery and tragic stories of love gone wrong that fill the Decameron and the songs of concupiscent nymphs and the laments of betrayed lovers that populate some of his other works have long led scholars to question the nature of his poetic employment of scenes of transgressive sexuality. In response to the pervasive idea that Boccaccio’s poems and stories were all written in praise of earthly love, Robert Hollander forcefully argued, in his book Boccaccio’s Two Venuses, that Boccaccio’s depiction of love was based upon the dualistic separation of the celestial and the earthly varieties and that his depiction of carnal love was entirely ironic.1 Such a reading results in a moralist Boccaccio, the ambiguity of whose literary works is flattened in the name of moral clarity. If nothing more, however, Hollander’s division of Boccaccio’s concept of love into the two Venuses balanced out the naturalist Boccaccio, and put the author of the Decameron back into play as a poetic thinker. He was no longer the jolly hedonist that readers had for so long read with a scandalous smile, but a writer who engaged in a moral discourse in the vein of a Dante or a Chaucer. Since Hollander’s provocative reading of Boccaccio’s “minor” works, scholars have continued to probe Boccaccio’s ethical engagement with questions of love both in the Decameron and elsewhere.2 Although there is scarcely a reader of Boccaccio’s oeuvre today who would not admit a greater amount of ambiguity in Boccaccio’s fictions, the nature of his ethical engagement remains a fundamental question, especially in Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 37 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011.

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those moments dedicated to carnal love. A moral middle ground is still in the course of being cleared for Boccaccio; in his recent book, Boccaccio’s Naked Muse, Tobias Foster Gittes puts it well, when he writes that “Boccaccio’s ideal society is not an orgiastic colony dedicated to serving the senses . . . nor is it found on the upper reaches of Mount Asinaio where Filippo Balducci preaches his austere creed of abstinence from all worldly pleasures” (29).3 In one alternative to an unambiguous moralist reading, Giuseppe Mazzotta, in his classic study, The World at Play in Boccaccio’s Decameron, argues that Boccaccio’s tales go beyond the limits established by society in order to reform those very limits; literature transgresses and lives in the margins, always challenging the boundaries that seek to contain it.4 Playing with the literature’s relationship to life, Boccaccio dramatizes the transgression of public morality in order to expose the instable moral and linguistic foundations of the historical world. What Mazzotta calls the “process of degradation of literature into pornography” (70), which is familiar from the stories across the Decameron and from other works such as the Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine is, in fact, Boccaccio’s way of engaging with the question of the nature of the truth, as he probes the possibilities that literature offers to mediate between a fixed metaphysical reality and a historical world in constant flux. In making Boccaccio a moralist, Hollander was effectively arguing against the critical understanding of the writer as a naturalist, who— to quote Aldo Scaglione—was reacting to societal convention “in the name of a return to the wholesome purity of” a natural state of things (2).5 Gregory Stone, in his book The Ethics of Nature in the Middle Ages, has reconstructed Boccaccio’s moral universe in order to show how his so-called naturalism must be considered not in opposition to the strictures of culturally imposed morality, whether Nature be a positive or a negative reality.6 Not the Epicurean naturalist that Hollander sought to eliminate nor a jaded realist for whom human society was opposed to the harshness of the reality of nature, Stone points out that Boccaccio “is a naturalist in the sense that, for Boccaccio, it is natural, it is our most essential nature, that we are ‘caused to become’ in the unfolding of human history” (37), if we consider as “Nature” as the “universe of all things” (15). As for Boethius, the Chartrians, and Dante before him, for Boccaccio the cosmos, both moral and physical, was ruled by a hierarchy of forces that begins with divine love, as the force that moves all things. Beneath it fell Nature, as the locus of materiality, followed by “all things,” or the materiality of the world, and finally physis and ethos, the physical and moral effects of Nature.7 Thus, Boccaccio conceives of human society, its mores, and the process of human history within the

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scope of the natural. To approach the question of Boccaccio’s ethics of love, then, we must first of all address the status of love as an effect of Nature that unfolds within human history; this is to say, we must trace the lines of convergence between love as ethos and the Love that moves the stars. I would like to address this question from such a theoretical perspective by examining the three different Venuses that Boccaccio delineates in his humanist tome, the Genealogie Deorum Gentilium Libri.8 Here Boccaccio is engaged with the question of how poetry, as a polysemous product of the human imagination, can bridge the gap between cosmic forces and the behaviors of human beings. When viewed from the perspective of their interrelationship, the three figures of Venus, which represent three levels of cosmic love’s actualization in history, will be seen to link in a poetic synthesis the ethical world of man with the transcendent power of cosmic love.9 The first two Venuses are sisters who were invented as figures for love in the transition between the age of gold and the age of silver.10 The first is Venus magna, the planet and celestial Venus genetrix; the second Venus is a poetic representation of voluptas, the corporeal reality of the first Venus, and of the impulse to procreate; the third, collocated in the decadent generation of the third Jupiter, is both a poetic figure for lascivia and the historical Cyprian Venus meretrix, the founder of prostitution. My goal here is to elucidate Boccaccio’s treatment of the relationship between celestial and transgressive love in the Genealogie, and to suggest that he insinuates that any poetic representation of Venus, as a figure for love, must implicate the celestial power with the transgressive historical body of love. The result of such an implicit theory would be that each Venus and all poetic representations of Venusian love have the potentiality of being celestial or transgressive. It is a poetic theory of love according to which myths, and by extension any poetic narrative, may bridge the historical and the ideal, creating the possibility of a convergence between the representation of transgressive sexual practices and the moral sublime. When Boccaccio first confronts the stories of Venus in Book Three of the Genealogie, among the progeny of Coelum, he tries to hold to a criterion of historical precision based on the information available in Cicero’s De Natura Deorum:11 Venus magna ut ubi De naturis deorum scribit Cicero, Celi fuit filia et Diei, et cum preter hanc tres alias fuisse demonstret, hanc primam omnium asserit extitisse. Attamen cum figmenta plurima circa Veneres indistincte comperiantur, his sumptis que ad hanc spectare videbuntur, reliqua reliquis relinquemus, non quia hiuc adaptari non possint omnia, sed postquam aliis attributa sunt, illis, dum de eis sermo fiet, apposuisse decentius est. (III.22.1, 7:336)12

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This is to say that the poetic record about Venus neglects to distinguish properly between the various instances of the goddess. For poets like Ovid and Virgil there was only a single Venus; they had melded stories about the three individual figures into a single poetic confusion. Boccaccio seeks to solve this poetic ambiguity through a process of historical separation of the myths’ allegorical layers, which does not take as its point of view the classical poets, but that of an unnamed primitive imagination.13 When added to his genealogical approach, such a process of division allows him to separate the three instantiations according to a diachronic and transcultural development.14 According to Boccaccio, the first Venus was born in the human imagination as a figure for the morning star and as the daughter of Coelum and Dies, figures for the heavens and daylight respectively. Having given the name Venus to the planet and invested it with a divine will later poets attributed to it a series of other meanings that were transmitted to the poets of classical antiquity: for Ovid she was the mother of the twin Loves (geminorum mater amorum);15 for Homer she was depicted with a belt, which meant that she intervenes in legitimate marriages (legitimis intervenire nuptiis). Boccaccio says that these poetic inventions were for the most part derived from the astrological properties of the planet Venus, or “a proprietatibus Veneris planete sumpta” (III.22.4, 7:338), but these very characteristics of the planet will later give license to the poetic imagination to transgress its celestial nature. When he goes on to describe what he calls the “physiological” qualities of the planet, there is a correspondence between them and the ethical qualities that will be associated with later, human Venuses, as is clear from the list of her properties that he offers: Volunt igitur Venerem esse feminam complexione flegmaticam atque nocturnam, acute meditationis in compositionibus carminum, apud amicos humilem et benignam, periuria ridentem, mendacem, credulam, liberalem, patientem et levitatis plurime, honesti tamen moris et aspectus, hylarem, voluptuosam, dulciloquam maxime, atque aspernatricem corpore fortitudinis et animi debilitatis. (III.22.5, 7:338)16

Already in this description there is a convergence of opposing attributes: she has honest manners and yet she is a liar, she is phlegmatic and yet cheerful. Boccaccio recounts that recent astrologers have found the planet Venus to hold sway over certain physical bodies and, citing his teacher Andalò del Negro as a source of scientific truth,17 he names a few of those powers, which the planet was given by God, in order to explain why it is no surprise that she is the mother of twin loves:18 amorem, amicitiam, dilectionem, coniunctionem, societatem et unionem inter animalia . . . et potissime ad procreationem prolis spectantia, ut esset qui segnem

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forte naturam in sui continuationem atque ampliationem urgeret, et idcirco causari ab ista hominum voluptates concedi potest. (III.22.7, 7:340–342)19

The description of the physical powers of the planet Venus over men complicates her celestial qualities. Because the metaphysical unity of love has become embodied in part by the physical entity of the planet, however rarified this conceptual unity may be in the spheres of the heavens, the celestial Venus is nonetheless a physical embodiment of that Amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle. Boccaccio works his way from this unity of love embodied by a planet to the individual actualizations in the world of men, concentrating on the astrological influence of the planet Venus over procreation, from which Venus’s association with sexual pleasure derives, and thus the transgressive lascivious practices associated with her alter egos. As the celestial power gradually becomes embodied by living beings and incorporated into a social order, the confusion about its limits and boundaries grows and must be remedied by positive law. For example, the belt that is a sign of Venus’s oversight of legitimate weddings is a figure for such a legal limit. Commenting on Homer’s description of Venus’s belt in book fourteen of the Iliad,20 Boccaccio writes: Cingulum Veneri quod vocavere ceston insuper esse dixere, quod illi minime a natura datum fuerat, nec a poetis fuisset ni sanctissima atque veneranda legum autoritate illi fuisset appositum, ut aliquali cohertione vaga nimis lascivia frenaretur. (III.22.9, 7:342)21

By introducing a distinction between what is socially acceptable and unacceptable, positive law sets the stage for the divergence of celestial and transgressive love. The figure of the belt found in Homer’s description of Venus is a sign for Boccaccio that the division between the kinds of love is determined by historically contingent human practices and the cultural reactions to those practices, not by an a priori metaphysical division of the celestial and the earthly forms of love. This line of reasoning leads him to believe that there is actually only one Venus and one Love, as he declares when he tries to reconcile his interpretation of Venus and Love with Ovid’s description of her child Amor as geminus, or twin: “Credo ego amorem tantum unicum esse, sed hunc totiens et mutare mores et novum cognomen patremque acquirere, quotiens in diversos sese trahi permictit affectus” (III.22.8, 7:342).22 If there are three (sometimes four) Venuses and two (sometimes three) Amores,23 Boccaccio tells us, it is because each instance denotes a specific kind of behavior in relation with the one Love. The descent into history of the power represented by the planet Venus magna continues in time as separate qualities of the planet are given the

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same name.24 At the beginning of his explication of the second Venus, Boccaccio recounts how he understands her existence in relation to the first: “Nam pro Venere hac ego voluptuosam vitam intelligo, et in omnibus ad voluptatem et libidinem pertinentibus cum superiori unam et eandem esse” (III.23.3, 7:352).25 The celestial and the earthly Venuses are only distinct in so far as the second is an aspect of the first that was embodied by human culture through the creation of a name and a narration—in sum, by virtue of a myth. Boccaccio focuses on the physical interpretation of the story of her birth from the blood of the testicles of Coelum when he was castrated by Saturn.26 According to his interpretation of the story, the second Venus signifies the procreative quality of love that arose when time (i.e., Saturn) mixed with the material of the heavens (i.e., Coelum). This narrative seems to be related typologically to the story of the creation of the world narrated in the first five chapters of the first book of the Genealogie, in which the Demogorgon (a figure for Natura naturans) fathers the Fates (figures for the progression of historical time) and Pan (a figure for the earth and Natura naturata) when he mixes with Eternity (a figure for limitless temporality) within the belly of Chaos (a figure for gross materiality, or hyle).27 This connection is clearly behind Boccaccio’s interpretation when he writes of Macrobius’s version of the tale in the Saturnalia: Ex sanguine autem testiculorum a Saturno desectorum ideo natam, quia, ut ex Macrobio sumi potest, cum chaos esset, tempora non erant; et sic a celi circuitione [sic] natum tempus, et inde ab ipso Caronos natus, qui et Cronos est, quem nos Saturnum dicimus, cumque semina rerum omnium post celum gignendarum de celo fluerent, et elementa universa que mundo plenitudinem facerent ex illis seminibus fundarentur, ubi mundus omnibus suis partibus atque membris perfectus est, certo iam tempore finis est procedendi de celo semina; et sic genitalia a Saturno, id est tempore, decisa videntur, et in mare deiecta, ut appareret gignendi atque propagandi facultatem, que per Venerem assumenda est, in humorem translatam coitu maris et femine mediante, qui per spumam intelligitur; nam uti spuma ex aquarum motu consurgit, sic et ex confricatione venitur in coitum, et uti illa facile solvitur, sic et libido brevi delectatione finitur. (III.23.4, 7:352–354)28

This Venus, then, can be understood as the embodiment of the generative power of the first Venus, which was itself an astrological actualization of the creative power of Love.29 Although Boccaccio had already linked the pleasures of mankind to the first Venus, he presents her twin sister as a figure for the sexual drive in human bodies, and interprets the story of her birth in terms of the humors that govern the body during coitus.30 If the first Venus governs the distribution of desire, pleasure, and generation, along with her other celestial influences in the macrocosm, the

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second similarly governs the dynamics of pleasure and desire within the microcosm of the human body. Boccaccio goes on to contextualize the myth anthropologically by locating it within the cultural context of primitive Cyprus. The second Venus, a personification of erotic desire and coitus, was associated with the people of Paphos because they were naturally prone to lasciviousness and voluptuousness. The astrological influence of the planet over Paphos seems to converge historically with the generation of the second Venus in the imagination of its citizens:31 Quod autem cives Paphos apud se e mari emersisse Venerem volunt, bona cum pace maiestatis tue, rex optime, dicturus sum, quod nisi te equum etiam in maximis rebus noscerem, non auderem. Est autem Cyprus insula vulgata fama, seu celo agente, seu alio incolarum vicio, adeo in Venerem prona ut hospitium, officina, fomentumque lasciviarum atque voluptatum omnium habeatur. Quam ob causam Paphiis concedendum est primo apud eos ex undis Venerem emersisse. (III.23.7-8, 7:354–356)32

The result of the anthropological focus of this description is to embed even further the psychological and physiological immanence of the second Venus within human culture. Not only an embodiment of a microcosmic aspect of the celestial Venus, the second instance was first actualized in a specific location within a specific social context. Furthermore, in an autograph marginal addition to a later manuscript, which he never had the chance to incorporate into a new copy, Boccaccio further contextualizes the historical embodiment of the goddess by reporting Tacitus’s description of the statue and temple of the Paphian Venus and the sacrificial rites performed in her honor:33 Verum hoc potius ad historiam quam ad alium sensum pertinere ex Cornelio Tacito sumi potest. Qui velle videtur Venerem auspicio doctam armata manu conscendisse insulam bellumque Cynare regi movisse; qui tandem, cum inissent concordiam, convenere ut ipse rex Veneri templum construeret, in quo eidem Veneri sacra ministrarent, qui ex familia regia et sua succederent. Concfecto autem templo, sola animalia masculini generis in holocaustum parabantur, altaria vero sanguine maculari piaculum cum solis precibus igneque puro illa adolerent. Simulacrum vero dee nullam humanam habere dicit effigiem, quin imo esse ibidem continuum orbem latiorem initio et tenuem in ambitu ad instar methe exurgentem, ex qua re hoc nullam haberi rationem. (III.23.8–9, 7:356)34

Even more than the earlier discussion about the character of the people of Paphos and their propensity toward lasciviousness caused by the influence of the planet Venus, this marginal narrative shows how Boccaccio’s focus is directed toward the historical embodiments and institutionalizations of mythic figures. He has abandoned all pretense to the textual commentary on the poems of Ovid, Virgil, and others, that had occupied

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mythographers before him. Instead, he reads the myths as indicative of a historical cultural tradition that is connected, by the ambiguities of a poetic figure, to the celestial concepts that first gave rise to them. In this specific case, only from the stories, traditions, and rituals of people does love (under the guise of Venus) become transgressive. It is human law and tradition that make the boundaries that human beings cross in their embodiment of the generative power of love. Boccaccio’s operation in separating Venus into different entities actually allows him to claim that there is only one love and only one Venus. The equivocatio of the goddess’s name, thus, depends on the different cultural contexts and on the meanings attached to the name in a given social order. It is a matter of interpretation of the poetic record that Boccaccio is seeking to reconstruct historically. The third Venus is the figure most recognizable from the classical tradition, in which she was the wife of Mars, the adulterous lover of Vulcan and Adonis, the mother of Aeneas, and the founder of prostitution to whom, according to St. Augustine, the Phoenicians would offer their daughters in prostitution before marrying them (XI.4.1–2; 7:1084).35 Because of geographical proximity, however, the stories of this Venus merged with those of a radically transgressive embodiment of love, a historical Venus meretrix, as Boccaccio suggests when he writes: Superest quod ambigitur ponere. Hanc enim Venerem quidam putant eandem esse cum Cypria. Ego duas arbitror, et hanc vere Iovis filiam fuisse et Vulcani coniugem. Aliam Syri et Cyprie, seu Dyonis filiam et Adonis coniugem. Qui unam et eandem putant, dicunt eam Iovis et Dyonis filiam primo Vulcano nuptam et inde Adoni. (XI.4.3, 7:1084)36

Although he himself believes these two Venuses to be separate, he treats them as one and continues his historical investigation, exploring this third Venus as an institutionalization of the transgressive behavior that the second instance had embodied psychologically and physiologically, and that was already potential in the celestial Venus.37 He traces her identity back to a period that predates the poetic record to the historical woman who had founded the institution of prostitution (“instituisse meretricium questum,” XI.4.2, 7:1084), describing her story in morally unambiguous terms further down: Aiuntque cum hec viro fuisset superstes, tanto ferbuisse pruritu, ut fere in publicum declinaret lupanar, et ad suum palliandum scelus, dicunt eam cypriis mulieribus suasisse meretricium, et instituisse ut facerent vulgato corpore questum, ex quo subsecutum ut virgines etiam ad litora micterentur, Veneri virginitatis et future pudicitie libamenta dature, atque ex coitu advenarum sibi exquisiture dotes. Theodontius autem superaddit, dicens tam scelestum facinus non solum in Cypro diu servatum, sed in Ytaliam usque deductum. Quod autoritate Iustini firmatur, qui dicit apud Locros ex voto aliquando contigisse. (XI.4.4, 7:1086)38

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Whereas with the first Venus Boccaccio had focused on the abstract moral and physical properties of the planet and its astrological powers, and with the second, he had connected those powers with bodily functions and behaviors—both physical and moral—explaining how they had become institutionalized, in the explanations of the third Venus Boccaccio’s focus is entirely historical. In this brief narration he progresses from the stories men tell each other (aiunt) to the account of an expert glossator (Theodontius . . . superaddit) to the authority of Justin’s epitome of Pompeius Trogus’s Philippic History (autoritate Iustini firmatur), moving geographically from the profession’s origins in Cyprus to its continuation in southern Italy.39 Considering those who believe that the third Venus is a single person, he explains her relation to the others by referring to the cultural institutions of Cyprus: dicunt . . . ob eximiam formositatem celestem Venerem a Cypriis arbitratam, dea dicta est, et tanquam dea sacris honorata, eique apud Paphos templum et ara fuit, eamque aram solo thure et floribus redolentem faciebant, eo quod Venus ex variis causis odoribus delectetur. (XI.4.3, 7:1086)40

Based upon a process of combination that breaks down historical barriers and fuses contradictory levels of meaning, the act of mythopoesis not only merges the Venus meretrix with the daughter of Jupiter and Dione, but with the celestial Venus as well. The process of mythmaking, as it unfolds over time and across space, has allowed for the combination and confusion of the different Venuses, but Boccaccio’s method of deallegorization separates them into their historical embodiments, revealing how they are connected. The story that he recounts by separating the three Venuses from one another, however, concerns the poetic relationship between the historically contingent embodiments of love and the celestial power. In fact, Boccaccio posits, following Cicero and the classical tradition, that the god Amor was the son of the third Venus, after she had been poetically fused with Venus magna, as he writes in the initial phrase of this chapter: “Amorem Iovis et Veneris fuisse omnes volunt, quod ego non hominum credam sed planetarum” (XI.5.1, 7:1086).41 This Amor, the figural son of the third Venus, who is now also the planet, is not concupiscent love, but the ennobling love “quo convivimus, quo amicitias iungimus,” which was invented “ut intelligamus quoniam ex convenientia complexionum et morum inter mortales amor et amicitia generetur” (XI.5.1, 7:1086).42 Taken together, Boccaccio’s three Venuses present a theory of love by which the conceptual unity first embodied by the power of the planet Venus includes both the potentiality of its own transgression and the promise of sublimity. The planet is the astrological

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sign that connects the metaphysical and historical realities, both physical and ethical; it is a means by which the creative power of Love becomes actualized in history. Once it is embodied by an individual or common will, as is the case with the second and third Venuses, limits are drawn and intentions are formed, so that transgression becomes possible. The transgressive body and the celestial power become fused across the history of the figure, so that in the poetry of classical antiquity the stories of the lascivious and meretricious Venus can represent celestial love and give birth to a morally sublime Love. The problem of the ambiguity of the poetic record makes Boccaccio’s critical labor of historical distinction difficult if not impossible, as he often notes throughout the Genealogie.43 He had warned in his description of the first Venus that all of the stories about her could have been reduced to the celestial Venus, but his historical and narrative interests bring him to seek out the historical embodiments of the celestial concepts. Through historical deduction and conjecture Boccaccio is able to separate their figures into the temporal and cultural contexts that reveal the nature of the relationship between the three Venuses and ultimately to the one Love. As a poetic figure for love, however, be it transgressive or celestial, Venus always contains the ambiguous potentiality of being transgressive, ennobling, or both. In conclusion, I would like to return to the terms of engagement with which I began and to explore the possibility of a link between Boccaccio’s earlier vernacular production in the Decameron and my reconstruction of this poetic theory of Venusian love in the Genealogie. Although the question of the relationship between the Genealogie and Boccaccio’s other works is problematic, I suggest a link between them in terms of reading and communication strategies.44 In the Genealogie, mythic figures function as transmitters of culture from a primitive Hellenic Arcadia to a modern Italy whose only connection with the past is a series of broken fragments.45 What saves ancient culture from the ravages of time for Boccaccio is the belief in a translatio of culture between antiquity and modernity across high and low forms of discourse. This transferal of meaning is evident in many of the myths across the work, such as those of Jupiter, Mercury, and the Earth, which begin in the East and often travel westward assuming new names, bodies, and stories at varying levels of discourse, from the poetic reflections of theological poets and the beliefs of common people to the poetry of classical antiquity and humanist modernity.46 The myths of the Venuses function in this manner, beginning in the Hellenic world with stories about an astrological phenomenon and ending in Cyprus and finally in Italy with

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the introduction of prostitution and the worship of a morally transgressive Venus, only to return to a sublime astrological sign with the birth of Amor as a celestial body in the poetic imagination. For Boccaccio, popular stories, customs, and beliefs, such as those that deified Venus meretrix, are key to the transmission of narratives that will later assume again an allegorical meaning. The myths of the Genealogie, of which the three Venuses are but a single example, are indicative of Boccaccio’s penchant for the popular as a medium of cultural transmission and of his openness toward texts of all kinds as allegorical.47 In his defense of poetry, in Book Fourteen of the Genealogie, he claims outright that even the tales of old maids have some meaning: Taceant ergo blateratores inscii, et omutescant superbi, si possunt, cum, ne dum insignes viros, lacte Musarum educatos et in laribus phylosophie versatos atque sacris duratos studiis, profundissimos in suis poematibus sensus apposuisse semper credendum sit, sed etiam nullam esse usquam tam delirantem aniculam, circa foculum domestici laris una cum vigilantibus hibernis noctibus fabellas orci, seu fatarum, vel Lammiarum, et huismodi, ex quibus sepissime inventa conficiunt, fingentem atque recitantem, que sub pretextu relatorum non sentiat aliquem iuxta vires sui modici intellectus sensum minime quandoque ridendum, per quem velit aut terrorem incutere parvulis, aut oblectare puellas, aut senes ludere, aut saltem Fortune vires ostendere. (XIV.10.7, 8:1422)48

If such old wives’ tales should hold a veiled meaning, then it should not be surprising that the scope of the tales of the Decameron might go beyond pleasure, parody, and social commentary. A philosophical depth to the Decameron’s tales for women is further suggested by his use of the term anicula here to refer to an old woman, which he had employed in the previous chapter to refer to the old woman who recounts the tale of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses:49 Fabulis laborantibus sub pondere adversantis fortune non nunquam solamen inpensum est, quod apud Lucium Apuleium cernitur. Quem penes Cartihes, generosa virgo, infortunio suo apud predones captiva, captivitatem suam deplorans, ab anicula fabule Psycis lepiditate paululum refocillata est. Fabulis labantium in desidiam mentium in meliorem frugem lapsus revocatos iam novimus. (XIV.9.13, 8:1418)50

The ostensible purpose of the tale within the narrative economy of the ancient novel was to restore hope to Charis in her time of need, yet the tale itself, a narrative within a narrative, escapes the consolatory intentions of the old woman when it is interpreted as a philosophical allegory for the flight of the soul.51 Although the Apuleian tale openly demonstrates the allegorical intentions of the author more than any tale in the Decameron, Apuleius’s use of narrative strategies to embed different levels of interpretation is a historical model for the ambiguity

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of the meaning of the stories of the Decameron. Boccaccio, however, goes much further than his predecessor by embedding his stories, which are of a much more popular nature, within multiple narrative levels. In this way, the distance created by the frame of the Decameron acts not only to detach Boccaccio’s authorial intentionality from the often morally questionable subjects of the tales so that the intentions of the ten fictional storytellers are separated from those of the author, but it also allows the reactions of the brigata to exist on a separate plane from those of the Decameron’s readership. Like the tale of Cupid and Psyche, told by a drunken old woman to console a captive girl, the popular stories of the Decameron can take on philosophical meanings in different interpretative contexts. As the author of the Genealogie, Boccaccio is a cultural critic who deduces the figural laws and cultural contexts that allow him to separate the chaotic mixtures constituted by classical mythic figures. In the case of Venus, his theory of allegory functions by dividing the different mythical functions of the goddess into separate temporal and geographical contexts in which the power of love has become embodied. When employed poetically, however, such a theory of allegory applied to Venus, or any Venusian type-character, would allow a reader to combine the celestial and the transgressive qualities of love. So when we look back at his stories of transgressive love, which have either scandalized readers or provoked radical moral apologies, we might read them in the way Boccaccio himself read the ancient poetic record that so inspired him, as allegorically polysemous and capable of signifying both transgressive behavior and celestial concepts.52 The narrative levels of the Decameron function as a mise-en-scène of these multiple levels of interpretation, from the popular to the sublime. Boccaccio seems to suggest just this when he writes in his self-defense, in the introduction the Fourth Day of the Decameron, that he was not ashamed “di dover compiacere a quelle cose alle quali Guido Cavalcanti e Dante Alighieri già e messer Cino da Pistoia vecchissimo onor si tennero, e fu lor caro il piacer loro,” because le Muse son donne, e benché le donne quello che le Muse vagliono non vagliano, pure esse hanno nel primo aspetto simiglianza di quelle; sí che, quando per altro non mi piacessero, per quello mi dovrebber piacere . . . per che, queste cose tessendo, né dal monte Parnaso né dalle Muse non mi allontano quanto molti per avventura s’avisano. (IV Intro., 33 and 35–36; 350–51)53

Boccaccio is asking us to read his stories of love, however parodic they might be on the surface, alongside the erotic myths of antiquity and the stilnovistic cult of love, as poetic reflections on the relationship between the human and the divine.

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If the tales of Venus become removed from the intentions of their creators over time and are reused in both the popular and the philosophical poetic imagination, linking the celestial and the earthly forms of love across high and low levels of discourse, then the female figures associated with erotic love in the Decameron may likewise bear a poetic ambiguity similar to that of the third Venus, despite the popular style of the narratives. Boccaccio’s tales of bodily transgression, which are well removed from authorial intentionality, could be reinserted into a philosophical continuum that leads back to a phenomenology of love similar to that of the stilnovist poets.54 In the context of Boccaccio’s comparison of the narrator of the Decameron to Guido, Dante, and Cino, the last of the Calandrino tales, told by Fiammetta, seems a particularly pertinent example of the Venusian type-character. The tale’s primary female protagonist, Niccolosa, is a prostitute whom Calandrino confuses with a noble lady of courtly love poetry, similarly to the way in which the third Venus was confused with the celestial Venus. The tale unfolds in a typical courtly fashion: a public encounter, a greeting, communication through a go-between, and a missed consummation. When they finally meet in the courtyard and then move to the barn to consummate their love, their verbal exchange is a popularization of the language of the love lyric. Calandrino’s humorous and even disastrous confusion of ennobling love with sex-for-sale establishes the narrative as a clear parody of the poetry of courtly love and its philosophizing heir, the dolce stil novo.55 For example, to Niccolosa’s exclamation, “O Calandrin mio dolce, cuor del corpo mio, anima mia, ben mio, riposo mio, quanto tempo ho disiderato d’averti e di poterti tenere a mio senno! Tu m’hai con la piacevolezza tua tratto il filo della camiscia; tu m’hai agratigliato il cuor con la tua ribeba: può esser vero che io ti tenga?”

Calandrino responds: “Deh! Anima mia dolce, lasciamiti basciare” (IX 5, 58–59; 814–815).56 The intrusion of the popular register into Niccolosa’s rhythmic list of epithets and into Calandrino’s bodily response makes a caricature of love poetry’s contemplation of the unity of body and soul. The vulgar vocabulary that he uses to describe his love for her to the trickster Bruno, who is acting as go-between, debases the philosophical pretensions of poets such as Dante and Cavalcanti: “Gnaffé! tu sì le dirai in prima in prima che io le voglio mille moggia di quel buon bene da impregnare, e poscia che io son suo servigiale e se ella vuol nulla” (IX 5, 27; 810).57 As David Wallace has put it, Calandrino’s nuovi atti “render the lexicon of courtly love suddenly bizarre” and “his oaths and vaunts mix the court with the barnyard” (Boccaccio 97). Calandrino literalizes the metaphorical nature of the love lyric,

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transforming the ennobling endgame of the courtly narrative into a bodily romp in the hay that is imagined in bestial terms: “ne la farò io accorgere se io le pongo le branca adosso, per lo verace corpo di Cristo, ché io le farò giuoco che ella mi verrà dietro come va la pazza al figliuolo” to which Bruno responds, playing along, “Oh! . . . tu te la griferai: e’ mi par pur vederti morderle con cotesti tuoi denti fatti a bischeri quella sua bocca vermigliuzza e quelle sue gote che paion due rose e poscia manicarlati tutta quanta” (IX 5, 36–37, 811).58 The radical embodiment of Calandrino’s experience of love is reinforced by the ending, in which, instead of devouring Niccolosa himself, he is severely beaten by his wife, Tessa. His broken body bears the physical signs of the sbigottimento, dolore, and ira that a poet like Cavalcanti experiences on a metaphorical or existential level. Calandrino’s literal deformation of the language of love enacts on a narrative level the same unreflective confusion of celestial and transgressive love that led to the deification of the third Venus, but from the distance afforded by the frame, it also suggests a poetic convergence of the two forms of love at the interpretative level of the reader. The humor of the tale derives from two sources: first, from the fact that Calandrino mistakes a whore for a lady and is beaten by his wife for betrayal, along with an appreciation for the ingegno that tricked him; second, for readers who think about love, precisely from the recognition of the ironic distance between the embodied reality of Calandrino’s story and the philosophical pretensions of its lyric source. The laughter that results from this recognition can lead the reader both to reflect on the origin and to seek out points of convergence and divergence, such as in their shared vocabulary and in the narrative’s popularization and even bestialization of that vocabulary. The reader need not seek an easy moral to the story, nor read it as a simple parody—since either interpretative operation inevitably eradicates its complexity, ambiguity, and selfreflexivity. To interpret this tale in the light of Boccaccio’s explication of the three Venuses, however, is to respect its place within a continuum of meaning, as a popular form of narrative that bears signs of relation to its sublime origins and can possibly give rise to future philosophical reflection about love. The frame of the Decameron dramatizes this relationship between the literal and the sublime readings of love literature, between the transgressive and the celestial. In the conclusion to the Third Day, in which the most licentious and even pornographic of tales are told, Lauretta sings a melancholic song that elicits contradicting reactions from the members of the brigata. The ballad recounts in the first person the misfortunes of

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a woman, who finds love after first being spurned. The voice then tells of her lover’s death and her own subsequent remarriage to a youth, which she regrets, wishing instead to meet with her dead first husband who is “nel ciel . . . davanti a Colui / che ne creò” (III Concl., 17; 342).59 The lamentation of the singer’s experience of lost and regretted love is preceded by a reference to divine love, which designates the relationship between the woman’s beauty and that of God: Colui che move il cielo e ogni stella mi fece a suo diletto vaga, leggiadra, graziosa e bella, per dar qua giù a ogni alto intelletto alcun segno di quella biltà che sempre a Lui sta nel cospetto. (III Concl., 13; 341)60

The woman’s embodied beauty is related metaphorically to divine beauty, so that love for her would also reflect metaphorically love for the divine Amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle, which Venus also embodied and transgressed in the three instances of her figure. As a conclusion to the Third Day, immediately following Dioneo’s story of Alibech (III 10), which lewdly played with the dangers of embodied metaphors, Lauretta’s song points to a certain convergence of the radically embodied narratives of the Third Day with the celestial love of which they are a deformation. Critical interpretations of the ballad’s meaning have varied from the historical (Boccaccio’s love of widows) to the allegorical (rhetoric, nobility, or poetry),61 but the response among the brigata signals that its own story of embodied love, together with those that precede and follow it, are signs that can lead the reader either to the depths of the real or to the sublime heights of philosophy: Qui fece fine la Lauretta alla sua canzone, la quale notata da tutti, diversamente da diversi fu intesa: e ebbevi di quegli che intender vollono alla melanese, che fosse meglio un buon porco che una bella tosa; altri furono di più sublime e migliore e piú vero intelletto, del quale al presente recitar non accade. (III Concl., 18; 342)62

The practical Milanese-style reaction of some of the brigata functions similarly to Calandrino’s literal (mis)performance of the language of the love lyric, and reduces the lyric reflection to its embodied reality. And just as the Cypriotes misguidedly interpreted the first prostitute as an embodiment of the celestial Venus, so the practical-minded listeners sought a historical application of Lauretta’s lyrical conclusion. Others of a more sublime intellect, whose interpretation the author leaves unspoken, would have recognized the poetic ambiguity, connecting the

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woman’s story of embodied love with its metaphysical counterpart and origin, like Boccaccio the mythographer in his explanations of Venus. The relationship of popular narrative with the poetry of philosophical reflection on love, which Boccaccio traces by separating the various instances of Venus in the Genealogie, is dramatized by the frame of the Decameron. Boccaccio’s aesthetic organization of the tales offers the narratives as spaces of intersection, where the high and low can meet in the reactions of the readers. By setting his authorial intentions at such a distance from the telling of the tales, Boccaccio leaves the interpretation, sublime or not, up to the reader. If the misconceptions and games that inform his tales of love are traced back to the origins that they share with, say, the poetry of Dante, Cino, and Guido, then there will be an inevitable reflection on the interrelationship between the radical embodiment of the narrative and the sublime pretensions of the poetic source. The critical operation of the reader of the Decameron would resemble that of Boccaccio the mythographer, when he traced the history of the invention of the different instances of Venus and their subsequent poetic confusion. Like the forces of history and nature that it artistically reproduces, the Decameron separates the embodied historical level of the tales from their sublime origins, asking its readers to recompose them. As the reception history of Boccaccio’s works has taught, some readers will interpret them alla melanese, whereas others will respond to them with a più sublime e migliore e più vero intelletto. Neither reading need be ascribed to Boccaccio himself, since this would only flatten the complexity of his stories into pure hedonism or heavy-handed moralization. By reading the tales of love of the Decameron like Boccaccio did the myths of antiquity, however, we will begin to give shape to their polysemous quality as myths of the modern world.

Notes A version of this essay was originally delivered as a part of the panel on “Transgressive Love” at the MLA annual convention in Los Angeles, CA (January 6–9, 2011), organized by the executive committee on Medieval and Renaissance Italian Literature. 1. Robert Hollander, Boccaccio’s Two Venuses (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977). 2. Besides those discussed below, among those studies that have contributed to a more nuanced reading of Boccaccio’s discourse on love are, to mention only a few: Millicent Marcus, An Allegory of Form: Literary Self-Consciousness in the Decameron (Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri, 1979); Janet Smarr, Boccaccio and Fiammetta: The Narrator as Lover (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986);

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8.

9.

10.

11.

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Teodolinda Barolini, “‘Le parole son femmine e i fatti sono maschi’: Toward a Sexual Poetics of the Decameron (Decameron II 10),” Studi sul Boccaccio 21 (1993), 175–197; Eugenio Giusti, Dall’amore cortese alla comprensione: Il viaggio ideologico dei Giovanni Boccaccio dalla “Caccia di Diana” al “Decameron” (Milan: LED, 1999); and Simone Marchesi, Stratigrafie decameroniane (Florence: Olschki, 2004). Tobias Foster Gittes, Boccaccio’s Naked Muse: Eros, Culture, and the Mythopoeic Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). Giuseppe Mazzotta, The World at Play in Boccaccio’s Decameron (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). Aldo D. Scaglione, Nature and Love in the Late Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963). Gregory B. Stone, The Ethics of Nature in the Middle Ages: On Boccaccio’s Poetaphysics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). See the useful discussion and visual representation of Boccaccio’s cosmos in Stone, The Ethics of Nature, 6–24 (esp. 15). On the idea of love as a moving force, or power, from antiquity through Chaucer, see Peter Dronke “L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle,” in The Medieval Poet and His World (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1984; repr. of Studi Medievali 6 [1965]: 389–422), 439–475. I have used throughout the edition edited by Vittorio Zaccaria, Genealogie Deorum Gentilium Libri, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca, vols. 7–8 (Milan: Mondadori, 1998), 11–1813. The parenthetical notation refers to the numbers of book, chapter, and paragraph, followed by the volume and page number in Zaccaria’s edition. All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted. John Mulryan has argued that the three images of Venus in the Genealogie (Caelestis, Genetrix, and Meretrix) show that for Boccaccio Venus was “a goddess of power” and that “just as the mythographer used the character of Venus as the receptacle for his synthesis of love ideas, so Boccaccio the storyteller used the love attitudes of his characters to give them depth and focus and to explain, in part, what motivates their actions” (“The Three Images of Venus: Boccaccio’s Theory of Love in the Genealogy of the Gods and his Aesthetic Vision of Love in the Decameron,” Romance Notes 19 [1979]: 388–394 [388–389]). He limits himself to finding parallels for the various behaviors of the characters of the Decameron and the various kinds of love denoted by the three Venuses. He does not discuss in depth the relationship between the various figures of Venus and the philosophy of love suggested by that relationship. For a comparative study of Boccaccio’s Venuses in the Genealogie and the account by Natale Conti in the Mythologiae (1567), see Mulryan’s article with Steven Brown, “Venus and the Classical Tradition in Boccaccio’s Genealogia Deorum Gentilium Libri and Natale Conti’s Mythologiae,” Mediaevalia 27, no. 2 (2006), 135–156. Tobias Foster Gittes notes that the three Jupiters delineate the ages of gold, silver, and bronze in the Genealogie (65–66). The timeline is confused, but there is a general progression in the Genealogie from a state of nature in the first book to decadence in the age of the third Jupiter. As the brother of the first Jupiter and the father of the second, Coelum marks a period of transition between the two ages. Cicero (De Natura Deorum III.59) actually mentions four Venuses, the last two of which Boccaccio combines as the third Venus. On this below.

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12. “Venus magna—as Cicero writes in the De natura deorum—was the daughter of Coelum and Dies. He demonstrates that besides her there were three others and asserts that this one existed before all three. Nevertheless, since many fictions about the Venuses are found indistinct of one another, we will take up those that seem to belong to this one and we will leave the ones that remain to the remaining Venuses. This is not because all the stories cannot be adapted to this one, but because they were later attributed to the other Venuses and it is more fitting to locate them where I will speak about those Venuses.” Cicero mentions four Venuses, the last two of which Boccaccio melds into the figure of Venus meretrix, on whom below. 13. Cf. Pierre Maréchaux, “Inventio allegorica: réflexions sur un paradoxe mythographique,” in La mythologie de l’Antiquité à la Modernité. Appropriation—Adaptation—Détournement, ed. J.P. Aygon, C. Bonnet, and C. Noacco (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009), 211–219. 14. Cf. Giuseppe Mazzotta, “Boccaccio: The Mythographer of the City,” in Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period, ed. Jon Whitman (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 349–364. 15. He quotes from Ovid’s Fasti IV.1, where the twin loves are Cupido (celestial love) and Iocus (earthly love). 16. “They want it, therefore, that Venus be of phlegmatic complexion, nocturnal, acute in the meditation of composing songs, humble and benign among friends, mocker of perjury, a liar, credulous, patient, liberal and very light-hearted, of honest custom and aspect, cheerful, voluptuous, very sweet in speech, a disparager of bodily strength and of spiritual weakness.” 17. In addition to del Negro, Boccaccio reports the “mores et potentiam” of the planet Venus according to Albumasar. On his use of their natural philosophy, see Antonio Enzo Quaglio, Scienza e mito nel Boccaccio (Padua: Liviana, 1967). 18. Before citing Andalò del Negro, Boccaccio offers a somewhat lengthy apology of astrology based on the assumption that God created celestial bodies with certain powers that were useful to living beings. See III.22.6-7 (7:341). 19. “love, friendship, pleasure, conjunction, society and union among animate beings . . . and especially those things that regard procreation, in order that there be someone who stimulated a nature—perhaps a non-energetic one— to continue and to grow. Therefore it can be conceded that the pleasures of men are caused by her.” 20. Boccaccio translates verses III.22.9, 7:342 of the Iliad, “ή̃, καί άπό στήθεσφιν έλύσατο κεστόν ίμάντα / Пοικίλον, έντα δέ οί θελητήρια [sic] πάντα τέτυκτο / ένθένιμένφιλότης, ένδ’ ίμερος, ενδ’ όαριστυς / Пαρφασις,” and translates them as “Et a pectoribus solvit ceston cingulum varium, ubi sibi voluntaria omnia ordinata erant, ubi certe amicitia atque cupido atque fecundia, blandicieque furate intellectum licet studiose scientium” (“And she loosened from her breast the ceston, the variegated belt, where all things that men want were arranged, and friendship and desire and flirtation were there too, and the flatteries that steal away the intellect even of those who studiously think” (III.22.9, 7:342). As Zaccaria notes, his source for the text mistakenly had “θελητήρια” (voluntaria) for “θελκτήρια” (incantamenta) (8:1635n.80). On his limited, though unique inclusion of Greek literature and thought among the sources of the Genealogie, see his own self-defense in this regard at XV.7 (8:1540-44) 21. “Furthermore, they said that Venus had a belt, called a ceston, which had not at all been given to her by nature, nor would the poets have attributed it to her if it hadn’t been imposed by the holiest and most venerable authority

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22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

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of the law, so that overly volatile lasciviousness would be slowed by some restraint.” “I believe that there is only one love, but that it changes behavior and acquires a new name and a new father, just as many times as it allows itself to be pulled to different affects.” Boccaccio also reconciles Ovid’s twin loves with Aristotle’s three worthy objects of affection (the honest, or good, delightful, or pleasant, and useful) by claiming that Ovid combined the second and the third, because “etiam delectari videatur utilitas” (“utility seems to delight as well,” III.22.8, 7:344). Boccaccio essentially extends across time and space the concepts of equovocatio and multivocatio of the gods by assigning the various instances of a particular god (whether they have the same name or a different one) diachronically and geographically. On Boccaccio’s employment of them via the school of Chartres, see Mazzotta, “Boccaccio: The Mythographer of the City,” 359. “For this Venus I understand the voluptuous life, and in all things pertinent to voluptuousness and desire she is one and the same with the [Venus] above.” He cites Ovid, Metamorphoses, IV.536-38 and Vergil, Aeneid, 5.800-81, but comments primarily on the account offered by Macrobius in the Saturnalia, I.8.7-8. See the third proem to the first book and the first five chapters of Book I, on Eternitas, Chaos, Litigium, Pan, and the Parcae (7:68-104) for Boccaccio’s idiosyncratic rendition and interpretation of the pagan cosmogony. Cf. Dronke’s discussion of love as the procreative anima mundi in Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia (“L’Amor che move,” 465–470). “[It is said] that she was born from the blood of testicles that had been cut off Saturn, because, as can be deduced from Macrobius, when there was chaos, time did not exist; so time was born from the rotation of heaven, and from it Charonos was born, who is also Chronos, and whom we call Saturn; and since the seeds of all things, which must have been born after heaven, flowed out from heaven, and all of the elements, which would have made plenitude for the world, would have been established with those seeds, when the world was perfected in all its parts and members, in that very moment of time is the end of the process for the seeds from heaven; and thus the genitals seem to have been cut from Saturn, that is from time, and thrown into the sea, so that it would become evident that the faculty of generation and procreation, which much deduced for Venus, was carried over (translatam) to the humors through the coitus of a man and a woman, which means by means of foam; in fact, just as foam arises from the motion of the sea, thus does it come from the friction in coitus, and just as the former easily dissolves, thus desire ends in a fleeting delight.” Boccaccio’s connection of Venus with the creative power of love in Nature is clearly linked to Bernardus Silvestris’ idea of love as a “cosmic fertility,” which emphasizes “the sexual and creative aspects of the universal ordering force;” for Bernardus “creation derives ultimately from an act of love between the highest god and his feminine emanation” (Dronke, 466). See the paragraphs that follow the quotation above at III.23.5-6 (7:354). Boccaccio boldly characterizes the people of Cyprus in a negative light, despite the fact that his patron was King Hugh IV of Cyprus, whom he addresses in the following section. “As for the fact that the citizens of Paphos want that Venus emerged from the sea near them, with all due respect for your majesty, great king, I am about to say what I would not dare if I did not know that you are fair even in the

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36.

37.

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Medievalia et Humanistica greatest of things. Cyprus is an island, as is common opinion, either under the influence of heaven or by some other vice of the inhabitants, that is so prone to Venus that it is held as the hospice, workshop, and tinder wood of all lasciviousness and voluptuousness. Therefore it must be conceded to the citizens of Paphos that Venus first emerged from waves near their shore.” Zaccaria notes that the quotation that follows is a marginal addition to the manuscript A, catalogued in the Vatican Library as Cod. Laur. LII 9, which Zaccaria recognizes as the manuscript on which Boccaccio was making additions and edits between 1365 and 1370. On the manuscript tradition of the Genealogia, see Zaccaria’s “Nota al testo” at the end of his critical edition and translation of the text, 8:1587-1605, especially 8:1592-99. On this particular annotation by Boccaccio, see Zaccaria’s note to the text, 8.1636n97. Boccaccio is citing Tacitus’s Historiae II.2-3 from memory, as is suggested by the significant differences between Boccaccio’s annotation and the actual text of Tacitus. “But from Cornelius Tacitus we can deduce that [the meaning] pertains to history rather than another sense. He seems to hold that Venus, who was learned in the arts of divination, attacked the island with an armada and waged war on King Cinyras. Once he had arrived at plan for peace, they agreed that the king would construct a temple to Venus, in which sacrifices would be offered to her and administered by the descendants of the king’s family and of her own. When the temple had been completed, only masculine animals were offered in to burn in sacrifice. It was a sin to spill blood on the altars since they worshipped her only with prayers and pure fire. Tacitus says that the statue of the goddess did not have human form, but rather was a round mass rising on a larger base that gets smaller at the top, like a cone. There is no explanation about this matter.” Boccaccio paraphrases Augustine’s De Civitate Dei as stating “Huic oblata a Phenicibus esse dona de prostitutionibus filiarum antequam viris illas coniungerent” (cf. De Civitate Dei, IV.10). In a direct address to his patron, King Hugh IV of Cyprus, Boccaccio also mentions Claudian’s Epithalamium de Nuptiis Honorii Augusti (which he misidentifies as the De laudibus Stylichonis): “Claudianus . . . apud tuam Cyprum, rex optime, deliciosissimum describit viridarium, in quo omnia facile possint enumerari spectantia ad suadendam lasciviam” (“Claudian . . . describes a most delightful garden in your Cyprus, great king, in which all the things that pertain to persuading one to lasciviousness can be enumerated”; XI.4.2, 7:1084). “It remains for me to address what is ambiguous. Some think that this Venus is the same as the Cyprian Venus. I think that there were two, and that this was the real daughter of Jove and wife of Vulcan, whereas the other one was the daughter of Syros and Cypria or Dion, and wife of Adonis. Those who think that she is a single person say that she was the daughter of Jove and Dion and that she first married Vulcan, then Adonis.” As I noted above, Cicero mentions four Venuses in the De Natura Deorum, and although Boccaccio thinks that the fourth and the third are separate, he nonetheless treats them in the same chapter as a single mythic representation of transgressive love. “They say that she survived her husband and that she burned with so much desire that she almost declined to a public brothel. In order to cover up her crime, they say that she persuaded Cyprian women to become prostitutes and instituted that they earn money by selling their body. Later on virgins were even sent to the shore to make to Venus an offering of their virginity

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39. 40.

41. 42.

43.

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both for their future chastity and in order to seek a dowry, after having sex with foreigners. Theodontius adds to this when he says that this accursed crime did not belong only to Cyprus, but was taken to Italy as well. This is confirmed by the authority of Justinian, when he says that it happened once at Locri ex voto.” On Boccaccio’s use of Justin’s epitome as a source for Venus meretrix see Gittes, Boccaccio’s Naked Muse, 92–93. “they say that . . . on account of her extraordinary beauty she was thought to be the celestial Venus by the Cyprians, and she was called a goddess and honored as such with sacrifices. At Paphos they say she had a temple and altars, which they perfumed with incense and flowers because Venus enjoys odors of different kinds.” “All have it that Love was the son of Jove and Venus, although I believe not of humans, but of planets.” “by which we live together and make friendships” “so that we may understand that love and friendship are born from the convergence of complexions and customs.” Also connected with the third Venus is Cupid, whom Boccaccio lists as the son of Mars at IX.4 (7:900-08). This Cupid, however, is a passio mentis and represents the bodily functions of desire when confronted with beauty. Amor concupiscibilis is located in the first book of the Genealogie as the son of Herebus, where Boccaccio merely cites Cicero’s account in the De Natura Deorum and mentions that this love, which is really a self-love recognizable in the desire for wealth, power, and glory, should rather be called hate (I.15, 7:140-142). An example of how this interest in historical exactitude manifests itself in the Genealogie can be seen very clearly in the entry on Io. After seeking to reconstruct her chronological position in relation to the different Joves and her possible alter ego, Isis, he associates her with the third Jove and declares his confusion: “Quod quidem tempus satis competit Iovi Cretensi, qui Iuppiter IIIus fuit. Quibus tam diversis hystoriographorum opinionibus fere stupefactus, quid teneam de hac Yside nescio. Hoc tamen scio quia temporis conformitas Ysidis Promethei cum Iove et hystoria, que si non vera est, vero tamen similis est, me magis quam ad aliquam aliarum trahit” (“Indeed this time is fitting enough for the Cretan Jove, who was the third Jupiter. I am almost stupefied by the very diverse opinions of the historiographers, and I do not know what to think about this Isis. But I do know that the temporal conformity of Isis, daughter of Prometheus, with Jove—and the history, even if it is not true, it is nevertheless verisimilar—brings me to her more than to any of the others” (VII.22.10-11, 7:762). There is a tendency to view the Latin works as the result of a conversion to Humanism that Boccaccio underwent in the later part of his life, after meeting Petrarch in 1350. This is the narrative recounted by Giuseppe Billanovich in Petrarca letterato I. Lo Scrittoio del Petrarca (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1947), 104–106. Boccaccio had long been an admirer of Petrarch before they meet when the latter passed through Florence on his way to and from Rome for the Jubilee of 1350. Although their meeting coincides with Boccaccio’s dedication to humanist scholarship in Latin, he never gave up his devotion to vernacular literature. His relationship with Petrarch was often rocky and his own Latin humanism is not necessarily “Petrarchan,” which is especially notable in his dedication to the works and life of Dante. On Boccaccio’s dedication to Dante as a major difference in his humanistic outlook, see Jason Houston, Building a Monument to Dante: Boccaccio as Dan-

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45.

46.

47. 48.

49. 50.

51.

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Medievalia et Humanistica tista (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), especially 64–73, 93–98, and 124–156. Cf. also Mazzotta’s distinction between Boccaccio’s approach to antiquity and that of Petrarch in “Boccaccio: The Mythographer of the City,” 349–350. In the first proem to the work, Boccaccio describes the fragmentary state of ancient culture as if it were a ship broken by a shipwreck upon a reef. He lists a number of causes for the destruction, including time and bigotry. His job is to collect and recompose the fragments for the use of his own age. He figures his work in terms of the myths of Prometheus, Daedalus, Mercury, and Asclepius. Cf. Mazzotta, “Boccaccio: The Mythographer of the City,” 357–358. The first book of the Genealogie recounts the temporal and geographical progression of figures for the Earth from primordial chaos to goddesses of the Earth across multiple names (multivocatio), whereas the figure of Jupiter marks the progression from the Golden Age to subsequent ages of decadence beneath the same name (equivocatio). See II.2, V.1, and VII.22 for the entries on Jupiter. The figure of Mercury best illustrates how mythic names change across place and time, as the six different instances of his name follow the itinerary of the translatio studiorum from Greece to Egypt to France. Almost always beginning with a planet or other natural phenomenon, in time these figures are transmitted by popular stories such as those that surround the figure of Mercury, god of thieves (II.12). Just as consistently, the figures become re-sublimated as astrological phenomena, as in the case of the sixth Mercury (XII.12). For the six entries on Mercury, see II.7, II.12, III.20, VII.34, VII.36, XII.12. For a reading of Boccaccio’s theory of allegory in Book XIV of the Genealogie in relation to vernacular literature, see James Kriesel, “The Genealogy of Boccaccio’s Theory of Allegory,” Studi sul Boccaccio 36 (2009), 197–226. “Let the ignorant babblers be silent, and let the arrogant be mute, if they can, since it must be believed that not only great men—who were brought up on the milk of the Muses, frequented the homes of philosophy, and have been hardened by sacred studies—have always placed the most profound meanings in their poems, but also that there is nowhere such a delirious old woman who, around the household fire among the wakeful on winter nights, makes up and recites stories of orcs, or fairies, or nymphs, and the like (from which these inventions are often composed), and does not intend beneath the pretext of the stories, in accordance with the powers of her modest intellect, some meaning, sometimes not at all ridiculous; a meaning through which she would like to cause terror in children, delight girls, or tease the old, or at least show the powers of Fortune.” Boccaccio takes the term anicula, in fact, directly from Apuleius, who also describes the old woman as delira et temulenta (Metamorphoses VI.25), which Boccaccio clearly echoes in his description of an old woman as delirans. “Stories have given solace to those oppressed beneath the weight of an adverse fortune, as we can see in Lucius Apuleius. According to him, Charis, a noble virgin who for her misfortune was captured by thieves, wept about her captivity and was relieved a little by an old woman with the charm of the fable of Psyche. We know still that the slips of minds tottering toward idleness have been called back to better fruit with stories.” For Boccaccio’s allegorical reading of this tale out of the context of its narrative function, see Genealogie V.22 (7:560-68). He reads it as an allegory for the return of the rational soul to the divine. On Boccaccio’s transcription

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52.

53.

54.

55.

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and interpretation of this tale and his use of it in the Decameron, see Igor Candido, “Amore e Psiche dalle chiose del Laur. 29.2 alle due redazioni delle Genealogie e ancora in Dec. X,10,” Studi sul Boccaccio 36 (2009), 171–196. On the importance of the Apuleian model for Boccaccio’s Decameron, see Vittore Branca introductory remarks to Boccaccio medievale (Florence: Sansoni, 1956), 9. For an analysis of the common ways in which Apuleius and Boccaccio use carnal love to eroticize interpretation and create epistemological ambiguity, see Martin Eisner and Marc D. Schachter, “Libido Sciendi: Apuleius, Boccaccio, and the Study of the History of Sexuality,” PMLA 124 (2009), 817–837. For a reading of allegory in the Decameron that sees the frame as a Thomistic allegorical structure that “pits the rational appetite against the lower irascible and concupiscible appetites” in a symbolic “drama whose locus is the human soul,” see Victoria Kirkham, “An Allegorically Tempered Decameron,” Italica 26, no. 1 (1985), 1–23 (2). “Striving to please the ones who were so greatly honored, and whose beauty was so much admired, by Guido Cavalcanti and Dante Alighieri in their old age, and by Cino da Pistoia in his dotage” and “The Muses are ladies, and although ladies do not rank as highly as Muses, nevertheless they resemble them at first sight, and hence it is natural, if only for this reason, that I should be fond of them . . . and so, in composing these stories, I am not straying as far from Mount Parnassus or from the Muses as many people might be led to believe” (Decameron, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, vol. 4, ed. Vittore Branca [Milan: Mondadori, 1967]; trans. G.H. McWilliam, The Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio, 2nd edition [New York: Penguin Books, 1995], 288–289). For quotations the parenthetical notation here and below refers to the numbers of book, chapter, and paragraph, followed by the page number in Branca’s edition. Cf. Gittes, 177–180 and Mazzotta, World at Play, 69–70. Unlike the phantastmatic love lyrics of Cavalcanti, Dante’s lyric in the Vita nova had already explored the radical corporeality of Beatrice. One presumes that Boccaccio had noted this aspect of Dante’s poetry, since he insisted on the connection between a historical Beatrice and Dante’s inspiration (Trattatello in laude di Dante, seconda redazione, 27–36, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca, vol. 3, ed. Pier Giorgio Ricci [Milan: Mondadori, 1974], 423–538 [502–504]). Inversely, he noted of Petrarch that Laura was a mere allegory, and not a real woman (De vita et moribus Francisci Petracchi, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca, vol. 5, tom. 1, ed. Renata Fabbri [Milan: Mondadori, 1992], 898–911 [908]). On Dante’s bodily poetics and its contrast with Cavalcanti and Petrarch, see Robert P. Harrison, The Body of Beatrice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). Cf. David Wallace, Boccaccio. Decameron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 97–98. In his notes to the text Vittore Branca finds numerous examples of the vocabulary of courtly love: e.g., “s’imbardo” (5, 11; 1479 n.14), “soffiar” (5, 12; 1479 n.1), “lammia” (5,15; 1479 n.4), “servigiale” (5, 27; 1479 n.3), “struggere come ghiaccio al sole” (5, 31; 1480 n.1). “‘Oh, my sweet Calandrino, heart of my body, my dearest, my darling, my angel, how long I have been yearning to have you all to myself and hold you in my arms! You’ve swept me off my feet with your winning ways! You’ve captured my heart with that rebeck of yours! Is it really possible that I am holding you in my embrace?’ ‘Alas, my dearest . . . ‘Let me up, so that I

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59. 60. 61. 62.

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Medievalia et Humanistica may kiss you’” (trans. McWilliam 675–676). The English translation cannot capture the popular terminology that Niccolosa ironically employs in her exclamation. Branca notes that it is a “sequenza di appellativi popolareschi tenerissimi, ritmati e rimati, il cui tono caricaturato ricorda particolarmente messer Ricciardo e le sue gaffe insistenze amorose” (1482 n.13). Furthermore, Branca finds that the phrases “tratto il filo della camiscia” and “agratigliato il cuor” are respectively an “espressione immaginosamente popolaresca” and a “voce popolaresca, armonica al tono enfatico e caricaturale di tutte le parole di Niccolosa” (1483 n.1 and n.2). Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin suggests that their use of the idiom “anima mia” is a parody of the intersection of soul and body (Religion and the Clergy in Boccaccio’s Decameron [Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1984], 233). “‘Faith! . . . You’re to tell her first and foremost that I wish her a thousand bushels of the sort of love that flattens a girl; then you’re to say that I’m her obedient servant, and if there’s anything she needs.’” (trans. McWilliam 671). “‘And once I lay my paws on her, she’ll know it even better. God’s truth! I’ll sport with her so merrily that she’ll cling to me like a mother besotted with her son’ . . . ‘Ah, yes! . . . You’ll make a proper meal out of her. I can see you now, in my mind’s eye, nibbling her sweet red lips and her rosy cheeks with those lute-peg teeth of yours, and then devouring her whole body, piece by succulent piece’” (trans. McWilliam 672). “in heaven . . . before Him who created it.” “He who moves the stars and heavens / Decreed me at my birth / Light, lovely, graceful, fair to see, / To show men here on earth / Some sign of that eternal grace / That shines for ever in His face” (trans. McWilliam 281). See Branca’s final note to the text of the poem, in which he lists the variety of scholarly opinions about its meaning (1195–1196 n.7). “Here Lauretta ended her song, to which all had listened raptly and construed in different ways. There were those who took it, in the Milanese fashion [i.e., literally], to imply that a good fat pig was better than a comely wench. But others gave it a loftier, more subtle and truer meaning, which this is not the moment to expound” (trans. McWilliam 283).

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Dante’s Justinian, Cino’s Corpus The Hermeneutics of Poetry and Law L O R E N Z O VA LT E R Z A

Roman law looms exceptionally large in the writings of Cino da Pistoia and Dante Alighieri, offering us a compelling arena for contrasting their respective interpretive practices. One—Cino—trained professionally as a jurist. The other—Dante—came to the law as an impassioned amateur.1 Yet, while their professional backgrounds differ in significant ways, both spent a considerable amount of time and energy engaging with that sixth-century collection of ancient Roman law, the Corpus Iuris Civilis.2 This article takes as its subject the remarkable ways the two clash and align in their approaches to interpreting this foundational collection of texts; I also explore how, in spite of their hermeneutic differences, Cino and Dante nevertheless aligned with one another in their shared hostility toward the intervening juridical tradition of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Indeed, our two Tuscans are remarkably prescient in their ability to pose questions that still preoccupy us today in the spheres of literature or jurisprudence. What role, each asks, might an author or legislator’s original psychological state play in our search for meaning within a text? How may one broaden one’s interpretive latitude while still remaining true to the object of study, arriving at an interpretation acceptable to others who may initially hold differing views? In my exploration of Dante and Cino’s treatment of the Corpus, I use “hermeneutics” in its Gadamerian sense (i.e., philosophical hermeneutics): to remind ourselves that the prejudices and assumptions supplied to us by tradition do not play solely a limiting or obstructing force to understanding. They also stand as the very things that enable judgment to occur, since they constitute cultural and experiential consciousness. In the case of Cino and Dante, I would extend this insight even further to posit that, though consciousness cannot help but be shaped by context, customs and language, there nevertheless exist moments when it becomes possible to recognize cultural prejudices and engage them in Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 37 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011.

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dialogue. Part of the fascination of historical texts comes from this possibility, since they offer readers the opportunity to engage with the past by fusing our own horizon of understanding with that of the text. This process inevitably challenges prior conceptions about a work and its ideas, eliciting new reactions and potentially altering beliefs. This is why I find Cino and Dante’s common interest in Roman law so tantalizing. It offers a rich opportunity to witness each writer’s confrontation with textual disparity: not just between each’s fourteenth-century perspective and the Corpus’s sixth-century horizon, but also, more generally, between each man’s approach to interpreting Roman law and prior legal interpretive traditions. This latter engagement over interpretive approaches proves extremely useful to understanding Cino and Dante’s limits: how they deal with historical difference lies at the heart of this essay. For Cino, the search for an acceptable reading of the law means confronting the professional juridical tradition that provides very specific boundaries for legal interpretation. The challenge for him is to overcome the interpretive straightjacket of his predecessors in the pursuit of a legal doctrine that more fully acknowledges the contemporary needs of the society in which he lives. Dante, though he inherits much of the same tradition in the form of the Accursian Gloss seeks to overcome the limiting force of this tradition by playing down the intervening centuries of juridical interpretation: looking back instead to the historical and metaphysical circumstances that surrounded the Corpus’s creation. There, as handed down by Justinian, he locates the meanings of the laws before they were interpreted and put into practice by centuries of jurists. Thus, we see each problematizing the intervening Accursian tradition as something to be overcome, but differently. Each also shares a common goal (finding more suitable meanings in Roman law) but pursues that goal in startlingly different ways: Cino looking forward to the promise of novel doctrine; Dante looking back to the origin of law. This study focuses primarily on two of Dante’s mature works, the Commedia and the Monarchia, and how they deal with Justinian’s auctoritas. Each of these two is uniquely suited to this discussion due to their content. The Commedia actually features an appearance by Justinian the character and in an extraordinarily privileged position, no less (he is the only character in the poema to speak for an entire canto, uninterrupted). Moreover, his revised Roman law occupies a place fundamental in Dante’s discussions of the political order. The Monarchia, on the other hand, largely avoids direct mention of the laws and does not feature a speaking Justinian, focusing on institutional auctoritas instead of that of individuals3 Nevertheless, it serves our purpose well

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by addressing head-on the question of the institutional auctoritas of the Empire and the Church. Indeed, as Albert Ascoli has pointed out, the Monarchia stands apart from the Convivio and the De Vulgari Eloquentia, because in it, Dante attempts to define “the exercise of legal power through transpersonal institutions, rather than with treating either the poetic or even the philosophical authority that accrues to an individual name.”4 Furthermore, as Ascoli later points out, the theme of authority occurs throughout the treatise, with Latin terms for “authority” appearing a remarkable sixty-six times.5 Thus paired, these two works, so close thematically and chronologically, serve well for a discussion of law; the Commedia addresses the issue of Roman law as an essential instrument of just governance, while the Monarchia, by confronting questions of imperial and papal authority, grapples directly with the role of institutional auctoritas.6 As a treatise, the Monarchia approaches the problem of the authority most directly, addressing textual auctoritas in the Holy Scriptures in Book 3. Applying this interpretive model helps us to understand better Justinian’s role within Dante’s treatment of Roman law. The treatment of Scripture in the Monarchia places the human authors of the Bible in a position of scribe or scriptor of God. Following Augustinian doctrine, Dante assumes that while Holy Scripture originates with God, it nevertheless passed through the human authors who worked under divine authority.7 A misinterpretation, therefore, of Holy Scriptures is far more serious than a betrayal of the human authors’ intentions because it ultimately betrays those of God. While certainly not on par with the authors of Holy Scripture, Dante’s Justinian nevertheless occupies a similar critical place owing to his role in the creation of a divinely inspired text. To be sure, Justinian did not compose Roman law the way, say, St. John penned the Gospel of John, yet his reforms of the preceding nearly 1400 years of legal literature places him in a similar intermediary role. The notion that the creation of the Corpus Iuris Civilis resulted from divine inspiration appears directly from Justinian’s mouth in the Commedia, Cesare fui e son Iustiniano, che, per voler del primo amor ch’i’ sento, d’entro le leggi trassi il troppo e ‘l vano. (Par. 6 vv.10–12) Caesar I was and am Justinian, who, by will of the Primal Love I feel, pruned from the laws what was superfluous and vain.

He introduces himself to the pilgrim as formerly the emperor, “Caesar”, and presently Justinian, the man whose divinely commanded task was to

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make Roman law perfect. In this way, the revised Corpus Iuris Civilis appears unambiguously as a divinely ordained work. Indeed, Justinian’s historic reform of law was itself, in at least two important ways, a conversionary act. While the preceding centuries of Roman legislation bore many edicts and precepts that assumed republican government,8 Justinian’s standardization effectively co-opted those selected for imperial service. Moreover, as Justinian’s commission sifted through laws going back nearly fourteen centuries, much of the material was largely pagan in origin. Those laws selected for inclusion in the Corpus fell under the Christian context of the work. Caroline Humfress sums this point up very well, “Every text within the Corpus, no matter what its original source, now counted as binding imperial legislation issued jointly ‘in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ’ and the sacred lord and emperor Justinian himself.”9 Justinian had succeeded in radical reworking an enormous accumulation laws from disparate origins into a single body of legislation, rendering them effectively imperial and Christian. The religious context proves crucial both for the historical Justinian’s stated objectives and for Dante’s fictional depiction of him. As mentioned before, the Justinian of the Commedia introduces himself as formerly Caesar and presently Justinian, corrected of his Monophysite heresy. Dante insists on the religious mechanism at work in his account of the creation of the Corpus in vv. 22–24, where he has Justinian says that once Agapetus had corrected his understanding of the dual nature of Christ, he set about his legal reforms, Tosto che con la Chiesa mossi i piedi, a Dio per grazia piacque di spirarmi l’alto lavoro, e tutto ‘n lui mi diedi; (Par. 6 vv. 22–24) As soon as my footsteps moved at the Church’s side, it pleased God, in His grace, to grant me inspiration in the noble task to which I wholly gave myself,

Of course, one significant inconsistency persists between Dante’s account of the creation of the Corpus and the historical record: Agapetus didn’t arrive in Constantinople until after the reforms had been completed.10 Yet, the Commedia’s Justinian presents himself as a divinely inspired, and a perfected Roman law as the result. The culmination of Dante’s critique of jurists and legal hermeneutics occurs late in his career, in his mature political treatise, the Monarchia. As a proof that the Romans had conquered their empire by right and with the divine blessing of God, Dante cites the validity of a special type of juridical ordeal known as trial by combat (duellum). In his unusual

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reasoning, the ancient Romans were engaging in duellum on a mass scale—a sort of aggregated trial by combat—as their armies steadily conquered their neighbors and created the empire. Roman victories, he argues, amount to tacit divine approval, since God will not permit the unjust to defeat the righteous. Dante addresses jurists directly in the second book of the Monarchia: Videant nunc iuriste presumptuosi quantum infra sint ab illa specula rationis unde humana mens hec principia speculatur, et sileant secundum sensum legis consilium et iudicium exhibere contenti. (Mon. II, 9) Now let the presumptuous jurists see just how far they are below that watchtower of reason from which the human mind contemplates these principles, and let them be silent and be satisfied to give counsel and judgment in accordance with the sense of the law.11

The address to the jurists appears suddenly and concludes abruptly; yet, it contains tantalizing clues to Dante’s perspective on legal interpretation. Dante’s use of ‘presumptuous’ always carries with it significant connotations of transgression. As, Teodolinda Barolini observes, Dante uses the variations of presumere in his works when dealing with the question of intellectual arrogance, even before the Commedia confronts that theme directly with Ulysses.12. Referring to Eve in the De Vulgari Eloquentia, he calls her ‘presuntuosissima Eva’13 for having dared to speak to the serpent in Eden and then taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Secundum quidem quod in principio legitur Genesis, ubi de primordio mundi sacratissima scriptura pertractat, mulierem invenitur ante omnes fuisse locutam, scilicet presumptuosissimam Evam, cum diabolo sciscitanti respondit: De fructu lignorum que sunt in paradiso vescimur; de fructu vero ligni quod est in medio paradisi precepit nobis Deus ne comederemus nec tangeremus, ne forte moriamur. According to what it says at the beginning of Genesis, where sacred scripture describes the origin of the world, we find that a woman spoke before anyone else, when the most presumptuous Eve responded thus to the blandishments of the Devil: ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees that are in Paradise: but God has forbidden us to eat or to touch the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of Paradise, lest we die’14

This transgression of the limits of knowledge, had the severest of consequences, resulting in humanity’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The word then appears in De Vulgari Eloquentia 1.6.4, in reference to the hubris of humanity demonstrated in the construction of the Tower of Babel and resulting in the loss of the single original human language, qua quidem forma omnis lingua loquentium uteretur, nisi culpa presumptionis humane dissipata fuisset, ut inferius ostendetur.

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and this form of language would have continued to be used by all speakers, had it not been shattered through the fault of human presumption, as will be shown below. DVE 1.6.4

The attempt to construct a building that would surpass even God offers a colossal example of hubris, once again indicated with a variation of ‘presumptuous’. Leading humanity in this endeavor, Nimrod attempted to elevate his art past that of nature, which human art imitates, and past even God, whom nature imitates, going beyond, in other words, the limits of human art. This act of transgression precipitated the political and social fragmentation of humanity, Ecce, lector, quod, vel oblitus homo, vel vilipendens disciplinas priores et avertens oculos a vibicibus que remanserant, tertio insurrexit ad verbera per superbam stultitiam presumendo And so, reader, the human race, either forgetful or disdainful of earlier punishments, and averting its eyes from the bruises that remained, came for a third time to deserve a beating, putting its trust in its own foolish pride.

Dante labels the construction of Babel the “third rebellion”. The loss of a common tongue is the third punishment to afflict humanity as a whole, after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden and the Flood.15 Presumere appears pointedly in Paradiso 21, where Peter Damian asks the pilgrim to tell the living to cease attempting to divine the future, però che sì s’innoltra ne lo abisso de l’etterno statuto quel che chiedi, che da ogne creata vista è scisso. E al mondo mortal, quando tu riedi, questo rapporta, sì che non presumma a tanto segno più mover li piedi. (Par XXI, vv. 94–99) ‘for what you ask is hidden in the depths of the abyss of God’s eternal law, so that the sight being part of God’s eternal law, such information is forbidden to mortals of any being He created is cut off from it.’ And to the mortal world, when you return, bear this report, so that it shall no more presume to set its steps toward such a goal.

Damian’s reply to the pilgrim’s question about destiny elicits this long rebuke; the future, or God’s plan, is hidden beyond the view of mortals. The activity of divination, seeking to access eternal knowledge, is presumptuous.16 The accusation of intellectual arrogance implied by all of these uses of ‘presumere’ has now been turned upon the jurists in the Monarchia. Dante demands that they acknowledge their inferiority to the ‘watch tower of reason’ and Prudence Shaw reminds us that this term appears in the De consolatione philosophiae 4. 6. There Boethius refers to a ‘watch-

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tower’ of providence. This very passage addresses themes very similar to those which Dante opens the second book of the Monarchia, Sicut ad faciem cause non pertingentes novum effectum comuniter admiramur, sic, cum causam cognoscimus, eos qui sunt in admiratione restantes quadam derisione despicimus. When confronted with an unfamiliar phenomenon whose cause we do not comprehend we usually feel amazement; and equally, when we do understand the cause, we look down almost mockingly on those who continue to be amazed. (M 2.1.2)

Dante goes on in the next line to discuss his arrival at the understanding that the ancient Romans had conquered the world with the help of divine providence. He had previously believed them to have achieved the empire through force. Now, in the passages cited above, Boethius discusses at length how providence works in human history. By the time he addresses the jurists in the Monarchia, Dante has just completed his own account of how the Romans gained control of the world through the divine will.17 Indeed, just before singling the jurists out specifically as a group, Dante asks “Who then is now so obtuse as not to see that the glorious people gained the crown of the whole world by right through trial by combat?” In short, he has become that one who “understands the cause” and looks “down almost mockingly on those who continue to be amazed.” But the caustic remark suggests that it is more than a simple rebuke for their ignorance. Calling on the jurists to limit themselves to the ‘sense of the law,’ Dante hints that their presumptuous activity has to do with not adhering to the ‘sense’ of legal language. His comment involves, then, their practice of legal interpretation. As Mario Sbriccoli argues, however one considers it, a jurist’s activity is substantially one of interpretation.18 But by the 1270s, this interpretive activity was taking on newer, more ambitious targets of study, thanks to the jurists’ increasingly sophisticated use of Aristotelian dialectic.19 Especially present in France, the development of the logical analysis allowed jurists like Jacques de Revigny and Pierre de Belleperche—masters whom Cino cites frequently in his Lectura of the Codex—to extract new norms from Corpus, even if they were not expressly stated within the Roman law texts. As Manlio Bellomo states so succinctly, “Thus by taking an existent disposition and using it as an indisputable base on which to construct a dialectical argument, the jurist expanded the normative capacities of Justinian’s laws.”20 Thus, the new dialectical techniques allowed jurists to interpret the Corpus in powerful ways not previously available to them. By 1274, jurists

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were dealing with material far beyond the law books of Roman and canon law, though any argument still always required a foundational text selected from Justinian’s Corpus. The new cases were quaestiones ex facto emergentes; matters not expressly covered by Roman law. Jurists approached them by locating any clues or pertinent content from one of the texts of the Corpus and then applying dialectical reasoning to them. In this way, they could deduce a normative principle from the original situation and apply it to new issues.21 We may say that by the second decade of the 14th century—the period in which Dante wrote his caustic rebuke of the jurists in the Monarchia—the ‘sense of the law’ was a matter necessarily open for debate and disputation among legal practitioners. Indeed, for Cino, there could be no static and single “sense” of the laws. All laws—especially Justinian’s—existed within a distinct professional tradition, still developing and yet grounded in firmly established historical readings. Justinian’s original intentions were significant, to be sure, but they mattered less than the task of updating and liberating legislation from the restraints of outdated dogma. Instead of looking behind him for an original and uncorrupted interpretation, in other words, Cino subjects the written laws to newer and more contemporary methods and doctrine, such as those of Orleanese juris doctores Jacques de Revigny and, especially, Pierre de Belleperche. Despite their differing interpretive approaches, Dante and Cino learned the law through the same texts and traditions. They came to know the legal philosophy expressed most coherently within the Digest, for example, chiefly with the help of a particular work, the accompanying Accursian Gloss, compiled in Bologna by a team of legal scholars in the first decades of the thirteenth century and completed around 1230.22 While Cino’s training was professional and Dante’s likely informal both studied by interpreting the Corpus through the explanations offered by the Gloss. In so doing, both partook of a rich traditionthat placed heavy emphasis upon a unifying view of the Digest in particular, and the Corpus Iuris Civilis in general.23 Such an approach is akin to something we might call today “law as integrity”—the theory of interpretation championed by the contemporary American jurist Ronald Dworkin, which holds that the interpretation of a given piece of legislation ought not violate principles elsewhere valued within the legal system of which it is part.24 The thirteenth- and fourteenth-century legal scholars compiling the Accursian Gloss sought to bring a similar sense of consistency and coherence to the Corpus. Ideally this sense of integrity held true both horizontally (thus creating a system of laws containing no contradictions), and tem-

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porally (thus creating a system of laws honoring important legal precedents over time). Thus, while precedent should not shackle a judge, it nonetheless should offer an important normative guide, promoting cohesion of the system overall going forward. While certainly not working within a Common law system, twelfth- and thirteenth-century Italian jurists nevertheless operated within a distinct interpretive community.25 Indeed, their establishment of a coherent and consistent system of glosses of Justinian’s Digest ranks among the central achievements of the early medieval jurists (now known as the Glossators) who flourished at Bologna in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Like Dante, these jurists considered a priori the Corpus as the highest expression of human reason26—ratio scripta. Such a privileged position for the Corpus meant that any seeming inconsistency one might encounter could not be not the fault of that nearly infallible collection of texts; rather, the inconsistency must arise from the inability of the jurist to understand the true—i.e. consistently logical—meaning of the legislation.27 Working under such an assumption, generation after generation of steady glossing did eventually smooth most of the inconsistencies out of the Corpus.28 The crowning achievement of this early school was Accursius’s Magna Glossa of the early 13th century, the definitive compilation of glosses that became the standard interpretive reference text at the university of Bologna for centuries to come. Thus Dante and Cino came to study Roman law in the late 13th and early 14th centuries, the Corpus presented a remarkably coherent vision of law, within an elaborate exoskeleton of glosses. The irony we confront, then, is that Cino and Dante, in spite of their stated hostility to this tradition, could not help but be beholden to it for the starting points of their individual conceptions of law. Indeed, they devoted a considerable amount of energy declaring their independence from it: Dante by creating a metaphysical place for the original text within a sophisticated political model, and, of course, by casting its author, Justinian, as the exemplum of church and empire cooperation. In numerous celebrated passages within the Divine Comedy, Dante fashions for Roman law—when properly interpreted and enforced by an omnipotent ruler, of course—a critical place for humankind’s salvation. Dante inserts into Marco Lombardo’s speech the fact that both Roman law and a ruler to enforce it are required to control the desire innate to human nature: Di picciol bene in pria sente sapore; quivi s’inganna, e dietro ad esso corre, se guida o fren non torce suo amore.

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Onde convenne legge per fren porre; convenne rege aver, che discernesse de la vera cittade almen la torre. (Purg. 16, vv. 94–96) Of some lesser good it first tastes the flavor; there it is deceived and runs after it, if a guide or rein does not turn away its love. Therefore, it was necessary to set the law as a curb; it was necessary to have a king who would discern the tower at least of the true city.

This passage is remarkable because in it, Dante proposes a political solution to an ethical problem. By situating Roman law as a means to rein in the reckless delight inherent in every human soul, he essentially configures it as a tool to be used to shape human nature. In other words, when wielded by the appropriate ruler, Roman law becomes a kind of para-sacrament29 to counter the cupidity inherent in human nature. From his heavenly perch, the emperor introduces himself in Paradiso 6 first in his role as legal reformer, In such an ontology, jurists and their glosses do not appear. Justinian’s speech is significant both for its content and for its form. As has long been noted by scholars, canto VI of the Paradiso is the only one in the entire poem in which but a single character speaks. No one, neither Beatrice, nor the pilgrim, nor the narrator, interrupts the emperor as he talks for what is also the longest speech of the entire Commedia.30 The speech, then, amounts to Dante’s most sustained and ambitious piece of ventriloquism—a feat all the more stunning when we consider the awe with which he always speaks of Justinian. This act of great homage and respect is also a singular act of appropriation, one in which Dante seizes a voice of unassailable authority to make pronouncements to his contemporaries. Cino insisted upon his own formidable analytical abilities as the final word in interpretation.31 With a bluster only slightly less brazen than Dante’s, Cino declares repeatedly within his magnum opus, the Lectura Super Codice (c. 1313), that the proper interpretation of law results from the diligent application of one’s own reason.32 The point here is not so much Cino’s belief in the fallibility of the Corpus as his insistence that it be reinterpreted to keep up with the times. Thus, in the midst of a lecture on a portion of Roman legislation, he crows, “. . . should the doctors and the Glossa, and even Roffredus say it: even if there are a thousand of them, they are all wrong”.33 Intentionally hyperbolic, the statement declares his willingness to disregard the Glossa whenever he deems it incorrect or insufficient, and instead to privilege dialectical analysis which he defines later in the text: “Concerning the readings I shall keep this order: first I shall make divisions, second give an account of the case,

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third offer comparisons, fourth objections, and fifth pose questions”.34 Such a dialectical scheme does more than fail to characterize the Corpus as infallible; it conspicuously prizes reason over authority.35 In spite of their differing perspectives on legal interpretation, then, Dante and Cino present us with an eerie symmetry: both would diminish the intervening juridical tradition, though in profoundly different ways. Dante would reduce, if not ignore, the vast interpretive tradition in favor of an originalist reading; Cino would not entirely dismiss the juridical tradition, but instead insist on opening up Roman law to new and modern avenues of interpretation. Put another way, the former proudly looks to the past for proper meaning, the latter looks confidently to the future, and neither shows himself very willing to acknowledge the hermeneutic tradition that brought him to his place of superior understanding. For all of his self-aggrandizing in the Lectura, Cino occasionally proves most willing to express his indebtedness to the works of his predecessors—at least those he deems worthy. He begins his Lectura with the line “Because I, Cino da Pistoia, find all new things pleasing provided they are useful, I find it beneficial to write here about the doctrines of modern doctors . . .”36 Aware that he is involved in a collaborative attempt at interpretation, he carefully situates himself within it—near the top, to be sure, but engaged with the back and forth of the professional dialogue, none the less. For, in Cino’s approach to the Corpus, Justinian’s words can not be the final word in legal interpretation, for they are the beginning of an ongoing and never-ending process of adapting the ancient laws to contemporary needs.37 Jurists like him were compelled to seek the principles behind the terms used in Roman law in order to apply them to their own world.38 As Walter Ullmann points out, a primary innovation of Commentators like Cino was the development of a doctrine that conceived of legal problems as a coherent whole. That is, they held individual jural precept to be merely the legal expression and enforceable verification of an idea behind the law.39 This shift toward underlying principles was necessary if Roman law was to remain relevant to political life; the world had changed dramatically since Justinian’s initial compilation of laws. The political landscape was far more fragmented, and, especially after the death of Frederick II in 1250, the notion of universal imperial sovereignty in the West, however appealing it was to some, was increasingly ridiculous.40 Much of the Digest, meanwhile, assumed the presence of an omnipotent ruler and explicitly asserted the primacy of his office,41 and medieval jurists—whose profession held that text in such esteem—could not simply ignore this fact.42

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Thus faced with discrepancies between the content of the Digest and political reality, jurists tended toward two modes of response. On the one hand, Neapolitan jurists like Marinus da Caramanico flatly denied the emperor’s universal sovereignty, claiming that the ius gentium trumped any such claim.43 Jurists like Cino, on the other hand, followed the French masters Jacques de Revigny, and, especially, Pierre de Belleperche, who insisted upon the de iure and de facto distinction. That is, while by law the emperor may be dominus mundi, the simple fact of the matter was that his jurisdiction was geographically limited and thus could not behave as such.44 Indeed, Cino employs the de facto/de iure cleavage early on in his Lectura by commenting, It seems to suggest that the Emperor does not rule all people, gathered from the word “who etc.”. But the law elsewhere says that the Emperor is lord of the entire world . . . Moreover the law is hollowed because God from Heaven constituted the Empire . . . Therefore all peoples are under the Emperor, just they are spiritually under the pope. Therefore against. I respond, this word “quos” can mean two things. One way is implicatively, the other restrictively. And according to this I respond that the Emperor is lord of the world de iure: but de facto there are some who resist, by means of making this word restrictive.45 —Cino da Pistoia Lectura (C. I. 1. 1) p. 1 verso, && 2–3.

Despite Cino’s reputation as possibly the ‘staunchest of the imperial lawyers’,46 he consistently qualifies in this way the notion of single world ruler from whom the legitimacy of Roman law is derived. His doctrinal models, moreover, are telling. Neither Jacques de Revigny and Pierre de Belleperche were imperial lawyers. Both were prominent within the Orleanese school, an institution not known for its imperial sympathies; as a Dominican school under the protection of the King of France, the French legal scholars had a tradition of downplaying the necessity of the emperor in validating the laws.47 Instead, they broadened the definition of a “ruler”, following St. Thomas, to “the one who has care of the community”. Therefore, Cino could begin his Lectura of the Code by perfunctorily declaring the emperor as dominus mundi de iure before immediately acknowledging that the de facto political landscape must be treated quite differently. True to his juridical formation, he argues that some peoples are simply unworthy of Roman law, this makes two reasons: first in order that his laws not be illusory among them, because it must not be so . . . and thus from one error would follow another . . . The second reason is, because those, who do not recognize the Empire as its master, are reputed to be vile and unworthy to be bound by its laws.48 —Lectura (C. I. 1. 1) p. 1 verso, && 2–3

Thus, in Cino’s assessment of the question of the emperor’s jurisdiction, those peoples who would resist the emperor (i.e. refuse to obey his

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laws) thereby prove themselves unworthy of having those laws: anyone who would defy laws that are gifts from heaven, he contends, must be too ‘vile’ to receive them.49 Faced with such vile resistance, the emperor must be careful not to diminish his majesty by attempting to enforce his jurisdiction on peoples who would resist it. Now, the question of what role law played in the personal relationship between Dante and Cino poses particular problems. They wrote to one another on matters chiefly concerning love and philosophy, never explicitly about the law.50 When we bring the two figures into contact with one another, perhaps the most explicit point of contact centers around Cino’s status as a jurist. As noted above, Roman law occupies a privileged position in Dante’s post-exile writing, appearing, much as it does in Cino’s works, as a divine gift to humanity: one part of a combination of factors critical for the establishment of a just political order. Justinian’s accomplishment appears in the Convivio, Commedia, and Monarchia as the refinement or perfection of the preceding legal production into a most elevated and elegant example of positive law, a legal system in line with the precepts of natural law. Together with an omnipotent (in mundane affairs, that is) ruler, these laws offer the best hope for curbing humanity’s innate cupidity. To borrow a term from one scholar, Roman law functions in the Commedia as a “para-sacrament” capable of countering the greed so destructive to the political order.51 Despite this centrality of Roman law in Dante’s oeuvre, legal practitioners, those responsible for interpreting and working with Justinian’s laws, occupy a far more vexed place, appearing often as subjects of biting and clever criticism.52 As early as the Convivio, we see professional legal activity portrayed as antithetical to the pursuit of truth, Nè si dee chiamare vero filosofo colui che è amico di sapienza per utilitade, sì come sono li legisti, [li] medici e quasi tutti li religiosi, che non per sapere studiano, ma per acquistare moneta o dignitade; e chi desse loro quello che acquistare intendono, non sovrastarebbero a lo studio. (Conv. 3.11, 10) “Nor should we give the name of true philosopher to anyone who is a friend of wisdom for the sake of utility, as are jurists, physicians, and almost all those belonging to religious orders, who study not in order to gain knowledge but to secure financial rewards or high office; and if anyone were to give them what they seek to gain, they would not persevere in their study.”

Unlike the truth-seeking philosopher, the professional jurist engages with the law as merely a means of acquiring wealth. His guiding principle is greed, the very vice that appears elsewhere in the Convivio as that which is most destructive to justice and order.53

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Dante nevertheless does not simply condemn lawyers for their vices. Instead he demonstrates a deep concern for the impact of these vices, extending his analysis of legal avarice instead to its ramifications on individuals and societies. Considering the problem of jurists coming to the law out of a desire for wealth and influence, Dante disapproves of such pecuniary motivations on philosophical and political grounds, opposing the desire for wealth to the desire for truth, a necessary prerequisite for justice. According to Dante, to be called a true philosopher one must pursue philosophical truth without having ulterior motives. Jurists can not qualify as lovers of truth, then, because of their desire for material compensation. This makes them enemies of real justice, for where philosophy is treated merely as a means to riches or power, truth cannot be valued in and of itself. We should not be surprised, in other words, to find this argument coinciding with Dante’s first specific mention of jurists as a professional group, since his indictment carries with it ethical implications that go beyond a mere attack on the legal profession. The condemnation of jurists in the Convivio is, in reality, a critical part of a larger analysis of desire, the accumulation of wealth, and the spiritual hazard to which these will lead. For Dante, greed, or desire directed to material wealth, is the primary obstacle to an individual’s goal of contentedness, or perfection. Specifically addressing the vice of avarice in the fourth book of the Convivio, Dante argues that only knowledge, the goal of a true philosopher, can lead men to completion by fulfilling their essential properties.54 The perils for those seeking to satisfy their desires by accumulating wealth, on the other hand, are multiple. The first danger comes from the tendency of physical possessions to make a person less complete, always leaving them with a greater desire for more. By Dante’s reasoning, no matter how much humans accumulate,wealth obtained always makes them crave more: Promettono le false traditrici, se bene si guarda, di tòrre ogni sete e ogni mancanza, e aportare ogni saziamento e bastanza; e questo fanno nel principio a ciascuno uomo, questa promessione in certa quantità di loro acrescimento affermando; e poi che quivi sono adunate, in loco di saziamento e di refrigerio danno e recano sete di casso febricante intollerabile; e in loco di bastanza recano nuovo termine, cioè maggiore quantitate a[l] desiderio, e con questa, paura grande [e] sollicitudine sopra l’acquisto . . . (Convivio, 4.12.5) The false traitresses, if one looks closely, promise to take away all thirst and feeling of want and to supply complete satiety and a feeling of sufficiency. This is what they do at first for every man, by guaranteeing the fulfillment of this promise when they have increased to a certain amount; and then when they have been accumulated to this point, instead of satiety and refreshment they produce and instill an intolerable and burning thirst in the breast; and in place of sufficiency

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they set up a new goal: that is, a greater quantity to be desired, and once this has been realized, they instill a great fear and concern for what has been acquired.

Dante assigns to riches this role of traitor because, as he fashions it, riches perpetrate a fraud on those who seek them. They may offer the promise of satisfaction, but instead only create more desire. The individual who seeks wealth will never be content, seeking increasingly larger sums to satiate his desires. This characterization of wealth’s impact on those who seek it forces us to reevaluate Dante’s remarks about jurists, because shortly before this he defines them as a group who studies “per acquistare moneta o dignitade”. We are therefore presented with lawyers as learned professionals whose studies are not only propelled by greed, but men who are also led on by the false promise of satisfaction that this wealth offers.55 The lawyer appears again near the end of the Convivio, this time as the target of a brief but pointed invective that casts him as a opportunist preying upon children. The attack is predicated on the idea that wisdom and good judgment are gifts from God, and as such should be given freely, not sold: Né questo cotale prudente non attende [che altri] li dimandi “Consigliami”, ma proveggendo per lui, sanza richesta colui consiglia: sì come la rosa, che non pur a quelli che va a lei per lo suo odore rende quello, ma eziandio [a] qualunque apresso lei va. (Conv. 4.27.7) Nor does a prudent man such as this wait until someone summons him with the words “Counsel me,” but, making provision for him, without being asked, he counsels him, just as a rose offers its fragrance not only to one who approaches it for this reason but also to whoever passes near to it.56

Not content to let his argument stand on its own merit, Dante creates a hypothetical objection in the form of a protest by a doctor or lawyer: Potrebbe qui dire alcuno medico o legista: “Dunque porterò io lo mio consiglio e darollo eziandio che non mi sia chesto, e della mia arte non averò frutto?” Rispondo, sì come dice nostro Signore: «A grado riceveste, a grado date». (Conv. 4.27.8) Here some doctor or lawyer might say: “Am I then to carry my counsel and offer it even though it has not been asked for, and make no profit from my art?” I reply as our Lord has said: “Freely have you received, freely give.”57, 58

As before, Dante targets lawyers and doctors, whom he deems professionals who pursue knowledge for the sake of material compensation, not truth. But he goes on to narrow his attack to lawyers, Dico dunque, messere lo legista, che quelli consigli che non hanno rispetto alla tua arte e che procedono solo da quel buono senno che Dio ti diede (che è prudenza, della quale si parla), tu non li déi vendere alli figli di Colui che ‘l t’ha dato. Quelli che hanno rispetto all’arte la quale hai comperata, vendere puoi;

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ma non sì che non si convegnano alcuna volta decimare e dare a Dio, cioè a quelli miseri a cui solo lo grado divino è rimasto. (Conv. 4.27.9) I say, therefore, my dear lawyer, that those counsels which are unrelated to your art and which proceed only from the common sense which God has given to you (and this is that prudence of which we are now speaking) you should not sell to the children of him who gave it to you: those that are related to your art, which you have purchased, you may sell, but not such that it is not fitting at times to pay a tithe and make an offering to God (that is, to those unfortunates to whom nothing is left but the gratitude of God).59

Here the honorific title (“messere lo legista”) rings sarcastic, putting into relief the lawyer’s high social status against that of the meek women and children. The invective lends a dramatic depiction of the earlier charge that jurists and physicians, as professionals, exploit knowledge for financial gain, not to pursue more fundamental philosophical truths. Here, however, the jurist is singled out for his elevated social status, his wealth gained by demanding payment from the weakest members of the community to help them procure justice, a dignity to which every human being is entitled. The honorific title “messer” that so caustically contrasts the lawyer’s elevated social status with his pusillanimity appears pointedly in Dante’s correspondence with Cino during their series of lively written exchanges on the philosophy of love. In all, they exchanged ten sonnets with each other, 60 and Dante wrote Cino a long epistle in Latin,61 but all of these neglect to discuss the law, at least directly. Tellingly, when Dante did acknowledge Cino’s status as a jurist in one of their final exchanges, he did so to disparage him, Io mi credea del tutto esser partito da queste nostre rime, messer Cino, ché si conviene omai altro cammino a la mia nave più lungi dal lito: ma perch’i’ ho di voi più volte udito che pigliar vi lasciate a ogni uncino, piacemi di prestare un pocolino a questa penna lo stancato dito. Chi s’innamora sì come voi fate, or qua or là, e sé lega e dissolve, mostra ch’Amor leggermente il saetti. Però, se leggier cor così vi volve, priego che con vertù il correggiate, sì che s’accordi i fatti a’ dolci detti. (Rime CXIV) I thought, messer Cino, that I had quite abandoned this poetry of ours; for now my ship must hold a different course, being further from the shore. But since I have heard more than once that you let yourself be caught on every hook, I feel moved to put my tired fingers briefly to this pen. One who falls in love as you

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do, now here, now there, and both binds and looses himself, shows that Love wounds him but lightly. So, if a fickle heart thus whirls you around, I beg you to correct it with virtue, so that your deeds accord with your sweet words.62

In the sonnet, Dante announces that he had believed that he had moved on to matters beyond his youthful love poetry. He tells Cino to correct his fickle heart.63 The accusation is that Cino is insincere in his treatment of fidelity in love, easily becoming enamored of multiple women (or qua or là, e sé lega e dissolve). Dante then portrays him fickle in the final line, urging him to exercise virtue and restraint, as his writing claims. Further sharpening the castigation is the sonnet’s language, which calls attention to Cino’s social and professional status as a jurist. Despite their previous exchanges in the informal and intimate “tu,” Dante in this final sonnet addresses Cino with the formal voi,” pointedly using the professional title of “messer” as a way of highlighting both his professional standing and the infidelity that comes with it. Labeling Cino from the outset as a legal professional, Dante thereby evokes all of the negative connotations of insincerity and duplicity that come with that role. Far from being a piece of friendly advice, the sonnet is a biting rebuke: an address Messer Cino the jurist, that compromised poet of love. For Dante, any such compromise of principle, whether pertaining to love or the law, amounts to a perversion of the truth, which in turn inevitably leads to social corruption and injustice. Messer Cino’s betrayal of the divine fidelity he owes to love stems, therefore, from a more fundamental willingness to betray divine principle. Put another way, Dante’s rebuke of Cino’s treatment of love originates in the same set of core beliefs that drive his rebuke of jurists in general. His solution in both cases is castigation; and, where castigation fails, dismissal. Within Dante’s ouevre, then, to call jurists “presumptuous” is tantamount to calling them hubristic. Calling on jurists to limit themselves to “the sense of the law,” Dante effectively calls on them to stop interpreting, since interpreting Roman law beyond its literal sense is to expose humanity to mortal peril. Does this mean that we should read the Commedia as a response to an interpretive trend spearheaded by jurists like Dante’s friend and fellow poet, Cino da Pistoia? I think we must—if only because recognizing this line of reasoning in Dante’s corpus allows us to understand why Dante’s writings address not just the issue of authority but also interpretive practice. At the very least, such an approach would explain why Paradiso 6, is the only part of the Divine Comedy in which a single character speaks, uninterrupted, for an entire canto. Indeed, the stakes must be high for Dante, that avowed legal originalist, to resort to ventriloquizing—and, of course, effectively interpreting—the great originator of Roman law, Justinian, himself.

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Notes 1. Kay, Richard, “Roman Law in Dante’s Monarchia,” In Law in Medieval Life and Thought. Ed. by Edward B. King and Susan J. Ridyard, Sewanee, Tennessee: The Press of the University of the South (Sewanee Mediaeval Studies, Volume 5),1990, 268. 2. In 528, Justinian nominated a commission of 10 members, charged with the compilation of a new volume of legislation consisting of constitutions taken from the Gregorian, Ermogenian, and Theodosian codes, as well as the latest imperial constitutions. Known as the Codex Iustinianus (henceforth referred to as the Codex in this article), the completed work was published on 7 April, 529. Whereas the Codex consisted primarily of the actual laws and legislation, the next component in the Corpus was more philosophical in nature. Justinian issued the constitution Deo auctor on 15 December, 530, ordering the creation of the Digest, or Pandectae (henceforth referred to as the Digest in this work). This volume consisted of selections from the works of 18 classical Roman jurists, organized so as to address common questions of law. Apart from ordering them to correspond to the same issue, Justinian and his editors intentionally left these selections in no particular order so that the opinion of none was privileged over the others. Furthermore, the commission carefully chose selections so as to avoid contradictions among them, and compiled them into 50 books, divided into titles, following the ordering of the Codex. The Digest was published on 16 December, 533. As the Digest was being compiled, Justinian ordered composed an elementary treatise on law, entitled Institutes Iustinian Augusti (henceforth referred to as the Institutes in this work). Consisting of four books, the Institutes were to serve as a textbook for students of law. They were published on 21 November, 533. 3. Ascoli, Albert Russell. Dante and the Making of a Modern Author. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 239. 4. Ascoli, Albert Russell. Dante and the Making of a Modern Author. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 238. 5. This volume is all the more impressive when we remember that Italian and Latin terms for that concept appear a grand total of one-hundred twentytwo times in the entire Dantean oeuvre (plus one, if one attributes the letter to Cangrande to Dante. See Ascoli 8–11.) 6. I follow Ascoli’s characterization of auctoritas as “a quality mediating between impersonal sources of power/knowledge and historical persons who put them into play.” Ascoli, 6) 7. Ascoli, Albert Russell. Dante and the Making of a Modern Author. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 246. 8. Canning, Joseph. History of medieval political thought, 300–1450. London: Routledge, 1996, 6. 9. Humfress, Caroline. “Law and Legal Practice in the Age of Justinian.” The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 162. 10. Robert Hollander reminds us that here Dante is quite creative in the narrative he fashions from the historical events. Specifically, he draws attention to the uncomfortable fact that historically, Agapetus came to Constantinople only after Justinians editing of Roman law was largely complete. Whether or not Dante does this intentionally is open to debate: “Agapetus came to Con-

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

26.

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stantinople only after the books were finished, while Dante’s account (vv. 22–24) is quite different. Our poet simply must have a Christian compiler of the laws that were to govern Christian Europe; and so he manages to find (“create” might be the better word) him.” (http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ search_view.php?doc=200053060130&cmd=gotoresult&arg1=1) Prue Shaw, trans., Dante: “Monarchia”. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Barolini, Teodolinda. The Undivine Comedy. Princeton University Press, 1992, 115. De Vulgari Eloquentia 1.6. Found in Barolini, The Undivine Comedy, 115. Steven Botterill, trans., Dante: “De vulgari Eloquentia” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Scott, John A. Understanding Dante. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004, 39. Barolini, Teodolinda. The Undivine Comedy. Princeton University Press, 1992, 116. Barolini further suggests that the verb is “invested with enormous selfconsciousness.” After all, the Commedia itself is a work of art that depicts the state of souls in the afterlife; this is the very sort of knowledge that mortals should not seek. Based on this observations, Barolini reminds us that the only two times Dante uses the verb ‘presumere’, he is referring to himself. Par. 22.25; Par. 33.82). Ascoli, Albert Russell. Dante and the Making of a Modern Author. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 248. Sbriccoli, Mario. L’interpretazione dello statuto: contributo allo studio della funzione dei giuristi nell’età comunale. Milan: A. Giuffrè, 1969, 3. Bellomo, Manlio. The Common Legal Past of Europe: 1000–1800. Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995, 179, 182, 183. Bellomo, Manlio. The Common Legal Past of Europe: 1000–1800. Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995, 182. Bellomo, Manlio. The Common Legal Past of Europe: 1000–1800. Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995, 144. Kay, Richard. “Roman Law in Dante’s Monarchia,” In Law in Medieval Life and Thought. Ed. By Edward B. King and Susan J. Ridyard, Sewanee, Tennessee: The Press of the University of the South (Sewanee Mediaeval Studies, Volume 5), 1990, 260. Bellomo, M. Medioevo edito e inedito. v.II: Scienza del diritto e società medievale. Il cigno Galileo Galilei. (Rome: 1993), 39. While much has been written on this aspect of Dworkin’s theory, his own original account remains among the clearest and most concise. For this, see Law’s Empire, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986. While the entire work addresses legal interpretation, chapters 6 and 7 are particularly focused on the question of integrity. Manlio Bellomo, Medioevo edito e inedito, v. 2 (Rome: Il Cigno Galileo Galilei, 1997), 6. For an exhaustive, yet thoroughly engaging investigation of the professional class of jurists, see Brundage, James A. The Medieval Advocate’s Profession. Law and Historical Review vol. 6, no. 2 (1988). For an equally informative discussion of their public image, see James A. Brundage, Vultures, Whores, and Hypocrites: Images of Lawyers in Medieval Literature. Roman Legal Tradition vol. 1, (2002). Walter Ullmann, “Reflections on Medieval Torture”, in Law and jurisdiction in the Middle Ages. London: Variorum Reprints, 1988, 123.

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27. Manlio Bellomo portrays this reverence for the text particularly well in Bellomo, M. Medioevo edito e inedito v.II: Scienza del diritto e società medievale. Il cigno Galileo Galilei. (Rome: 1993), 39. 28. Calasso, Francesco. Medio evo del diritto. Vol. 1. Varese: Multa Paucis, 1954, 531, 532. 29. Peters, Edward. “The Frowning Pages: Scythians, Garamantes, Florentines, and the Two Laws”. Limits of Thought and Power in Medieval Europe (Variorum Collected Studies Series, 721). Grand Rapids: Ashgate, 2001, 291. 30. Barolini, Teodolinda. The Undivine Comedy. Princeton University Press, 1992, 190. 31. Donald R. Kelly, “Civil Science in the Renaissance: Jurisprudence Italian Style.” The Historical Journal 22.5 (1979), 781. 32. Donald R. Kelly, “Civil Science in the Renaissance: Jurisprudence Italian Style.” The Historical Journal 22.5 (1979), 781. 33. Cynus, Lect. super Cod., IV, 15 unde legitimi etc. “dixerunt doctores et Glossa, et idem Roffredus: at quotquot fuerint, etiamsi mille hoc dixissent, omnes erraverunt.” 34. circa cuius lecturam tenebo hunc ordinem: quia primo dividam, secundum ponam casum, tertio colligam, quarto opponam, quinto quaeram. Cited in Calasso, Medio evo del diritto, I, 571. Translation by Donald R. Kelly, 781. 35. Donald R. Kelly, “Civil Science in the Renaissance: Jurisprudence Italian Style.” The Historical Journal 22.5 (1979), 782. 36. Quia omnia nova placent potissime quae sunt utilitate decora bellissime visum est mihi Cyno Pistoriensi, propter novitates modernorum Doctorumsuper Codice breviter utilia scribere. Lectura Super Codice, Preface). Translation mine. 37. Donald R. Kelly, “Civil Science in the Renaissance: Jurisprudence Italian Style.” The Historical Journal 22.5 (1979), 780. 38. Canning, Joseph P. “Ideas of State in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth-Century Commentators on the Roman Law.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 33 (1983): 2. 39. Walter Ullmann, The Medieval Idea of Law. Methuen & Co. LTD. (London: 1946), 1. 40. Canning, Joseph P. “Ideas of State in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth-Century Commentators on the Roman Law.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 33 (1983): 4. 41. D.14.2.9 42. Moreover, Joseph P. Canning reminds us that the Emperor still carried political weight in parts of Northern Italy, where the signori of independent states such as Florence, Milan, and Perugia still purchased vicariates to legitimize their rule well into the 14th century (Canning, 4). 43. Canning, Joseph P. “Ideas of State in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth-Century Commentators on the Roman Law.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 33 (1983): 5–7. 44. The conflict between Robert of Naples and Henry VII after the coronation of the former at Rome was a watershed in political history, the last time that an emperor attempted to assert in practice universal lordship of the empire. Henry sent an encyclical letter to the heads of state of Europe, announcing his election and strongly implying that his supremacy over all of them as divinely ordained. The responses are telling. Philip of France replied flatly that France, since the time of Christ, had never been subject to another temporal power, and would not submit now. Clement V likewise refused to recognize imperial supremacy, and insisted on papal arbitration to resolve Henry’s dispute

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45.

46. 47. 48.

49.

50. 51. 52.

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with Robert of Naples. Henry declined to recognize the pope’s authority and went it alone, setting about to lay the legal groundwork for his condemnation of Robert as a traitor. On September 12, 1312, he accused Robert of treason, and summoned the king to appear before him within three months. Among the charges were that Robert had supported rebels in Northern Italy during Henry’s journey to Rome, and that his forces had waged war on the emperor at Rome. To lay the legal groundwork for his prosecution of the Neapolitan King, Henry resorted to Roman law, promulgating a pair of laws known as Ad reprimendum and Quoniam nuper est. In the first, he declared that he had the right to try in absentia anyone who committed treason against the Emperor. The second defined specifically who could be called treasonous. Both were promptly incorporated into the Corpus Iuris Civilis at the law schools. Robert was condemned in absentia, and condemned to death. He never presented himself for judgment or punishment, and the matter was resolved abruptly when Henry died on 24 August, 1313. Pennington, Kenneth. The Prince and the Law. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, 168. “. . . Vedetur innui quod Imperator non regit totum populum ut colligitur ex litera ista ‘quos etc.’ Sed lex alibi dicit quod Imperator est totius mundi dominus . . . Praeterea lex cavetur quod Deus de coelo constituit Imperium . . . Ergo temporaliter sub Imperio omnes populi omnesque reges sunt, sicut sub Papa sunt spiritualiter. Ergo contra. Respondeo, litera ista ‘quos’ potest sumi duobus modis. Uno modo implicative . . . Secundo modo restrictive. . . . Et secundum hoc respondeo quod Imperator totius mundi de jure dominus est: sed de facto sunt aliqui qui resistant, propter quod ponit hic istam literam restrictivam,” Translation mine. Walter Ullmann, “The Development of the Medieval Idea of Sovereignty.” Jurisprudence in the Middle Ages. London: Variorum Reprints, 1980, 5. Bruno Paradisi. Studi sul medioevo giuridico. Rome: Tiferno Grafica, 1987, 971, 972. Et secundum hoc respondeo quod Imperator totius mundi de jure dominus est: sed de facto sunt aliqui qui resistant, propter quod ponit hic istam literam restrictivam, et hoc facit duobus rationibus: prima ne suae leges apud illos sint illusoriae, quod esse non debet . . . et sic ex uno errore sequeretur alius. . . . Secunda ratio est, quia illi, qui non recognoscunt Imperatorem suum dominum, reputantur viles et indigni laqueis suae legis innodari. . . . Unde alias dicitur quod Graeci noluerunt tradere leges Romanis, nisi essent digni legibus, et ideo experti sunt eos per signa, sicut refert Glossa. Cino once again turns the French jurist, Pierre de Belleperche, this time referencing his Repetitiones in Aliquot . . . Cod. Leges C.I.1.1), p. 8, &3. Cino makes reference to a legend, oft-repeated among jurists, that the ancient Greeks had first tested the Romans before passing along their laws. See Bellomo, Manlio. Saggio sull’universtita nell’eta del diritto comune. Catania: Giannotta, 1979,15. Peters, Edward. “The Frowning Pages: Scythians, Garamantes, Florentines, and the Two Laws”. Limits of Thought and Power in Medieval Europe (Variorum Collected Studies Series, 721). Grand Rapids: Ashgate, 2001, 301. Peters, Edward. Limits of Thought and Power in Medieval Europe (Variorum Collected Studies Series, 721). Grand Rapids: Ashgate, 2001, 291. The primacy of law and justice in Dante’s thinking has been the subject of many outstanding studies; see especially Richard Kay and Edward Peters. I limit the present work to Dante’s treatment of civil jurists, those figures responsible for interpreting Roman law.

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53. Convivio 4.12.4 54. Convivio, 4.12, Richard H. Lansing, trans., Dante’s “Il Convivio”. New York: Garland, 1990. 55. To be clear, this desire for wealth is not specific to jurists, or to any one professional class. On the contrary, Dante says that this perpetual hunger for more possessions is inherent to the human condition, exhibiting itself from the earliest moments of childhood Conv. 4.12) 56. Lansing translation. 57. Matthew 10:8 58. Lansing translation. 59. Lansing translation. 60. A definitive chronology of the exchanges has yet to be established. 61. The lengthy epistle seems promising for a study such as this, but law and legal interpretation do not appear in it. 62. K. Foster and P. Boyde, trans., Dante: “Rime” in Dante’s Lyric Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967). 63. Scott, John A. Understanding Dante. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004, 96.

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Dante’s Appropriation of Lucan’s Cato and Erichtho PA U L M . C L O G A N

Among the ancient Latin auctores—Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Lucan, and Statius—who were studied in the schools and appropriated in medieval literature, Lucan, who in earlier times was scorned for lack of conforming to humanist ideas of propriety and decorum, in recent years has acquired a genuine admiration and reputation by modern critics. Dante appropriated him in the Commedia and particularly in the Inferno and Purgatorio where he provides historical information with respect to the civil war between Pompey and Caesar (De Belle Vivili) as well as strange mythological characters and material. Dante refers to him as “grand poeta” in Convivio IV, xxviii, 13. The aim of this article is to undertake a reassessment of the character of Cato of Utica episodes and Erichtho episodes in which Dante appropriated Lucan’s Pharsalia, and to affirm the importance of the Latin epic to Dante’s project by focusing on the text. F.M. Ahl was one of the first critics to express true interest in the poem and its aspirations, representing its good qualities in the critical tradition, but he overlooked or ignored the problems in Lucan’s political views. W.R. Johnson avoided a close reading of the poem but exercised the powers of rhetoric to demonstrate the first-rate quality of the work and an enthusiasm for Lucan, “demanding that he be taken seriously on his own terms” (Masters xiii). The work of these two critics was central in initiating a Lucanian restoration.1 It is inappropriate to refer simply to “commentators” on Lucan, for they are found as early as the fourth and fifth centuries. Two sets of glosses on the Phasarlia written before the tenth century are still available to us, and the Commenta Bernensia in the tenth century manuscript in Bern (Bern 370), and Arnulf of Orleans’s2 Glosvle svper Lvcanvm, which was known to Dante, was composed toward the end of the twelfth century.3 Some modern commentators consider Lucan primarily a historian and others a poet as we shall see later, but Arnulf considers the purpose of the Phasaralia to be ethical, as do most medieval commentators. Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 37 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011.

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Arnulf notes that Lucan’s intention is not to teach ethics but to illustrate “worthy models to imitate, who exemplify the four cardinal virtues or the ‘political virtues’.” He is more perceptive than the commentators who, following Servius ranked Lucan as a historian rather than a poet. As he points out in the accessus and later in his glosses Lucan is both; and since poets are said to sing as they are inspired by a revelation of the divine spirit and write metrically, Arnulf considers that Lucan is justified in using the “canto at the start of the poem” (Marti xxxviii). One of Dante’s most notable appropriations of Lucan comes at the end of the Inferno as he and Virgil, refugees from Hell, approach Purgatory. After his bleak and hazardous journey through the Inferno, Dante now invokes Calliope, the leader of the Muses, to accompany his song as he employs the metaphor of the sea voyage both for the journey and act of composition, “For better waters, now . . . / and leaves behind the cruelest of the seas,” referring to his earlier journey through Hell. Turning his gaze back to earth again, he finds a dignified old man, Cato of Utica, standing near him. Cato was a devout Stoic who was known for his strict moral principles. He opposed the ambitions of both Pompey and Caesar, although in 49 b.c. when the civil war began, he supported the efforts of Pompey. After the victory of Caesar at Pharsalia, Cato continued his opposition to Caesar in North Africa by aligning himself with the forces of Metellus Scripio, which were defeated at the battle of Thapsus. As a result, all of Africa, excepting Utica, came under the control of Caesar. Cato refused to submit to Caesar and decided to commit suicide. At the vigil of the suicide, it is claimed, he read Plato’s Phaedo, concerning the immortality of the soul. Dante’s notable regard for the character of Cato is found in earlier writings. He describes Cato in De monarchia (II, 15) as “that most severe author of true liberty,” and in the Convivio (IV, xxviii, 121–213) he notes “what earthly man is more worthy to represent God himself than Cato? Certainly none.” Dante’s understanding and appreciation of Cato is linked to an ancient tradition that he found in Lucan (Inferno IV), who admires Cato’s honesty and sincerity (Pharsalia II, 380–390), and Cicero, in the De Officiis, who praises and sanctions Cato’s suicide. Virgil’s reference to Cato’s suicide suggests that Dante, like Cicero, regarded it not as an act deserving harsh treatment but as emblematic of the Stoic’s devotion to freedom. Tu sai, ché non ti fu per lei amara in Utica la morte, ove lasciasti la vesta ch’al gran dì sarà sì Chiara. (I, 73–75)

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[You know, you found death sweet in Utica For freedom’s sake; there you put off that robe Which will be radiant on the Great Day.]

Cato is viewed by some readers as the continuity of natural virtue with respect to virtue achieved through grace. Erich Auerbach claims that Cato’s love of liberty accounts for his change to “a state of definitive fulfillment, concerned no longer with earthly works of civic virtue or the law, but with . . . the freedom of the immortal soul in the sight of God.”4 Giuseppe Mazzotta sees in Cato’s experiences characteristics of the Christ and claims that Dante’s appropriation of him amounts to “a mimetic representation of the redemptive pattern of history.”5 In early illustrations of the Commedia and in medieval iconography Cato has been compared to Moses with long gray hair and beard with a nimbus on his head and ends his life by suicide in 46 b.c. by order of the emperor. Attempts to sanctify Cato by some Dante critics have considered Cato saved. Mazzotta identifies the four stars that light up Cato’s face as emblems of the restorative grace. These critics suggest that the question of Cato’s salvation touches upon the question of “salvation” of the good pagan and “salvation” outside the Church. Yet Saint Thomas Aquinas would say that such a man violated the natural law and was thus as far as we know excluded from the company of the just. But as far as I know, this is a conclusion from his overall teaching, and so there is no text. Though the implications of verse 75 are not clear, its evidence in favor of Cato’s salvation is unwarranted. He is fixed in his earthly self and the limits of the natural world in which he is an emblem of pietas. Dante’s appropriation of Lucan’s Cato is complex and ambiguous. He is a man of great wisdom and human virtue, a law giver and appropriate guardian of the shores of Purgatory. Modern commentators have been puzzled and disturbed by Lucan’s character of Erictho, the wicked Thessalonian witch and necromancer who can summon dead spirits to accomplish her evil commands (Pharsalia VI, 508–827). Some question her continuity and consistency as a seemingly true literary character. Ahl describes the witch as “a creature on the borderline of plausibility” (1976, 148). Gordon views her as “a figure that refuses to be exorcised” (1987, 231). Johnson regards her as the “first recognizably modern witch in European literature” (1987, 19). Zissos considers her “an undeniably composite figure, developed principally from three existing literary models”: (1) Dira, the Virgilian fury, (2) Lamina, popular image of the night witch, and (3), perhaps most important, as the

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antithetical counterpart to Virgil’s Sibyl. As Rosner notes, Erichtho’s exclusive domain is the realm of the dead. She alone of the “living” knows Hell and its secrets. She lives underground and outside the city. Notably her appearance is one of unnatural paleness, suggesting her intense association with death (248–249). tenet ora profanae foeda situ macies, caeloque ignota sereno terribilis Stygio facies pallore gravatur inpexis onerata comis. (6.515-8)

At the beginning of Canto IX of the Inferno, Dante the Pilgrim becomes afraid because help from Heaven has not appeared. Virgil is obviously worried and to reassure Dante and disguise his own anxiety he tells the Pilgrim that shortly after his own death the wicked Erichtho commanded him to resume mortal shape and to descend to the pit of Hell to raise the soul of a traitor. Dante knew Lucan’s account of the Erichtho episode in the Pharsalia and appropriates it to suggest an important change in relation of the Pilgrim with Virgil whose authority has been called into question.6 Dante’s appropriation of Lucan’s Phasarlia is seen not only in his descriptions of hell in the Inferno, its scenes of cruelty and its grotesque imagery, but also in the roles of the characters of Cato and Erichtho who are modeled on their roles in Lucan’s epic. If Cato is an emblem of pietas, Erichtho is an emblem of nefas. Dante considered Lucan as a major poet and his Erichtho episode conceals his close interpretation and exploitation of the Latin epic.

Notes I am indebted to Mark Musa, ed., Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy: Purgatory, Text and Commentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Charles Singleton, ed., Commedia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970–1975); for the text of Lucan, Abel Bourgery, ed., rev. by Paul Jal, 2 vols. (Paris: “Les Belles Lettres,” 1997); Cristina Bon, “Lucano all’Inferno,” in La Divina foresta: Studi danteschi, ed. Francesco Spera (Naples: M. d’Auria, 2006), 71–104. For medieval commentaries on the Pharsalia, see Violeta de Angelis, “Il Testo di Lucano,” in Dante e Petarca, Seminario Dantesco Internazionale 1, ed. Zygmunt G. Baranski, Società Dantesca Italiana, Quaderno 7 (Florence: Società Dantesca Italiana, 1997), 67–109. Kevin Brownlee, “Dante’s and the Classical Poets,” in The Companion to Dante, ed. Rachel Jacoff (New York: Cambridge University Press), 159–160; Winthrop Wetherbee, The Ancient Flame (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008); A. Zissos, “Silver Muse” (University of Texas Library). 1. See also, R. Pichon, Les sources de Lucan (Paris, 1912); H.J. Rose, “The Witch Scene in Lucan,” Proceedings of the Transactions of the American

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3. 4. 5. 6.

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Philological Association 44 (1913), l–lii; E.J. Kenney, “Nequitiae poeta,” in Ovidiana, ed. N.I. Herescu (Paris, 1958), 201–209; and Cristina Bon, “Lucano all’inferno,” in La Divina foresta: Studi danteschi, ed. Francesco Spera (Naples: M. d’Auria, 2006), 71–104.l-iii; A. Bourgery, “La Géographie dans Lucan,” Rev. de Phil. series 3, vol. 2 (1928), 25–40; M.P.O. Morford, The Poet Lucan (Oxford, 1967), 66–70; W. Fauth, “Die Bedeutung der Nekromanti-Szene in Lucans Pharsalia,” RhM, 1975, l, no. 18, 325–344; L. Baldini Moscadi, “Osservazioni sull’ episodio magico del VI libro della “Farsalia” di Lucano,” Stud. It. Fil. Class. 48 (1976), 140–199; J. Volphilac, “Lucain et l’Ėgypte dans la scène de nécromancie de la Pharsale VI 413-80 à la lumiére des papyri grecs magiques,” REL 56 (1978), 272–288; and R. Gordon, “Lucan’s Erictho,” in Homo Viator: Classical Essays for John Bramble, ed. M. Whitby and P.R. Hardie (Bristol, 1987), 231–241. On the nekuia and Virgil’s underworld scene, see A. Guiillemin, “L’inspiration Virgilienne dans la Pharsale,” REL 29 (1951), 214–227; E. longi, “tre episodi de3l poepoema di Lucano,” in Studi in onore di Gino Funaioli (Rome, 1955), 186–187; L. Paoletti, “Lucano magico e Virgilio,” Atene e Roma 8 (1963), 11–26; M.Tartari Cherson, “Lucano e la tradizione epica Virgilianna: ripresa e contrapposizione nel libro VI del Bellum Civile,” Boll. Stud. Lat., 9 (1979), 25–39; C.A. Martindale, “Lucan’s Nekuia,” in Studi. Lat. Lit. II, ed. C. Deroux, Coll. Latomus, 168 (1980), 367–377; D.C. Feeney, “Stat magni nominis umbra: Lucan on the greatness of Pompeius Magnus,” Classical Quarterly 36 (1986), 239–243; Feeney, “Epic Hero and Epic Fable,” Comparative Literature 38 (1986), 137–158; Feeney, “History and Revelation in Virgil’s underworld,” PCPhS 212 (1986), 1–24; H. Le Bonniec, “Lucain et religion,” in Entretiens Hardt 15 (Lucain) (Geneva, 1970), 161–195; F.M. Ahl, Lucan: An Introduction, Cornell Studies in Classical Philology 39 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976). Fausto Ghisalberti, “Arnolfo d’Orléans, un cultore di Ovidio nelo secolo XII,” Memorie del R. Instituto Lombardo di Scienze e Lettere 24 (1932), 157–234; see also E.H. Alton, “The Medieval Commentators on Ovid’s Fasti,” Hermathena 44 (1926), 124–129. Arnvlfi Avrelianensis Glosyle Svper Lvcanvm, ed. Berthe M. Marti (Rome: American Academy in Rome, Papers and Monographs XVIII, 1958). Auerbach, Dante, Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 7. Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 3–4, 58–68, 170–180, 188–191. See Roberto Danese, “L’anticosmo di Eritto e il capovolgimento dell’Inferno virgilano (Lucano, Pars. 6,333-40).” Atti della Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei: Memorie, ser. 9, vol. 3 (1992), 197–265.

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Alberico di Montecassino, Brevarium de dictamine. Edizione nazionale dei testi mediolatini, 21. Ed. Filippo Bognini. Florence: Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2008. Pp. cc. + 199. index.

The art of writing letters in Latin (ars dictaminis) was a major subject in medieval European schools from the late eleventh to the mid-fifteenth century and literally hundreds of instruction manuals survive in continental libraries. Because antiquity regarded letters as essentially a form of conversation, medieval teachers borrowed what they could from ancient prescriptions for oratory, but on the whole they had to develop their own rules. Although probably he was not alone in his generation to compose manuals providing rules for letter writing, Alberico of Montecassino (ca. 1030–d. 1094–99) wrote the first ones to survive. The Dictaminum radii, probably written about 1085, was published as Flores rhetorici by Mauro Inguanez and Henry M. Willard, Miscellanea cassinese, 14 (Montecassino, 1938). A second manual forms part of a collection of Albertano’s short rhetorical and grammatical works called the Brevarium de dictamine that circulated as a single volume from the first half of the twelfth century. In 1963 Peter-Christian Groll in his two-volume thesis “Das ‘Enchiridion de prosis et de rithmis’ des Alberich von Montecassino und die Anonymi ‘ars dictandi’” (Ph.D. diss., Universität Freiburg, Freiburg im Briesgau), included an edition of the Brevarium based on three manuscripts. Even as he was finishing the dissertation, however, two other fundamental manuscripts of the work were discovered and his death in 1967 delayed a critical edition until now. Filippo Bognini bases his readings on a thorough study of all known manuscripts containing full or partial versions of the work. As Bognini explains in his extensive introduction, he had no archetype with which to work nor have the two subarchetypes (α and β) that he hypothesizes derived from it survived. Of the two extant manuscripts that contain the whole work, one from each tradition, he selected as his base text a descendant from α that is also the oldest manuscript in the corpus:(L) Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 37 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011.

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Sankt-Petersburg (olim Leningrad), Rossiiskaia Natsional’naia Biblioteka (olim Publičnaja Biblioteka im. M.E. Saltykova-Ščedrina), cod. O. v. XVI.3 (sec. XII). Where possible he collated L with other descendants of α and occasionally with those from β. Not only does Bognini give alternative readings from the major manuscripts on each page of text, but a chapter of the Prolegomena (cviii–clxv) provides detailed explanations for his editorial decisions as do the elaborate notes that follow the edition. The first thirteen chapters of the work, referred to as the “amplified Brevarium,” were probably composed between 1077 and 1084. The oldest part of the work, chapters I–VI, to which Alberico’s term brevarium most aptly applies, consists of a two-week course in the ways of achieving verbal elegance by means of manipulating grammatical constructions such as the ablative absolute. Chapters VII–X are dedicated to the composition of letterae formatae (episcopal letters of transfer of clerics to specific churches), and papal and imperial letters. The final chapters (XI–XIII) of this first section return to the concern of the first six by listing “unusual ways of speaking” (inusitat[a]e orationes), proverbs, and vices of speech to be avoided. After a separate chapter on Latin prosody (chapter XIV) and two concerned with grammar, the last brief chapters (XVII–XXI) constitute the dictamen manual proper. Bognini uses Franz Joseph Worstbrock’s critical edition in his “Die Anfänge des mittelalterlichen Ars dictandi” (Frühmittelalterliche Studien 23 (1989): 1–42 [33–37]) as his text for these chapters. Probably written early in 1084, they may have inspired the Dictaminum radii, written about a year later. Both Alberico’s manuals reflect an early stage in the development of ars dictaminis in Italy when letter writing was viewed as part of a broad education in grammar and literature. In fact many of Alberico’s observations would have been unintelligible to readers without a background in pagan and early Christian authors. Bognini best displays his impressive understanding of ancient and medieval culture in his in-depth analysis of the sources for Alberico’s highly referential work (xxxvii–lxxix). By the middle decades of the twelfth century, however, the link between grammar and rhetoric changed decisively. Authors of manuals of ars dictaminis in this period were responding to a growing demand for training in letter writing by simplifying Latin style to make the ars accessible to those with only minimal training in grammar. Bognini grounds his assertion that Alberico of Montecassino was the father of ars dictaminis on the early date of his two manuals, but the issue of Alberico’s precedence is complicated by what is meant by a manual. The prime characteristic of the manual as it developed from the early twelfth century was its separation from the study of rhetoric in general.

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Credit for the separation belongs to Adalberto of Samaria, a layman teaching in Bologna, whose Praecepta dictaminum (written in Bologna between 1112 and 1118) was concerned only with letter-writing to the exclusion of all other aspects of rhetoric. Once that distinction is recognized, I see no objection to Bognini’s claim. In conclusion, the author has given us a superb edition of Alberico’s text, one that sets the highest standards for anyone contemplating editing one of the many manuals of ars dictaminis still unpublished. It has been argued that Bognini’s critical edition of Alberico, extrapolated from the individual testimonies of the work, is an artificial creation. In fact, it could be argued that such an edition ignores the dynamic relationship of the manuscript to the specific environment in which it was produced. Taken to the extreme this position would largely negate the validity of “critical editions” and favor individual editions of multiple manuscripts of the same work dictamen. Francesca Luzzati Lagana chose this alternative for her edition of Mino da Colle’s Epistolae. Helene Wieruszowski had already done extensive research in preparation for editing the work but her death in 1978 prevented her from realizing her goal. Her plan had been to use Seville Biblioteca columbina, 5.5.22 (formerly 10493) containing 400 of Mino’s model letter as her base text. These letters would be collated where possible against those found in five other manuscripts and letters missing from the Seville manuscript would be added in the edition. At her death her notes were deposited in the Istituto Germanico in Rome. Francesa Luzzati Lagana graciously recognizes her debt to Wieruszowski’s work, but she decided to follow a somewhat different line. Decades later dictamen authors appended a collection of letters as illustrations of the rules given in the body of the manuals; by the mid-twelfth century collections of model letters began to circulate independently. Mino’s Epistolae is a mid-thirteenth-century representative of this tradition. Ronald Witt Duke University Daniel Anlezark, ed. and trans. The Old English Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn. AngloSaxon Texts 7. Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2009. Pp. xii + 167.

Daniel Anlezark has produced an edition of the four Old English works presenting dialogues between King Solomon, known in the Bible and thus in later traditions as the wisest of philosophers, and Saturn, who, Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 37 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011.

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according to one strand of Anglo-Saxon tradition, was, like all the Roman gods, originally a human who came to be worshipped as a deity. The four texts are Solomon and Saturn I, a poem of 169 lines that survives in two manuscripts; the Solomon and Saturn Prose Pater Noster Dialogue; the 9-line Solomon and Saturn Poetic Fragment, and Solomon and Saturn II, a poem of 327 lines. All four works are contained in MS Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 422, though Solomon and Saturn I survives there as a fragment containing only its first 93 lines. That poem also survives as a fragment in a second manuscript, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 41, which contains lines 30–169. Since there are significant variant readings in the 64 lines of Solomon and Saturn I shared by the two manuscripts, Anlezark edits them separately. This poem and the prose Dialogue depict a debate the two participants have over the use of the Lord’s Prayer as a powerful charm, while the other two works deal with didactic material of a more general nature. Anlezark provides a facing-page translation of each of these works (including a translation of both versions of lines 30–93 of Solomon and Saturn I) together with a glossary, a lengthy Introduction (57 pages), an extensive commentary on individual lines, a bibliography, a critical apparatus that describes various anomalies in the manuscripts, and an index. One could argue that the translations render the glossary unnecessary, but it is there to provide helpful information, including listing by text and line number each instance of a word among the various works. The Introduction comprises the following sections: 1) The Manuscripts, 2) Language and Meter, 3) Genre, Context and Sources, 4) Structure and Relationships, and 5) Date and Authorship. The third section, as might be expected, is the longest; it contains a grab bag of information about wisdom literature, the use of the Lord’s Prayer, letters and runes, Chaldea, and Solomon’s Temple. Anlezark argues for the influence of Irish continental learning on the works and suggests that the texts were produced in the early tenth century at Glastonbury, where the young Saint Dunstan was active. Anlezark further suggests that the works be read in light of learned riddling tradition. I particularly found interesting his comparison of the Solomon and Saturn material with the riddle competition depicted in the Old Norse Vafthrudnismal, one of the poems of the Elder Edda. There the god Odin enters into a riddle contest with Vafthrudnir, a giant noted for his wisdom (15). Anlezark’s translations are accurate and without literary pretensions—as is perhaps fitting for originals that have never been overly praised for literary worth. Students of Solomon and Saturn I, Solomon and Saturn II, and the Fragment have long relied on the edition of those poems contained in

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Volume 6 of The Anglo-Saxon Records, which was published in 1942 and where they are edited by Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie. Dobbie unfortunately prints the three poems as one continuous poem. Though some Anglo-Saxonists working today have begun to pay attention to the Solomon and Saturn works, interest in them has been sporadic and often shaped by the short introductory treatment of them found in Stanley Greenfield’s A Critical History of Old English Literature and its subsequent revision. Anlezark’s helpful edition should provide direction for future scholars and critics. Robert Boenig Texas A&M University Averroes (Ibn Rushd) of Cordoba, Long Commentary on the De Anima of Aristotle. Translated with an introduction and notes by Richard C. Taylor, with ThérèseAnne Druart, sub-editor. Yale Library of Medieval Philosophy. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. cix + 498.

One guaranteed way to sully a thinker’s significance is to overstate it, but in the case of Averroes/Ibn Rushd (d. 1198) it is not too much to say that he is one of the giants of medieval philosophy. Given this, it is a sad curiosity that his thought—which influenced the philosophical trajectory of the Latin west—“played no detectable part in the development of [the medieval] philosophical tradition in Arabic” (Taylor, xcvi). Still, the suppression of Andalusian philosophy that began late in Averroes’s life did not prevent the translation of his work—including the Long Commentary—into Hebrew and Latin. After a brief period in which his thought was viewed by Christian thinkers as a much-needed corrective to that of Avicenna, the Long Commentary served as the catalyst that sparked the famous controversy surrounding “Latin Averroism.” Its significance was not limited to that controversy, however, and the text continued to be a touchstone for discussions of the intellectual soul in the Christian west through the Renaissance and beyond.1 In the present volume, Richard C. Taylor provides readers with a substantial introduction as well as the first translation into English of the entire Long Commentary. The introduction has four main sections, in the first of which he summarizes Averroes’s “initial,” “middle,” “transitional,” and “final” positions regarding the unicity of the material intellect. The last of these sub-sections situates the doctrine within the Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 37 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011.

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broader philosophical psychology of the commentary. This exposition covers Averroes’s understanding of (a). the relationship between the science of the soul and metaphysics, (b). the senses and internal powers, (c). the material intellect, (d). its relationship with the agent intellect, and (e). the cogitative power in man and the nature of its conjoining to separate intellect. The second main section of the introduction considers Averroes’s major and minor influences and gives context to many of his arguments. Section three looks to the influence of the commentary, focusing on the Latin tradition, but also considering its reception and neglect in Jewish and Arabic thought respectively. The final section discusses the translation itself. Simultaneously thorough and clear, the introduction will prove an invaluable resource for graduate students and those engaged in research concerning Averroes and/or medieval philosophical psychology. The order and method of the Long Commentary follows that of the three books of Aristotle’s text. Averroes is constantly concerned not to deviate from what he considers to be Aristotle’s true intention, and he follows the Stagirite with attention and alacrity. Book One establishes—by means of dialectical engagement with earlier thinkers—the method to be used in the investigation of the soul and the questions that must be answered. Book Two begins to answer these questions, treating of soul and body, vegetation and sensation. Of the three possible endings for Book Two, Averroes chooses the last, causing the order of this text to differ from that of his earlier commentaries. Thus, Book Two includes the discussions of the common sense and the imagination. Book Three begins with the treatment of the intellect and is centered on this discussion. It is here that the core of Averroes’s doctrine of the eternal, separate material and agent intellects is to be found, and it is here that his ability as both commentator and philosopher are unquestioningly displayed. Translating from the most recent edition of the Latin text, Taylor includes in his notes extended citations from corresponding Arabic fragments—with English translations—wherever textual differences arise. The translation is literal so as to communicate the text as it was known to the Latin world. As such, a certain degree of cumbersomeness is unavoidable. This is compensated for by the rich notes, which provide necessary background information and clear paraphrases of elusive arguments. All told, the volume is a landmark contribution to scholarship on Averroes, and a necessary acquisition for graduate level philosophical and theological libraries. Though philosophical investigation was suppressed amongst his own, Averroes’s thought lived on in translations taken up and read

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in the Christian west. The present translation, along with the impetus given to Catholic philosophers and theologians by the encyclical Fides et Ratio, seems to indicate that this trend will continue. But what of philosophical thought in the Arabic tradition? The various responses to Pope Benedict’s Regensburg Address certainly raise the question, and it remains to be seen whether Averroes’s philosophical thought will remain an export commodity.

Note 1. The classical Thomistic tradition maintained unbroken dialogue with Averroes regarding the positions found in this commentary. See, for example, from the late fifteenth to early sixteenth centuries, Cardinal Cajetan’s In De Ente et Essentia, Q. VIII, n.74 and, from the seventeenth century, John of Saint Thomas’ Cursus Philosophicus Thomisticus, P.IV, Q.IV, Art.1 (the second difficulty).

Philip Neri Reese, O.P. Dominican House of Studies, Washington, DC Lisa Kaaren Bailey, Christianity’s Quiet Success: The Eusebius Gallicanus Sermon Collection and the Power of the Church in Late Antique Gaul. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Pp. x + 278.

The Eusebius Gallicanus sermon collection, ed. Fr. Glorie, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, was composed by various writers for various purposes in the fifth century and compiled into a collection in the sixth. The picture they present of late antiquity in transition to a Christian church in a position of true power in the West has not been much studied because of vexing questions of authorship, plagiarism, date, and also because of the towering presence of Caesarius of Arles as writer of sermons. The present excellent study does a great deal to remedy this neglect, and throws welcome light on the seventy-six sermons, which are found scattered in a large number of MSS down to the fifteenth century. Many follow the liturgical year, commemorations of saints and martyrs, theological issues, ecclesiastical occasions such as the burial of a bishop, and other subjects. Ten sermons are addressed to monks. The tenor is not exegetical, but seeks to shape Christian behavior. This pastoral task, the gentle work of parish clergy engaging with their congregations over Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 37 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011.

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long stretches of time, and using such resources as this model collection of sermons for their own place and time, accounts for the “quiet success” of the Christian church in Gaul. After a helpful survey of preaching in late antique Gaul, with its emphasis on clarity, sound moral exhortation, and doctrinal orthodoxy, Bailey turns to the collection itself, named “Eusebius Gallicanus” by a seventeenth-century editor because of the recurrence of the name Eusebius Episcopus in medieval MSS. Stemming seemingly from southeast Gaul, the collection is not an ex nihilo creation but its compiler puts together many elements from earlier sermons. The collection’s pastoral style reveals clearly the aspirations and strategies of the fifth-century church there, and what elements of these continued to be useful in the sixth and later centuries. Three chapters present the goals of the collection: building community, explaining the faith, and dealing with sin. Bailey’s tactic of disentangling these three major goals of the collection is most rewarding. The cult of local saints and the ensuing civic imagery went far to create and strengthen a community around its bishop. The absence of polarizing notions of good and bad people, sheep and goats, is noteworthy. The community being forged is one of independent people, exhorted to harmony and consensus, actively participating in their salvation, informed and shaped by their clerical leaders, but basically on their own responsibility for their actions. Explanation of the faith had to be kept under control. But the dangers of semi-pelagianism in Gaul at this time were likely slight moderations of Augustine’s own, and pastoral works are not position pieces in theological debate. Bailey does well not to view the theological contents of the sermons as clearly on one side or the other of a theological divide. By treating certain matters of faith as givens, and believed by all Christians, the preacher could readily win assent; controversy was not explored. Likewise, the “rhetoric of paradox” left certain limits on human understanding of divine matters. In dealing with the ongoing headache of sin, the Eusebian preachers usually stressed the undramatic ongoing private penance for ordinary sins, which would remain inevitable, with an eye on Christian community and the forgiveness of God, showing their flock how to expiate sin, while still presenting their personal responsibility for sin and a God who was not going to be overlooking anything on judgment day. In this the writers were very much of a piece with the rest of Western Christendom. The considerable influence of Augustine is skillfully presented, and also the preachers’ modification of it into their own

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pastoral strategy, stressing more working on personal responsibility and the expiation of sin in this life. In addition to sermons to the laity, there are ten sermons to monks, here examined not in aid of contrasting lay and monastic forms of Christian community, but to show that there were substantial and ongoing connections between monastic and lay communities in late antique Gaul. The Eusebian sermons to monks stress the same importance of harmony and consensus as do those to laity. Leadership stressing pastoral, responsive, and exemplary models pertains to both the monastic and the secular cleric. Though the setting of the sermons ad monachos was probably Lérins, Bailey persuasively argues that the astonishingly large number of monk-bishops from Lérins in fifth- and sixth-century Gaul did not represent an ascetic “invasion” of the monastery’s values into lay community, which continued to stress the model of equality within the Christian family. The epilogue samples some of the 447 surviving MSS of these sermons, assessing shifting popularity of various sermons, physical evidence of use and repair, plundering from their bulk for other sermons, especially in the Carolingian period, and their final eclipse as the mendicant orders rose. Welcome attention has been drawn to a body of texts that went far in assuring that the community addressed was united behind a commonly shared set of beliefs, was not sabotaged by unrepentant sin, and was not addressed in authoritarian manner by clergy bent on power over their communicants. This style of pastoral care was one of great adaptability and evident success, now drawn to our attention by this careful study. Charles Witke University of Michigan Tiffany Beechy, The Poetics of Old English. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2010. Pp. viii + 142.

The Old English literary corpus shows a considerable amount of “standard” poetry, but “[also] presents a spectrum rather than a single standard of metrical regularity; there is . . . a diversity of poetic phenomena across [it]”: Tiffany Beechy’s challenging goal is to demonstrate that “Old English did not recognize a distinction of prose and poetry, rendering instead all of its documents in an artificed literary language not qualitatively far from what we could call poetry” (2). According to this assumption, Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 37 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011.

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Old English highlights the way the message is composed, the “poetics” of it, the meaning being encoded poetically, that is by virtue of formal devices of the language. Like all orality-based cultures, Anglo-Saxons may have considered poetry as their unmarked literary language. Beechy’s analysis is based on the Jakobsonian linguistics, on oral theory, on philological and metrical studies of single texts or corpora, and especially investigates significant sections of Old English literature, that is, the translations of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae, the vernacular homilies, and the Anglo-Saxon laws, charms, and riddles. The final chapter focuses on instances of “extraordinary poetics” in traditional verse. Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae was originally a prosimetrum— a mix of prose and verse; there are two extant Old English translations of it, the Alfredian prose version and the so-called Meters of Boethius. The Alfredian translation shows lexical and rhetorical solutions such as doublets, repetitions, and the tendency to figure in personal rather than abstract relations, which are clearly tied to the oral-traditional style. In the preface to this version—Beechy underlines—the translator does not conceptually distinguish between prose and poetry, the distinction being only between spell (the message that has been translated) and leoð (the way it has been worked in the target language) (chapter 1). Vernacular homilies appear to be a genre that renders a message originally encoded in Latin through typical tools of the Anglo-Saxon literary culture: in the context of the church, his performance setting, the priest assumed several traditional social roles, including that of spellboda, the “messenger” or “reciter of important speech” (i.e., of the Gospel). Through a detailed analysis of passages of different texts, Beechy aims to demonstrate that Old English homilies show complex metrical patterns, and the use of a range of stylistic and rhetorical techniques that are characteristic also for classical Old English poetry. A single homily transmitted in multiple versions (cf. Vercelli Book 10 and Blickling 9) shares formal features with late Old English verse (chapter 2). The same poetic richness characterizes the Anglo-Saxon law collections, which present syntactic parallelism, alliteration, assonance, and a particularly evocative, formulaic, and proverb-like language, in what Beechy defines as “legal poetics.” The use of a ludic language is most evident in the corpus of the Old English charms and riddles. Especially the charms, which are nonsensical and non-referential, get their meaning through sound effects, while the riddles typically function as “language at play” (chapter 3).

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Chapter 4 analyzes select poetry texts: Christ I, lines 104–108, the Æcerbot charm, and the so-called Nine Herbs Charm are grouped together as containing a praise toward natural objects; all of them show recurring sounds, chiasmus, and unconventional alliteration. The elegiac poem Deor in particular builds not only on a regular metrical and stylistic pattern, but also on a complex strophic construction with conceptual and syntactic parallels and internal echoes, such as the final refrain of each strophe. What Beechy finally manages to prove is the presence of a dense degree of poetics, and a great attention to the way the message is composed (a legacy of oral culture) in Old English, which does not allow to draw drastic theoretical conclusions about the lack of distinction of poetry and prose. The Poetics of Old English offers an accurate stylistic and metrical study of the corpus examined; it is therefore worth reading thoroughly, in order for readers to discover and savor the poetic element of Old English beyond the boundaries of strict genre categorizations. Valeria Di Clemente Cevolani Cento, Ferrara David J. Collins, Reforming Saints: Saints’ Lives and Their Authors in Germany, 1470– 1530. Oxford Studies in Historical Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xv + 227.

Saints’ lives were commonly composed in the Middle Ages, and we would not really associate this genre with the humanist movement. Nevertheless, as David J. Collins discovered, many humanists spent a considerable time and energy to this very task, which requires a bit of explanation. The present book tries to do just that, and in the process opens new perspectives toward the late Middle Ages and the early modern age, though the author limits himself to the period until the 1520s when Martin Luther radically broke all ties with Rome. As recent scholarship has clearly demonstrated, humanism was as much confessionalized as virtually every other intellectual group north of the Alps. Little wonder that Collins could thus identify forty Latin lives published during that time focusing on holy men and women who had lived in Germany in the past. The authors made certain attempts to classicize their texts, but otherwise they relied heavily on the medieval tradition and did not Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 37 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011.

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truly vary from their models. But we are not simply dealing with a second tier of humanists involved in the production of saints’ lives. Major names such as Alexander Hegius (1435–1498), Sigismund Meisterlin (ca. 1435–1479), Jakob Wimpheling (1450–1528), Ortwinus Gratius (ca. 1480–1542), and Hieronymus Emser (1477–1527) are mentioned here, and Collins demonstrates through a close reading how much these authors actually succeeded in creating the same kind of texts but used the classicizing Latin characteristic of humanism. Many times the emphasis rests more closely on the bishops’ administrative duties, their political roles, their struggles against worldly authorities, and their achievements in missionary activities. Other new concerns were to cast those bishops as reformers of their church. This in turn often facilitated the projection of idealized church leaders who could easily be regarded as models for the worldly rulers. In the case of Meisterlin’s Vita S. Sebaldi from 1484, the author outlines more clearly than elsewhere in his book where the differences to the medieval sources rested. First, Meisterlin critically resolved the differences between the various sources and the vita; second, he deemphasized the international setting, focusing more on the local relevance; third, he reduced the miracle accounts; and fourth, he outlined more scriptural parallels. In a subsequent subchapter Collins discusses in greater detail the work by Albert von Bonstetten (ca. 1442–ca. 1504) who created many vitae. This allows him to proceed to the larger question of what those humanists intended to achieve, offering the insight that they hoped to create a sense of Germany’s glorious past already in the early and high Middle Ages. This tendency found its perhaps best representative in Conrad Celtis (1459–1508) who along with Eneas Piccolomini aimed for the development of chorography, which means the glorification of specific spaces or regions (in contrast to geography). Another good example is the life of Saint Bruno by Peter Blomevenna of Leiden (1466–1536), which created a textual base for the idealization of Cologne. Collins also examines the contributions by Joannes Cincinnius (ca. 1485–1555), before he turns, in the last chapter, to vitae representative of Switzerland, where the veneration of the Holy Hermit Nicholaus served well for the chorographic purposes pursued by the local humanists, such as Henry Gundelfingen (1445–1490) and Henry Wölflin (1470–1534). In this region we can even detect proto-nationalist sentiments formulated by the humanists in their saints’ lives. Although at face value many humanist authors of vitae seem to have been simply devout writers, Collins can uncover a range of other

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motives for their writings, which have much to do with local pride, patriotic feelings, political interests, and ideological purposes. The religious past proved to be highly useful for those humanists because with these vitae they could demonstrate their learnedness in dealing with the sources, and because they could bring back to life major figures who then served as role models for the fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury audiences. The volume concludes with an extensive apparatus, a select bibliography (Why select? Would it not have been better to collate all bibliographical information here and thin out the apparatus to avoid duplication?), and a most welcome index. The structure of this book does not make it really easy to read. Many biographical data in this review I had to search for elsewhere, and the account does not flow clearly enough. More concrete contrasts of medieval sources and humanist vitae would have been helpful. Nevertheless, overall, this is a convincing and innovative study of great significance for historians, literary historians, and religious scholars. Albrecht Classen University of Arizona 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: Yale University Press, 2008. Pp. xiv + 416, 200 color and 10 black and white 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 coffee table book, albeit a scholarly one. Its textual side-boxes 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 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 Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 37 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011.

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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, or 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 found within the mélange 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 from 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 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 Saint Denis (109). There is

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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 multi-confessional 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 multi-cultural 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 mid-1260s 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 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

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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 lens? 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-edge 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 which 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 40–43 ignores the antiJewish 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 brother 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 mid-thirteenth century and afterward, in the expulsion of Muslims from the lands or their semi-enserfment in the Crown of Aragon, in the frequent 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.

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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 UCLA Sten Ebbesen, Topics in Latin Philosophy from the 12th–14th Centuries: Collected Essays of Sten Ebbesen, Volume 2. Farnham, England and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. 243.

If John Deely is correct in identifying semiotics as a crucial field for understanding modern and post-modern consciousness, then medievalists will not be the only scholars in philosophy or intellectual history to welcome a second volume of the collected essays of Sten Ebbesen, professor at the University of Copenhagen and Fellow of the Royal Danish Academy. The present volume, which follows Greek-Latin Philosophical Interaction: Collected Essays of Sten Ebbesen, Volume 1, contains a series of essays that explores semiotics in the Middle Ages. Ebbesen’s treatment of logic from early supposition theory to the nominalism of Jean Buridian supplies a useful tool for understanding the development of signification into the modern era. Ebbesen’s first essay sets the stage for the rest of this collection. He shows what it means to say the medievals believed words were signs and that this philosophical belief gives rise to different philosophical problems. Specifically, he points out that a correspondence theory of truth demands a certain precision in determining the objects signified by particular words and that the use of substantive adjectives raises questions about defining the thing specified. He establishes how Anselm of Canterbury begins to address these problems by distinguishing between words as meaning and referencing. This distinction constitutes the starting point for the development of supposition theory. Ebbesen shows how the medievals of the early twelfth century developed Anselm’s thought on words used referentially not only to lay down specific rules for determining the truth value of important theological propositions but also to answer sophisms. Ebbesen then makes a well-supported case Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 37 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011.

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to show that supposition theory declined rather early and that it was overshadowed by thirteenth century modistic theory until its revival in the fourteenth century by Ockham and Buridian. In the next five essays, Ebbesen treats of twelfth-century problems of logic. These essays are broad in their scope covering topics such as the origin of British logic and the semantics of the Trinity. Ebbesen finishes his treatment of the twelfth century with an essay entitled “Porretaneans on Propositions” that treats of the fundamental reality accessible to humans and its necessary effects on human expression. Not only historians of philosophy and logicians will find much to interest them in this first set of essays; theologians interested in the relationship between medieval logic and theology, and philosophers interested in epistemological questions also will benefit. The seventh essay of the volume, “Albert (the Great?)’s Companion to the Organon,” confronts the charges of Roger Bacon and Karl von Prantl against the philosophy of the early Dominican universalist, Albert the Great. Although these thinkers criticize the whole of Albert’s corpus, Ebbesen considers the charges specifically as they relate to Albert’s logic. Admitting that Albert made advances in other fields, Ebbesen shows the dependence of Albert’s logic on fellow Dominican, Robert Kilwardby, and so argues that Albert’s logical writings are more works of compilation than of original composition. The 1980 article of Jeremiah M.G. Hackett, “The Attitude of Roger Bacon to the Scientia of Albertus Magnus,”1 is still worth consulting for an overview of the particular charges raised against Albert by Bacon. The eighth essay, “Concrete Accidental Terms: Late ThirteenthCentury Debates about Problems Relating to Such Terms as ‘Album’,” identifies the catalyst for the development of different modist philosophies. The author exhibits the difficulty that arises in using words that identify accidents such as “white” and “whiteness.” Ebbesen asserts that late thirteenth-century thinkers were concerned with how “whiteness” points to the substance in which it inheres and how “white” has a unitary meaning. Through this study, the author also brings to light the close connection between the logical considerations of the thirteenth century and fundamental questions of epistemology. Ebbesen then treats of the thought of Boethius of Dacia and Radulphus Brito on scientia and metaphysics. The book concludes with an essay on proof according to Jean Buridian. Ebbesen considers both Buridian’s alteration of Aristotle’s requirements for science as well as Buridian’s treatment of the relationship between faith and reason. Ashgate Studies in Medieval Philosophy has produced a handsome volume in Topics in Latin Philosophy from the 12th-14th Centuries. The pro-

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duction value coupled with the author’s erudition, lucid writing, and occasional witticisms make this volume an excellent tool for the student of logic, epistemology, or theology. The topics treated by the essays provide a keen insight into the medieval use of logic and the relationship of the art of thinking to various branches of philosophy and theology. While the text may be too advanced for most undergraduates, graduate programs and libraries require Ebbesen’s text.

Note 1. In Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays. ed. James A. Weisheipl (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980), 53–72.

Justin Marie Brophy, O.P. Dominican House of Studies, Washington, DC Robert Fossier, The Axe and the Oath: Ordinary Life in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Pp. xii + 384.

A historian of rare distinction and accomplishments, Robert Fossier’s works have long illuminated diverse aspects of rural life. His books on the subject have always included vignettes and information that vividly guide the reader to the quotidian, to the ebb and tide of daily life, and to the people at the bottom of the social ladder. In his The Axe and the Oath (a far more felicitous title than the original French), Fossier seeks to present a capacious view of what he describes as “ordinary life.” The book, written as the author openly acknowledges for the general public and not for scholars, rests on some important premises—interestingly enough listed in his conclusion—for which Fossier has sought to provide examples and answers throughout most of the book. These premises, or “preoccupations” as he calls them, are as follow: 1) Fossier’s assertion that “man” is not superior to other species. Emphasizing man’s inability “to master nature” or to its “ignorance of the animal world,” Fossier describes the vulnerability of our species in la longue durée of climatic and ecological time. 2) His second “preoccupation” is to re-emphasize his long standing position—already clearly articulated in many of his previous books—that the history of the Middle Ages is not a real history if its only focus is on universities, kings, clergy, nobility, or the cultural artifacts of the elite, while neglecting nine-tenths of the population: those who did not read or write and who toiled endlessly to support Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 37 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011.

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those on top. 3) Fossier also raises the question as to whether medieval “man” was similar or different from us today. While I readily may agree with the first two of his “preoccupations,” I am less sure of where I may locate myself in relation to his last point. Drawing from numerous sources (never acknowledged in the book) and from his long experience as a historian of rural life, Fossier provides a lively account of what it may have meant to be alive in that long period we call the Middle Ages. Divided into seven long chapters, with each chapter subdivided into small sections that function almost as standalone essays, The Axe and the Oath’s two initial chapters focus on “man.” They range over topics related to humans’ life cycle: from birth to death, illness, eating, taste, human sexuality, human relations, the household, the family, and work among many other themes thickly discussed in these early chapters. Chapter 3 explores the world of nature and the relationship of humans to natural events, rural activities, and the forest, while chapter 4 provides a narrative of the not always easy relationship between men and animals. In the second part of the book, “Man in Himself” (which is also the title of chapter 5), Fossier examines man’s relation to the social orders, honor, and power, while in chapter 6, Fossier’s main concern is man’s relation to knowledge. Finally, chapter 7, entitled “And the Soul,” addresses medieval’s rejection of dualism, questions of sin, salvation, and the life after. The book is sprinkled with revealing asides, powerful insights into obscure and hitherto unexplored topics, charming anecdotes, and stories. It is a portrait of everyday life painted with a wide brush. Detailed examples, when we have them, often come from the world of the powerful or are overwhelmed by generalizations. But these generalizations work in providing a composite portrait of what living in the Middle Ages may have been like. Culinary preferences, the role of mouths and hands provide fascinating insights into the tenor of daily life. Information such as the fact that there were no pockets in everyday clothing until the late Middle Ages is rendered in a truly fascinating fashion. His remarkable and engaging discussion on measurement and what numbers meant for medieval people and his debunking of the didactic nature of medieval art are not only beguiling accounts but also provide important information to lay readers as well as to specialists. So is the section on the trial of animals. I will shamelessly incorporate a great deal of these small gems into my lectures from now on, for these are the types of knowledge that students most remember about the past. In that sense, this is a book that ought to be read by all. To the general public, it will offer a different and novel take on what life in the Middle Ages may have been like. For specialists, it may help illuminate aspects of that history to which we

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have had limited or no access until now. Undergraduates will love this book. And that, I fear, is part of the problem. This book, as Fossier himself points out in several disarming asides, will also generate a good number of complaints from professional historians. It would be perhaps ungenerous to pick up small details and point to mistakes here and there. There are very few books indeed in the history of scholarship that do not contain errors of fact, small mistakes, and the like. Some of them are found here. But I would rather focus on some general issues with which I am sure others will be concerned as well. First, as enchanting as his descriptions of the details of ordinary life are, the question remains as to how well these accounts reflect the lived experience of medieval men and women? Are his comments on birth, abortion, children’s toys, and the like the same for all social classes, the same for all periods of medieval history, the same for all geographical locations in the West? The answers to these questions are even more complicated by the fact that his samples are often gathered from learned sources. As Ginzburg has cautioned us in his introduction to the life of Menocchio, the sources that allow us to see “popular” culture are the same sources that intend to erase that culture. How can we access the life of ordinary men and women unless it is through the eyes of those who wrote? In that sense, the latter sections of the book are almost exclusively dedicated to those who read and wrote, those in power, those who asserted the unyielding empire of acquired knowledge and physical violence. There is little in the final sections of the book about “ordinary lives,” but a great deal about the one-tenth of the population that Fossier so extraneously argues are not representative of the real Middle Ages. Second, this is a book with a definite northern or French bias. It is a book about Christian Europe in the Middle Ages. Muslims or even Jews seldom make it into the narrative; yet significant portions of the medieval West were under the rule of Islam for most of the Middle Ages. Mediterranean Europe on the whole gets shortchanged, so does the northern “periphery.” I thought we had long moved from this vision of medieval history from the center to a more expansive, inclusive, and nuanced geographical awareness of the medieval past. And then there are the casual but, nonetheless, disturbing remarks, such as: “the brutal expansion of Islam,” (27) or when discussing suicide: “Islam in our own time furnishes incessant and bloody examples of this” (138). Brutal, I would ask, in comparison to what? The benign Crusades? And I do not think that ancient Romans, Greeks, Japanese, as well as many modern people (including myself) would agree with his contention that suicide is “always an admission of defeat . . . an expression of self disgust” (138). There is also a great deal of essentializing and not just about Islam.

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When he argues that men fear women, that “man did not understand her,” we enter into a territory where there is certain to be disagreement. In that same vein, his off-the-cuff dismissal of some scholars’ emphasis on the seigneurial or feudal system, on the “feudal revolution,” or on the violent and predatory nature of lordship—described brilliantly by Thomas Bisson in a recent book—feels almost a kind of idealization of the Middle Ages that is not fully in accord with the evidence. Third, there is a continuous running of two important tropes throughout the book. One is the incessant polemic against the modern world, against texting, e-mail, and so on. Although I am guilty sometimes of such critique myself: “Do our contemporaries speak with no rhyme or reason? Do they read less and less?” It may be so, but the reality is that “ordinary people” today read whereas the ordinary people then did not. Fossier tells us in his conclusion that he wrote this book because he felt like saying all of this. It is indeed his right, but the condemnation of the present or of the errors of non-identified “traditional historiographies” gives this book a polemical feel that is not always in accord with the profound erudition of the author, nor with his passionate desire to tell a story as yet untold in this manner. Finally, are we like medieval men and women? Fossier himself explains how we see today things no longer through the filter of Christianity, how time was compressed in the Middle Ages, so our sense of time is different from that of medieval people. Biologically, in our brain structure and our sexual lives we may be the same, but, as Geertz taught us, we live within “webs of significance” that makes us different. Context makes all the difference. If we were to be transported into the Middle Ages, that would be alien to us and we would not understand it as the people of that period did. In that respect, Fossier’s impressive efforts, in spite of my disagreements and critiques, offer us an approximation to that world or, more accurately, to some representations of a world long lost to us. Teofilo F. Ruiz UCLA Deborah Howard and Laura Moretti, Sound and Space in Renaissance Venice: Architecture, Music, Acoustics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Pp. 368.

In L’antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica (Venice, 1555), music theorist and composer Nicola Vicentino describes the essence of the musical work with an analogy to architecture: Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 37 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011.

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The most important foundation a composer must have in mind is this: he should consider what he plans to build his composition on, in keeping with the words . . . The foundation of this building is the selection of a tone or mode suitable to the words or to another idea. On that foundation, then, he will use his judgment to measure well and to draw over this good foundation the lines of the fourths and fifths of the chosen mode, which lines are the columns that support the building of the composition and its boundaries.1

Vicentino, like another prominent theorist of the sixteenth century, Gioseffo Zarlino, was a student of Adrian Willaert, maestro di cappella at San Marco in Venice from 1527 to 1562. While architectural analogies in Renaissance music theory are by no means scarce, Vicentino and Zarlino may have been particularly aware of the interconnectedness of the two arts through their experiences with Willaert in the doge’s chapel in the 1530s and 1540s. For although Willaert left no verbal architectural references, his introduction of the technique of coro spezzato, or split choir, into San Marco added an integral spatial—indeed, architectural—element to his sacred music, and might also have led to the construction of the two singing galleries on opposite sides of the chancel in the church itself. This type of potential cross-fertilization between architecture and music is precisely what the new study by Deborah Howard and Laura Moretti sets out to investigate. Sound and Space in Renaissance Venice: Architecture, Music, Acoustics is a novel exploration of the acoustic environments of several sacred spaces from sixteenth-century Venice, applying our knowledge of architecture and music of the time to the rigorous technical analysis of building acoustics. As the authors state, “the aim of this book is to rewrite the aural and visual dimensions of worship and ritual in Renaissance Venice” (1) by shedding light on possible influences of acoustic issues on the buildings of such figures as Jacopo Sansovino and Andrea Palladio. To gather their data, Howard and Moretti embarked on a week-long series of choral experiments with the choir of St. John’s College, directed by David Hill, in April 2007. The twelve buildings studied included a representation of five types of churches—ducal chapel, two island monasteries, three Mendicant friaries, three parish churches, and three state hospitals—as well as of specific architectural features (raised choir gallery, timber ceiling, Gothic rib vaults, and so on). The sound experiments included vocal music (ranging in forces from plainchant to fifteen-part polyphony), organ solo, and spoken voice, which was evaluated using a combination of objective (acoustic measurements with technological equipment) and subjective (audience and performer questionnaires) data. In addition, the experiments considered a variety of different performer–listener configurations within each space in order to judge, for example, how a performance from the choirstalls would sound to a listener

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in the nave versus a listener also in the choirstalls, or how a performance from the chancel would sound to these same listeners. The results are informative and thought provoking, adding not only “a new aural dimension to the architectural history of Renaissance Venice” (14), but also a new architectural dimension to the city’s musical history. The format of the book is rather formulaic, with a chapter devoted to each of the five basic church types. For each church the authors provide a general summary of the history of the building (including, where applicable, its religious order and its function), followed by a discussion of the architectural and acoustic properties of each individual space— nave, chancel, choir, chapels, and so forth. Despite the highly technical nature of the study, the treatment of the results in each chapter is well attuned to the interdisciplinary reader, while the weighty experimental data is usefully presented in the appendices in the forms of charts, graphs, and prose, providing a rich resource for future studies regarding architectural and musical choices in these Venetian buildings. The example of San Marco (chapter 1) illustrates well the questions that the authors confront, with its long musical history stretching back at least to the early Trecento, and as the place where two prominent innovators, Willaert and Sansovino, worked side by side. Around 1530, the ailing doge, Andrea Gritti, moved his seat from the pulpit outside the rood screen to inside the chancel, bringing “a radical change in the ritual use of various spaces” (38). The position of the choir(s) at San Marco in the sixteenth century has been a much debated issue: one account (by Willaert’s student Zarlino) sustains that the two parts of the coro spezzato were divided spatially, while another attests that they were grouped together in the large pulpit formerly occupied by the doge. Based on their acoustic tests, the authors suggest that Sansovino’s plans for a second singing gallery in the 1540s, opposite the first gallery in the chancel, were likely an afterthought designed expressly to enhance the effectiveness of Willaert’s music for split choir. This assertion is bolstered by the experimental results: the performance of coro spezzato using the two choir galleries yielded optimal sound quality and textual clarity, especially for a listener in the chancel (like the doge). Other arrangements—with the choir in the pulpit or with the listener in the nave—yielded less satisfactory results. As explained, “the chancel behaves as a church-within-achurch, allowing far better listening conditions than those experienced elsewhere in San Marco” (41). In other words, if Zarlino’s testimony is accurate, the doge and his guests (now in the chancel) had the best seats in the house on account of Willaert’s and Sansovino’s developments. At the same time, it perhaps should be acknowledged that the acoustic problems in the nave—in San Marco, but even more so in the larger

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churches—might have been overcome with certain measures, such as those outlined by Willaert’s other student at San Marco, Vicentino: In churches and other big, spacious places, music composed for four voices makes a small sound, even when there are many singers per part. Because it is necessary to make a large sound in such places, and for the sake of variety, you may compose Masses, psalms, dialogues, and other works to be played with various instruments mingled with the voices. For an even bigger sound, you can also compose for three choirs.2

Vicentino’s statement highlights the potentially ad hoc nature of church performances of the time—something he may have learned from Willaert—and it would be interesting to see just what added forces would be required to achieve optimal sound quality and textual clarity in the nave (for example). These possibilities were, of course, beyond the scope of this study, and such variability would have made objective comparisons of the data between churches a statistical nightmare. The study was not without its own challenges of an ad hoc nature— challenges that would best have been avoided to ensure the true and consistent collection of data. These included, for instance, the guaranteed encounter of restoration work, in this case in the chancel of San Giuliano, which not only prevented the use of the area for testing, but also meant that “heavy canvas drapes . . . protecting the restoration work” (153) affected the sound characteristics of the church as a whole. A similar problem was encountered in San Martino, where cloth wall hangings for Easter exacerbated the small amount of reverberation in the nave of the small parish church. In San Francesco della Vigna only fifteen male singers performed from the wooden choir stalls that accommodated forty-six, and only twelve performed in the retro-choir of San Giorgio Maggiore, where forty-eight monks were known to have performed. In the Frari, the performers were not even allowed to sit in the available 124 stalls due to recent restoration, leaving one to wonder how the carved wooden stalls might have influenced sound projection. These difficulties were clearly unavoidable, and their potential effects are openly acknowledged. What is much more important than any shortcomings, however, are the results and approaches of the study and the compelling questions and opportunities that they open for future inquiry. For instance, most music performers have probably experienced that a particular venue responds distinctively not only to certain ranges of frequencies, but sometimes even to specific pitches. Through analyses of frequency spectra, the authors consider differences in decay times between high and low frequencies, demonstrating, for example, that “high frequencies (or high notes) are more strongly dampened in the larger volume” (233) of bigger churches. Could a more focused scrutiny of

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frequency spectra shed light on idiosyncratic behaviors of specific pitches within these spaces to demonstrate how architecture might even have influenced decisions of pitch-level in composition and performance? Even more, could this favorable resonance of low frequencies in large churches explain, for instance, Willaert’s marked preference for low vocal ranges in his sacred music of his celebrated Musica nova (1559), or the decision to put the chant (cantus firmus) in a certain vocal part in a polyphonic work? Acoustic experiments of this type might also provide insight into questions of performance practice, such as tempo: could the reverberation time in a building have demanded a certain minimum threshold of time between vocal entries in order to maintain textual clarity? One might also (when possible) take the format and size of the music books used by an individual church into account as a way to judge the placement and positioning of the choir. Thus, were the singers likely to be huddled around a single choir book, or were they freer to disperse, each holding a separate printed partbook? In addition to illuminating new dimensions of the churches of Renaissance Venice, this study presents the means by which to look further into questions such as these. For while the central hypothesis of the book (“that both architects and musicians in Renaissance Venice—informed by theory, tradition and practical experience—knew more about acoustics than has previously been recognised” [xiii]) is something that many have surmised, Sound and Space takes a major and admirable step toward systematically reinforcing it.

Notes 1. Vicentino, L’antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica (Rome: A. Barre, 1555), ch. 15; translated in Ancient Music Adapted to Modern Practice, trans. Maria Rika Maniates (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 148. 2. Ibid., 268.

Seth J. Coluzzi Brandeis University Hugh Magennis and Mary Swan, eds. A Companion to Ælfric. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Pp. xvi + 466.

Brill has of late been issuing a number of high quality “companion” volumes that should interest medievalists and early modern specialists. Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 37 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011.

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Hugh Magennis and Mary Swan have edited a substantial volume for Brill’s Companion to the Christian Tradition Series, A Companion to Ælfric, which looks at that Anglo-Saxon monk and abbot from every imaginable angle. Anglo-Saxonists and historians of the early medieval church should find the book valuable, for the individual contributors offer much in the way of insightful analysis. A “companion volume” can mean different things, however, and prospective readers should be aware that this book’s primary aim is not to summarize past scholarship. As the editors put it at the book’s outset, “[R]ather than a systematic summary and overview of the state of research on its topic, it offers a set of fresh contributions which, though taking their starting points from the current research context, break new ground” (1). Though the editors’ self-congratulatory tone here and in the well-worn phrase they apply to their book’s content, “cutting-edge research” (1), might for some strike the wrong note, they have nevertheless produced a book that both furthers our knowledge of Ælfric and suggests areas of subsequent analysis. The book contains too many individual contributions to summarize in the brief length of this review, but a list of the individual titles should provide a good idea of what A Companion to Ælfric has to offer. Hugh Magennis surveys the field of “Ælfric Scholarship,” while Joyce Hill concentrates on what is known about Ælfric’s biography in “Ælfric: His Life and Works.” Christopher A. Jones situates Ælfric in the monastic revival of the tenth century in his “Ælfric and the Limits of ‘Benedictine Reform’.” In “Ælfric, Language and Winchester,” Mechthild Gretsch analyzes what Ælfric learned about language and style during his early years at Winchester. Malcolm R. Godden addresses Ælfric’s engagement with the Old English translations produced a century earlier during the reign of King Alfred in “Ælfric and the Alfredian Precedents.” In “Ælfric’s Lay Patrons,” Catherine Cubitt summarizes what can be known about the two noblemen, Æthelweard and his son Æthelmær, whose patronage aided Ælfric in his career and for whom he produced some of his most important work. Thomas N. Hall in “Ælfric as Pedagogue” surveys what we can learn from Ælfric’s “classroom” pieces, the Grammar, the Glossary, the Colloquy, and De temporibus anni. Robert K. Upchurch’s “Catechetic Homiletics: Ælfric’s Preaching and Teaching during Lent” demonstrates that Ælfric’s skill as a teacher animates his work as a preacher. Mary Swan concentrates on how Ælfric fashions an authoritative reformist persona in “Identity and Ideology in Ælfric’s Prefaces.” Clare A. Lees focuses on Ælfric’s Englishness in her chapter “In Ælfric’s Words: Conversion, Vigilance and the Nation in Ælfric’s Life of Gregory the Great.” In “Ælfric’s Schemes and Tropes: Amplificatio and the Portrayal of Persecutors,” Gabriella Corono analyzes

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Ælfric’s rhetoric. Kathleen Davis argues for Ælfric’s fusion of apocalyptic salvation history with his own sense of self in her “Boredom, Brevity and Last Things: Ælfric’s Style and the Politics of Time.” Jonathan Wilcox employs manuscript evidence in “The Use of Ælfric’s Homilies: MSS Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 85 and 86 in the Field” to argue that Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies were intended for a non-elite audience in a parish setting. Aaron J. Kleist’s “Assembling Ælfric: Reconstructing the Rationale behind Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Compilations” examines the principles behind the gathering together of works by Ælfric in late Anglo-Saxon manuscript compilations. Finally, Elaine Treharne examines Ælfric’s reception during the three centuries after his death in “Making Their Presence Felt: Readers of Ælfric, c. 1050–1350.” As one can tell from this roster, A Companion to Ælfric follows a basic and useful life/works/impact order, but the individual chapters offer rich detail that is anything but basic. The quality of the work—from established and emerging scholars alike—is high, and there is much that one can learn from the book. Robert Boenig Texas A&M University Dana M. Oswald, Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature. Gender in the Middle Ages 5. Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010. Pp. 236.

Halfway through the introduction to her monograph Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature, Dana M. Oswald picks up J. J. Cohen’s famous tenet that “the monster always escapes” and claims that “a better formulation might be ‘the monster always returns’” (13). While Oswald uses her revision of Cohen’s thesis to elaborate on her own concept of the monstrous, her wordplay may be equally applied to medieval studies, for in the last twenty years the monster has been returning continuously in works such as J. J. Cohen’s Of Giants, David Williams’s Deformed Discourse, Caroline Walker Bynum’s Metamorphosis and Identity, Andrew Orchard’s Pride and Prodigies, and Mary Campbell’s The Witness and the Other World,1 which have interpreted monsters from the vantage points of identity formation, the relation between self and other, center and margin, orientalism, and taxonomy. To these, Oswald adds readings of The Wonders of the East, Beowulf, Mandeville’s Travels, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, and Sir Gowther, which relate the monstrous to gender, sex, and sexuality, especially to sexual, reproductive bodies. Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 37 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011.

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When monsters like the Donestre, Grendel’s mother, the giant of Mount Saint Michel, and the semi-demonic Gowther make a return in Oswald’s monograph, they do so in a strongly gender-oriented context informed by Freudian, Lacanian, Butlerian, but also Derridean theories. Her readings are particularly based on the notion of erasure and the trace: monsters, especially overtly sexual ones, are so upsetting that they are erased from the text, but remain as a trace. The individual chapters map a general change in the depiction of monsters and their sexualized bodies from Old to Middle English literature: in the former, monsters are scarce, have immutable monstrous bodies, and live in realms distant from civilized communities; in the latter, they feature in abundance, have mutable bodies, and can live either close to or in human communities, sometimes even undetected. These different cultural-historical paradigms are reflected in different ways of erasing the monstrous. In her discussion of The Wonders of the East, Oswald focuses on the genitalia of the monsters painted in the different manuscripts, and shows that these are either “never drawn,” removed, or revised; in Beowulf, erasure is done through the dismemberment of Grendel’s hypermasculine body and Beowulf’s revisions when retelling his fight against Grendel’s uncanny mother. In the Middle English texts, monsters occupy a much more precarious position, as they can transform or pass as human. Hence, the monstrous women in Mandeville’s Travels are threatening because they may circulate as reproductive bodies and infiltrate human communities. Male monsters suffer different fates: whereas the all-too-virile giant of Mount Saint Michel in the Alliterative Morte Arthure can only be erased by Arthur’s killing him in a double castration, Sir Gowther’s monstrous body sheds its demonic nature once transformed by God, a form of erasure that makes him part of the human community. Oswald’s approach is often unabashedly psychoanalytical; in the chapter on Beowulf, for instance, she gives unsurprising phallic readings of Grendel’s severed arm and head, and the various swords used in Beowulf’s fight with Grendel’s mother; in her interpretation of the Alliterative Morte Arthure she claims that Arthur’s killing the giant with a small knife “shows the audience the extent of his phallus” (179). Whether one has minor or more significant reservations concerning such interpretations depends on one’s predilections: while some will certainly find her psychoanalytical approach elucidating, others might find it lacking in subtlety. This reviewer prefers Oswald’s less theory-ridden readings, for example her erudite discussions of Beowulf’s different versions of the fight against Grendel’s mother, and especially her elaborate and astute comparative analyses of the monster illustrations in the various manuscripts of The Wonders of the East.

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Oswald’s academic prose is clear and lucid, but needlessly redundant, as she frequently reiterates her main findings, especially at the end of individual chapters. The volume is well edited (spelling, punctuation, and layout), and contains a useful index to names and key words. (Genuine mistakes are few, but include the inconsistent use of double and single quotation marks for book and journal articles, while Ovid’s Metamorphoses are reduced to a mere singular [118].) Of special value are the black and white reproductions of illustrations from the various versions of The Wonders of the East, as they make for easy reference and interact well with Oswald’s detailed readings. Monsters, Gender and Sexuality is recommended for scholars interested in the Middle Ages, teratology, and gender studies, with the caveat that Oswald’s readings work better when they focus on the texts rather than the theory.

Note 1. J. J. Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages, Medieval Cultures, 17 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); David Williams, Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996); Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001); Mary Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988); Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript (Cambridge: Brewer, 1995).

Maik Goth Ruhr University, Bochum Ladies, Whores, and Holy Women: A Sourcebook in Courtly, Religious, and Urban Cultures of Late Medieval Germany. Introductions, translations, and notes by Ann Marie Rasmussen and Sarah Westphal-Wihl. Medieval German Texts in Bilingual Editions. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010. Pp. vii + 155.

This most pragmatic book series, Medieval German Texts in Bilingual Editions, makes available, in the original medieval German and in English translation, important texts that provide great materials for teaching premodern German literature. Ann Marie Rasmussen and Sarah WestphalWihl have compiled seven fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts that are supposed to provide good insight into the broad gender debate determining that period. As the title of the collection indicates, these texts reflect three major roles open to medieval women, apart from being wives of Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 37 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011.

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farmers or burghers: being married to a nobleman, entering a monastery, or turning to prostitution. To what extent prostitution really played such a big role cannot yet be fully determined, although several scholars have already dedicated some attention to this issue (mentioned here are Ruth Mazo Karras, Common Women, 1996; Peter Schuster, Das Frauenhaus, 1992; Beate Schuster, Die freien Frauen, 1995; but surprisingly not the classical study by Leah Otis-Cour, Prostitution in Medieval Society, 1985). It does not become clear to what extent this anthology illuminates the role of ladies, and we also do not really have representative texts of holy women. Prostitution, however, plays a big role in this work. The first text, a short verse narrative, consists of a highly satirical dialogue between a priest and a prostitute who convinces him that her profession satisfies all expectations of the Church, making her into a virtuous lady. The second text, the oldest in this anthology, dating from the late fourteenth century (hence, why not in the first position?), Dis ist von der bichte tochter, or Sister Catherine, combines mystical thoughts— most likely borrowed from Meister Eckhart—with sermon literature. The third selection offers an example of a young woman talking with a spiritual leader, who well might be Meister Eckhart (Schwester Katrei), but it is by far not the only text from this group of “free thinkers,” often accused of heresy (the translation is borrowed from the one created by Elvira Borgstädt, 1986). Fittingly, this chapter also contains the text Meister Eckharts Tochter. Most interestingly, the fourth chapter offers the catalog of books in the possession of the noblewoman Elisabeth von Volkenstorff from Upper Austria from the first half of the fifteenth century, followed by a contemporary text with rhymed couplets about a mother who instructs her daughter in the art of being a prostitute—certainly a highly satirical text (here in two versions) composed by a male poet who wanted to ridicule women. The slim volume concludes with the Nuremberg law regulating the city’s brothels during the fifteenth century. Each text is accompanied by thorough introductions and a short bibliography. The translations are well done and meet modern standards. The only question that I have pertains to the selection of texts and hence the almost complete absence of texts that were actually composed by women. I myself have made numerous attempts to fill that lacuna through editions (1999, 2002), an English translation (2004), and a textbook (2000) for the academic classroom, none of which have been considered here. The criteria that guided Rasmussen and WestphalWihl are limited to the issue of the gender debate, but this is also given a somewhat short shrift ultimately because true female voices are not considered here (those in chapter 3 do not pursue gender-specific issues), while the exchanges between man and women always prove to be

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entirely fictional and, in reality, totally one-sided, reflecting deep-seated misogyny. In fact, the text selection predominantly reflects male perceptions of women, mostly through sarcastic and satirical lenses, but this was the basic standard in medieval literature at large. I assume that Rasmussen and Westphal-Wihl are familiar with the relevant women’s literature (they refer, for instance, to Elisabeth von NassauSaarbrücken in the context of Elisabeth von Volkenstroff’s catalog of her books), but they wanted to expose their student readers to heretofore mostly ignored or little understood texts in light of the gender debate. In this regard they have partially succeeded with their publication, even though there is no clear sense how that debate might have taken place. The introductions to each text are well written, even though at times the bibliographies could have been fleshed out a little more. Unfortunately, there is no index. I would have strongly recommended to provide more insights into the complexities of late medieval songbooks where gender issues are discussed in much more controversial terms than we can learn from the present selection. Its greatest strength, however, irrespective of the specific contents, consists of the novelty of these texts, which have heretofore been mostly unknown to non-Germanist medievalists. Albrecht Classen University of Arizona Silver, Larry and Elizabeth Wyckoff, eds. Grand Scale: Monumental Prints in the Age of Dürer and Titian. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Pp. 176, 62 b/w + 45 color illus. + 2 gatefolds.

Prints from early modern Europe are often thought of today as small objects, encountered pasted into books or tucked away inside folders. This publication is a fascinating reminder of a very different yet less frequently encountered mode of printmaking: large-scale images. Such prints were often made up of composite sheets, their technical and sometimes imaginative requirements exceeding the dimensions offered by the wood blocks, metal plates, and printing presses utilized to create singlesheet images. Published to accompany an exhibition of large-scale prints staged at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College, the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the catalog is structured as a series of thematic essays, followed by high-quality illustrations of each of the forty-seven works included in the exhibition. While these are accompanied simply by captions rather Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 37 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011.

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than by detailed catalog entries, a number of the artworks are discussed at some length in the essays. Inevitably, others receive little treatment, and in those cases the reader must use the high-quality reproductions in the catalog as a jumping-off point for further exploration. Due to the restrictions of the printed page, the reader cannot fully appreciate the size and therefore the physical and graphic impact of these prints in the manner that visitors to the exhibition might. Nonetheless, excellent color illustrations reveal many subtle details and shades within these black and white prints, and several gatefolds allow an unusually close and accurate consideration of several long sequences of imagery. One very minor issue will make the catalog slightly harder for scholars to cite from: the figure numbers restart in each individual essay, demanding extra information to distinguish which figure 3, for example, belongs to which essay. Grand Scale demonstrates that a great variety of visual themes—both secular and religious—were treated in large-scale images, with some of the more significant including processions, topographical studies, and battles. But alongside such images full of many figures, there are also slightly less busy images that we might normally expect to see on a smaller scale, like a 1586 Sacrifice of Isaac by Andrea Andreani after Domenico Beccafumi, a Stag Hunt of c. 1506 by Lucas Cranach the Elder, a 1525 Adam and Eve by Hans Burgkmair the Elder, and an extraordinarily spatially dynamic Wedding of Cupid and Psyche of 1587 by Hendrick Goltzius after Bartholomaeus Spranger, to note only a few examples. As Larry Silver and Elizabeth Wyckoff explain in their introduction, the genre of the large print has not received close treatment since the 1976 German exhibition Risenholzschnitte. As the title indicates, that exhibition was focused on woodcuts, whereas this new project broadens out to include etchings and engravings. Silver and Wyckoff stress that prints on this scale could be a less expensive form of wall decoration than paintings or tapestries, and that large-scale prints were therefore physically handled in ways that made their survival unlikely, especially in comparison to small prints carefully displayed in portfolios and bound volumes. They also emphasize the role of artistic exchange across Europe, primarily Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries. Larry Silver’s essay, the most wide-ranging of the volume, considers the theme of processions and triumphs in some detail across southern and northern examples. These images packed in many figures and could celebrate the classical world, biblical history, or modern-day rulers like Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. Maximilian used the new medium of print for his own self-presentation, as Silver demonstrates in a particularly detailed analysis of the Triumphal Procession worked on by artists including Hans Burgkmair the Elder, Hans Springinklee, and Albrecht Dürer. Concluding with a consideration of satirical

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processions that emerged in the Reformation period, Silver analyzes an extraordinary range of imagery. Suzanne Boorsch offers a broader introduction to early Italian printmaking, emphasizing that Venice and then Rome dominated print production in the sixteenth century. Presenting the 1500 View of Venice—designed by Jacobo de’ Barbari and printed by Venice-based Nuremberger Anton Kolb—as emblematic of the development of the large print, Boorsch also argues convincingly that topographical views and especially maps need to be better accounted for in histories of printmaking. In a further focus on Italy, Lilian Armstrong’s close reading of the 1504 Venetian Triumph of Caesar (reproduced as a gatefold image), and her argument for Benedetto Bordon as the designer and Jacob of Strasbourg as the cutter, will be useful for more specialized readers. The essay also includes a broader contextual survey of triumphal imagery in book illustrations in Venice and northern Italy, drawing connections between large composite images and cycles inside books and reminding readers of the variety of print media. Alison Stewart provides an intriguing reading of the use of large prints as wallpaper, and focuses upon the erotic imagery in Nuremberg artist Sebald Beham’s c. 1520–25 Wallpaper with Nymphs and Satyrs. Reminding the reader of the physical spaces in which such images would have been displayed, Stewart recounts her own research process of recreating the larger pattern of the wallpaper through the use of multiple scale copies pieced together. As she observes, the larger pattern that emerges—based on the forms of male and female genitalia—is only visible in the larger, multi-sheet pattern, and is therefore effectively lost to modern audiences who must make do with a smaller, reduced version of the intended effect. Stewart’s discussion is nicely complemented by the final essay: Stephen Goddard’s examination of modular printing; that is, sheets printed with multiple blocks or plates. A hallmark of this catalog is the way that it insistently presents the reader with unexpected examples of the very physical nature of the printmaking process and the objects produced, alongside careful accounts of the historical circumstances under which the images were made and the details of their iconography. Collectively, the catalog proposes that large-scale, composite prints were more varied in imagery, material production, and use than viewers and readers might have imagined. The reader of the catalog alone misses out on the opportunity to be convinced by the objects on display at the exhibition, but nonetheless must surely be persuaded by this wide-ranging, carefully argued, and beautifully presented publication. Jennifer Spinks The University of Melbourne

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Books Received

Ali, Samer. Arabic Literary Salons in the Islamic Middle Ages; Poetry, Public Performance and the Presentation of the Past. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Pp. 312. $32.00. Anlezark, Daniel, ed. and trans. The Old English Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn. (AngloSaxon Texts, 7.) Rochester, N.Y.: Boydel and Brewer, 2009. Pp. xii, 167, $95.00. Appleby, John C., and Paul Dalton, eds. Outlaws in Medieval and Early Modern England: Crime, Government and Society, c.1060–c. 1600. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. xi, 184. $99.95. Bailey, Lisa K. Christianity’s Quiet Success: The Eusebius Gallicanus Sermon Collection and the Power of the Church in Late Antique Gaul. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Pp. 288. $34.00. Baldwin, John. Paris, 1200. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2008. Pp. 289. $24.95 (paper). Beechy, Tiffany. The Poetics of Old English. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2010. Pp. 152. $89.95. Bembo, Pietro. History of Venice, 3: Books IX–XII, ed. and trans. Robert W. Ulery Jr. I Tatti Renaissance Library, 37. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. Pp. xi, 396; I map. $29.95. Bernard, G.W. Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions. New Haven: Yale University Press. Pp. 256. $30.00. Bison, Thomas N. The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Pp. 677. $24.95 (paper). Booton, Diane. Manuscripts, Market and the Transition to Print in Late Medieval Brittany. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2010. Pp. 490. $144.95. Bowron, Edgar P., ed., and Essays by Michael Clarke and Andrew Butterfield. Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Painting: Masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Pp.108 +50 color illustrations. $29.95. Brown, Cynthia J. The Queen’s Library: Image-Making at the Court of Brittany, 1477–1514. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Pp. 384. $79.95. Campbell, Kirsty. The Call to Read: Reginald Pecock’s Books and Textual Communities. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Pp. 328. $38.00 (paper). Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Lisbeth, Jack Soultanian, and Richard Y. Taylor. Italian Medieval Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Cloisters. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Pp. 368, 328 illustrations, 287 color plates. $75.00. Ćurčić, Slobodan. Architecture in the Balkans: From Diocletian to Süleyman the Magnificent. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Pp. 912, with 600 b/w +100 color illustrations. $85.00.

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Books Received

de Maria, Blake. Becoming Venetian: Immigrants and the Arts in Early Modern Venice. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Pp. 256, 140 b/w + 60 color illustrations. $65.00. Dickerson III, C. D. Raw Painting: The Butcher’s Shop by Annibale Carracci. New Haven: Yale University Presss. Pp. 100, 2 b/w +59 color illustrations. $16.95 (paper). Fletcher, Christopher. Richard II. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. $45.00. Flori, Jean. Chroniqueurs et propagandists: Introduction critique aux sources de la Première croisade. Genève: Droz, 2010. Pp. 353. Fossier, Robert. The Axe and the Oath: Ordinary Life in the Middle Ages. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Pp. 384. $35.00. Franklin, Carmela V. Material Restoration: A Fragment from Eleventh-Century Echternachle in a Nineteenth-Century Parisian Codex. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010. Pp. xvi + 242. €60.00. Harmless, S.J., William. Augustine in His Own Words. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. $34.95 (paper). King, Edmund. King Stepphen. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Pp. 384. $55.00. Oswald, Dana M. Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature: A Gendered Reading of Monsters and the Monstrous Body in Medieval Literature. York: Boydell Press, 2010. Pp. 236. $95.00. Parish, Helen. Clerical Celibacy in the West: c. 1100–1700. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2010. Pp. 294. $112.46. Partridge, Loren. Art of Renaissance, 1400–1600. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Pp. 256 + 204 illustrations. $65.00 (paper). Pomata, Gianna, ed. and trans. The True Medicine: Oliva Sabuco de Nantes Barrera. Toronto: CRRS, 2010. Pp. 267. $24.50 (paper). Rasmussen, Ann Marie, and Sarah Westphal-Wihl. Ladies, Whores, and Holy Women: A Sourcebook in Courtly, Religious, and Urban Cultures of Late Medieval Germany. Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University Press, 2010. Pp. 155. Rigby, Stephen H. Wisdom and Chivalry: Chaucer’s Knights’ Tale and Medieval Political Theory. Medieval and Renaissance Authors and Texts 4. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Pp. 329. €169.00. Scully, Terence, trans. Du fait de cuisine: On Cookery of Master Chiquart (1420). Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval Renaissance Studies, 2010. Pp. 327. $70.00. Smith, Lesley, The Glossa Ordinaria: The Making of a Medieval Bible Commentary. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Trachtenberg, Marvin. Building-in-Time: From Giotto to Alberti and Modern Oblivion. New Haven: Yale University Press. Pp. 978, 120 color illustrations. $65.00. Warren, Nancy B. The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1355–1700. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Pp. 352. $36.00

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