Medievalia et Humanistica, No. 40: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Culture: New Series (Volume 40) (Medievalia et Humanistica Series, 40) 9781442243002, 9781442243019, 1442243007

Table of contents :
Contents
Editorial Note
Manuscript Submission Guidelines
Articles for Future Volumes
India Perceived through the Eyes of Sixteenth-Century Readers: Ludovico de Varthema’s Bestseller on the Early Modern Book Markets—A Narrative Landmark of the Emerging Positive Evaluation of curiositas (Together with a Study of Balthasar Sprenger’s Travelogue on India)
The Image of Judaism in Nicholas of Cusa’s Writings
Some Remarks on the Hymn to Light of Dracontius (Laudes Dei 1,115–28)
“Even Children and the Uneducated Know Them”: The Medieval Trojan Legends in Dante’s Commedia
The Art of Clerkly Love: Drouart la Vache Translates Andreas Capellanus
Review Notices

Citation preview

MEDIEVALIA ET HUMANISTICA

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M ED I E VA L IA E T H U MA N ISTICA Editors Reinhold F. Glei (articles) and Wolfgang Polleichtner (reviews) with the editorial assistance of Nina Tomaszewski Ruhr-Universität Bochum E DITORIA L BOA RD

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David Bevington University of Chicago

Peter Dembowski University of Chicago

Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski University of Pittsburgh

Yasmin Haskell University of Western Australia, Perth

Robert Boenig Texas A & M University

David Lines University of Warwick

Daniel Bornstein Washington University, St. Louis

Richard Marsden University of Nottingham

Christopher S. Celenza Johns Hopkins University

Adriano Prosperi Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa

Albrecht Classen University of Arizona

Francesco Stella Università di Siena

Jacques Dalarun Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes, Paris

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 40

EDITED BY R E I N H O L D F. G L E I ( A RT I C L E S ) AND WOLFGANG POLLEICHTNER (REVIEWS) W I T H T H E E D I T O R I A L A S S I S TA N C E O F NINA TOMASZEWSKI

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

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Published by Rowman & Littlefield A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB, United Kingdom Copyright © 2015 by The Medieval and Renaissance Society, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available 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: 978-1-4422-4300-2 eISBN: 978-1-4422-4301-9 Library of Congress (8108)

™ 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. Printed in the United States of America

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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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India Perceived through the Eyes of Sixteenth-Century Readers: Ludovico de Varthema’s Bestseller on the Early Modern Book Markets—A Narrative Landmark of the Emerging Positive Evaluation of curiositas (Together with a Study of Balthasar Sprenger’s Travelogue on India) Albrecht Classen The Image of Judaism in Nicholas of Cusa’s Writings Görge K. Hasselhoff

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Some Remarks on the Hymn to Light of Dracontius (Laudes Dei 1,115–28) Lorenzo Nosarti

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“Even Children and the Uneducated Know Them”: The Medieval Trojan Legends in Dante’s Commedia Valentina Prosperi

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The Art of Clerkly Love: Drouart la Vache Translates Andreas Capellanus Lucas Wood

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Review Notices Burns, E. Jane, and McCracken, Peggy, eds., From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (Luuk Houwen)

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Contents

Ferrer, Vicent, Quaestio de Unitate Universalis. ‫מאמר נכבד כבולל‬ (Ma’amar nikhbad ba-kolel). Latin Text and Medieval Hebrew Version with Catalan and English Translations. Edited by Alexander Fidora and Mauro Zonta in collaboration with Josep Batalla and Robert D. Hughes (Ryan Szpiech) Fuchs, Franz, ed., Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften in der Zeit von Philipp Melanchthon: Akten des gemeinsam mit dem Cauchy-Forum-Nürnberg e.V. am 12./13. November 2010 veranstalteten Symposions in Nürnberg (Reinhold F. Glei) Glück, Helmut, Mark Häberlein, and Konrad Schröder, Mehrsprachigkeit in der frühen Neuzeit. Die Reichsstädte Augsburg und Nürnberg vom 15. bis ins frühe 19. Jahrhundert. Unter Mitarbeit von Magdalena Bayreuther, Amelie Ellinger, Nadine Hecht, Johannes Staudenmaier, und Judith Walter (Niklas Holzberg)

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Kent, Francis W. (†), Princely Citizen: Lorenzo de’ Medici and Renaissance Florence. Edited by Carolyn James (Christoph Pieper)

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Marenbon, John, Abelard in Four Dimensions: A Twelfth-Century Philosopher in His Context and Ours (Knut Martin Stünkel)

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Santing, Catrien, Barbara Baert, and Anita Traninger, eds., Disembodied Heads in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Maik Goth)

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Schulte, Jörg, Jan Kochanowski und die europäische Renaissance, Acht Studien (Matylda Obryk)

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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 from a variety of disciplines, and it has given attention to new directions in medieval and 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 in the sections titled “Manuscript Submission Guidelines” and “Articles for Future Volumes.” Articles in English may be submitted to editor Reinhold F. Glei or to any member of the editorial board. Books for review should be addressed to Wolfgang Polleichtner, Seminar für Klassische Philologie, Medievalia et Humanistica, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, GB 2 / 162, Universitätsstraße 150, 44780 Bochum, Germany. Inquiries concerning subscriptions should be addressed to the publisher: Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Blvd, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 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. • Use the Notes feature of Word so the notes are embedded and autonumbered. 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-queen clad in gold] (329–331) Sample Notes Journal Article: 1. Melinda Shepard, “The Church in Eleventh-Century Europe,” Medieval Studies 15, no. 1 (1993): 211–26. Book 2. Shepard, “Church in Eleventh-Century Europe,” 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 the editor Reinhold F. Glei (reinhold.glei@ rub.de) or to any member of the editorial board: David Bevington ([email protected]) Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski ([email protected]) Robert Boenig ([email protected]) Daniel Bornstein ([email protected]) Christopher Celenza ([email protected]) Albrecht Classen ([email protected]) Jacques Dalarun ([email protected]) Peter Dembowski ([email protected]) Yasmin Haskell ([email protected]) David Lines ([email protected]) Richard Marsden ([email protected]) Adriano Prosperi ([email protected]) Francesco Stella ([email protected]) Jan Ziolkowski ([email protected]) For inquiries concerning review articles and review notices please contact Wolfgang Polleichtner ([email protected]). Prospective authors are encouraged to contact the editors 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, with ample margins; documentation should be held to a minimum. The articles should be submitted via e-mail in both Microsoft Word and PDF formats. Notes, prepared according to The Chicago Manual of Style, sixteenth edition, should be double-spaced and numbered consecutively. Use the Notes feature of Word so the notes are embedded and autonumbered. All quotations and references should be in finished form.

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India Perceived through the Eyes of Sixteenth-Century Readers Ludovico de Varthema’s Bestseller on the Early Modern Book Markets— A Narrative Landmark of the Emerging Positive Evaluation of curiositas (Together with a Study of Balthasar Sprenger’s Travelogue on India) ALBRECHT CLASSEN

Abstract By the turn of the fifteenth century we can observe an imminent paradigm shift in the European perspective toward India. While medieval authors still discussed it in light of mostly mythical concepts, since the early sixteenth century Western travelers reached India and explored it in ever-greater detail and extent. Two major writers, the Bavarian Balthasar Sprenger and the Bolognese Ludovico de Varthema, provided their readers back home with the first critical accounts about India that prove to be highly realistic and observant. Varthema subsequently enjoyed a tremendous success on the early modern book market, as demonstrated by numerous German translations. Significantly, neither Sprenger nor Varthema appear to be determined by an Orientalist attitude and offer rather objective and respectful descriptions.

In the early sixteenth century the account of the Bolognese Ludovico de Varthema (ca. 1470–1517) about his extensive travels caused a publication sensation in the West. He described traveling through Egypt, the Holy Land, and Syria and from there down to the Red Sea, through the Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 40 (Reinhold F. Glei and Wolfgang Polleichtner, eds.), Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

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Arabian peninsula with a secretive visit to Mecca, disguised as an Arab, from there to India and Burma, Sumatra, Borneo, Java, Nagapattinam, and finally to Malacca and then back to Europe. In fact, his Itinerario de Ludouico de Varthema Bolognese (1510) was quickly reprinted and translated into numerous languages and emerged as one of the most authoritative sources for information on the South Asian world. While India had been up to that point mostly a land of mystery and enigma, attractive yet very far away and basically unknown in specific terms,1 with Ludovico’s travelogue European readers had suddenly available the most detailed and realistic description of the Orient up to that point, far exceeding what all previous authors, including Marco Polo, had reported and what geographers and cartographers had projected. Moreover, his Itinerario was published with lavish illustrations. As an anonymous author comments online: Accusations aside, Itinerario provides a look at the local customs, wildlife, dress and beliefs of the Middle East, India and the Spice Islands from a time when many Europeans were obsessed with these places. Blending in with local populations whenever possible, Varthema was able to sneak into places that readers back home in Europe would never see. It was this singular look at the mysterious East that made Varthema a favorite of Europe’s literate elite.2

The Itinerario has already been studied from a variety of perspectives, including geography, ethnography, anthropology, and art history.3 Here I intend to examine primarily how the myth of India was translated into a much more realistic narrative about that exotic East in the German tradition. For our purposes it matters most to investigate how much we can recognize in Varthema’s travelogue an extraordinary document reflecting early-modern curiositas directed toward Arabia and especially India, as well as several neighboring countries farther East. In order to establish the necessary literary-historical context, however, I will begin with a brief outline of how India was perceived since antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages, which will lay the foundation for our analysis of how India was then viewed in the early sixteenth century, especially through German lenses. Ever since the appearance of Varthema’s popular tract, no German author could simply fall back again to the traditional stereotypes about India. A new cultural-intellectual window had opened up with the German translation of the Itinerario, which this paper will analyze through a close reading of this enormous success on the early modern German and European book markets. The critical analysis of Die ritterlich un[d] lobwirdig Rayss from 1515 allows us to gain a deeper understanding of how Europeans in general perceived India at that time and to grasp what narrative and visual filters were available for their own comprehension of the exotic Orient beyond

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the traditional stereotypical imaginary perpetuated for centuries.4 In order to recognize the remarkable difference between Ludovico’s account and those of his medieval precursors, such as John Mandeville’s Travels, we need to realize, first, whether India was even known to Western audiences throughout the Middle Ages and how much it attracted concrete interest.5 As tempting as it might be to resort at this point to the theoretical model of Orientalism as developed by Edward Said in his famous monograph from 1978, I refrain from pursuing this approach because the focus will rest on the German perception of India in the sixteenth century, hence on the presentation of Varthema’s account filtered through the German translations.6 Despite Varthema’s mercantile interest, it would be inappropriate, perhaps even anachronistic, to investigate to what extent his German readers might have pursued colonialist perspectives. While Said probably correctly charged especially nineteenthcentury writers or artists of having pursued a Eurocentric prejudice against the non-Christian, nonwhite cultures to the East, Varthema and his contemporaries simply discovered the Indian subcontinent and described it in fairly naive terms determined by cultural curiosity. As we will observe, the author created more of a “scientific” and objectifying report than a narrative platform that would have encouraged his European audiences to pursue a potential strategy to colonize the East or to fantasize about it the way nineteenth-century readers, for instance, were wont to do. As Orientalist as Varthema’s account certainly sounded, it did not really conform to the concept of Orientalism because he traveled primarily out of curiosity and interest, not for religious or economic reasons. Hence, because he did not yet know what to expect, he traveled without a sense of European superiority. At the same time, we notice throughout his text how much Portuguese colonizing efforts were at play, but Varthema only attached himself to individual merchants or sea captains for pragmatic purposes. In his text he never indicates any desire to settle in India or to appropriate that foreign world for himself, and he does not signal any concern about how his successors might achieve such a goal. Moreover, if we compare his narrative with numerous geographic books composed by his contemporaries and in the following decades, we recognize the remarkable absence of fable and biblical material. Even if we must concur with Sven Trakulhun regarding the development in the later sixteenth century concerning European knowledge about India and the lands farther East, the evidence offered by Varthema contradicts his viewpoint: “Fable still vied with concrete information to form and visualize the European conception of the world beyond the old oikumene. Although the fifteen years between 1546 and 1560 witnessed the publication of some of the most important

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geographical books of the Renaissance, the more distant parts of the history of countries in the Far East remained unknown.”7 The European fascination with India actually dates as far back as the fifth century B.C.E. when Herodotus (ca. 484–425 B.C.E.) reported first about that Eastern continent (The Histories III, 98) with its abundant gold and flowers—both objects critically symbolic of a utopian world with endless treasures and offering almost unimaginable physical happiness. At the same time the people of India are described as vegetarians, as consumers of raw fish, or as cannibals—that is, very extreme in their eating habits at any rate. The account of Alexander the Great’s war campaign through Persia and then parts of India provided new and exciting information, strongly feeding into exotic fantasies about the mythical East that also were prevalent in the Middle Ages, if we think, for instance, of Alberich of Bisinzo’s Alexandre or the Priest Lamprecht’s Alexanderlied (both late twelfth century).8 Pliny the Elder (ca. 23–79 C.E.) summarized much of that array of references to India in his Historia naturalis, which in turn proved to be the major source for Solinus’s Collectanea rerum memorabilium (early third century). Isidore of Seville (ca. 560–636) later leaned heavily on Pliny when he composed his deeply learned Etymologiae, but the fictional narrative of Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Persian empire cast in a letter to his teacher and mentor Aristotle exerted an even greater influence on the European audiences.9 Both medieval authors (anonymous, Herzog Ernst; Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival) and many geographers dealt at least tentatively with India as a mythic space of great significance, although their protagonists actually never quite make it there themselves. However, Marco Polo’s famous travelogue, Il milione (ca. 1300), was the first text to include more specific, perhaps even verifiable, details of the political structure of India, its geographic conditions, and its fauna and flora. The focus both here and in subsequent, mostly fictional accounts, such as John Mandeville’s Travels (ca. 1360), rested on highly desired luxury items, such as perfumes, ores, and spices; on the mythical ruler in India, the so-called Prester John, as a representative of Christianity in the East; and, moreover, on the immolation of widows, the veneration of animals, pepper, and other Oriental products.10 Many medieval authors—whether we think of Dante (Divina commedia), Jean de Meun (Roman de la rose), or Heinrich of Neustadt (Apollonius vom Tyrland)—incorporated some references to India in their narratives.11 Geoffrey Chaucer includes several references to India in his “Knight’s Tale” and “Squire’s Tale,” but these are only general allusions without any basis in reality.12 Yet, despite the fleeting character of these allusions

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to India, it remains an open-ended question how much premodern Europeans really knew about this South-Asian subcontinent. Nevertheless, already in the nineteenth century the so-called indische Theorie gained strong support and has exerted a deep influence until today, suggesting the very opposite situation from what most critics would generally accept. In 1859 Theodor Benfey had argued, in the introduction to his German translation of the famous collection of Indian tales, the Panchatantra, that virtually all modern fairy tales can be traced back to an Indian origin, mostly designed by Buddhist monks. We have learned since then to discriminate and refine this theory considerably, and many scholars have pointed out, for instance, countless autochthonous sources of European narratives, which would imply that their alleged Indian origin was nothing but a myth. However, the deep influence of Indian literature on medieval and then early modern literature in the West via the Persian and Arabic intermediaries cannot be denied altogether.13 One of the most significant comments about India, still formulated, so to speak, within the framework of the Middle Ages, can be found in the anonymous prose novel Fortunatus (Augsburg, 1509), where the narrator remarks explicitly about the utopian character of India and elucidates the reasons why the Indians do not come to visit Europe and the Europeans do not succeed in making their way to India. Certainly relying in many ways on the standard concept of India as developed centuries before, the narrator refers to the many “wunder / abenteür vnd sitten in den landen” (490), which had been described in much greater detail by John of Mandeville. Many people in Germany would certainly like to travel there to witness the splendor, wealth, and sweet fruit (491). But both the extraordinary distance to India and the difficult roads would make it virtually impossible for the majority of people to travel there because they would not be willing to risk their lives in order to reach this exotic world in the Orient. Moreover, revealing a good dose of realism, the author also assumes that the cost of travel to India would be prohibitive for most, while the fictional character Fortunatus possesses his magical purse and so can afford to travel wherever he desires (491), not to forget his magical travel hat with which he can be transported anywhere in the world wherever he desires within split seconds. Next the narrator raises the intriguing question of why the East Indians would not come to Europe for a visit and quickly points out a number of reasons that keep them from undertaking such a rather foolish journey: Jst die vrsach / sy hoeren sagen wie vnsre land vnaertig seyen / von keltin vnd auch nit guote frücht haben / hond sorg das sy gleich sturben / machen och die rechnung / sy wurden für toren geschaetzt / das sy auß guoten landen in

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boese zugen vnd guott vmb boeß gaebenn. Auch ligt yn das an / das sy wissen das groß sorg vnderwegen ist [The reason is that they have heard how terrible our lands are, determined by cold weather and the lack of good fruit, so they are afraid of dying right away. They calculate that they would be deemed fools if they moved from good lands to bad ones and would give good things for evil things. They are also aware that they would run into many trouble on the way here. (491)]14

Nevertheless, this musing on India in Fortunatus clearly indicates the extent to which European audiences were fascinated by the idea of that exotic world and harbored some desire to visit this distant continent of which many mythical accounts had dimly informed them since antiquity and of which countless cartographers had spoken in visual terms.15 But the situation fundamentally changed in the early sixteenth century when Europeans actually began to travel to India and brought with them much more accurate accounts, even better ones than those by Marco Polo. The first significant traveler to India who subsequently reported about it at great length was the Bavarian Balthasar Sprenger, who accompanied the Portuguese Admiral Francisco de Almeida (ca. 1450–1510) on his journey from 1505 to 1506 and then produced an extensive narrative about it, his Die Merfart vnd erfarung nüwerSchiffung vnd Wege zu viln onerkanten Inseln vnd Künigreichen (Oppenheim: Jakob Köbel, 1509).16 Sprenger and the companions went by ship straight from Lisbon to India and explored that world mostly with their ship, going from harbor to harbor, buying and selling products. The author limits himself to a rough sketch with little information about the peculiar features of the various cultures, but the Merfart still constitutes a remarkable beginning in early modern apodemic literature.17 There were no further reprints of that text, and it remains unclear how much the author truly succeeded in reaching an audience.18 My intention here is hence to examine, by contrast, Ludovico de Varthema’s phenomenally successful travelogue especially on the German book market and thus to gain a better understanding of how India gained in profile and depth in the early modern age among Western readers. Sprenger provided, just on fourteen pages, mostly personal observations regarding the travel, emphasizing ethnographic attributes only in the second part, deliberately ignoring, however, for the first time the traditional monster lore. His account comes with a number of good illustrations of people in India in their typical clothing and appearance. By contrast, with Varthema’s text we confront a strategically placed travelogue about India translated from the Italian’s perspective but now appealing to a German audience. While older scholarship commonly acknowledged some vague references to India in medieval and early modern literature,19 the next step in

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that research then was always to focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the crucial time of Orientalism.20 Nevertheless, the revolutionary transformation of the early modern book market in the sixteenth century also provided a venue for new reports about India to reach European, especially German, readers. This can be ideally illustrated with Ludovico Varthema’s travel account because it appeared in print in 1510 and was then reprinted numerous times, both in Latin and in various vernacular languages, and hence quickly found a large audience. Many aspects of this account prove to be highly significant for both historians and literary scholars alike because the author offers an eyewitness narrative, which today would be called an ego-document, of an extraordinary caliber, providing perspectives of a merchant and a traveler, of an explorer and geographer, of an anthropologist and a religious scholar. Ludovico obviously succeeded in appealing to a vast and growing readership across Europe, so we can identify his work as a major representative of early modern travel literature. Nevertheless, his name hardly figures in the relevant scholarship dealing with medieval and early modern travel authors.21 However, his experiences in the Orient proved to be highly significant not only from his personal perspective but also as reflections of rising global competition among the European naval and merchant powers. As George Winius observes, Varthema is of the greatest interest because places he visited and describes were already or soon to be of great importance to the oncoming Portuguese, who either conquered, acquired, or fought with them only a few years later. He provides a veritable inventory of all the cities and areas, which within a decade or less, were to play a major role in the establishment of the Portuguese empire.22

Joan-Pau Rubiés goes so far as to praise him for having been “one of the most successful and best-known travel writers since Marco Polo.”23 Varthema departed from Venice in 1502 and traveled to Alexandria, from there to Cairo, and then on to Syria. In the German translation, however, we are told that he had embarked on his journey on April 8, 1503 (bii r). Whether he acquired the Arabic language while he was in Syria, as Winius claims in his introduction (12), cannot be fully confirmed since he only spent several months in Damascus in order to gain the necessary linguistic skills for his journey to Mecca, which he undertook disguised as a Muslim pilgrim (a iv r). Subsequently he went to Aden, crossed the ocean to India, and turned from there to the Persian Gulf. From that point Varthema followed a path to Goa, Malabar, Calicut, and Cochin. Afterward he reached Sri Lanka, then the Bay of Bengal and Tenasserim in Myanmar, resting finally for a brief time in Malacca. In 1505 this courageous traveler slowly meandered backward

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to India and from there, having entered Portuguese service, reached Europe again in 1508. Although we know of many other daring European travelers, Varthema truly stands out as one of the most successful and farreaching explorers of the South Asian continent in the early sixteenth century, blazing a path into the East that many were to follow thereafter. Considering the extraordinary extent of his journey, and the depth of details he conveyed to his audience in his published account, it comes as no surprise that the Itinerario was a major success on the early modern book markets. It was first printed in Rome in 1510, then in Venice in 1518, 1520, 1535, 1563, 1589, and so on, and in Milan in 1519, 1523, and 1525. Latin translations appeared in Milan in 1511 (by Archangelus Madrignanus) and in Nuremberg in 1610, and there were numerous translations into other European languages, such as German (Augsburg, 1515, 1518; Straßburg, 1516; Frankfurt a. M., 1548, 1549, 1556, and 1567; Leipzig, 1608, 1610, 1764; and Helmstedt, 1636).24 Curiously, Varthema does not seem to have found much of an audience in France, Spain, or Portugal during the early modern age;25 a Dutch translation appeared in Utrecht in 1654 and 1655.26 The only French translation that appeared still in the sixteenth century was one, as far as I can tell, included in a large volume of similar travelogues, Historiale description de l’Afrique, tierce partie du monde, contenant les royaumes, régions, viles . . . iles, fleuves, animaux . . . coutumes, loix, religion . . . escrite de nôtre tems par Jean Léon African, premièrement en langue arabesque, puis en toscane et à présent mise en françois. Plus cinq navigations au païs des noirs avec les discours sur icelles . . . (Lyon, 1555).27 Varthema was also popular in England, as the translations published in 1577 and 1625 confirm,28 but his travelogue disappeared from the book markets by the eighteenth century since the information that it contained no longer met with the expectation for accurate geographical reports.29 This bibliographical survey concerning the dissemination of his text on the early modern book market seems to indicate that Varthema appealed mostly to Italian and German readers—to the former probably because of the extensive mercantile interests in Venice, Genoa, and other trading cities and to the latter because of the highly sophisticated book markets and the printing industry available there that was constantly on the lookout for new interesting and exciting titles. However, it remains a curious fact that the Itinerario was so popular especially in Germany where there were no direct lines of contact available to the Orient, while all east-west trade from Central Asia to Western Europe flowed through Venice, for example. German readers might have flocked to Varthema’s account also because they had already enjoyed for decades the flood of pilgrimage accounts about the Holy Land, whether we think

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of Bernhard of Breydenbach’s travelogue or the ones by Felix Fabri and Arnold von Harff. Moreover, as the title page of Varthema’s book signals, he did not only explore the Holy Land, as all the other travel authors had done,30 but he also explored many lands farther to the East, offering rich information on the local fauna and flora. Specifically addressing people’s general motivation to purchase such a book, Varthema added the traditional trope often to be found in late medieval and early modern travelogues, “seltzamen wunderparlichen sachen” (“strange and amazing things”), underscoring that he himself had witnessed everything he reports about: “Das alles er selbs erfaren vnd in aygner person gesehen hat” (“which he had experienced and seen with his own eyes”). John Mandeville could not have formulated it differently or better, although we know today how much that armchair traveler compiled most, if not all, of his information from previous sources and had mixed them in a most attractive framework of fiction and fact.31 Varthema’s account supersedes in many respects both the traditional medieval pilgrimage narratives, including those amazingly detailed ones by Harff and Fabri, and also the famous travelogues by Polo and Mandeville insofar as he undertook his journey not explicitly for religious reasons but because he wanted to gain knowledge and understanding of this world for its own sake: Vnd nam mir fyr ain tayl des vmb krayß der welt in aygner person zuo ersuochen als ich mich nit genuogsam erkant / mit meiner klainen verstentnuß durch studieren oder sunst / Soellichs zuo erlernen. Sunder hab ich woellen selbs mit meinen augen besechen die gelegenhayt der oerter die gestaltten vnd sytten der menschen / die seltzamigkayt der thier / die froemden poem / vnd dero gewechß vnd früchten vnd anders. So in der fruchtparen vnd vnfruchtparn Arabia Persia India vnd Ethiopia / Namlichen so mer zuo gelauben ist ainem der es selbs mit seinen augen gesechen hat dann von hoeren sagen. (a i v) [determined to investigate some small portion of this our terrestrial globe; and not having any inclination (knowing myself to be of very slender understanding) to arrive at my desire by study or conjectures, I determined, personally and with my own eyes, to try to ascertain the situations of places, the qualities of peoples, the diversities of animals, the varieties of the fruit-bearing and odoriferous trees of Egypt, Syria, Arabia Deserta and Felix, Persia, India and Ethiopia, remembering well that the testimony of one eye-witness is worth more than ten heard-says. (52)]

Whether he actually managed to visit Mecca in the disguise of an Arab cannot be confirmed today, although he assures us constantly in many different ways of the veracity of his report and hence of his roleplaying in the foreign world, which easily helped him to visit sites that were off-limits to most other European travelers. Naturally, the author engages at length with the difference in religious practice and beliefs separating Christians and Muslims, and offers more details especially

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about the design and appearance of Mecca than any other European writer before him (74–81), but here our interest rests only on India as presented in this report, which constitutes in this respect a novelty in Western travel literature.32 While most other travel authors prior to him were driven either by religious or mercantile reasons, Varthema reveals an additional dimension in this regard, being motivated, as he admits openly at one point, by his simple curiosity and desire to explore novel cities, places, and countries.33 He received considerable credit from his contemporaries for his efforts and outreach to collect as much information about the Eastern world as possible, especially from the papal secretary Mattheus Bonfinis and also Varthema’s editor, who praised him for providing such valuable descriptions: “those who have devoted themselves to such studies have always been held in the highest honor and have been abundantly rewarded” (49). Similar to Marco Polo, but certainly much less concerned with mercantile interests, Varthema used the visit to the Holy Land primarily as a stepping-stone for his global exploration of the Arabian Peninsula, Persia, and then the South Asian subcontinent, with an emphasis on India, indicating thereby the emergence of curiosity as the critically innovative strategy motivating early modern travelers and travelogue authors and, by the same token, early modern scientists, medical researchers, geographers, and writers.34 Curiosity had become the driving force of European apodemic literature, a benchmark of the early modern age, which began, however, as Sprenger’s and Varthema’s accounts illustrate, considerably earlier than it is commonly assumed by scholars working in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries.35 After having gone through many different adventures in Arabia, Ethiopia, and Persia, which took him already far beyond the traditional scope of medieval European pilgrimage accounts, Varthema finally reaches India, but instead of delving into many different aspects characteristic of the expected wonders of that fabled country, the author simply continues outlining more or less precisely where he went, what he experienced, how the cities were situated, and the like. The first chapter reflecting on India illustrates this phenomenon quite well: “We entered India where, near to the port, there is a very large river called the Indus, which is near to a city called Cambay. This city is situated three miles inland, and to the south of the Indus” (115). His eyes wandered around, like everywhere else on his journey, so he can provide us with detailed descriptions about the city’s fortification, the availability of different kinds of spices, the features of mountains in the distance, and the political situation in that country (115–16). He was particularly impressed by elephants, which he no longer

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interprets allegorically in the old tradition of the early medieval Physiologus; instead, he discusses them as natural animals with intelligence and understanding (117). There are also mythical, hence probably fictional, elements, such as the references to the sultan and his huge harem of women, each of whom, one by one, the sultan kills after he has slept with her, very much in the vein of The Arabian Nights. But then the author turns his attention to commercial and trade aspects, emphasizing how many ships from so many different countries have anchored in the harbor: “About three hundred ships of different countries come and go here. This city, and another of which I will speak at the proper season, supply all Persia, Tartary, Turkey, Syria, Barbary, that is, Africa, Arabia Felix, Ethiopia, India, and a multitude of inhabited islands, with silk and cotton stuffs” (118). In a way similar to Marco Polo’s Il Milione, Varthema impresses us almost more by what he is not delving into—the exotic wonders of the East. The more pedestrian his account often sounds, the more intriguing it actually proves to be, perhaps just because of the understatement of his presentation, which adds a considerable degree of realism and piques the curiosity of his readers/listeners. The traditional literary character, which highlighted Mandeville’s approach, is basically missing here since the author limits himself to a rather plain, though not boring, narrative concerning the material conditions of the Eastern continent. He wanders in his comments from the various kinds of peoples to the geophysical conditions, especially mountains and plains. Clothing habits and weapons, city fortifications and harbors, agricultural products and the climatic conditions dominate Varthema’s discourse, and he does not shy away from handing out criticism and praise as it appears to be appropriate regarding various governments and rulers, for instance: “Justice is extremely well administered here” (120). But from this important statement he quickly turns to other aspects of a material kind, as if the former aspect seemed not be of supreme importance. The author clearly demarcates the Muslim world from the Christian, but he rarely, if ever, attributes any negative character to this religious difference itself: “This city is walled after the manner of the Christians, and the houses are very beautiful. The king of the city lives in great pride and pomp” (122). A statement such as “They are all Mohammedans” (123) remains without comment and is supposed to satisfy the curious reader about this important religious aspect, highlighting one part of the cultural difference. Similarly, racial differences are noted but not evaluated: “The natives of the kingdom are of a tawny color” (123). Politically, Varthema finds much to be praised abroad,

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as when he identifies the king as a very generous person: “This king is extremely powerful, very rich and most liberal” (123). In the German translation, however, marked by slight but at times significant variations, we notice that the author qualifies this “liberality” by relating it exclusively to the way the king treats his soldiers, paying them enormous salaries, which makes them the worst kind of warriors in any ruler’s service (b ii v). Curiously, those very soldiers apparently originate from Europe, as they are identified as white people, but we are not told of the reasons, whether they are slaves or Mamelukes. Vathema also recognizes differences among the non-Christians, whom he all qualifies negatively as “idolaters,” whether they hold the Muslim faith or another one (124). With interest he observes that certain types of grain, barley, and vegetables do not grow, while other fruits and vegetables equal to or even better than those in Europe are produced in that foreign world (124). Overall, the author grants us a panoramic view of Indian cities, regions, provinces, people, harbors, and geophysical sites, commenting rarely and limiting his narrative to the descriptive dimension, such as when he notes, “In this city there are many Moorish merchants” (124), or, regarding another location, “The inhabitants are pagans and Moors. Their mode of living, their customs and their dress are like those above described” (125). Varthema seems rather unaffected personally by what he perceived in those distant lands, recording only differences and similarities but mostly refraining from judging, and thus he avoids, at least more than most of his predecessors, the traditional Eurocentric perspective (which is not to say that those were victims of “Orientalism”). Remarkably, the author encountered already early Portuguese colonies at times, such as in Cannanore, where the king of Portugal maintained a castle and where the local king was identified as friendly toward the Portuguese irrespective of the conflict between their religions (125). But Varthema hardly investigates what the political implications might have been for both sides and simply expresses, especially later in the text, his great joy about having encountered Europeans—that is, Christians. The author occasionally alludes to the Portuguese building a colonizing network, but for him they primarily served at the end to help him get away and return home to Europe (208–14).36 While he regularly discusses which animals can be identified in which places and which ones are not customary, in Vijayanager he finds a good opportunity to introduce a detailed commentary on elephants and how they are used by the people as work animals and in war (127–28), thereby clearly taking us out of the tradition of medieval interpretations of animals in an allegorical fashion (Physiologus).37 Instead of limiting

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himself to a sweeping view of the elephant in general terms, we are told almost in minute detail how this animal actually looks: “The ears are two palms every way, some more, some less. Their legs are almost as large at the lower extremity as at the upper” (129). Even if Varthema might have copied from other sources in other respects, here we clearly recognize a writer who emphasizes in unmistakable terms that he had witnessed those creatures himself and had even ridden on one of them: “I have seen a great many thirteen and fourteen palms high, and I have ridden on some of that height” (129–30). By the same token, Varthema does not turn his back to religious differences; he regularly notes with drastic criticism whom the foreign rulers worship instead of turning to the Christian God: “His faith is idolatrous, and they worship the devil, as do those of Calicut” (131; the German phrase is apgoetterey, c i r). However, apart from these comments, he does not appear to evaluate the religious otherness and only presents it as part of the exotic Orient. At the same time, his curiosity is strongly piqued when he turns his attention to the extraordinary splendor and wealth displayed by the various rulers and their courts in contrast to the ordinary people, who wear almost nothing in terms of clothing (131). Varthema also comments on the coinage used abroad for commercial activities, but he does not compare it with the one he was familiar with in Europe. However, when he has occasion to describe the location and size of a city, such as Narsinga, he makes a deliberate effort to compare it with Milan, Naples, and Venice in order to help his readers visualize the city’s appearance and size (130). We also recognize how much the Portuguese had already developed a strong trading relationship with that Indian kingdom and tried to keep that territory of influence for themselves. Referring to a local ruler, the author comments: “Because he does not know much of any other Christians” (132). But then the author breaks off and turns to the next, probably most important Indian city, Calcutta, where he examines, after a brief geophysical outline, once again the specific features of their religion, which he identifies with the devil. Nevertheless, the author limits himself mostly to a description of their rituals and ceremonies, and does not venture into theological reflections or condemnation of their heathenness. In fact, once we follow Varthema’s account further along, we recognize in him an early anthropologist who pursues a detailed analysis of the foreign cultures, collecting data about their social class system (138), the king’s and the queen’s clothing and food (139), funeral ceremonies for the members of the royal house (139–40), polygamous

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marriage practices (141), living habits and the justice system (142), religious worship (143), fighting habits (143–44), navigational system (145–46) and types of ships (147), and the royal palace (147–48). The author then covers the wide range of spices and fruit that grow in Calcutta (148–50) and gives perhaps the first extended description of bananas in the Western context: The tree which bears this fruit is as high as a man or a little more, and it produces four or five leaves which are branches and leaves. Each of these covers a man against rain and sun. In the middle of this it throws out a certain branch which produces flowers in the same manner as the stalk of a bean, and half a palm and a palm in length, and they are as thick as the staff of a spear. When they wish to gather the fruit they do not wait until it is ripe, because it ripens in the house (151).

While the banana certainly appealed to the author considerably, the coconut tree excited him even more than any other because he regarded it as “the Most Fruitful Tree of the World” (152). Full of amazement, the author outlines how many functions the tree can have, since virtually every part both of the trunk and the leaves, and then especially of the coconuts themselves, can be used for many different purposes. Varthema also offers a whole chapter on planting rice, which is most unusual for any premodern travelogue about India (154–55). This is followed by chapters on the local physicians, bankers, how women nurse their babies, serpents, oil lamps in the royal household, and also some local Christians, followers of St. Thomas: “These Christians keep Lent longer than we do; but they keep Easter as we do, and they all observe the same solemnities that we do. But they say mass like the Greeks” (162). Both as a strategy to lend more veracity to his account and as an excuse for not lingering longer on specific areas or countries in his narrative, Varthema refers to wars that were waged between various countries, which forced the travelers to break off their stay quickly, such as in Coromandel in India (163). Surprisingly, overall neither he nor any of his travel companions seems to have suffered from any military attacks, not to mention highway robbers or thieves. Although the author traversed many foreign countries where they certainly were not able to communicate with the local people in their languages, verbal exchanges were possible after all, and differences in religion apparently did not matter: “We lodged in the house of a Moorish merchant, and we told him where we came from, and that we had many corals to sell. . . . The merchant, understanding that we had this kind of merchandise, was greatly pleased” (167). In a later chapter we are also treated with a strongly sexual theme insofar as Varthema relates that the men in India prefer their newly wed wives to be deflowered by

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white Christian or Muslim men (170). In Tenasserim, for instance, the entire group of travelers is invited in by a local merchant who requests this service from the European colleagues. Their host explicitly demanded that one of them help him in that regard: “My friends, fifteen days hence I wish to bring home my wife, and one of you shall sleep with her the first night, and shall deflower her for me” (171). Although the European merchants felt rather embarrassed and shy about this matter, their translator assured them: “Do not be ashamed, for this is the custom of the country” (171). However, the idea behind this practice was strictly limited to the deflowering act; any attempt later to sleep with the young woman, wife of the host, would have cost the perpetrator his life (172). Whether Varthema relays the truth here cannot be confirmed easily, but this account certainly struck a strong chord with his audience, titillating them with these juicy facets of Oriental life. Following this, the author explores how the dead are taken care of and reports on the burning of widows alive along with their deceased husbands (173). As incredible as that account might sound for European ears, Varthema offers too many specific details and personal remarks to cast doubt on it. He reflects on his own horror about this practice and provides many explanations of how such a miserable widow prepared herself for her fiery death, not to mention his comments about how her relatives and friends immediately hit her with sticks and threw balls of pitch on her to accelerate her death out of pity for her pain. The author might certainly be guilty of exaggeration, or overdramatization, but there would be little reason to question or to doubt his reports, since they cover all the essential features relevant for a foreign country, including the judicial system (174–75), shipbuilding (175–76), physical distance between cities (176), Christian merchants whom they met in India or Bengal (176–78), and racial differences of the various people, including different skin colors (178–79). Wherever Varthema traveled, he constantly found intriguing aspects to relate, and both as a merchant and as a traveler he seems to have met friendly and interested audiences that opened to him the doors of the kings and rulers of the various countries, including Sumatra (184–85). In fact, Varthema might have been the first European writer to refer to this huge island, and to other places farther and farther to the East. Following this, he finally decided to return home. The reasons for this change of further plans are given in a straightforward manner. Once having reached Java, the traveler expresses great fear of becoming a victim of cannibalism, of the change of weather (cold temperatures), and of the fact, as he assumed, that there was not much more to discover: “there was hardly any other

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place known to the Christians” (198). The original German version reveals, however, some further details, since Varthema says that they were informed about a cold climate farther north, while the following sentence limits the motivation to nothing but a lack of interest: “vnd wolten wir vns nit meer vnderston fyr bas zuo faren” (p iiii v; “we did not care about traveling further on”). After outlining more of their route taken by ship, and having detailed more of their mercantile activities, the author returns to his previous effort to explain the decision to return home, repeating himself: “having become wearied, partly by the different temperatures of the air, as may be imagined, partly by the different customs we met with at every step, . . . and especially by the inhuman men not unlike beasts, determined to return” (199). But the author also emphasizes, at least in the German translation, his great desire to see his family again: gewan über grossen willen vnd begird zuo inen zuo flyechen / Wann mich hertzlichen ain mal zuo besichtigen meyn weyb kynd fraind vnd vater land verlanget / vnd nit vnpilich gedacht mir du bist nun mer ainem andern gleych wyt genuog gefaren (q i r) [I was filled with a great desire and wish to flee to them [Christian Portuguese] because I longed dearly to see again my wife, child, friends, and father, so it was not inappropriate to think in my mind that I had traveled far enough compared to others.]38

The farther East he went, the more he desired to be home again in the West. Nevertheless, Varthema clearly signals how much he traversed the world for its own sake, in order to encounter new countries, people, customs, fruit, fauna, craftsmanship, and architecture. We can also confirm that he was most curious about Islam and tried hard to learn as much as possible about it in practical and theoretical terms, and this even at the price of assuming a Muslim identity, which allowed him to enter even the holiest sites and temples together with the other travel companions, who were Muslims. More than ever before, so it seems, we recognize remarkable details about the religious rituals and ceremonies, which the author in a comparatively objective way compares with those commonly practiced by Christians: “so they set me publicly to make the prayer, which you shall hear, which prayer is as common with them as the Our Father is with us, and the Hail Mary” (207). In the German version we are even given some Arabic phrases: “vnd sprechen also / alla u ccubar alla u cccubar aia lassale aia lassale aia alfale aia alfale alla u cccubar alla u cccubar leilla illala eseiadu ana machumet resullala” (q iiii v), which he then translates into German—a passage that definitely differs from the Italian or Latin original (here in the English translation).39

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This does not indicate that Varthema was spiritually converted to Islam, despite the rather respectful treatment of the other religion, even though he then resorts to maligning them (in the German text only): “dye hund die hayden” (“the heathens are dogs”). Nevertheless, the author openly admits that the Muslims pray in the very same fashion to their god as the Christians do: “das gebet der hayden ist in gemain wie vns das pater noster” (q iiii v; only in the German version: “the heathens’ prayer is generally like our pater noster”). We do not need to be surprised about Varthema’s aggressive comments about the local rulers who hold him virtually as a prisoner. He really wanted to extricate himself from his bondage to the Muslim lord and thus find a safe way for his return home. He operated in a dangerous framework with all the merchant friends, who were Persians, Syrians, and Turks and who naively assumed that he was a Muslim, while in his heart he had maintained his complete faith in the Christian God. But this should not concern us here because the author continues to provide amazingly realistic impressions about India and other parts of the South Asian continent that find no parallels in the entire contemporary literature of his time, with the exception of the report by the Bavarian Balthasar Sprenger (see above). Varthema’s escape from Calcutta caused a major uproar in the local population because they were afraid that he would reveal military secrets and other information to the Portuguese, but he managed to get away from his companions and join the Christians after all (210–12). The details of this escape, of the enormous political and military conflicts that resulted, and of the negotiations between the various European and Indian forces do not need to be outlined here. It is important, however, to recognize how much Varthema perceived himself to be in the center of dramatic political events pitting the Muslims against the Christians, although there are no indicators of a Crusader mentality, and this despite explicit appeals to God to protect the Christians against their Muslim enemies: “We Christians always hoped that God would aid us to confound the pagan faith” (215). A naval battle erupted, however, in which scores of Muslims were killed, and this, of course, to Varthema’s great delight. While the Italian (in our English translation) version then engages immediately with the world of Ethiopia, the German translator offers first a kind of summary of Varthema’s experiences on his further travels and also some comments on his homesickness after seven years of absence: “von meiner haymant von weyb vnd kinden vnd meinem vatter land geschayden het” (t i r; “had departed from my home country, from wife and children and my fatherland”). Both text versions meet again as soon as the narrator turns his attention to the concrete travel route, which

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took them at first to Mozambique, then to the Cape of Good Hope, and from there along the western coast of Africa back to Portugal. In the original edition, the author investigates, the scientific importance of his account instead of concentrating on his personal sentiments: “To those who wish to make any profession of history or cosmography, by which they may contribute both to the common advantage, as already has been many times touched upon, and to the immorality of a laborious life, there is nothing more necessary than to be the tenacious possessors of their memory” (226). Varthema comments until the very end about amazing natural phenomena, such as huge whales (231) and oddly behaving birds (231), and concludes with an address to his audience that he had enjoyed a good conversation with the Portuguese king, whom he provided with extensive information about “the things of India” (232). Again, in this specific context, the German translator either invents more details or has better access to the original text, describing more explicitly how that audience went and what the king wanted from him: “er thet mir vil eren vnd gros hoff zuo erfaren von mir die leyff vnd sitten in india” (t iii v; “he honored and praised me greatly because he wanted to learn from me the life and customs in India”). Although the author resorted to a typical humility formula in the introduction when explaining the reasons for his extraordinary travels, he might have revealed a true aspect of himself, not being particularly trained and skilled for other activities but to travel: “And thus, as I do not see that I am fit for any other pursuit, to spend in this praiseworthy exercise the remainder of my fleeting days” (54). Clearly setting himself off from previous travelogue authors, Varthema emphasizes that he wanted to offer innovative and fresh perspectives by going farther to the East than any of his predecessors, “and inasmuch as all other countries have been considerably written about by our people, I deliberated in my own mind that I would see those which had been the least frequented” (55). Varthema’s account, even more so than Sprenger’s, clearly signaled a remarkable change in the discourse about India. All teratology has fallen away, and curiosity about the foreign world in its realistic appearance dominates. The author comments rather neutrally about the other religions, races, and the different fauna and flora, and he describes, without any noticeable value judgment, local customs, dress, habits, and political structures. Curiosity overrules all previous narrative tendencies and habits because the author is mostly concerned with discussing his own experiences and providing as detailed information

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about the foreign world as possible. In this regard we can identify the Itinerario as a true landmark in the history of early modern mentality, since India and the neighboring countries finally emerge on the horizon as countries that were within European reach and accessible both for merchants and tourists alike. This did not diminish Varthema’s personal problems since he had to operate very carefully under the disguise of a Muslim, but overall, as his narrative indicates, he felt rather comfortable there and knew well how to operate in that foreign, but no longer really alien, world where he spent a surprisingly long time, immersing himself in the new cultures, adapting so much that he could gain true insider information. Sprenger still traveled mostly along the coastlines, but Varthema went into the interiors of the various countries and could thus observe many more details and fascinating features characteristic of the local customs and cultural conditions.40 In a way, he truly brought India home to his European readers, as the enormous reception process on most of the important book markets—that is, in Italy and Germany—indicates.41 He no longer simply fantasized about India; he reflected, instead, on his personal experiences and combined those with his extensive reading about countries further East. Here we encounter, in other words, the first modern travel writer who based his account about India on his own observations and thus became a true European authority in matters pertaining to India.42 Altogether, as we can thus conclude, “Orientalism,” as commonly remarked on in this context, does not prove to be a useful analytic term to comprehend the true accomplishments of either writer.

Notes 1. Rudolf Wittkowski, “Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942): 159–97; Wittkowski, “Marco Polo and the Pictorial Tradition of the Marvels of the East,” in Oriente Poliano: studi e conferenze tenute all’Is.M.E.O. in occasione del 7. centenario della nascita di Marco Polo (1254–1954), ed. E. Balazs (Rome: Instituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1957), 155–72. 2. For a selection of the splendid illustrations, see “In Pictures: Itinerary, First Travel Best-Seller on India,” BBC News India, October 25, 2012, www.bbc .co.uk/news/world-asia-india-20038986; the quote is taken from “Ludovico di Varthema,” The Mariners’ Museum, http://ageofex.marinersmuseum .org/?type=travelwriter&id=11. For a digitized edition of the Latin version, see “Ludouici Patritii Romani Nouum itinerarium Aethiopiae, Aegipti, vtriusque Arabiae, Persidis, Siriae, ac Indiae, intra et extra Gangem,” Biblioteca Complutense, Proyecto de digitalización, Universidad Complutense Madrid, http://dioscorides.ucm.es/proyecto_digitalizacion/index .php?doc=b23500736&y=2008&p=1.

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3. Pietro Barozzi, Ludovico de Varthema e il suo itinerario, Memorie della Società Geografica Italiana 54 (Rome: Società Geografica Italiana, 1996); Stephanie Leitch, Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany: New Worlds in Print Culture, History of Text Technologies (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 101–45. See also Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 1–72; Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001); John Archer, Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Christine Johnson, The German Discovery of the World: Renaissance Encounters with the Strange and Marvelous, Studies in Early Modern German History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009); and Susan Scott Parish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). I have not yet been able to consult Kim Phillips, Before Orientalism: Asian Peoples and Cultures in European Travel Writing, 1245–1510, The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). 4. Lodovico de Varthema, Die ritterlich un[d] lobwirdig Rayss (1515), a facsimile reproduction with an introduction by George Winius, Maritime History Series (Delmar, N.Y.: Published for the John Carter Brown Library by Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1992). See now also Varthema, Reisen im Orient, Eingeleitet, übersetzt und erläutert von Folker Reichert, Fremde Kulturen in alten Berichten 2 (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 2002). A new historical-critical edition appeared only recently, Itinerario, ed. e commento a cura di Valentina Martino, Oltremare. Viaggiatori italiani dal Medioevo al Rinascimento 12 (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2011). For a social-historical analysis, see Elke Waiblinger, Reisende des Cinquecento: sozialer Typus und literarische Gestalt, Studia Romanica 112 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2003). 5. The extent to which modern research still has to realize the enormous importance of Lodovico’s contribution finds a clear illustration in the total absence of his account in Trade, Travel, and Exploration in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. John Block Friedmann and Kristen Mossler Figg (New York and London: Garland, 2000). But he only left Europe in 1502 and returned in 1508. For a good summary of his travels, see the article in Wikipedia, http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludovico_di_Varthema. 6. Edward Said’s theory has been severely challenged in recent years, especially if applied to the early modern age; see now Allison P. Coudert, “Orientalism in Early Modern Europe?,” in East Meets West in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: Transcultural Experiences in the Premodern World, ed. Albrecht Classen, Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture 14 (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2013), 715–56. However, Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), explicitly excluded German travelogue authors and commentators on the East because they had “a clean past” (2–4). For a good summary of his arguments, see Orientalism (book), Wikipedia, http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_%28book%29. 7. Sven Trakulhun, “The Widening of the World and the Realm of History: Early European Approaches to the Beginnings of Siamese History, c. 1500–1700,” in Asian Travel in the Renaissance, ed. Daniel Carey and Anthony Reid (Malden, Mass., Oxford, and Carlton, Victoria, Australia: Blackwell, 2004), 67–92; here 69. 8. For the history of reception of the Alexander myth in the late Middle Ages, see the contributions to Figures d’Alexandre à la Renaissance, ed. C. Jouanno, Alexander redivivus 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012).

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9. “The Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle,” in The Wonders of the East, in The Beowulf Manuscript: Complete Texts and The Fight at Finnsburg, ed. and trans. R. D. Fulk, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2010), 33–83; see also the contributors to Alexanderdichtungen im Mittelalter: Kulturelle Selbstbestimmung im Kontext literarischer Beziehungen, ed. Jan Cölln et al., Veröffentlichungen aus dem Göttinger Sonderforschungsbereich 529, Serie A: Literatur und Kulturräume im Mittelalter 1 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2000); Faustina DoufikarAerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus: A Survey of the Alexander Tradition through Seven Centuries: From Pseudo-Callisthenes to Ṣūrī, Mediaevalia Groningana, New Series 13 (Paris and Walpole, Mass.: Peeters, 2010). 10. U[lrich] Knefelkamp, “Indien,” in Lexikon des Mittelalters (Munich and Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1991), 5:404–5. See also Helmut Gregor, Das Indienbild des Abendlandes, Wiener Dissertationen aus dem Gebiete der Geschichte 4 (Vienna: Geyer, 1964); Ulrich Knefelkamp, Die Suche nach dem Reich des Priesterkonigs Johannes: dargestellt anhand von Reiseberichten und anderen ethnographischen Quellen des 12. bis 17. Jahrhunderts (Gelsenkirchen: A. Müller, 1986); Maria Francesca Tagliatest, “L’immagine dell’India nel medioevo italiano” (PhD diss., Naples, )2005; Albrecht Classen, “Indien: Imagination und Erfahrungswelt in Antike und Mittelalter,” in Mittelalter-Mythen V, ed. Ulrich Müller and Werner Wunderlich (St. Gall: UVK, 2008), 359–72. 11. Thomas Hahn, “The Indian Tradition in Western Medieval Intellectual History,” Viator 9 (1978): 213–34; Frank J. Korom, “Indien,” Enzyklopädie des Märchens, ed. Rolf Wilhelm Brednich (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), 7:138–51; Laurance Harf-Lancner, “From Alexander to Marco Polo, From Text to Image: The Marvels of India,” in The Medieval French Alexander, ed. Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox, SUNY Series in Medieval Studies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 235–57; for a special perspective, see Abraham Melamed, “The Image of India in Medieval Jewish Culture: Between Adoration and Rejection; With Particular Reference to the Work of Judah ha-Levi,” Jewish History 20, nos. 3–4 (2006): 299–314. 12. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, 2nd. ed. by Robert Boenig and Andrew Taylor (Peterborough, Ontario, and Buffalo, N.Y.: Broadview, 2012), “Knight’s Tale,” 2156, “The Summoner’s Tale,” 1980, “The Squire’s Tale,” 110. 13. Martin Pfeiffer, “Indische Theorie,” in Enzyklopädie des Märchens, ed. Rolf Wilhelm Brednich (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), 7:151– 57. For a concrete case where this influence can actually be observed in great detail, see Sabine Obermaier, Das Fabelbuch als Rahmenerzahlung: Intertextualitat und Intratextualitat als Wege der Interpretation des Buchs der Beispiele der alten Weisen Antons von Pforr, Beihefte zum Euphorion 48 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2004). 14. Quoted from Romane des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts: Nach den Erstdrucken mit sämtlichen Holzschnitten, ed. Jan-Dirk Müller, Bibliothek der Frühen Neuzeit 1 (Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1990). 15. P. D. A. Harvey, Medieval Maps (London: British Library, 1991). See also the valuable anthology India in the Fifteenth Century, Being a Collection of Narratives of Voyages to India in the Century Preceding the Portuguese Discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, from Latin, Persian, Russian, and Italian Sources, now first translated into English, edited with an intro. by R. H. Major, Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society 22 (1857; New York: B. Franklin, [1964]). 16. Die Meerfahrt: Balthasar Sprengers Reise zur Pfefferküste. Mit einem Faksimile des Buches von 1509, ed. Andreas Erhard and Eva Ramminger (Innsbruck:

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17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

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Medievalia et Humanistica Haymon, 1998). An earlier edition, together with an introductory interpretation, appeared already in 1902 but under a slightly different spelling: Franz Schulze, Balthasar Springers Indienfahrt 1505/06: Wissenschaftliche Würdigung der Reiseberichte Springers zur Einführung in den Neudruck seiner “Meerfahrt” vom Jahre 1509, Drucke und Holzschnitte des XV. und XVI. Jahrhunderts in getreuer Nachbildung VIII (Strassburg: J. H. En. Heitz, 1902). The original print has now been digitized: http://daten.digitale-sammlungen .de/~db/0004/bsb00045403/image_1. For a good introduction, though devoid of any noticeable interpretive analysis, see Thomas Horst, “The Voyage of the Bavarian Explorer Balthasar Sprenger to India (1505/1506) at the Turning Point between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Times: His Travelogue and the Contemporary Cartography as Historical Sources,” in Weltbilder im Mittelalter: Perceptions of the World in the Middle Ages, ed. Philipp Billion, Nathanael Busch, Dagmar Schlüter, and Xenia Stolzenburg (Bonn: Bernstein-Verlag, Gebr. Remmel, 2009), 167–97. Wolfgang Neuber, Fremde Welt im europäischen Horizont: Zur Topik der deutschen Amerika-Reiseberichte der Frühen Neuzeit, Philologische Studien und Quellen 121 (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1991), offers an insightful discussion of the emergence of travel literature, though he focuses primarily on the travelogues pertaining to America. See also Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). The VD 16, WorldCat, and the Karlsruhe Virtual Catalogue all list only this one printing of Sprenger’s text. We would expect some references to Varthema in Asian Travel in the Renaissance, but that is not the case. For a quick survey of Varthema’s accomplishments, see Explorers and Discoverers of the World, ed. Daniel B. Baker (Detroit, Washington, D.C., and London: Gale Research, 1993), 565. There is nothing on Varthema in the Lexikon des Mittelalters, vol. 8 (Munich: Lexma Verlag, 1997), or in Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia, vol. 2, ed. Christopher Kleinhenz (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). By contrast, Lance G. Lazar, “Varthema, Lodovico de,” Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, vol. 6, ed. Paul. F. Grendler (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1999), 216–17, outlines at least the basic data. Hans Losch, “Einwirkung Indiens auf die deutsche Dichtung,” Deutsche Philologie im Aufriss, 2nd rev. ed. by Wolfgang Stammler (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1962), 3:589–98. He is not even mentioned by any of the contributors to Reisen und Reiseliteratur im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Xenja von Ertzdorff and Dieter Neukirch, Chloe, Beihefte zum Daphnis 13 (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Editions Rodopi, 1992). Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), does not know him. Neuber, Fremde Welt, mentions him several times in passing (209, 220, 255, et passim), but with no particular interest or awareness of the author’s particular qualities. Georg Winius, Introduction, Die ritterlich un[d] lobwirdig Rayss, 9. Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250–1625, Past and Present Publications (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 125. Itinerary of Ludovico Di Varthema of Bologna from 1502 to 1508, as translated from the original Italian edition of 1510, by John Winter Jones, F.S.A., in 1863 for the Hakluyt Society; with a Discourse on Varthema and his travels in southern

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25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33.

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Asia, by Sir Richard Carnac Temple, Argonaut Press Publication 4 (London: Argonaut Press, 1928; reprint, New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1997). See now the new edition, Itinerario, ed. e commento a cura di Valentina Martino, Oltremare. Viaggiatori italiani dal Medioevo al Rinascimento 12 (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2011). As to the German translation, see Die ritterlich un[d] lobwirdig Rayss (1515), a facsimile reproduction with an intro. by George Winius, Scholar’s Facsimiles & Reprints 477 (Delmar, N.Y.: Published for the John Carter Brown Library by Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1992). Via a catalog search, I found one printing of Varthema’s text in Spanish from 1520: Itinerario del venerable varon micer Luis patricio romano en el qual cueta mucha parte dela ethiopia Egipto y entra-bas Arabias: Siria y la India / Buelto de latin en romance por Christobal de arcos clerigo (Seville: Jacob Kronberger, 1520). Surprisingly, Lazar, “Varthema, Lodovico de,” claims that there were also four Spanish translations, two Flemish translations, and one English translation (216). This still needs to be confirmed by further research. My search for other translations or editions cannot claim to be exhaustive, but it seems relatively representative, considering that I extensively searched both WorldCat and the Karlsruhe Virtual Catalogue (last accessed on February 13, 2013). Max Böhme, Die großen Reisesammlungen des 16. Jahrhunderts und ihre Bedeutung (Straßburg: Heitz, 1904), 50, 75, 94, 150. Reichert, Reisen im Orient, 29–30. Europäische Reiseberichte des späten Mittelalters: Eine analytische Biographie, ed. Werner Paravicini. Part 1: Deutsche Reiseberichte, by Christian Halm, Kieler Werkstücke, R. D.: Beiträge zur europäischen Geschichte des späten Mittelalters 5 (Frankfurt a. M., Berlin, et al.: Peter Lang, 1994); Part 2: Französische Reiseberichte, by Jörg Wettlaufer together with Jaques Paviot, Kieler Werkstücke 12 (1999); Part 3: Niederländische Reiseberichte, nach Vorarbeiten von Detlev Kraack bearbeitet von Jan Hirschbiegel, Kieler Werkstücke 14 (2000); see also Ursula Ganz-Blättler, Andacht und Abenteuer: Berichte europäischer Jerusalem- und Santiago-Pilger (1320–1520), Jakobus-Studien 4 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990). The Book of John Mandeville: with Related Texts, ed. and trans. with an introduction, by Iain Macleod Higgins (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2011). For the rich history of Mandeville’s reception, see, most recently, Ladan Niayesh, A Knight’s Legacy: Mandeville and Mandevillian Lore in Early Modern England, Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press; distributed in the USA exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Before him the Portuguese spy Pero de Covilh seems to have visited Mecca in 1486, and so Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot) sometime before 1490. See Reichert, Reisen im Orient, 9. In one image accompanying the original print, we can read: “I, longing for novelty (as a thirsty man longs for fresh water), departed from these places as being well known to all, and, entering the Nile, arrived at Cairo” (xviii). This quote is not included in the text itself. See Travelers in Disguise: Narratives of Eastern Travel by Poggio Bracciolini and Ludovico de Varthema, English by John Winter Jones, rev. with an introduction by Lincoln Davis Hammond (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963). I have carefully compared the English translation with the German original printed in Augsburg in 1515 and found it to be reliable. Hence I will quote from this translation, unless I will discuss specific, philologically relevant passages.

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34. For theoretical reflections on this phenomenon, see the seminal study by Hans Blumenberg, Der Prozess der theoretischen Neugierde, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 24 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1973); cf. also Barbara M. Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Neil Kenny, The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). See also the contributions to Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. R. J. W. Evans and Alexander Marr (Aldershot, England, and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2006). 35. Neil Kenny, Curiosity in Early Modern Europe: Word Histories, Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 81 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998); Barbara M Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). See also the contributions to Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel, ed. Jas Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés (London: Reaktion, 1999). Medievalists have protested with good reasons against this modernist perspective and have pointed out that curiositas was already a specific value embraced by a good number of medieval thinkers, but this is not the central issue of my paper. See the articles in Edward Peters, Limits of Thought and Power in Medieval Europe, Variorum Collected Studies Series CS721 (Aldershot and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2001), and in Richard Newhauser, Sin: Essays on the Moral Tradition in the Western Middle Ages, Variorum Collected Studies Series CS869 (Aldershot, England, and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate/Variorum, 2007). 36. For the Portuguese discovery of India, see Reichert, Reisen im Orient, 12–16.v. 37. See the contributions to Tiere und Fabelwesen im Mittelalter, ed. Sabine Obermaier (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009). Despite some brief references to the elephant, this animal does not figure prominently here, or in any other studies on animals in the Middle Ages, since it was only an exotic creature living at the margin of European imagination. 38. Again, the difference between the original and the English translation is most curious, but this would not be attributable to the modern translator but to the fact that the English version is based on the Italian text from 1510, while we are looking at the German translation from 1515. 39. The proper call to prayer (adhān) would read thus: “Allāhu akbar, allāhu akbar (God is greater [than everything else], God is greater), ḥayya ‘alā ṣ-ṣalāt, ḥayya ‘alā ṣ-ṣalāt (Hasten to the prayer, hasten to the prayer) ḥayya ‘alā l-falāh, ḥayya ‘alā l-falāh (Hasten to success, hasten to success) allāhu akbar, allāhu akbar (God is greater, God is greater) lā ilāha illā llāhi (There is no god but God alone) ashhadu anna muḥammadan rasūlu llāhi (I bear witness that Mohammed is God’s prophet).”

40. See the Introduction to Travelers in Disguise by Lincoln Davis Hammong, xix–xxx. 41. Reichert, Reisen im Orient, 25–50. 42. See the contributions to Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, ed. Stuart Schwartz, Studies in Comparative Early Modern History (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

[email protected]

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The Image of Judaism in Nicholas of Cusa’s Writings GÖRGE K. HASSELHOFF

Abstract With regard to questions of religion the Renaissance philosopher Nicholas of Cusa is known for his concept of “one religion with different rites.”1 Nonetheless, his attitude to living Jews must be understood differently. In his political actions he tried to establish strict measurements against Jews, but in his philosophical chef d’oeuvre De docta ignorantia, in his sermons, and in his mathematical work De reparatione kalendarii he more than once referred to Jewish philosophers. In this article all reference to medieval Jews and Jewish writings are collected and analyzed. Thereby, Nicholas’s possible sources are shown. Nonetheless, one point remains open—namely, why he sometimes referred to Maimonides as Rabbi Salomon, which is the name of the Jewish exegete Rashi.

The study of Christian attitudes toward Judaism reveals an interesting phenomenon. There is biblical, pre-Christian Judaism, which is simply a given and therefore easily acceptable fact. Jews from these pre-Christian times sometimes are the object of polemics, but they are still seen as God’s chosen people. A second group of Jews are the contemporary ones. We do not know much about everyday interaction, but in theological terms this group seems to have posed a problem for Christians for a long time because they relate to the biblical God but do not believe in Christ. Up to the middle of the twentieth century for most Christian theologians these Jews were no longer God’s chosen people. In fact, this group was frequently attacked in books and even suffered physical assaults. Finally, there is a third group between biblical and contemporary Judaism that consists of literarily active Jews. While rabbinic traditions were only partially known to Christians through authors such as Justin Martyr or Jerome until the middle of the thirteenth century (and even later), exegetical, philosophical, and scientific writings were received more widely. Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 40 (Reinhold F. Glei and Wolfgang Polleichtner, eds.), Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

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In the following pages I will concentrate on Nicholas of Cusa’s attitude toward contemporary Jews and his reception of nonrabbinic literature from the eleventh to fifteenth centuries.

I. Nicholas and Contemporary Jews In 2005 Karl-Heinz Zaunmüller published his 2001 PhD dissertation, “Nicholas of Cusa and the Jews.”2 The main focus of this work lies in Nicholas’s activities as legatus a latere in the German countries from 1450 to 1452. Zaunmüller shows that Nicholas tried to stop Jewish money lending and that he attempted to force Jews to wear a yellow ring in order to make them recognizable as such. Although Nicholas obtained a number of synodic decisions in support of his plans, they were—grosso modo—not executed in the territories that Nicholas visited and were finally revoked by the bishops and by the pope himself. Thus, while Nicholas failed to implement his plans, we should nevertheless keep in mind his negative attitude toward contemporary Jews, which, incidentally, was mirrored in the political campaign (pursued by him in the last years of his life) for a new crusade against the Turks to free Constantinople. A second facet of Nicholas’s attitude toward contemporary Judaism and Jews is highlighted by short remarks in his very first sermon (1430/1) and in his theological treatise De pace fidei (1453). In the following remark, inserted into his sermon, Nicholas mentions a conversation between himself and wise Jews on the subject of Trinity: Ego etiam aliquando disputando deprehendi sapientes Judaeos ad credendum Trinitatem inducibiles. Sed quod Filius in divinis sit incarnatus, hoc est, in quo sunt indurati nec rationes nec prophetias audire volunt.3 [Also once during a disputation I was surprised that wise Jews were inclined to believe in Trinity. But that the Son as part of the divine became flesh is [an idea], toward which they are hardened, and for which they want to hear neither reasonable arguments nor prophecies.]

It is not clear whether this remark relates to historical facts or to an episode adopted from earlier texts. If it is historically accurate, it might most likely refer to Nicholas’s time in Padova, where a large Jewish community flourished. However, it seems to be rather unlikely (although not impossible4) that a Jew was inclined to be introduced to the mysteries of the Trinity. Alternatively, it is conceivable that Nicholas refers to a literary occurrence. In his Pugio fidei (Dagger of Faith, book I-III, 3–6) Raymundus Martini tries to show that a close reading of the Jewish teaching of middot as proprietates (qualities) should lead to an understanding of Trinity. This position seems to be summarized by Nicholas of Lyra in

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his Quaestiones contra perfidiam Iudeorum,5 and, interestingly, Nicholas of Cusa mentions Nicholas of Lyra as one of his sources only a few lines before the quoted sentence. Although we cannot settle the question with certainty, it is likely that this model is the backdrop of the position attributed to the Jew in De pace fidei. Here, Nicholas of Cusa writes: Ad haec Iudaeus respondit: “Optime explanata est superbenedicta trinitas, quae negari nequit. Nam propheta quidem nobis ipsam quam breviter aperiens aiebat Deum interrogasse, quomodo ipse qui aliis fecunditatem generationis tribuit sterilis esse posset. Et quamvis Iudaei fugiant trinitatem propter hoc quia eam putarunt pluralitatem, tamen intellecto quod sit fecunditas simplicissima perlibenter acquiescent.”6 [To these [statements] a Jew responded: “The Super-blessed Trinity, which cannot be denied, has been explained very well. For a certain prophet, disclosing the Trinity to us very briefly, said that God had asked how He Himself who bestowed on others the fecundity of begetting was able to be sterile. And although Jews shun the [doctrine of] the Trinity because they have considered the Trinity to be a plurality, nonetheless once it is understood that [the Trinity] is most simple fecundity, [the Jews] will very gladly give assent.”7]

II. Nicholas and Postbiblical Judaism Considering the background of his attitude toward contemporary Jews described above, it is interesting that Nicholas is only a little reluctant to quote Jewish authors in a positive way and even to mention their names. Apart from some references to works by Jewish authors (even if they are only mentioned once), he refers to three medieval Jewish authors by name.8 The first is Abraham Avenezre, who is quoted six times in the early work De reparatione kalendarii.9 Avenezre appears as an astronomer who gives insight into Jewish calculations10 and who (literarily) inspired his successor Petrus de Abano: “ut Abraham Avenezre et post eum Petrus de Abano”11 (“as Abraham Avenezre and following him Petrus de Abano [say]”). In another instance he is one of the (Arabic) astronomers12 who sometimes provide additional calculations.13 Whether Nicholas’s Avenezre is a Jew or not cannot be established with certainty (at least he is never called a Jew), although it is obvious that it is Abraham ibn Ezra (ca. 1092–1167) who is meant here. Ibn Ezra, who contributed to medieval astronomy, philosophy, and exegesis, wrote in Hebrew and Latin.14 Still, it cannot be determined without a doubt whether Nicholas of Cusa read Ibn Ezra or whether he relied on Petrus de Abano or possibly on another astronomical work from which he might have taken the quotations.

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The other two Jews who are referred to by name are easily recognizable as Jews by their introduction as “rabbi.” The first is Rabbi Salomon, whom scholastic writers normally identify as Rabbi (or Rabbenu) Shlomo Yitzhaqi (also known as Rashi; ca. 1040–1105).15 However, a close examination of the four quotations of this “Rabbi Salomon” reveals that it is by no means Rashi who is introduced here. In the first book of De docta ignorantia we find three of these quotations, of which the first is the most important. In chapter 16 (n. 44) of that book the rabbi is introduced with a quotation demonstrating that knowledge alone does not suffice to fully understand the creator: Et ad hoc concordanter ait Rabbi Salomon omnes sapientes convenisse, “quod scientiae non apprehendunt creatorem; et non apprehendit, quid est, nisi ipse; et apprehensio nostra respectu ipsius est defectus appropinquandi apprehensioni eius.” Et propterea idem alibi concludens dicit: “Laudetur creator, in cuius essentiae comprehensione inquisitio scientiarum abbreviatur et sapientia ignorantia reputatur et elegantia verborum fatuitas.”16 [And in harmony with this [verdict] Rabbi Solomon states that all the wise agreed “that the sciences do not apprehend the Creator. Only He Himself apprehends what He is; our apprehension of Him is a defective approximation of His apprehension.” Accordingly, Rabbi Solomon elsewhere says by way of conclusion: “Praised be the Creator! When His existence [essentia] is apprehended, the inquiry of the sciences is cut short, wisdom is reckoned as ignorance, and elegance of words as fatuity.”17]

Jacob Guttmann has already demonstrated that Moses Maimonides is quoted here,18 and Herbert Wackerzapp has revealed Meister Eckhart as the source of the two quotations.19 Nicolas’s quotation concludes with the interesting remark: “Et ista est illa docta ignorantia quam inquirimus” (“And this is that learned ignorance we ask for”).20 In other words, this quotation of Rabbi Salomon alias Maimonides reveals a fundamental principle of the learned ignorance (docta ignorantia). We come across the next two quotations in chapters 24 (n. 82) and 26 (n. 87). In chapter 24 Nicholas demonstrates that the (unspeakable) tetragrammaton is God’s proper name, which denotes only him. Nicholas recommends to the reader the study of Jerome and that of Rabbi Salomon, who wrote extensively on that subject in his book Dux neutrorum: De quibus Hieronymus et Rabbi Salomon in libro Ducis neutrorum extense tractant; qui videri possunt.21 [On these [things] Jerome and Rabbi Salomon in the Book of the Guide of the Indifferent write extensively; they can be read.]

The third and last reference to Rabbi Salomon in De docta ignorantia puts the Jew in line with (Ps.-)Dionysius the Areopagite: “quem Rabbi

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Salomon et omnes sapientes sequuntur” (“whom Rabbi Salomon and all wise men follow”).22 If it were only these four references23 to Rabbi Salomon (alias Rashi) alias Maimonides, one could say that Nicholas perhaps relied on a faulty source and that the names should simply be corrected. However, that approach would be too simplistic because there are also seven further references to Maimonides that use the “correct” name Rabbi Moyses. In Nicholas’s first sermon (dated 1430/1 according to the critical edition) we already find a reference to Rabbi Moyses’s claim—made in his Liber Directionis perplexorum—that all divine names are derived except for the tetragrammaton, which exclusively denotes the creator, signifies the divine essence with its inherent proprieties, and is a great (maximus) mystery: ideo Rabbi Moyses in libro Directionis perplexorum dicit, quod omnia nomina divina derivata sunt ab operibus divinis praeter Tetragrammaton, quod est appropriatum altissimo creatori, quod significat divinam essentiam cum proprietatibus intrinsecis,—et maximi mysterii est. Et per ipsum, ut quidam aiunt, cunctas quas hodie magicas vocamus operationes, quae apparentem rationem non habent, antiqui operati sunt.24 [Therefore Rabbi Moyses in the book of Guidance of the Perplexed says that all divine names are derived from divine activities except for the Tetragrammaton, which is appropriate for the highest creator, [and] which signifies the divine essence with its intrinsic proprieties. And it is the greatest mystery. And with it, as some say, the ancients have worked all actions that we today call magic, [i.e.] which do not have an apparent reason.]

It is difficult to trace the source of Nicholas’s reference. The editors of the critical edition of his works suggest as sources either Nicholas of Lyra’s commentary on Jeremiah 23:6 or Raymundus Martini’s Pugio fidei II, 3, where The Guide for the Perplexed II, 61 is translated anew. Nevertheless, the knowledge could have been transmitted by several scholastic writers, such as by Henricus Batenus of Mechelen, Henry of Ghent, and so forth.25 The context of the reference to unknown Jewish mystical texts (see below) allows the possibility that Nicholas either referred to verbal information or to a lost florilegium. A second reference to Rabbi Moyses is found in Sermo XX (dated 1439/40) where Nicholas explains that he transliterated the tetragrammaton “Yehova” whose ineffability is a secret and therefore cannot be translated: Quare in nomine “Jehova” huius ineffabilitatis est secretum, quia nec transferri potuit, ut dicit Hieronymus et Rabbi Moyses.26 [Therefore in the name “Jehova” there is the secret of this ineffability because it cannot be translated as is said by Jerome and Rabbi Moyses.]

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It is interesting to note that these two references to Rabbi Moyses are followed chronologically in Cusanus’s works by the four references to Rabbi Salomon that were introduced before. Why Nicholas changed the name remains open, though. We will return to that point soon. After these six references to Maimonides concerning God’s ineffable name there is a period of silence regarding the Jewish philosopher. However, a few years later a series of different references to Rabbi Moyses appears. Between 1446 and 1455 we find four more or less similar quotations of a single phrase. In Sermo LVIII (dated 1446) Nicholas explains: Ut sic spiritus, qui Deus est et solo spiritu intellectuali participabilis, sit “omnia in omnibus” et “manu angeli omnia faciat,” ut ait Rabbi Moyses.27 [This way, the Holy Spirit, who is God and takes part only through the intellectual spirit, is “all in all” [1 Corinthians 15:28] and “through the hand of an angel does all things,” as is said by Rabbi Moyses.]

In Sermo CIV (dated 1451) this is rephrased: “Et dicit Rabbi Moyses ‘Deum omnia operari in manu angeli.’”28 In Sermo CLXXI (dated 1455) it reads: “Nam, ut ait Rabbi Moyses, omnia [quae] Deus in manu angeli operator.”29 Finally, in Sermo CLXXVI (also dated 1455) the phrase appears as: “ut loquitur Rabbi Moyses Deum in manu angeli omnia facere.”30 Again, it is difficult to trace back the origin of that “quotation” because there is no such sentence in Maimonides’ works. There is, nonetheless, a phrase in Meister Eckhart’s explanation of Genesis 1:26a that includes a paraphrase of a passage from Maimonides.31 In Eckhart we read: Quod autem dicitur faciamus in plurali, Rabbi Moyses sic exponit, dicens quod “intelligentiae” secundum Aristotelem et secundum nos “angeli medii sunt inter creatorem et inter alia et eis mediantibus moventur caeli, quorum motus est causa omnis generationis et generabilis,” “nec invenies opus aliquod quod creator faciat nisi per manum angeli.”32 [But what is meant by the plural faciamus, Rabbi Moyses explains as follows. He says that “intelligences” according to Aristotle and according to us are “angels who are in the middle between the creator and all other [beings] and by whom the heavens are moved, whose movement is the reason of all growing and [ability] to generate,” “and you will not find any work that the creator will make if not through the hand of an angel.”]

Perhaps Nicholas had this passage in mind when he quoted his Rabbi Moyses. We find one last reference to Rabbi Moyses in Sermo CCXV (dated 1456). In that sermon Nicholas touches on Jesus’ circumcision on the eighth day of his life. With reference to Rabbi Moyses, Nicholas explains

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that boys are circumcised not earlier or later than that because of their perfect physical condition on that day: Dicit autem Rabbi Moyses, quod propter tenerem complexionem pueri, ne periclitetur, exspectatur octava dies, ut sint membra solidiora, aut quia in octava die seu aetate scilicet resurgentium debent omnes superfluitates resecari.33 [But Rabbi Moyses says that because of the tender state of a boy, in order not to harm him, one has to wait for the eighth day, so that the parts of the body are more solid, or because in the eighth day, i.e. at the age of the presentation, all unnecessary (parts of the body) must be cut off.]

Although in 1451 Nicholas of Cusa, as is reported by Frederik of Heilo, discovered in Egmond (today’s Netherlands) a copy of the Dux neutrorum, which he copied for Pope Nicholas V,34 it seems to me that his quote is not based on a firsthand reading of the text but rather relied on Jacob de Voragine. In his Legenda aurea Jacob quotes this particular passage on circumcision from Maimonides.35 The passage is introduced with the words “Rabbi Moyses maximus philosophus et theologus.” Since in a marginal note of a Cusan codex Nicholas quotes these exact words,36 it seems probable that Nicholas went back to Jacob for the sermon in question as well. Ibn Ezra and Maimonides are not the only Jewish sources to which Nicholas refers. In the first and the twentieth sermons we find references to Jewish books that are even more puzzling than the exchanged names of two rabbis. In Sermo I, in the paragraph following the first mention of Rabbi Moyses, Nicholas states that we are informed about the secrets of the divine names in the books of Adam and Abel, and in the Sepher Raziel, which is attributed to Salomon. Et in hiis libris, quos Adam et eius filius Abel iustus dicuntur scripsisse, et in libro quodam, qui Salomoni inscribitur et vocatur Sepher Raziel, reperitur, quo modo in hoc nomine et aliis infinitis divinis nominibus antiqui omnem sapientiam tam superiorum quam inferiorum contineri putarunt. Hodie autem libri sunt destructi, quia per non intellegentes linguas scripti, et iuste spreti et damnati.37 [And in those books, which are said to have been written by Adam and his just son Abel, and in a certain book, which is ascribed to Salomon and is called Sefer Raziel (Book of Raziel), it can be found, how the ancients believed that in this name and in the other uncountable divine names all wisdom of the highest and of the lowest world is contained. But today the books are destroyed because they are written in unintelligible languages, and they are justly scorned and damned.]

As Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann has shown recently, the Sepher Raziel mentioned here has little in common with the Sepher Raziel that is known under that title as one of the kabbalistic writings.38 The other writings cannot be identified either. As stated before, Nicholas might

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have relied on verbal information or on a florilegium that we do not know. Nonetheless, the concluding sentence of that passage is puzzling: “De quibus alio loco potius dicendum est” (“It is better to speak about these in another place”).39 We do not have that “other place” if the remark does not apply to Sermo XX. Following the above-cited reference to Jerome and Rabbi Moyses, Nicholas states that the Jews have a liber Cabbala on the virtue of the tetragrammaton: Unde de hoc nomine Tetragrammaton, “quattuor scilicet litterarum,” antiqui omnia secreta posuerunt; et Judaei librum Cabbala habent de virtute huius nominis.40 [Therefore the ancients stated that all secrets [came] from that name Tetragrammaton, namely the four letters. And the Jews have a book [called] Cabbala about the virtue of that name.]

There is no book called “Cabbala” on the divine name, though, while there is, of course, the Jewish mysticism called “kabbala.” Perhaps Nicholas simply misunderstood his informant. He continues with his sermon, and two paragraphs later he states that there are indeed several names for God. These names are written in the libri exorcismorum Salomonis: Sed secundum primum modum habemus nomina divina: Jah, Adonai, El, Elohim, Vaheie, Schaddai, Sabaoth, et cetera nomina de Libris exorcismorum Salomonis.41 [But according to the first kind we have divine names: Jah, Adonai, El, Elohim, Vaheye, Shadday, Sabaot, and further names from the Books of Salomon’s exorcisms.]

These books are also unknown to us.42 Even though we cannot identify any of these books mentioned by Nicholas, we can nevertheless state with certainty that he knew at least some aspects of the Jewish mystical movement known to us as kabbala, which he made known to his readers (even if the sermons were not published immediately).43

III. Conclusion In summary, although Nicholas of Cusa, as a cardinal of the Roman Church, showed a strong antipathy toward contemporary Jews and even attempted to deprive them of their livelihood on German territories, as a philosopher and theologian Nicholas nonetheless demonstrated some interest in Jewish thought. Apparently, he was not afraid of conversing with Jews (unless the described encounters are not based on real experience and should simply be interpreted as rhetorical embellishment) or

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of quoting from Jewish texts. In astronomical matters he had no qualms quoting the Jewish astronomical authority Abraham ibn Ezra. For his own understanding of God’s mystery he referred to Rabbi Moyses, to Rabbi Salomon, and to several kabbalistic writings—despite polemicizing against them a little. He even connected his main philosophical concept of a learned ignorance with Rabbi Salomon. With the help of Rabbi Moyses he explained one aspect of God’s acting as creator. Following an accepted Scholastic tradition, Rabbi Moyses also served as a source of information on the sense behind the fundamental Jewish rite of circumcision (even if the Scholastic writers only partially followed Maimonides here).44 Nevertheless, some points remain open. If Nicholas was aware of at least some aspects of Jewish religion, it remains unclear why he constructed an “un-Jewish” Jew for his “dialogue” De pace fidei. It would appear that the Jewish position was not truly included in his concept of “one religion with different rites.” I do not agree with the reconciliatory suggestion made by Klaus Kremer, who argues that Nicholas tried to present the Jew based on Jewish scriptures.45 Such an attempt fails on a fundamental point: since the disputation on the Talmud in Paris in 1239/40, Christians had a growing knowledge that European Judaism was slowly transforming from a “biblical Judaism” into a “Talmudic (or Rabbinic) Judaism.” Therefore, Nicholas’s Jew in De pace fidei is an anachronistic figure. A second point that remains puzzling is the change of the name Rabbi Moyses into Rabbi Salomon. This could have happened by chance46 or on purpose. If it happened by chance, how could such a distracted philosopher turn into a respected and strict politician? If the exchange happened on purpose, why would Nicholas have done this? Whichever is the case, we have to note that the exchange of names was not a singular phenomenon; it rather happened in several instances, of which I give only two examples here: In De docta ignorantia I n. 18 Nicholas mentions Marcus Varro as the author of the Libri antiquitatum, but it seems that he actually meant Josephus Flavius, who also wrote a book of that title. In the same work, De docta ignorantia I n. 71, Nicholas mentions Parmenides but actually means (Ps.-)Beda the Venerable. (This list could easily be extended.) Again: Why did Nicholas rename Rabbi Moyses as Rabbi Salomon? A possible answer might be that Rabbi Moyses was too closely connected to the Dominican Order for Nicholas.47 Since he found material for his idea of the learned ignorance (docta ignorantia) in a quotation from Rabbi Moyses, he might have had in mind to separate his ideas from that particular order. Since Rabbi Salomon was also known to Scholastic scholars

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through the work of Nicholas of Lyra, who—despite being a Franciscan— could not be classed with any philosophical and theological school, Rabbi Salomon was not subject to any (anti-Dominican) prejudice. Additionally, it was difficult to verify references, as can be seen from Nicholas himself: he seems to have known Maimonides only through the works of Meister Eckhart, Henricus Batenus of Mechelen, Thomas Aquinas, or Jacob de Voragine and probably had to wait until 1451 for the opportunity to see the Dux neutrorum himself. Admittedly, such explanations cannot go much beyond guesswork, and ultimately the question of whether the change of names had a specific purpose or not needs to remain unresolved.

Notes 1. This paper goes back to a lecture given at the First Cusanus International Symposium in Latin America of Young Researchers: The Symbolic Dimension of Nicholas of Cusa’s Thought; Its Genealogy and Projection, Buenos Aires, October 30 to November 1, 2013. The works by Nicholas of Cusa are quoted from the edition Opera Omnia (Hamburg: Meiner) as “OO ([Vol.-No.], [p.], [Editor]),” except for De docta ignorantia, which is quoted from Nikolaus von Kues, Die belehrte Unwissenheit Buch I Lateinisch—deutsch, Übers. und mit Vorwort und Anmerkungen hrsg. von Paul Wilpert, 4., erw. Aufl. besorgt von Hans Gerhard Senger, Philosophische Bibliothek Meiner 264a (Hamburg: Meiner, 1994), and De reparatione kalendarii, which is quoted from Tom Müller, “ut reiecto paschali errore veritati insistamus.” Nikolaus von Kues und seine Konzilsschrift De reparatione kalendarii (Münster, Westf.: Aschendorff Verlag, 2010), 287–319. Unless noted otherwise, all translations are mine. 2. Karl-Heinz Zaunmüller, “Nikolaus von Cues und die Juden: Zur Stellung der Juden in der christlichen Gesellschaft um die Mitte des 15. Jahrhunderts in den deutschen Landen” (PhD diss., Trier, 2001), für die Internetpublikation überarbeitete Fassung 2005, http://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/ volltexte/2005/348/pdf/diss_zaunmueller.pdf. 3. Sermo I, n. 7 (OO 16, 8, Haubst). 4. There are also Christians or Muslims who hold opinions that cannot be found in their Holy Scriptures or in the dogmas of their religious communities. 5. These Quaestiones were printed several times; I refer to the edition of Nicholas of Lyra’s Postilla, Venice 1482–1483, vol. 3, f. 306r–307v. 6. De pace fidei n. 25 (Cp. 9) (OO 7, 26, Klibansky and Bascour). 7. Jasper Hopkins, trans., Complete Philosophical and Theological Treatises of Nicholas of Cusa, 2 vols. (Minneapolis, Minn.: Arthur J. Banning Press, 2001), 2:646. 8. He also mentions Philo of Alexandria (ca. 20/10 B.C.E.–40/50 C.E.) and Iosephus Flavius (ca. 37/8–ca. 100 C.E.) whom I neglect here because they belong to the standard authorities of “biblical” Judaism despite the fact that they lived during New Testament times. Philo is sometimes called sapiens or even sapientissimus. 9. A seventh mention at the end of n. 9 in two manuscripts seems to be an addition. 10. See De reparatione kalendarii n. 9 (292, Müller): “Et ut refert Abraham, Iudei dicunt . . .”

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11. De reparatione kalendarii n. 9 (292, Müller). 12. See De reparatione kalendarii n. 8 (291–92, Müller): “Si quis latius videre optat, ad Augustinum 18° libro contra Faustum et ad Bedam de temporibus, Solinum de mundi mirabilibus, Ptolemaeum in Introductorio in almagesti, Abraham Avenezre de rationibus tabularum Pisanarum ac Macrobium Saturnalium et Ovidium de Fastis ac alios recurrat”; and n. 9 (293, Müller): “cui Abencine et Azarabel consentiunt; similiter et Abraham Avenezre.” 13. See De reparatione kalendarii n. 10 (293, Müller): “sed dicit annum ex motu solis a stella fixa ad eandem constare, uti Indi annum mensurant secundum Abraham Avenezre addentes ultra 4am 1/120 partem diei scilicet 5tam partem unius horae” and n. 35 (305, Müller): “Et dicit Abraham Avenezre: Licet 9 existente aureo numero et 8 et 19 sit inter Christianos et Iudaeos embolismi differentia [etc.].” 14. On Ibn Ezra see, e.g., Raphael Jospe, Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages (Boston: Academic Studies, 2009), 177–236. 15. For Rashi see Avraham Grossman, Rashi (Oxford and Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2012); for his influence on Christian authors see Herman Hailperin, Rashi and the Christian Scholars (Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963); G. K. Hasselhoff, “Raschi und die christliche Bibelauslegung dargestellt an den Kommentaren zum Neuen Testament von Nicolaus von Lyra,” Judaica 62 (2006): 193–215. 16. De docta ignorantia I, n. 44 (60, Wilpert). 17. Complete Philosophical and Theological Treatises of Nicholas of Cusa, vol. 1, 25. 18. Jacob Guttmann, “Aus der Zeit der Renaissance,” Monatschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums 43 (1899), 250–66, at 254–57; reprinted in Guttmann, Die Scholastik des dreizehnten Jahrhunderts in ihren Beziehungen zum Judenthum und zur jüdischen Literatur (Breslau: M & H Marcus, 1902), 173–75; see also Guttmann, “Der Einfluß der maimonidischen Philosophie auf das christliche Abendland,” in Moses ben Maimon, Sein Leben, seine Werke und sein Einfluss, vol. 1, ed. W. Bacher et al. (Leipzig: Fock, 1908), 135–230, at 209–12. 19. Herbert Wackerzapp, Der Einfluss Meister Eckharts auf die ersten philosophischen Schriften des Nikolaus von Kues (1440–1450) (Münster, Westf.: Aschendorff, 1962), 8; the Eckhartian texts quoted here are from the commentary on Exodus in Heribert Fischer et al., ed., Lateinische Werke II (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1992), n. 184 (p. 158) and n. 174 (p. 151). 20. De docta ignorantia I, n. 44 (60, Wilpert). 21. De docta ignorantia I, n. 82 (104, Wilpert). Similar to this quotation is the fourth reference to Rabbi Salomon in Sermo XXIII, n. 35 (OO 16, 377, Haubst and Bodewig): “ut illa divina nomina exponuntur a Rabbi Salomon et sancto Hieronymo.” 22. De docta ignorantia I, n. 87 (110, Wilpert). 23. For the fourth reference, see above, note 21. 24. Sermo I, n. 4 (OO 16, 5, Haubst). 25. See G. K. Hasselhoff, Dicit Rabbi Moyses: Studien zum Bild von Moses Maimonides im lateinischen Westen vom 13. bis 15. Jahrhundert, 2nd ext. ed. (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005), 149–51. 26. Sermo XX, n. 7 (OO 16, 305, Haubst and Bodewig). 27. Sermo LVIII, n. 23 (OO 17, 306, Schnarr). 28. Sermo CIV, n. 8 (OO 17, 545, Hein and Schnarr). 29. Sermo CLXXI, n. 12 (OO 18, 243, Donati, Mandrella, and Schwaetzer). 30. Sermo CLXXVI, n. 1 (OO 18, 275, Donati, Schwaetzer and Stammkötter).

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31. See Rabbi Moyses, Dux neutrorum II, 7 (f. 43r, Giustiniani). 32. Meister Eckhart, Commentary on Genesis 1, 26a, in Konrad Weiss, ed., Lateinische Werke I (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1964), n. 116 [p. 273, 1–5] with quotations from Rabbi Moyses, Dux neutrorum II, 7 (f. 43r, Giustiniani). 33. Sermo CCXV, n. 2 (OO 19, 79, Reinhardt and Euler). 34. Today: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat. 1124; see Hasselhoff, Dicit Rabbi Moyses, 127–28 (with further bibliography). 35. Thomas Aquinas also refers to this passage (see Hasselhoff, Dicit Rabbi Moyses, 77), but here he does not seem to be the source. 36. See Cod. Cus. 212, f. ar, quoted from Rudolf Haubst, Das Bild des Einen und Dreieinen Gottes in der Welt nach Nikolaus von Kues (Trier: Paulinus-Verlag, 1952), 132n81. 37. Sermo I, n. 4 (OO 16, 6, Haubst). 38. See Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Geschichte der christlichen Kabbala, vol. 1, 15. und 16. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstadt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2013), 51. Cf. Liber Razielis in Sefer ha-Razim I und II: Das Buch der Geheimnisse, ed. Bill Rebiger et al., vol. 1: Edition, Texte und Studien zum Antiken Judentum 125 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 31–52. 39. Sermo I, n. 4 (OO 16, 6, Haubst). 40. Sermo XX, n. 7 (OO 16, 305, Haubst and Bodewig). 41. Sermo XX, n. 9 (OO 16, 306, Haubst and Bodewig). 42. The editors of the critical edition suggest that the title probably refers to the Sepher Raziel mentioned above. 43. Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Geschichte der christlichen Kabbala, vol. 1, 52n46, claims that Nicholas is the first Latin writer to mention the kabbala, but this is simply wrong: Raymundus Martini already mentions the kabbala thrice in his Pugio fidei (II, 3: ed. Carpzov, p. 290; II, 8: ed. Carpzov, p. 367; III-III, 11, ed. Carpzov, p. 813). 44. See Hasselhoff, Dicit Rabbi Moyses, 77–80. 45. Klaus Kremer, “Die Hinführung (manuductio) von Polytheisten zum einen, von Juden und Muslimen zum dreieinen Gott,” in Der Friede unter den Religionen nach Nikolaus von Kues, ed. Rudolf Haubst (Mainz: MatthiasGrünewald-Verlag, 1984), 126–59. 46. See, e.g., Wackerzapp, Der Einfluss Meister Eckharts, 35n78: “irrtümlich.” 47. The translation of the Dux neutrorum seems to have been made on behalf of the Dominican Order, whose first and most important readers were Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and Meister Eckhart.

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Some Remarks on the Hymn to Light of Dracontius (Laudes Dei 1,115–28) L O R E N Z O N O S A RT I

In memory of Eleonora Vos autem, fratres, non estis in tenebris, ut uos dies illa tamquam fur comprehendat. —St. Paul, 1 Thessalonians 5:4 Non intenta in eloquentiam sapientia, sed a sapientia non recedente eloquentia. —Augustine, De doctrina christiana 4:21

Abstract This paper, after a short introduction to the main themes of Dracontius’s Laudes Dei, deals with the exegesis of lines 1,123 and 1,128, considered from the scientific-philosophical, symbolic, lexical, and stylistic points of view.

1 Dracontius’s Laudes Dei (LD) is a poem in hexameters, the line of the great hymnodic tradition, and in three books. The poem sets out, mainly, to show allegiance to Christian dogma, defend orthodoxy, and extoll in psalmic style1 God’s omnipotence, goodness, mercy (pietas), and forbearance toward sinful humanity. The praise of God (ἔπαινος θεοῦ, laus Dei)2 is not only a unifying theme but also a deep underlying structure of the whole poem, a pervasive element running through it for the purpose of obtaining an apparent uariatio effect, and the hymn thus becomes the most recurring and hierarchically important literary Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 40 (Reinhold F. Glei and Wolfgang Polleichtner, eds.), Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

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form.3 At key points of the narration, then, the poet has placed hymns or rather, to be more exact, hymnal modulations,4 each of which, however, is always related in subject matter to the poem as a whole, so as to illustrate why mankind must worship, fear, and glorify God,5 who “made as good what is useful, as wise what is very beautiful, as powerful what is biggest.”6 In the first book of LD, where the goodness and mercy of God are extolled, Dracontius states that the best evidence for God’s wish to preserve Adam and human beings is testified to by the fact that God created humans last of all the creatures and set humans at the head of the whole world because “a beautiful hymn to God is an immortal man who is being built up in righteousness, and upon whom the oracles of truth have been engraved.”7 Compare 1,115ff.: “quis genus humanum nescit seruare uolentem / auctorem dominumque deum? cui contulit index / per tot facta dies, quem sexta luce creauit,” as well as 1,580ff.: “usibus humanis data sunt haec cuncta uenire, / ut similis qui factus erat de puluere Christo / his dominaretur cunctis, sub carne creatis / corpora corporibus seruirent cuncta subacta.” The poet moves on immediately after to tell the story of the Creation, vv. 115–555, a Hexameron8 in the true sense of the word, where he shows a certain originality,9 as is acknowledged by scholars. The poetic narrative beginns with the first day, the day of light, that the poet celebrates (vv. 119ff.) in a typical psalmic style10 and with a solemn and refined diction;11 the text reads following Moussy-Camus’s edition, except vv. 119 and 128 (see below): Laudes Dei 1,115–37 Quis genus humanum nescit seruare uolentem auctorem dominumque Deum? Cui contulit index per tot facta dies, quem sexta luce creauit. Prima dies nam lucis erat, mors una tenebris: lux datur ante polum, lux clari causa diei, lux iubar aethereum, lux noctis limes et umbris, lux facies rerum, dux lux cunctis elementis, lux genitis per cuncta color, lux gratia solis, lux decus astrorum, lux aurea cornua lunae, lux fulgor caeli, lux et primordia mundi, lux splendor flammae, lux magni temporis index, lux opus Auctoris primum, lux cardo pudoris, lux honor agricolis, requies lux omnibus aegris, lux aeui media, lux quae dat tempora metis. Et bene constituit mundi primordia lucem clarus ubique Deus numquam maculabilis Auctor, quem non obscurant quacumque ex parte tenebrae nec celantur ei quaecumque obscura geruntur. Initium factis lucem dat lucis origo. Quanta spes mundi promissa est principe luce!

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Some Remarks on the Hymn to Light of Dracontius Quae totum praecessit opus quod continet orbis, quae solis praeuenit iter lumenque coruscum, cuius iussit ope clarescere cuncta creata.12

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[Who is unaware that God, the Creator and Lord, wishes to preserve and protect mankind? To him, whom He created on the sixth day, He showed and entrusted the wonders of creation produced over the preceding six days. The first indeed was the day of light, which was the only possibility of victory over darkness: light is given to us before heaven, light the source of bright day; light the ethereal radiance, light the boundary of night and its shadows, light which reveals the shapes of things, light the leader of all the elements, light which shows the colours of beings, wherever they are, light the charm of sun, light the embellishment of the stars, light which gilds the horns of the moon, light the brilliance of the heaven, light the initial stage of the universe, light the dazzle of the flame, light which points to time’s immensity, light the Creator’s first creation, light the underpinning of purity, light a godsend to farmers, light the solace for all ills, light the mediator of eternity, light which brings about the change of the seasons with its revolutions. And well it is that God has initiated the life of the whole world through light, the Creator, who shines everywhere ever immaculate, whom the shades of darkness never obscure, and nothing, even though it is secretely plotted, lies hidden to Him. He, source of light, establishes light as the beginning of creation. What great grounds for hope were given through the primogeniture of light, which preceded every being in the world, which is the forerunner of the path of the sun and its vivid brightness, by whose help (God) ordered all things to be illuminated.]

This ornate passage is rich in rhetorical figures, in expressions and hexametrical endings from pagan and Christian poetry, but at the same time it is rich in iuncturae and endings, which sound totally new. In line with the tastes in rhetoric of late antiquity, Dracontius in this hymn seems to parade all his literary expertise, associating in this “litany” two clearly contrasting principles—repetition and variation—both played with elegance and vivid variegation in color.13 If we consider the ends pursued and the means employed by the poet, we must recognize that his aim was to communicate in a convincing and forceful way what he had to say both in the doctrinal-expository and in the hymnodic passages, where the whole range of rhetorical colors, the whole gamut of tones and styles need to be finely balanced and blended together;14 the result is a highly sophisticated composition. Such a careful arrangement of traditional and new poetic material produces a feeling of expectation in the reader, arouses interest of the reader, and through the wide variety of precious expressions aims to involve the reader emotionally, following one of the main purposes of rhetoric, mouere (cf. ex. gr. Cic. De orat. 2,121; Brut. 185; orat. 69; al.; Aug. doctr. christ. 4,138 p. 136f. Martin), which is a component of sublime style (gr. τὸ ἁδρόν, genus grande). There are indeed in this hymn as many as ten hexameters opening with anaphora of the word lux,15 repeated always within each line just after penthemimeral or hephtemimeral caesura (except line 12116); moreover, in accordance

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with the classical style, the sentence ends with each hexameter. In such a way the whole passage is arranged so that by means of this continuous blaze of light the beginning of the marvels of Creation and the defeat of darkness is emphasized, because God is light by definition and where God’s light is, there darkness can never be (cf. LD 1,118 “prima dies nam lucis erat, mors una tenebris”).17 This same light, symbol of God himself, of his infinite brightness and wisdom,18 will come down to Adam’s descendants through God’s Son, the second Adam, the Lord, the divine Intermediary and Saviour of humankind,19 the Pedagogue (Clem. Alex. Paed. 1,7,53,1), the πρωτοφαής (Syn. Hymn. 2,89), the source of life, the light of the world, the lucis lumen and the sun of justice and resurrection,20 sent to defeat the darkness of the spirit, as says John 8:12: “Ego sum lux mundi / qui sequitur me non ambulabit in tenebris / sed habebit lucem uitae,” and 12:46: “Ego lux in mundum ueni / ut omnis qui credit in me in tenebris non maneat.”21

2 Enough of preliminaries; let’s turn now to exegesis and textual criticism. There are two passages of the “Hymn to Light” that need a full explanation, as far as I can judge. The first question regards line 123 (“lux decus astrorum, lux aurea cornua lunae”), which within the hymn has something special from several points of view—conceptual, symbolic, lexical, and stylistic. The poet declares more than once that lux is the first act of God’s Creation; compare, for instance, vv. 119, 121, 124, 126, 129, 133. Such an insistence on this point of primary importance is due to the theological concern, common to all the Church Fathers, with giving primacy to light rather than to the sun, which at that time was still worshipped by the pagans; likewise, the moon played a leading part and was regarded as the being from which all natural life originates.22 Thus, as a consequence of the theological controversy sparked off by the Fathers, the divine prerogatives of sun, moon, and stars were called into question; these heavenly bodies lost credit little by little and became nothing more than the heavenly luminaria, created after the light. Compare Ambr. hex. 3, 6,27; 4,1,1: “quarto die iubet Deus fieri luminaria, solem et lunam et stellas. Sol incipit.”23 As for the first hemistich, one may compare the hexametrical ending we find in Orph. Hymn. 9,9 Quandt3 (to the Moon: cf. also Hymn. Mag. 18,3 II, p. 253 Preis.2 = 10,3 p. 191 Heitsch2) νυκτὸς ἄγαλμα, / ἀστράρχη, and Greg. Naz. carm. I,2,1,61 (PG XXXVII, 526A); Drac. Rom. X (Medea), 539, “Luna, decus noctis”; AL 389 Riese2 (hymn to the Sun), lines 58 and 60, “Sol mundi caelique decus . . . Sol noctis

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lucisque decus”; AL 723,1 (hymn to the Moon), “Luna, decus mundi.” Decus, as well as honor, is a common term praising the invoked deities, especially Sun and Moon. Compare, for example, Culex 11 (Phoebus), “Latonae magnique Iouis decus, aurea proles”; Sen. Oed. 250 (Oedipus addresses the Sun), “tuque o sereni maximum mundi decus”; Herc. Oet. 1518 (Chorus), “o decus mundi, radiate Titan”; Phaedr. 410 (nutrix addresses the moon/Hecate), “noctis decus” (but Thy. 791 with reference to the stars, “noctis opacae / decus omne”); and so forth. There is no doubt that Dracontius’s expression is derived from Virgil, Aen. 9,405, “astrorum decus,” where it refers to the goddess Diana, identified completely with the moon, although the order of the two elements of the syntagma is here inverted. The eulogistic epithets of the two heavenly luminaries were interchangeable, however, and the exchange was of course favored by the fact that both deities were often invoked together. See ex. gr. Hor. carm. saec. 1 f.; Firm. math. 5 praef. 5 (a little prose hymn to the Sun), and the like.24 But this first hemistich borrowed from Virgil, and belonging to the sad words spoken by Nisus to the goddess Diana, serves as a suitable introduction to the second hemistich, in which the line ending, common in hexametrical poetry at least until Corippus and even beyond, is again another adaptation with inverted components of a Virgilian expression that occurs for the first time in Aen. 3,645, “tertia iam lunae se cornua lumine complent,” a temporal indication of the anguished Achaemenides, who had been abandoned accidentally by his companions in arms in the cave of Polypheme. Dracontius uses this same iunctura once again in satisf. 241 in a context where the poet illustrates some natural phenomena influenced by the phases of the moon: “ipsa medulla latens obseruat cornua lunae.”25

3 The expression “cornua lunae” is noteworthy both for its evocative strength and its imagery, indicating the waxing and waning phases of the moon, which, like the sun, has the important task of illuminating the darkness of the night and removing the fear of primeval chaos from human minds.26 Since behind it lies a centuries-old literary tradition, it is perhaps worth outlining briefly the use of the hexametrical ending “cornua lunae” so that we can give due weight to the innovation made by Dracontius within a well-known literary topos he has revisited successfully. This metaphor is relatively frequent in pagan and Christian hymnology, so it is no great surprise that the substantive κέρας / cornu and the words derived therefrom are used to depict this prerogative of the moon, often identi-

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fied with the goddess Artemis/Diana, as is easily understood.27 Compare, for instance, Hor. carm. saec. 35, “siderum regina bicornis” (gr. δίκερως); Greg. Naz. carm. I,2,1,61 (PG XXXVII, 526A), µήνη κερόεσσα; Syn. Hymn. 8 (= 9), 45, κερόεν σέλας; Orph. Hymn. 9,2 Qu.3 = 9,2 Ricc. ταυρόκερως Μήνη; Hymn. Mag, 18,32 II, p. 254 Preis.2 = LIX 10,32 Heitsch2, κερόεσσα; PGM VII 759 (II, p. 34 Preis.2), δικέρατον θεὰν Μήνην.28 The point we are making is that Dracontius is very innovative in the context of the hymn because he seems at the same time to be in harmony yet to be breaking with epic tradition. The lowest common denominator is always represented by the divine figure of Artemis/Diana, who in this poetic rewriting serves as a sort of litmus test; the goddess remains in the background and her presence is supported both by precise mythological references and by her identification once again with the moon. It is true, on the other hand, that the adjective aureus, indicating a prerogative of “excellence” in both a literal and a figurative sense, is often referred to the divinities and the heavenly bodies, especially to the sun and the moon,29 of which it enhances the brightness and beauty. But the whole phrase “aurea cornua lunae,” which intertwines and intermingles two different literary traditions, as we will try to show later, is a coinage of Dracontius, a unicum from the formal point of view, that seems to recur in dactylic poetry only in this passage of LD and in the corresponding line of Eugenius Toletanus.30 This fact must be explained because the adjective aurea can be anything but a mere ornamental epithet, so we need to try to understand why it has been employed by the poet. First of all, it is worth remembering that we find a similar eulogic expression in Martianus Capella, probably a contemporary of Dracontius, again in a hymnologic context and with reference once again to moonlight, obviously. As far as I know, the only purpose the author entertains is to extoll its brightness, which increases the beauty of the night sky; he is depicting the virgin Harmonia addressing a praising sacred song to Iuppiter astrisonus, IX 912 v. 6f.: “sic tua noctis honos lampade menstrua / auratis reuehit praemia cornibus.”31 That is not quite our case; for as regards the content, indeed, Dracontius’s true aim is not only to extol the brightness of the moon but also to turn our attention to a different text type, linked meaningfully with the myth of the labors of Hercules. As far as the eulogic adjective aureus (bright) is concerned, it may come from contexts where it refers to the moon-Diana because of the well-known equivalence between luminary and goddess. Compare, for instance, Verg. georg. 1,431, “uento semper rubet aurea Phoebe”; Ou. met. 2,722, “aurea Phoebe”; and met. 10,448f., “fugit aurea caelo / Luna, tegunt nigrae latitantia sidera nubes.”32 But iuncturae, like aurea and aurata cornua, have rather to do with contexts where a broad allusion is made to the

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fourth labor of Hercules. Compare, in particular, passages such as Val. Fl. 6,70–73 (review of the troops), “Acesinaque laeuo / omine fatidicae †Phrixus† mouet agmina ceruae. Ipsa comes saetis fulgens et cornibus aureis / ante aciem celsi uehitur gestamine conti, / maesta nec in saeuae lucos reditura Dianae”; Hyg. fab. 30,5, “ceruum ferocem in Arcadia cum cornibus aureis uiuum in conspectus Eurysthei regis adduxit”; Auson. ecl. 17,4 p. 103 Green = 24,4 p. 314 Past., “aeripedis quarto tulit aurea cornua cerui”; AL 627,4 Riese2, “cornibus auratis ceruum necat ordine quarto”; and Myth. Vat. 1,63 p. 28 Kulcsár, “Nam fertur . . . et ceruo cuidam aurea cornua abstulisse.”33 In the example from Ausonius, the adjective aurea gains importance, just as in Dracontius, from the fact that the poet highlights it through its placement before cornua—that is, before the diairesis, which separates the first four meters of the dactylic hexameter from the well-known ending.

4 We are faced with a complex puzzle of literary cross-references; let us try to unravel the threads of this close weave of passages we have recalled. If it is true that the line ending of the Virgilian Georgics, mentioned above, comes from a rather neutral but positive context and refers to the weather forecast of natural phenomena based on the careful observation of sun and moon, it is not quite the same for the two Ovidian passages, which refer to the myth of Aglaurus and that of Myrra, respectively. In the former we have to do with a eulogic context like that of Dracontius, where Herse’s astonishing beauty, according to the lyricelegiac erotic tradition, is compared to the brightness of the moon, which is more vivid than the brightness of Lucifer and of the other stars; in the latter the moon hides one’s horror at the incest committed by Myrra. There is no doubt that both factors, the eulogic context and the single lexemes, employed by Ovid in those passages of the Metamorphoses, are of great interest to us, since the poet was very famous and his lines were easily memorized. As for the passages in particular of Valerius Flaccus and Ausonius,34 we feel the need to examine them closely because they both refer to the fourth labor of Hercules,35 a mythological context of great importance for its symbolic content. First of all, it is interesting to note that in the line from Ausonius the phrase “aeripedis cornua cerui” comes from epic and has been borrowed from a celebrative context of Silius’s Punica, 3,38f., which belongs to the ecphrastic account depicting the Herculean labors, carved on the god’s temple gates at Gades, where Hannibal had gone to worship him, “et altos / aeripedis

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ramos superantia cornua cerui.”36 So, Silius’s line also has to do with the hind of Cerynaia, which Hercules must seize and bring to Mycenae. Secondly, the compound epithet aeripes is in its turn a Virgilian coinage that goes back to a well-known context, belonging to the eulogy for Augustus delivered by Anchises with something hyperbolic (the deeds of Hercules and Bacchus are surpassed by those of Augustus37); the passage contains a partial catalog of Hercules’ labors, among which the poet mentions exactly the hind killed by Hercules, according to one of the two versions of the myth (cf. Aen. 6,802, “fixerit aeripedem ceruam licet”).38 Aeripes as Virgilian stylistic feature occurs rarely in poetic Latin and characterizes specifically two kinds of mythological beings, either the brazen-footed hind sacred to Artemis or the brazen-footed bulls of Aeetes at Colchis.39 But this Virgilian coinage is a perfect calque done on the Homeric χαλκόπους, an epithet used also by tragic poets for its preciosity.40 If Dracontius gives up this poetic epithet, he has good reasons for doing so, inasmuch as it was not suitable for his purpose; he prefers indeed to exploit the other weird and wonderful prerogative attributed to the hind, that of having horns of gold, “aurea cornua,” a clear mark of distinction and excellence, as we have said.41 This expression, however, translates, as is easily understood, another Greek compound epithet,42 χρυσόκερων used by Pindar, once again with reference to the hind of Cerynaia and to Hercules’ fourth labor. Compare Ol. 3,28ff. Sn.-M.,43 “when at the behest of Eurystheus, the fate that bound the sire and son urged him on the quest of the hind with golden horns, which Taÿgetê [one of the Pleiades] had inscribed with the name of Artemis when she devoted it to the goddess in her own stead.”44 Such an expression is reused, always with reference to Hercules’ labors, by an anonymous poet in Anth. Pal. (= App. Plan.) XVI 92, 4, as we have pointed out above (compare also note 34). But this very important peculiarity of the hind is confirmed by Ps.-Apollodorus, who follows most likely the same source as Pindar because he shares another valuable detail of the myth with him, the fact that the animal was sacred to Artemis Orthosia (cf. Bibl. 2,5, 3: “Now the hind was at Oenoe; it had golden horns and was sacred to Artemis”; trans. Frazer, p. 191). As regards this subject, an important link in the chain within the Greek and Latin literary tradition is supplied by the passage of Valerius Flaccus 6,71ff., mentioned above, where the hind is portrayed as emblem on the ensign of the Acesina agmina commanded by Phryxus (the name of the commander is uncertain however; see above note 33). Two particulars appear interesting: the horns of gold and the fact that the hind will not get back to the woods of the goddess Diana, a pointed reference to its capture at the hands of Hercules. This precise allusion to the fourth labor of the hero allows Dracontius to activate a se-

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ries of potential references and to finely link these figures of the pagan mythology with the polysemic Christian symbolism,45 so making them a touchstone on the basis of the sometimes similar, sometimes contrasting ideals they personify. It is clear that the poet prefers to activate in this eulogic context only those particular qualities that are in tune with the aims he pursued. From this subtle play of various cross-references we can draw some important indications of the symbolism involved. The figures, then, of pagan mythology, recalled by the poet through a very dense expression like “aurea cornua lunae,” are Artemis/Diana, Selene/moon, Hercules and the hind/stag.46 Each of them is the bearer of some positive traits that can be attributed likewise to well-defined figures of the Christian world. To begin with Artemis/Diana, who has a complex identity and shows mixed qualities connected with her character (she is significantly symbolized by a bear and called ἀγροτέρα for example by Homer, Il. 21,471; Aristoph. Eq. 660, Lys. 1262): thanks to the easy identification of the goddess with the moon/Selene,47 our poet can play on this in counterpoint and recall for Christians the motherly sense closely related as well to the moon, which “distils her horn’s liquid light,”48 as to the church, who is virgin and, at the same time, protective like a mother; and, at the same time, also to mother.49 Indeed, the hind is under the goddess’s protection just as the believer is under that of the church. Moreover, the moon goddess shares another particularity with the church, that of being the solis imago (LD 1,666): she is lit up by the sun like mother church is illuminated by Christ, “the Sun of Justice.”50 A final point to be noted: the crescent moon can symbolize both the resurrection, according for instance to Theophilus of Antioch and Cyril of Jerusalem,51 and the cyclical phases of the natural generative processes it favors, characterized by the union of the humid element with the warm:52 similarly, the church through baptism regenerates believers “with fire and water” and gives them new life.53 By the same token, however, it needs to be remembered that Artemis/Diana is a skilful huntress and protectress of the wild and of the great outdoors in opposition to the civilized world. She always goes into action, hunting wild, ferocious animals with bow and arrows (hymn. Hom. 27,1, “I sing Artemis of the gold shafts and the view-halloo”; 2, “the deer-shooter profuse of arrows”; 5f., “who . . . takes her pleasure in the hunt, and draws her golden bow to discharge grievous arrows”; 10, “killing the animals’ brood”; 11f., “when the animal-watcher goddess profuse of arrows . . . unstrings her bent bow”), but she chases also the enemies of wildlife.54 In the same way, the church, which fights for two good causes, the freedom of worship and the defence of orthodoxy, must also be adept at fighting all the external enemies and internal opponents—that is, persecutors and heretics.

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5 Let us set aside Artemis/Diana now to move on to the figure of Hercules. The hero assumes great relevance in this passage so pregnant with meaning, albeit in a roundabout way by Dracontius because for two good reasons he appears closely linked to the figure of Christ. First of all, Hercules represents for pagans not only obedience to the orders of King Eurystheus, who harshly treated Hercules at the instigation of Juno, but also the benefactor par excellence of humankind and a model of rationality. Secondly, from a theological point of view, he was seen as the great rival of Christ.55 From this twofold perspective, in general terms, the allusion to Hercules as benefactor can certainly recall the figure of Christ, the envoy of the Father, performing his will to save sinful humankind by means of his own death on the cross. On the other hand, Hercules in the fourth labor exemplifies patience inasmuch as he has pursued the hind for a whole year. This is a typically Christian virtue and may recall both the endless patience of God towards sinful humankind and the Gospel parable of the lost sheep (cf. Luke 15:4–7). The conflicting relationship, on the other hand, between Artemis/Diana and Hercules, caused by the capture of the hind by the hero, may, again in general terms, hint at the persecutions of Christians by pagans and at the resulting grief of the church.56 However, the elevated language employed by the poet, so densely packed with meaning, should not lead us to exclude, from the symbolic point of view, a more subtle and elaborate system of subtended references to the mythological figures mentioned above. In particular, if the moon, which reflects the sunlight, has become the well-known symbol of mother church illuminated by Christ, then the hind/stag,57 so learnedly evoked, being a fast, horned animal, related always to the divinities of light,58 may embody several prerogatives from a theoretical point of view: (a) the speed with which Christians must shun or fight temptations and sins59 but also with which they embrace faith in God;60 (b) the purity and simplicity of the Christians’ heart and life;61 and (c) the allegiance and devotion to the Christian faith.62 Lastly, as an active, prompt, and resourceful animal, it may symbolize either a typical figure such as Jesus Christ himself,63 who, as does Hercules, struggles against the forces of evil, wherever they may hide in this world, in order to protect the souls of his believers. Or, by the fact that the hind/stag is capable of digging out the venomous snakes without harm,64 may symbolize the church, the holy community, which, in the name of orthodoxy, takes on the difficult task of chasing away the devils and warding off the dangers and threats of venomous heresies through its apostles and saints, the linchpins of the church, the montes Dei (Paul. Nol. epist. 9,4), the vener-

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ated heirs of Christ, who are constantly illuminated by him. In support of this last point of view, we can quote a significant passage of Mark 16:18 where Jesus Christ appears to the eleven apostles and exhorts them to have faith: “(οἱ πιστεύσαντες) . . . [καὶ ἐν ταῖς χερσὶν] ὄφεις ἀροῦσιν κἂν θανάσιμόν τι πίωσιν οὐ μὴ αὐτοὺς βλάψῃ.”65

6 Something remains now to be said about the symbology of the horns themselves; we shall limit this to an illustration of a few cases. St. Jerome says that the horn is a symbol of royalty. Compare in Zach. I,1 18/21, CC LXXVI A, p. 760 f., l. 438 ff. Adr., “Et rectissime pro regnis cornua posuit, hanc habente scriptura sancta consuetudinem, ut regnum semper interpretetur in cornibus, ut est illud: Et exaltauit cornu Christi sui [Psalm. 148 (147), 14]. Et in alio loco: Et erexit cornu salutis nobis in domo Dauid pueri sui [Luc. 1,69].” For St. Ambrose and Verecundus Iuncensis66 the horns symbolize the Old and the New Testaments. Compare, respectively, in Psalm. 118, serm. 6,15 (CSEL LXII, p. 116 Petsch.Zelzer), “ceruus habens cornua legis et gratiae, cornua eius duo sunt Testamenta”; and sup. cant. Az. 22 (CC XCIII p. 106, l.49ff. Demeul.), “His (scil. ceruis) ergo sanctus uir se conparari praeoptat, ut cornibus suis, uidelicet duobus Testamentis, spiritales angues de domo sui cordis expellat, cum ea in se per caritatis flammam fecerit sufflammari.”67 Primasius also in the commentary on the Apocalypsis gives more than one interpretation of the horns: (a) He states that the horns represent the munera of the Holy Spirit (cf. 2,5 (CC s.L. XCII, 1985, p. 85, l. 546ff. Adams): “‘Habentem cornua septem et oculos septem, qui sunt septem spiritus Dei missi per orbem terrarum.’ Diuersitas uocabulorum unum proferri docuit intellectum, cornibus enim significans excellentissima sancti spiritus munera, quibus per orbem in sua Christus regnat ecclesia.” (b) He indicates (comm. in Apoc. 2,5, 555ff., pp. 85f. Adams) that the horns can refer to Christus, who builds the church on himself: “Verum quia cornua super caput sunt, recte exaltatio singularis ecclesiae super Christum conlocatur, propter ‘super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam’ [Mt. 16,18], ac si diceret super me aedificabo te. ‘Spiritus autem Domini repleuit orbem terrarum’ [Sap. 1,7], quod ut fieret confractis cornibus peccatorum, exaltari dicuntur cornua iusti. . . . Septem ergo cornua habere tamquam omnem mundum intellegitur possidere, in quo septiformis spiritus gratia principatur propter memorabilem eius operationem septenariam [Zach. 4,10].” (c) He adds (ibid. 2,5, 565ff., p. 86 Adams) that the horns can be interpreted as a symbol of spiritual-

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ity and lofty ideals: “Sed et ipsius excellentiae dignitatem non incongrue cornibus uidetur exprimere. Cornua enim naturalia locorum iura tamquam rumpendo nascuntur nec carnis aequalitate contenta residunt, sed crescendo altiora magis ac magis petunt.”68 Finally, we may conclude by saying that the allusion to the hind is fully justified on these grounds: the hind/stag is an animal always connected with the divinities of light, in particular with Artemis/Diana/Selene;69 it is a figure of Jesus Christ, the light sent by God the Father to illuminate sinful humankind; the horns of gold represent divine power and royalty; and last but by no means least, the animal, so obliquely evoked, has the prerogative of digging out and killing the venomous snakes, symbols of the forces of evil in every way. If we are right about the exegesis of such a multireferential line, then that would be an excellent and revealing example of Dracontius’s great ability to reuse poetic material of classical tradition and to attach to it some completely new meanings; in this respect we can say that this line reinforces the belief that we face a true literary tour de force by the poet.

7 To approch some questions related to line 1,128, we shall begin with a problem of textual criticism. Vollmer prints the following text: lux aeui media est, lux quae dat tempora metis.70

This solution begs a few observations. Indeed, “media est” is Vollmer’s emendation, but the manuscripts forming the Bruxellensis family, B dated back to the twelfth century, and its descendants MVRU, all of them going back to the humanist age, hand down “cui media es.” Only Eugenius Toletanus’s manuscripts, on the one hand F Ma, going back in the first case to the ninth century and in the second to the ninthtenth, on the other hand L Q, dated both from the ninth century, and Z, datable at thirteenth-fourteenth century, read respectively “eui (ebi F) media.”71 The editor’s emendation is light and would appear justified by the fact that Dracontius generally avoids the so-called lengthening before caesura of a word’s final syllable, ending with a short vowel not followed by a consonant cluster.72 The parallel example, however, of the Orestes, line 926, “si ulciscenda reá | genetrix, quid iam pater insons?” for which L. Müller73 proposed a similar remedy “rea ” without meeting the approval of modern editors, should not encourage acceptance of such a supplement, considering that from line 120 on the litany is composed only of nominal sentences and that Eugenius, who often rewrites Dracontius’s text without good reason, this time leaves the line

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unchanged. Second, as for the content and style of the line, there are also other reasons that lead us to believe that in this eulogistic context the word media cannot mean dimidium—that is, “half of the time”—or anything like it; in our opinion such a catch-all expression has little to do with this context. Dimidius -a -um used both as adjective and substantive indicates the half of a well-defined thing; if it is employed in connection with a notion of time, it can indicate for instance the equal duration of daylight and darkness in the vernal and autumnal equinox,74 a meaning which in this case seems to bear no relation to the actual thought of the poet. Here the poet, as we have already seen above, bases praise for his God on two apparently contrasting rhetorical principles, repetition and variation, but this choice responds to his precise strategy. By means of this device he aims, from the formal point of view, to avoid monotony through the virtuosity, from the point of view of content to suggest that in God, the true light, all becomes reconciled, since he is not only the beginning and end, the alpha and omega of everything, but also the veritable center of the whole creation.75 After concluding the hymnodic part (vv. 118–28) of his praise for God and before starting the didascalic one (129–37),76 Dracontius sets a real literary jewel (let the metaphor pass) in line 128: he ends his catalog of praises pointing out the close connection between light and time. Since both these realities share a philosophical significance, involving two different dimensions, one (to speak in Augustinian terms) eternal and intelligible, the other historical and sensible, the poet visualizes this conceptual antithesis setting the immutable world of eternity beside the mutable, vividly portraying the latter through the different duration of seasonal daylight. It is well-known that an increasing taste for the portrayal of concepts and things in visual terms answers a predominant tendency of late antique poetry, and the poet does not break away from this in this hymn.77 At any rate, what the reader expects from this line seems to be simply the centrality of light in creation and its basic role of “mediation” between the sensible and the transcendent world. That being said, we think, contrary to Vollmer and Camus, that the adjective medius in connection with a genitive may indicate what is “halfway, in-between, central, in the middle, in the central point,” both in a spatial and in a temporal sense, both literally and figuratively. This idea of centrality fits in with a separative or conjunctive-conciliative function of the phrase, confirmed also at the formal level, since, as we have said, this line serves to separate the eulogistic part of the hymn from the didactic one, or, better still, to facilitate the transistion to it. So, at the end of the aretalogic section, Dracontius, using two rhetorical contrivances—the Ringkomposition, a circular structure that reproduces the course of the stars and has

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at the same time a high symbolic value, meaning “perfection,”78 and the “Summationsschema,”79 a summarizing line as regards content— proposes linking together the end of the hymn with the prerogative previously praised at the beginning, at v. 118, where the triumph of light over darkness is celebrated, and at v. 125, where light is generically recognized as “magni temporis index.” Thanks to this further device, the poet seems to give to the phrase “aeui media” a particular pregnancy of proper and figurative meanings, which all appear pertinent but in a way compressed and superimposed upon one another. On this account, the reader must try to detect more than one hermeneutic level, considering the density of the verbal texture of the image. The substantive aeuum is certainly a polysemic term for both Christians and pagans,80 as is wellknown, and this fact can explain the understandable embarrassment of the translators.81 On the other hand, philosophers and the Church Fathers draw a distinction between eternity, implying the notion of enduring and immutable time, which has always existed and always will and which neither flows nor slips by, and time understood as a sequence, a measurable entity, that can be divided into several parts, just like the subdivision into days, months, or years marked by the alternation of day and night or of the seasons,82 in any case always the same regular path (Cic. nat. deor. 2,49; 102; Apul. Plat. 1,10 p. 201 Oud.).83 In accordance with the teachings of St. Augustine, this time progrediens, which is in motion84 and therefore measurable on the basis of the mutability of the sensible world, is the image of the eternal and immutable one. Compare Gen. ad litt. imperf. 13,6ff. (CSEL XXVIII/1, p. 487 Zycha): “haec enim nunc dicit tempora, quae interuallorum distinctione aeternitatem incommutabilem supra se manere significant, ut signum, id est quasi uestigium aeternitatis tempus adpareat.”85 Time, which is determined and regulated in this sensible world by the paths and revolutions (cf. metis) of the sun, moon, and other stars, allows humans not only to perceive what they learn directly by experience but also to gain an insight into what belongs to timeless eternity; in fact, light is in some ways an eye open both on timelessness and the temporal together. If we regard light as a symbol of the concept of eternity itself, we note that it can refer to two distinct entities: (a) It can refer to eternity of light belonging to “the intelligibile world,” part of the light of the Holy Trinity, because the angelic world or “the Heaven of the Heaven”86 is made eternal by direct contemplation of God’s inaccessible light, phôs aprósiton (light inaccessible),87 and by the communion with divine blessedness. It is not coeternal with the Creator because it has had a beginning, but it is eternal in the sense that it will be without end.88 (b) It can also refer to the

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eternal light of God himself, that is fons luminis (Min. Fel. 32,6) and fons ueritatis (Aug. conf. 12,30,41), “centre of the universe” (Syn. hymn. 1,151 = 3,15189), Father and Creator of all eternal times and Eternity of eternity.90 In our context, however, the focus of the image proposed by Dracontius may very well refer to Jesus Christ, the Logos-Verbum, who is not only coeternal with the Father but also shares with him the light of Wisdom; the Son, coming into this world, has brought to humanity the light of Wisdom and has acted as point of connection between the Father’s eternity and the temporality and precariousness of humanity, whom he has redeemed from sin and to whom he has again given eternal life through his death on the cross and his resurrection.91 So Jesus Christ, fulfilling his Father’s will, becomes the central plank of humankind’s ransom.

8 In the light of the remarks above on the particular content and formal aspect of the line, it seems evident that Dracontius wished on the one hand to counterpoint the two basic notions of time (aeuum versus tempus) and on the other hand to point out the centrality and preeminence of God’s eternal light, compared to the other wonders of Creation, specifically through the adjective media. This concept of centrality as the focus of the Creation might have been borrowed from some pagan hymnologic contexts, where Zeus is worshipped and praised as the beginning, the center, and the end of all things: compare ex gr. Tiberian. carm. 4,8, “Tu solus, tu multus item, tu primus et idem / postremus mediusque simul mundique superstes”92; Apul. mund. 37, p. 372 Oud. = Orph. fr. 21a, 1–2, p. 91 Kern2, “Ζεὺς πρῶτος γένετο, Ζεὺς ὓστατος, ἀρχικέραυνος93 / Ζεὺς κεφαλή, Ζεὺς μέσσα· Διὸς δ᾽ ἐκ πάντα τελεῖται”;94 Plat. Leg. 715e–716a (cf. Schol. Arat. 14, p. 57 Martin), “ὁ μὲν δὴ θεός, ὥσπερ καὶ ὁ παλαιὸς λόγος [formula that goes back to Orphism], ἀρχὴν τε καὶ τελευτὴν καὶ μέσα τῶν ὄντων ἁπάντων ἔχων, εὐθείᾳ περαίνει κατὰ φύσιν περιπορευόμενος”; Apul. mund. 38, p. 374 Oud. “‘Deus namque, sicut uetus’ inquit (scil. Plato), ‘continet ratio, principia et fines et media rerum omnium penetrat atque inlustrat ac curru ueloci superfertur’”95; Auien. Arat. 17ff., “Rite hunc (scil. Iouem) primum, medium atque secundum (supremum Grotius) / uox secreta canit . . . unus et idem est / auctor . . . et mundi uere sanctus pater” (Soubiran; factus pater A, edd.; factus sacer Vac; pastor sacer E);96 and so on. Moreover, Calcidius, talking about the ratio interuallorum, tells us that the triad is the first of the perfect numbers because it has a beginning, an end, and a center.97 So this concept of the light

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placed in the middle of Creation and having irradiant power implies also some special functions and prerogatives: for instance, it may indicate either a point of convergence or equidistance as well as a point of mediation between opposite poles. According to the particular wording employed by Dracontius to underline the function of centrality of the light, there would be a clear dividing line between aeuum, which would refer to the infinite and immutable time of “eternity,” and tempora, which indicates on the contrary the variations of time of this sensible world, determined by the annual paths of the heavenly bodies, in other words of a divisible and measurable time. We must remember, by the way, that in some authors such as Cicero (diu. 2,91; rep. 6,17), Manilius (1,814 ff.), Vitruvius (9,1,5), Pliny the Elder (2,12 f.; 34–41), Calcidius (fr. 18 Blänsd.2), and Macrobius (somn. 1,17,3; 1,19,1 f.; 1,21,30; 2,3,13), we find mention of the sun as the heart of the universe, set in the middle of the planets, following the Chaldean order: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.98 Moreover, in the Derveni papyrus, col. XV 3f., the anonymous author seems to allude in this regard to the “fixity of the Sun’s position in the cosmos.”99 God’s light then, a fixed, immobile light set, so to speak, in the middle of eternity (aeuum), is reflected in this sensible world by means of the orbits of sun, moon, and the other luminaries, which permit humans to have a clear perception of the flowing of time. As regards the philosophers, Plato is the first, as far as I am aware, to make the distinction between the more general notion of time expressed by χρόνος compared to αἰών (cf. Tim. 37d–38b):100 Wherefore he resolved to have a moving image of eternity, and when he set in order the heaven, he made this image eternal but moving according to number, while eternity itself rests in unity; and this image we call time. For there were no days and nights and months and years before the heaven was created, but when he constructed the heaven he created them also. They are all parts of time . . . for we say that it “was,” or “is,” or “will be,” but the truth is that “is” alone is properly attributed to it, and that “was” and “will be” are only to be spoken of becoming in time. . . . Time, then, and the heaven came into being at the same instant in order that, having been created together, if ever there was to be a dissolution of them, they might be dissolved together. It was framed after the pattern of the eternal nature, that it might resemble this as far as possible.101

There should be no difficulty attributing to light, the visible mirror of divine and angelic wisdom, a prerogative peculiar to living beings because it is itself a living being as are the heavenly bodies that emit it. Compare Aug. Gen. c. Man. 1,14,21 p. 88 Weber: “‘in signa et tempora’ dictum est, ut per haec sidera tempora distinguantur et ab hominibus dinoscantur: quia si currant tempora et nullis distinguantur articulis, qui articuli per sidera notantur, possunt quidem currere tempora atque praeterire, sed intellegi et discerni ab hominibus non possunt.”102

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9 On the basis of what we have said above, we can make the following findings: (a) God’s eternal light is reflected in this sensible world by means of the orbits of sun, moon, and the other luminaries; thanks to them humans can perceive the flowing of time. (b) This same light through the Incarnation and the Passion of the Logos-Filius restores the connection with God the Father’s eternity; thereby Jesus Christ, sent to illuminate the darkness of this world, becomes as in a perfect circle the center of the redeeming process of humankind. Compare St. Paul 1 Tim. 2,5, “Vnus enim Deus, unus et mediator Dei et hominum, homo Christus Iesus” (cf. Paul. Nol. carm. 19,725f.). (c) Light, symbol of wisdom and of primigenial being (Eccl. 1,4), mirror of God’s uncreated Wisdom (Aug. conf. 12,15,20), performs a mediating role, so to speak, between two opposite worlds, spiritual versus unspiritual, timelessness versus temporality, and his main function is that of announcing and revealing to humankind the idea of eternity, just as at v. 125 the poet talks of sensible light as index of finite time born together with the world. These meanings of mediating or announcing both fit in with our line and are, in a way, the corollary of the previous statements on the centrality of the light in all the process of the Creation. Then, provided always that we give to aeuum the meaning of aeternitas, perpetuitas saeculi, the phrase “aeui media” may be translated as follows: “light, the mediator of eternity, light etc.” or “light, the herald of eternity, light etc.” Such a function of Erkenntnismedium is already attributed to light by Philo103 anyway. As regards the adjective medius with the meaning of nuntius, compare Petr. Chrys. (fifth century C.E.) serm. 127,2 dei testis (scil. John the Baptist), totius medius Trinitatis, and see Migne, PL 52, p. 549 note c: “medius, id est nuntius Trinitatis, explicat Mita.” Bulhart, the author of the entry medius in Thesaurus linguae Latinae, agrees with this interpretation; see vol. VIII 591,19.

10 Let us turn now to the second hemistich of the hexameter, “lux quae dat tempora metis” (“light that changes its seasonal duration as a consequence of its revolutions [metis]”). Already Plato, as everybody knows (resp. 7,516 b-c, the cave myth104), states that the path of the sun gives birth to the seasons and the years (cf. Orph. hymn. 8,5 Qu. regulator of seasons, 8,10 young regulator of seasons), and Cicero, Tim. 33 (cf. Plat. Tim. 39c 5ff.) in addition says that most people, knowing nothing about

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the revolutions of the stars, “nesciunt hos siderum errores id ipsum esse, quod rite dicitur tempus, multitudine infinita, uarietate admirabili praeditos. . . . Has igitur ob causas nata astra sunt quae per caelum penetrantia solstitiali se et brumali reuocatione conuerterent, ut hoc animal quod uidemus esset illi animali quod sentimus ad aeternitatis imitationem simillimum.” We find again such a statement, which will later become prevailing doctrine, for instance in Philo, op. mundi 35, “When light had become into being, and darkness had moved out of its way and retired, and evening and dawn had been fixed as barriers in the intervals between them, as a necessary consequence a measure of time was forthwith brought about, which its Maker called day”;105 St. Basil, Hex. 2,8,6 p. 66 Naldini; c. Eun. I,21 pp. 246–50 Sesboüé-de Durand-Doutreleau; St. Ambrose, Hex. 4,21,1 (the sun’s path determines the time span of the seasons), “Tempora autem quae sunt nisi mutationum uices, hiems, uer, aestas, autumnus?”; and, finally, in Dracontius himself, LD 2,19, “permutat iussus sol tempora quattuor anni”; Satisf. 247ff., “Alternant elementa uices et tempora mutant. . . . Ver aestas autumnus hiems (redit annus in annum) / quattuor alternant tempora temporibus.” St. Augustine, although maintaining that flowing time is not dependent on the motion of luminaria (conf. 11,23,29), will be more precise about this point later, saying that the mutability of living beings is exactly what makes it possible to perceive the march of time in the sensible world (conf. 12,8,8). In our line, however, tempora seems to have a more general sense, indicating, according to its fundamental meaning, the daily, seasonal, or yearly cycle of light and darkness determined by the orbits of the celestial bodies. Metis is syntactically an instrumental ablative, and the verb dare has here the meaning “to determine, to fix, to set”; compare ex. gr. Manil. 3,517, “luna dabit menses, pergit quod mestrua cursum.”106

11 As stated above, the cyclical nature of time (cf. Plat. Tim. 38a) is therefore perceptible thanks to the circular motion of the celestial bodies on which it is modeled, in particular the orbit of the sun (cf. Hymn. Orph. 8,11 Qu. κυκλοέλικτε)107; as the substantive metae suggests to us, the relation between time and motion is assimilated vividly to a run on a racetrack, where the two- or four-horsed chariots, running all around the ring, change direction twice in the proximity of the metae.108 The term meta (gr. νύσσα, καμπή, καμπτήρ), here employed metaphorically in accordance with poetic tradition,109 reveals a complex symbolism with its pregnancy and figurative nature: on the one hand, it summarizes and

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suggests in fact the analogy, testified to by a wealth of literary sources, between the organized space on the inside of a racetrack and “the cosmic plan”; on the other hand, the connection is made between the run of the carts and the motion of the sun originating the annual cycle of the seasons.110 Early Christianity, following pagan religious thought in this regard, saw in the repetition of natural phenomena a symbol of immortality and resurrection, as we are told for example by Tertullian, resurr. 12,4: “reuoluuntur hiemes et aestates, uerna et autumna, cum suis uiribus, moribus, fructibus. . . . 12,7: Totus igitur hic ordo reuolubilis rerum testatio est resurrectionis mortuorum.”111 As for the metaphorical meaning of meta, “turning point in the path of the sun,” that corresponds to gr. τροπή, τροπαί, compare ex. gr. Germ. 481, “dum tangat (scil. sol) metas”; Manil. 1,572f., “(orbis solstitialis) metamque uolantis / solis et extremos designat feruidus actus”; 4,163f., “ad ardentem . . . metam, / quam Phoebus summis reuocatus cursibus ambit”; Stat. Ach. 1,455, “donec sol annuus omnes / conficeret metas”; and Calc. fr. 18,5 f. Blänsd.2, “Quadriiugis inuectus equis Sol igneus ambit / quartus et aethereas metas.”112 A few words to conclude: this line, as the hexameter examined previously, is another clear example of the density of Dracontius’s poetic language that exploits constant associations with other significant texts of literary tradition by means of a learned use of intertextuality, thanks to which he constantly breathes new life into his own inspiration and vivid imagination.113

Notes This article is to be viewed in connection with the forthcoming commentary on the “Hymn to Light” we find in the first book of Dracontius’s Laudes Dei, vv. 118–137 (henceforth LD). Latin quotations from the Bible, unless otherwise specified, are made according to the Vulgate (ed. Weber-Gryson et al., 5th ed. [Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2007] and Noua Vulgata, Libreria Editrice Vaticana 1979, abbrev. N. Vulg.); relative to the Old Testament, the Greek translation of the Septuaginta follows the edition of A. Rahlfs. vols. I–II, 9th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft 1979; 1st ed., 1935). As for the critical editions of the Latin Christian authors, we have indicated especially those that are not included in the index of Thesaurus linguae Latinae. As a general rule, bibliography has been reduced to the bare minimum. I wish to thank M. J. Falcone, M. Losacco, and N. Zorzi for helping me to obtain some essays not easily available. I am also grateful to the journal’s editorial office for revising my English. 1. See J. Fontaine, Naissance de la poésie dans l’occident chrétien: Esquisse d’une histoire de la poésie latine chrétienne du IIIe au IVe siècle (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1981), 255; F. Stella, “Fra retorica e innografia: sul genere letterario

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delle Laudes Dei di Draconzio,” Philologus 132 (1988): 273; Id., Poesia e teologia: L’occidente latino tra IV e VIII secolo (Milano: Jaca book, 2001), 101. This practice of singing among the Christians is oldest; in this regard the witness of Pliny the Young about them is very interesting, epist. 10.96,7 quod essent soliti stato die ante lucem conuenire carmenque Christo quasi deo dicere secum inuicem (see comm. of Sherwin-White, The Letters of Pliny [Oxford: Clarendon, 1966; corrected repr. 1985], 705; and F. Bracci, Plinio il Giovane, Epistole, libro X [Pisa: Edizioni Plus, 2011], 268 f.). The believer always has good reasons for praising God, cf. Paul. Eph. 5, 19 f.; Col. 3,16; I Tess. 5,17; Phil. 2,5–11 (the first Christological hymn, going back to an older tradition). Iust. Apol. I, 13,1 f. p. 158 Munier; Basil of Caesarea In Psalm. 44 (PG XXIX, col. 392 A) and Gregory of Nyssa, Inscr. Psalm. III,32 (p. 278,1ff. Reynard = GNO V, p. 75 McDonough) distinguish between song and psalm; moreover Gregory, ibid., pp. 282,63ff. Reyn. = p. 77 McDon., gives us some teachings, saying that the praise of God belongs to David. 2. Cf. N. Vulg., Psalm. 50 (49), 14 Immola Deo sacrificium laudis, 23 qui immolabit sacrificium laudis, honorificabit me; LD 1,749 ut ualeam memorare tuas hoc carmine laudes: we find something analogous in the pagan literature too: the same need to constantly praise God Almighty is expressed for example by the Stoic Cleanthes in the hymn to Zeus, cf. v. 6 τῷ σε καθυμνήσω καὶ σὸν κράτος αἰὲν ἀείσω, and v. 33 ff. Dracontius’s poem indeed belongs to genus demonstratiuum or laudatiuum, subject to amplificatio or adornatio, cf. Cic. de orat. 3,104 f. Quint. 3,7,6. This rhetorical figure was often combined with adbreuiatio, according to the well-known rule plura paucis amplecti (Quint. 8,3,82). As for the two mainstays of the poem’s framework, praise and teaching, they are both typical of some psalms; cf., for instance, Psalm. 34 (33). M. Roberts, “Bringing up the Rear: Continuity and Change in the Latin Poetry of late Antiquity,” in Latinitas Perennis. Volume I: The Continuity of Latin Literature, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 144, ed. W. Verbaal, Y. Maes, and J. Papy (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007), 141–67, here 150, points out that “the relationship between narrative and praise, both functions of the Psalms, would be a familiar issue to students of the rhetorical schools,” and Stella, “Intercultural Imitation in Christian Latin Poetry as a Way to the Medieval Poetics of Alterity,” in Verbaal, Maes, and Papy, Latinitas Perennis, 31–52, here 45, maintains that the biblical repertoire “functions as a hierarchically superior arch-text, while the classics function as a formulaic reserve; it is the former that activates the latter” and that the Christian poets incline to “construe a structural diphony that would always guarantee a double reading of every single verse: it is the embryo of the modus allegoricus which will dominate medieval poetry.” 3. See K. Smolak, “Die Stellung der Hexamerondichtung des Dracontius (laud. dei 1,118–426) innerhalb der lateinischen Genesispoesie,” in Antidosis. Festschrift für W. Kraus zum 70. Geburtstag, Wiener Studien. Beiheft vol. 5, ed. R. Hanslik, A. Lesky, and H. Schwabl (Wien, Köln, and Graz: Böhlaus, 1972), 381–97, here 394; Stella, “Fra retorica e innografia,” 268ff.; Myriam De Gaetano, Scuola e potere in Draconzio (Alessandria: Edizioni Dell’Orso, 2009), 243ff. Worthy of note is a similarly structured poem with a mix of several literary genres and forms, in particular with insertion of hymns and prayers in the narrative pieces, we find in the Dionysiaca of Nonnos of Pannopolis, characterized not only by ποικιλία and encomiastic purposes but also by significant correspondences between the figures of Dionysus and Christ: see for example F. Tissoni, Nonno di Pannopoli, I canti di Penteo (Dionisiache 44–46):

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

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Commento (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1998), 71–79 and passim (with bibliography concerning this theme). In this way I try to define those eulogic passages, which contain structural parts of a standard hymn. Worth bearing in mind is that there is a clear difference between hymn and prayer from the point of view of the literary genre and that we are faced with recitative hymns here in LD. Furthermore, there are poems that must be defined mixed because they contain elements peculiar partly to the hymn and partly to the prayer: G. D’Ippolito, “Inno e preghiera nelle ‘Dionisiache’ di Nonno,” Paideia 66 (2011): 121–48, here 127, following Norden [Agnostos Theos, p. 161 = Ital. edn. p. 280], proposes to call them “preghiera innica” (“hymnenartiges Gebet,” “hymn prayer”). See the list given in their edition of LD by Moussy and Camus, t. I, 146–48; 193–96; t. II, 13f., but all these parts indicated by them as hymns do not satisfy the requirements of a standard hymn structure, composed of invocationpraise (ἐπίκλησις-ἔπαινος), narrative (ὀμφαλός), and prayer (εὐχή), cf. for instance Cleanthes’ “hymn to Zeus.” Basil. Hexam. 1,7,5 p. 24 Naldini ἐποίησεν ὡς ἀγαθὸς τὸ χρήσιμον, ὡς σοφὸς τὸ κάλλιστον, ὡς δυνατὸς τὸ μέγιστον, cf. Clem. Alex. Paedag. I,11,97,2 [cf. Paul Gal. 3,24] p. 147f. and III,12,101,2 p. 291 Stählin-Treu; Ambr. Hexam. 1,3,9. We find analogous formulations also in the pagan authors, although the idea of god is basically different (monotheism vs henotheism), cf. for example Iamblich. myster. IV,6 p. 151 f. des Places; Corpus Hermeticum VI 5 (beauty and goodness belong only to God). Clem. Alex. Protrept. X,107,1 p. 76 Stählin-Treu; English translator G. W. Butterworth, Clement of Alexandria, The Exortation to the Greeks, The Rich Man’s Salvation (London: W. Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), 231. On the man’s prerogative cf., for example, Gen. 1,26 and Psalm. 8,6ff.; the same idea recurs also in pagan authors and philosophers. It is also worth remembering that both Philo of Alexandria and Proclus wrote a work entitled De aeternitate mundi. Under the title of Hexaemeron or De fabrica mundi or De opera sex dierum the work appears indeed in the so-called Eugenius’s recensio. It belongs to the kind of “biblical paraphrases” from the Old and the New Testaments. See Smolak, “Hexamerondichtung,” 381–97 (the scholar highlights the original aspects of Dracontius’s Hexameron); D. Kartschoke, Bibeldichtung: Studien zur Geschichte der epischen Bibelparaphrase von Juvencus bis Otfrid von Weißenburg (München: Fink, 1975), 100f.; Moussy, Dracontius, Introd., 49ff. The features of the Christian paraphrases from the Old and the New Testaments form a particulary lively and extensive point of debate, as everybody knows; I limit myself to refer to the exhaustive analysis of M. L. Roberts, Biblical Epic and Rhetorical Paraphrase in Late Antiquity, ARCA 16 (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1985). In addition to the recensio of Eugenius Toletanus, containing LD I, 118–754, and Satisfaction with a lacuna from v. 253 to the end, it is also necessary to take into account Isidorus’s passage, uir. ill. 24 p. 146 Codoñer Dracontius composuit heroicis uersibus Hexameron creationis mundi et luculente quidem compositeque scripsit. It seems that both authors had only a partial knowledge of Dracontius’s works. See Vollmer’s edition, intr., p. XVII; F. Corsaro, Blossii Aemilii Dracontii De laudibus Dei libri tres, Centro di Studi sull’antico Cristianesimo (Univ. di Catania, 1962), 13f.; P. Langlois, “Notes critiques sur l’ Hexameron de Dracontius et sa recension par Eugène de Tolède. À propos d’une édition récente du De laudibus Dei,” Latomus 23 (1964): 807–17, here 807; and F. Speranza, Blossi Aemili Draconti Satisfactio, Biblioteca di Helikon 9 (Roma: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1978),

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Praefatio, 16. In the Eugenian manuscripts the first Book of Dracontius’s LD in the revised form is put together with other biblical epic poems. 9. See Smolak, “Die Stellung der Hexamerondichtung,” 383ff. Among the main sources of LD must be considered the Ps.-Hilarius’s Metrum in Genesin and Claudius Marius Victorius’s Alethia; as regards the other possible literary sources, see Moussy’s edition, Introd. 64–66, loci similes 377ff.; Vollmer’s edition, MGH: Auctores antiquissimi 14 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1905; reprinted 1984), Notae, 23–113. W. Speyer, “Der Bibeldichter Dracontius als Exeget des Sechstagewerkes Gottes,” in Stimuli, Festschrift Dassmann, JAC Ergzb. 23 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1996), 464–84, here 471 = Kleine Schriften II, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 116 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 1999), 181–206, here 190f., which points out: “Hier verzichtet der Dichter darauf, seine Vorlage genau zu spiegeln.” About the techniques of adbreuiatio and amplificatio in the works of the biblical poets, and, more generally, of the Christian authors, see Kartschoke, Bibeldichtung, 174ff. and 178f.; Roberts, Biblical Epic and Rhetorical Paraphrase, esp. 117–19 and chap. 6, 161–218; M. Donnini, Versificazioni: i testi, in Lo spazio letterario del Medioevo, 1. Il Medioevo latino, a cura di G. Cavallo, C. Leonardi, E. Menestò, III, La ricezione del testo (Roma: Salerno Editrice, 1995), 221–49, here 222ff.; R. P. H. Green, Latin Epics of the New Testament: Juvencus, Sedulius, Arator (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), passim (General Index, 432, s.v. abbreviation, amplification); U. Martorelli, Redeat uerum. Studi sulla tecnica poetica dell’Alethia di Mario Claudio Vittorio, Palingenesia 93 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2008), passim (the author distinguishes among different kinds of amplification: ecphrastic, psychological, epic, and as simple addition). 10. See J. F. Irwin, “Liber I Dracontii ‘De laudibus Dei,’ with Introduction, Text, Translation, and Commentary” (PhD diss., Univ. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1942), 71: “This eulogy of light is very rich, for Dracontius seems to have borrowed much of what had already been said in commendation of light. Cf. St. Augustine Gen. ad Litt. 117; and St. Ambrose hex. 1,9.” Worthy of mention is also the closing prayer of Basilius’s Hexameron, 2,8,11, where the author praises God with a similar “hymn to Light.” See M. Naldini, Basilio di Cesarea, Sulla genesi (Omelie sull’Esamerone) (Milano: Mondadori Editore, 1990), 331 comm. ad l. On the connection the ancients felt between ἔπαινος and ὕμνος and the fact that they followed a set pattern for eulogy of the divinities (as we learn from the work Περὶ ῥητορικῶν ἀφορμῶν of Alexander, son of the rhetor Numenius, lived, as everybody knows, at around the middle of the 2nd century C.E.), see L. Spengel, Rhetores Graeci. vol. III (Lipsiae: Teubner, 1856), 4,3; 4,14 and 17ff. The same idea is repeated by Isidorus, orig. 1,39,17 hymni autem ex Graeco in Latinum laudes interpretantur. We are concisely told of the celebration of a laus deorum by Quintilianus 3,7,7–9, the only available Latin source. As for the Christian literature, see for instance Iustin. Apol. I, 13,2 pp. 158–60 Munier (text and n. 1); Gregory of Nyssa Inscript. Psalm. III 32, p. 278,6f. Reynard (Paris: Les editions du Cerf, 2002, S.C. vol. 466) = p. 75 McDonough (GNO V, Leiden: Brill, 1962); ibid. 33 p. 284,1ff. Reyn. = p. 77 McDon. As for the use of the various terms, A. A. R. Bastiaensen, “Psalmi,” “Hymni” and Cantica in Early Jewish-Christian Tradition, Studia Patristica 21, papers presented to the Tenth International Conference on Patristic Studies held in Oxford 1987 (Leuven: Peeters, 1989), 24, points out that psalmus, unknown to non-Christian Latinity, is the technical term for the psalmus of David and that from the third century onward psalmus is the normal term generally employed (cf. Aug. Enarr. in psalm. 67,1).

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However, “whether the Latin use of hymnus continues a pagan custom or is a Christian borrowing from Greek Christian idiom, cannot be ascertained.” On the Er-Stil der Prädikation that is in this hymn, see E. Norden, Dio ignoto: Ricerche sulla storia della forma del discorso religioso, Italian edition by Chiara Tommasi Moreschini (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2002), 282ff.; on the Christian hymnology in general, see M. Lattke, Hymnus. Materialien zu einer Geschichte der antiken Hymnologie, Novum Testamentum et orbis antiquus 19 (Freiburg, Schweiz: Universitätsverlag, and Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1991). Another useful bibliography can be found in L. Nosarti, Forme brevi della letteratura latina (Bologna: Pàtron, 2010), 142–46n198. 11. We shall also continue with the use of the term “hymn,” although it would perhaps be better to employ “litany,” because the poet is celebrating the aretalogy of the light (interesting parallels in Apul. met. XI,5; Pap. Oxyr. 1380 G.-H.). Moreover, see the commentary ad l. by Colette Camus, p. 264: “Cet éloge de la lumière forme un poème dans le poème”: the insertion of a shorter literary genre inside a larger one is a typical refinement from the structural point of view, with well-known models in classical literature (it goes back to the Alexandrian); this device is employed with the express aim of assuring the whole poem has variety. For the praise of light as beginning of creation see Theoph. Ant. Ad Autol. 2,11,1 f. p. 40 Grant, p. 55 Marc. [cf. Gen. 1,3–2,3]; Basil. Hex. 2,7,5 p. 60–62 Naldini. 12. As for the most important branchs of LD’s tradition, besides the introductions in Vollmer and Moussy’s editions, see F. Stella, “Variazioni stemmatiche e note testuali alle Laudes Dei di Draconzio: Con edizione del florilegio Paris, B.N., Lat. 8093, f. 15v (sec. VIII-IX),” Filologia mediolatina 3 (1996): 1–34 (on 12 there is also the revised stemma of manuscripts); and P. F. Alberto, “Eugenius Toletanus archiepiscopus,” in La trasmissione dei testi latini del Medioevo: Mediaeval Latin Texts and Their Transmission¸ TE.TRA. 1, ed. P. Chiesa e Lucia Castaldi (Firenze: Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2004), 97–117, esp. 111ff.; Id., Eugenii Toletani opera omnia, CC s. L. CXIV (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), history of text 54ff.: 281ff. (the stemma codicum relating to the Eugenii recensio is particularly detailed and accurate); conspectus siglorum and critical text 319ff. Furthermore, see the essay of Langlois, “Notes critique sur l’ Hexameron de Dracontius et sa recension par Eugène de Tolède,” 807–17 (see note 8 above), and especially that of F. Dolbeau, “Sur un manuscrit perdu de Dracontius,” Latomus 48, no. 2 (1989): 416–23. 13. On this passage see the incisive stylistic analysis of K. Smolak, “Die Stellung der Hexamerondichtung,” esp. 382–83; Id., “Anmerkungen zur formalen Typologie lateinisher Kreuzhymnen,” in La croce: iconografia e interpretazione (secoli I-inizio XVI), vol. III, Atti del convegno internazionale di studi (Napoli, 6–11 dicembre 1999), ed. B. Ulianich in alliance with U. Parente (Napoli: Elio de Rosa, 2007), 10f. We cannot forget that the psalm of David is the kind of psalm that can conciliate opposites, imitating the cosmic harmony. See Greg. Nyss., Inscr. Psalm. III 7, p. 176,17ff.; 178,13ff. Reyn. = GNO V, pp. 31–32 McDon. (As is well-known, this doctrine goes back to Timaeus of Plato.) Roberts, The Jeweled Style (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2010), 38ff., explains well the concepts of leptologia and variatio in the rhetoric of late antiquity; moreover, he points out advisably that “variation was conceived in visual terms” (47) and that “the elements of a text were understood chromatically, described as multicolored flowers or jewels. The art of the poet was akin to that of the jeweler. . . . The poet strives for an impression equivalent to that of a flower-covered meadow in spring” (55).

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14. 15.

16.

17.

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Medievalia et Humanistica Worth bearing in mind is that in the Isis’s aretalogy of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, XI 5, we have again the combination of same rhetorical devices, uariatio with amplificatio. The pathetic, “jeweled” elements of the style and the didactic ones are so arranged inside the poem that they coexist and complement one another in the most natural way. So, we have an emphatic homologous anaphora with the word lux, repeated about twenty times in ten lines; see also Stella, “Epiteti di Dio in Draconzio fra tradizione classica e cristiana,” CCC 8, no. 1 (1987): 91–123, here 120, who underlines the stylistic refinements of the passage. It is useful to remember that we find a similar stylistic feature in Augustine’s Soliloquia 2–4, where God is invoked and praised by the author with particular emphasis. (This reminds us of Isaiah’s invocations in the Old Testament, without forgetting that we find something similar also in pagan texts. Cf., for example, Corpus Hermeticum I, 31, where the expressions ἅγιος ὁ θεός / ἅγιος εἶ are repeated nine times.) As for the poetry, we draw attention for instance to the orphic fragment 21a Kern2 (compare Plato leg. 4, 715e and see Kern’s comm., pp. 92f.), a short hymn to Zeus, where the name of the god is repeated as many as seven times at the beginning of and within each line. Another interesting formal parallel is given by the poem entitled In laudem solis (AL 389 R.²): it ends in fact “with 23 hexameters, in which the opening word is always sol.” The osmosis in the Orient as well as in the West between pagan (Neoplatonic in particular) and Christian thought from the fourth to the sixth centuries C.E. is a well-known phenomenon; more generally we can say that from Origen to Gregory of Nyssa and beyond, Christian monotheism was articulated and formulated in Platonic terms. In light of the very significant parallel given in the orphic hymn to Zeus (fr. 21a Kern2), where the god’s name, when it is repeated inside the line, is always just after the male caesura (that is, in a prominent position), it is not unlikely that the text of Dracontius as it has been handed down (dux lux cunctis BM, lux cunctis dux V2, lux lux cunctis V1R, lux lux cunctisque U, dux cunctis lux G; lux facies rebus cunctis et lux elementis cdd. FMaLQ of Eug. Tol.), needs to be emended; in that case it would be preferable in my opinion to read lux dux instead of dux lux at line 1,121. Cf. (W.-Gr., N. Vulg.) epist. Iac. 1,17 Omne datum optimum et omne donum perfectum desursum est, descendens a Patre luminum, apud quem non est transmutatio nec uicissitudinis obumbratio; epist. Ioh. 1,5 Deus lux est et tenebrae in eo non sunt ullae. This concept became a commonplace; cf., for instance, Theoph. Ant., Ad Autolyc. 2, 11,1 p. 40 Grant, p. 55 Marc., and in parallel the darkness became the symbol of the devil. For an analogous figurative sense of mors see also Cypr. Ad Donat. 4 mecum pariter recognoscis, quid detraxerit nobis quidue contulerit mors ista criminum, uita uirtutum. Here mors = causa mortis, cf. Tert. resurr. 12 p. 41,1 (worthy of note is the conceptual affinity with Dracontius’s line) interficiens (lux) mortem suam, noctem; Prud. Perist. 2,510 mors (proprie) illa sancti martyris mors uera (translate) templorum fuit; Drac. LD 3,361 (Verginius) hostis erat generis, prolis mors, ThlL VIII, 1506,79 ss. As for the concept in particular of “death that dies” or that of “killing, destroying death,” relating to Christ, cui licuit sine morte mori (Sedul. c. pasch. 281; op. pasch. 5,23), cf. Melit. Hom. Pasch. 66, v. 458 “he killed death the killer of men” (S. G. Hall, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Hier. in Os. II, 6, 1/3, CC s. L. LXXVI, p. 64, l. 62ff. Adrien (cf. in Is. 14, 7/l1, l. 61ff.) pro ‘ceruo’ matutino, eo quod interfecta morte (cf. 2 Tim. 1,10 destruxit . . . mortem) et tortuoso antiquoque serpente, cupiat ad montana

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18.

19.

20.

21.

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conscendere; Aug., c. Fel. 2,11,19 (CSEL 25.2, p. 840 Zycha) suscipiendo mortem interfecit mortem; Ps.-Paul. Nol. carm. 32,234 = Poem. ult. p. 76 Palla tunc poterit mors ipsa mori, cum eqs. and Corsano’s comm. ad l.; Ps-Claud. carm. min. app. 21,12 (= Miracula Christi) p. 427 Hall et durae mortis lex resoluta perit; Anon. In Iob comm. 1,3 (CSEL 96, p. 91 Steinhauser) ut per passionem sane mortem interficeret. As for the beginnings of the world, we read something similar already in the pagan authors, cf. for example Ou. met. 1,5–88; Auien. Arat. 21 ff.; Anth. Lat. 389,9 Riese2. We want to remember, by the way, that the conceptual opposition between light and darkness was common both to philosophy and rhetoric and that Plato in the Republic VI, 508a–509b uses the sun in order to symbolize the sovereign Good (cf. Macr. Comm. I,2,15). From a purely formal point of view the hexameter ending una tenebris is a clear variation of Manil. 3,373 per totidem menses iunget nox una tenebras, but this kind of phrase, which points out the exclusiveness of an action or thing, already occurred in Virgil and in epic tradition. Cf., for instance, Georg. 3,510 ea uisa salus morientibus una; Aen. 2,354; Lucan. 2,113; Sil. 15,402; etc. Such a stylistic feature, but amplified with anaphora, occurs also in Augustinus, cf. conf. 10,32,48 una spes, una fiducia, una firma promissio, misericordia tua. Cf. psalm. 18(17), 29; 27(26), 1; 36(35), 10; 43(42), 3; Ioh. Apoc. 22,5; Athenag. Suppl. 10,1 p. 20 Schoedel, p. 39 Marcovich; 16,3 p. 32 Schoed. = 16,1 p. 51 Marc.; Rufin., Orig. Princ. I,1,1, lin. 14ff., p. 90 Crouz.-Sim. = p. 100 Görg.Karpp (Deus = lux = ueritas); Comm. in psalm. 118; Ambr. hex. 1,9,33 Deus . . . lucem habitat inaccessibilem (cf. St. Paul 1 Tim. 6, 16: the correspondence between light and truth is already Platonic, as it is well-known, cf. resp. 509a; it is also worthy of mention that the θεοί νοητοί of the Platonic philosophers (Jamblich, Proclus, Julian the Apostate) were likewise transcendent and inaccessible); Prud. perist. 10,318; Hier. In Os. II, 6, 1/3, p. 64, 64ff. Adriaen tenebris dissipatis oritur nobis sol iustitiae ut nostram illuminet caecitatem; Aug. conf. 7,6,8; 11,2,3; 11,11,13; 12,18,27; ciu. 8,7, 332 D.-K. Lumen autem mentium esse dixerunt (scil. Platonici) ad discenda omnia eundem ipsum Deum, a quo facta sunt omnia [cf. Plat. resp. 509d-511e; 532a–535a; Plot. Enn. 5,8,12]; 8,9, 334, 5 f. D.-K.; Syn. hymn. 1(3),155f. p. 11 Terzaghi2, p. 48 Gruber-Strohm (God the Father) ἀμφιφαὲς φῶς, ἀτρέκεια σοφά, παγά σοφίας, Mar. Vict. aleth. prec. 21 tu lux uera, deus. Cf. (N. Vulg.) psalm. 80/79, 4 Deus . . . illustra [ostende LXX, Hebr.] faciem tuam et salui erimus; (W.-Gr., N. Vulg.) St. Paul 1 Tim. 2,5 Vnus enim Deus, unus et mediator Dei et hominum, homo Christus Iesus; Clem. Alex. Paedag. III, hymn. 17 f. βροτέας γενεᾶς / σῶτερ Ἰησοῦ, Aug. ciu. 11,2 p. 463,18 f. D.-K.; Prud. cath. 9,94 dux salutis. See Ps.-Paul. Nol. CSEL 30, p. 350 Hartel = PLS III (1963) col. 1129 Hamman; Malach. III,20 (an analogous expression is applied to sun in Orph. Hymn. 8,18 p. 8 Quandt3 ὄμμα δικαιοσύνης); furthermore cf. Clem. Alex. Protrept. IX, 84,2 p. 63 St.-Treu ὁ τῆς ἀναστάσεως ἥλιος, ibid., X,98,4 p. 71, ibid., XI,114,3 p. 80, Method. Symp. VI,4,142, p. 68 Bonwetsch = p. 172 Musurillo, ibid. XI, 286, hymn. v. 30 Χριστέ . . . φῶς ἀνέσπερον, Greg. Naz. carm. I,1,32, v. 3 φῶς ἐκ φωτὸς ἀνάρχου, II,1,38, v. 6 (PG XXXVII, col. 512 A and 1326 A); Rufin., Orig. princ. I,1,1, I, p. 90 Crouz.-Sim. = p. 100 Görg.-Karpp; Prud. apoth. 278 de Lumine Lumen; perist. 10,320 ex luce fulgor natus hic est Filius; etc. Cf. Iren. 4,20,5–7 (II, pp. 638–40; 646 A. Rousseau et al.) uisus autem (scil. Deus Pater) et per Filium adoptiue (gr. υἱοποιήτως) . . . Quemadmodum enim uidentes lumen intra lumen sunt et claritatem eius percipiunt, sic et qui uident Deum intra Deum sunt, percipientes eius claritatem . . . Enarrator ergo ab initio Filius Patris; Clem. Alex. Protrept. XII, 119,3 p. 84 St.-Treu “Christ is shining more

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than the sun,” Rufin. Orig. princ. I,1,1 quoted above, n. 20; ibid. 1,2,7: I, p. 124 Crouz.-Sim.= p. 136 Görg.-Karpp “Deus lux est” secundum Iohannem; splendor ergo huius lucis est unigenitus filius, ex ipso inseparabiliter uelut splendor ex luce procedens et inluminans uniuersam creaturam. Philo the Alexandrian, who distinguishes, following Plato, material from immaterial, sensible from intelligible, would like to call (opif. mundi 31) the “intelligible light . . . , created in image of the divine Logos” “universal brightness”; and in his work De specialibus legibus I 279 God is named ἡλίου ἥλιος: “Sonne der Sonne ist eine Art Überformel für einen Überbegriff. Das wird verstärkt durch die Parallelbildung: παράδειγμα ἀρχέτυπον = vorbildliches Urbild . . . Gott erscheint dadurch als Quell allen Lichtes und Urgrund der Erkenntnis.” Antonie Wlosok, Laktanz und die Philosophische Gnosis: Untersuchungen zu Geschichte und Terminologie der gnostischen Erlösungsvorstellung, Abh. Der Heidelb. Akad. der Wiss., Philos.-hist. Klasse, 1960/2 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1960), 91. St. Augustine, after a careful and long deliberation, comes to identify in De Genesi ad litteram the light of the first day with the spiritual light belonging to the “angelic nature.” See A. Solignac, “Exégège et métaphysique: Genèse 1,1–3 chez saint Augustin,” in In principio: Interprétations des premiers versets de la Genèse, Études réunies par P. Vignaux, Collection des Études Augustiniennes: Antiquité 51 (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1973), 161. In general, for metaphorical uses of lux and lumen see Ricarda Liver, Die Nachwirkung der antiken Sakralsprache im christlichen Gebet des lateinischen und italienischen Mittelalters, Romanica Helvetica 89 (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1979). (Dracontius is not mentioned, unfortunately.) It is useful to refer also to the entry Luce (simbolismo) by Giulia Sfameni Gasparro, NDPAC 2, 2nd ed. (2007), coll. 2928f. (short summary about OT and NT). Lastly, Elizabeth Rees, Simboli cristiani e antiche radici, Italian edition by E. Coccia (Cinisello Balsamo, Milano: Ed. S. Paolo, 1994; English edition, London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley, 1992), 122, points out that “Cristo assunse il ruolo di Elios e delle antiche divinità solari”; on this theme see also Stella, Epiteti di Dio in Draconzio, 98f. and n. 29. 22. See G. Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer, 2nd ed. (München: C.H. Beck, 1912; repr., 1971), 315ff., and cf. for example Cic. nat. deor. 3,51 Solem deum esse lunamque, quorum alterum Apollinem Graeci, alteram Dianam putant (and see Pease II, p. 1085 ad l.); Varro ling. 5,69 luna enim nascentium dux, quod menses huius; Plin. 8,1 religio quoque siderum solisque ac lunae ueneratio; Hymn. Orph. 8 Quandt3 = 8 Ricc. (εἰς Ἥλιον) and 9 (εἰς Σελήνην), PGM IV 640–42, I, p. 94 P., IV 2196–2202, I, p. 140 P.; John Lawrence Lydus mens. IV 80, p. 133,8 Wünsch ἀρχή γενέσεως σελήνη, etc. The divine nature of the heavenly bodies is a recurring statement in Plato’s dialogues, as everybody knows (cf. Leg. 950d 2f.; resp. 508a–509b; Tim. 92c 8); and from Aristotle on they are called θεῖα σώματα. As for the sun, cf. ex. gr. Proclus, in Tim. V,3,311,4ff. [cf. 42 D-E]: he maintains that “C’est pour cette raison donc qu’il ont coutume d’appeler Hélios aussi ‘jeune dieu.’ ‘Hélios chaque jour est jeune’ dit Héraclite (fr. 6 Diels) en tant qu’il participe à la puissance dionysiaque” (transl. A. J. Festugière, Proclus, Commentaire sue le Timée, t. V, Livre V [Paris: Vrin, 1968], 191); moreover Theol. Plat. VI,12,63,20ff. See also J. Opsomer, “La démiurgie des jeunes dieux selon Proclus,” Les ètudes classiques 71 (2003): 5–49. 23. Cf. further Id., ibid. tres dies transacti sunt et solem nemo quaesiuit et luminis claritas abundauit. Habet enim et dies suam lucem, quae praecessor est solis; Clem. Rom. 1,20,2f. p. 134 Joubert; Aristid. Apol. 4,2 p. 260 and 6,1f. p. 264–66 Pouderon-Pierre-Outtier-Guiorgadzé τὸν ἥλιον . . . τὴν σελήνην εἶναι ἔγρον

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24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

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θεοῦ, Theophil. Ant., Ad Autol. 1,4,4 p. 6 Grant (= p. 19 Marc.) “sun and moon and stars are his elements . . . created for service and slavery to men”; ibid., 2,15,1 p. 50 Grant, p. 62 Marc.; Clem. Alex. Protrept. IV, 63,1 p. 48 St.Treu; Lact. inst. 2,5,2–6; Basil. Hex. 6,2,2 p. 168 Naldini; Cyril of Jerusalem, Catech. IV,5 (I, p. 95f. Reischl-Rupp) somewhat ironically: “and some have deified the sun (so that after sunset, for the space of the night, they are godless), others the moon, so they have no God during the day” (transl. Leo. P. McCauley [-A.A. Stephenson], The Works of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem. vol. I [Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1969], 122). Boethius also attributes to unus rerum Pater (cf. Plat. Tim. 28 C) the creation of all beings, sun, moon, stars, and men, cf. cons. 3,6 v. 3 f. (4da^ + 2ionmin) ille dedit Phoebo radios, dedit et cornua lunae, / ille homines etiam terris dedit, ut sidera caelo and see comm. of Gruber2 p. 262 ad l. On these theological issues see H. Rahner, Simboli della Chiesa. L’ecclesiologia dei Padri, Italian edition (Cinisello Balsamo, Milano: Edizioni S. Paolo, 1971; repr., 1995), 201; J. C. M. van Winden, s.v. Hexaemeron, RAC 14 (1988), coll. 1250–69: esp. 1260–62; A. M. Ritter, s.v. Luce, in Gregorio di Nissa, Dizionario, ed. by L. F. Mateo-Seco, G. Maspero (Roma: Città nuova, 2007), 360–63. The idea, however, of the eternity of the moon occurs also in the Psalms, cf. 72 (71), 5; 89 (88), 38. Futhermore, in Graeco-Roman iconography sun and moon are often represented together in order to symbolize the notion of eternity: see for instance C. Letta, s.v. Sol, LIMC IV 1 (1988), 625. Cf. ibid. 237ff.; Rom. X, 403 and see Vollmer’s edition Index uerborum, s.v. uerax, p. 424); further Cic. diu. 2,33; Hor. serm. 2,4,30; carm. 4,6,38; Manil. 2,93 ff.; Philo Al. spec. leg. II, 143 p. 316 Daniel; etc. See e.g. LD 1, 211ff. cuius ab igne suo (scil. igne) lunam iubet ire secundam / nigra tenebrarum corrumpere tempora noctis / et trepidum proferre diem comitante quiete; candida somnigeris collustrans cornibus axem; 2,10–15 quo splendet frigida luna / partita cum fratre uice (-es trad.) sua tempora lustrans, / ne simul inuadant mundum sine luce tenebrae / credaturque chaos spatio sub noctis adesse, tu deus ispiras; Anast. Sin. Quaest. et resp. 28,344 p. 73 Richard-Munitiz. Something similar to this thought, however, can already be found in the pagan poetry, cf. e.g. Pindar, who calls the moon by means of a periphrasis ἑσπέρας ὀφθαλμόν (Ol. 3,20) and Sen. Thy. 838 f. non . . . demet nocti / Luna timores; moreover Hor. carm. 4,6,38 (Sapphic hendecasyllable) crescentem face Noctilucam. The lack in the sky of sun and moon is tantamount to chaos, cf. Ou. met. 1,10 ff. Nullus adhuc mundo praebebat lumina Titan / nec noua crescendo reparabat cornua Phoebe, / . . . sic erat . . . lucis egens aer. On this identification see Reisch, s.v. Diana, ThlL Suppl. Nom. propr. III, 126,80ff.; Maltby-Flury, s.v. luna, ThlL VII 2, 1834,49ff.; Wernicke s.v. Artemis, RE II 1 (1896), col. 1354; Erika Simon, s.v. Artemis/Diana, LIMC II 1 (1984), 792–849; Françoise Gury, s.v. Selene/luna, LIMC VII 1, 706–15. There has certainly been no lack of attempts to etymologize the goddess’s noun, cf. e.g. Phil. Alex. De congr. erud. gr. 21,117; De uita Moys. II 18,88; Quaest. in Ex. II 85; Clem. Alex. Strom. 5,6,37,1 p. 84 Le Boulluec (-Voulet) and II, p. 154 comm. ad l.; Euseb. Praep. Euang. 3,11,30 p. 140 Mras-des Places = p. 222 des Places (for the implied etymology of the noun cf. also Heraclit. Quaest. Hom. 57,3 f.); Macr. Sat. 1,15,20 unde et Graeci lunam Ἄρτεμιν nuncuparunt, id est ἀερότεμιν quod aera secat; 7,16,27 Hinc est quod Diana, quae luna est, Ἄρτεμις dicitur quasi ἀερότεμις, hoc est aerem secans. “Già nelle civiltà neolitiche il corno bovino era immagine della luna nuova; le due corna possono indicare due lune nuove e quindi l’intero ciclo lu-

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29.

30. 31.

32.

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Medievalia et Humanistica nare,” Gabriella Ricciardelli, Inni orfici (Milano: Mondadori, 2000), 265 ad l.: in Graeco-Roman tradition the lunar cycle as well as the solar may be a symbol of eternity understood as the capacity of renewal and regeneration of Nature. Other useful material is available in C. F. H. Bruchmann, Epitheta deorum quae apud poetas graecos leguntur (Lipsiae: Teubner, 1893), s. v. Σελήνη, 206f.; I. B. Carter, Epitheta deorum quae apud poetas Latinos leguntur (Lipsiae: Teubner, 1902), s.v. Luna, 62; O. Tescari, Quinto Orazio Flacco, I carmi e gli epode, 3rd ed. (Torino: Società editrice internazionale, 1943 = rist. 1967), 436 comm. ad l. (moreover cf. carm. 4,2,57 f.); N. Terzaghi, Synesii Cyrenensis hymni, 2nd ed. (Roma: Typis publicae officinae polygraphicae, 1949), 213f. and 267f. comm. on 3,22 and 8,45; J. Gruber, and H. Strohm, Synesios von Kyrene, Hymnen (Heidelberg: Winter, 1991), 198 and 228 ll. cc.; Sophie Lunais, Recherches sur la lune, Études préliminaires aux religions orientales dans l’empire romain 72 (Leiden: Brill, 1979). The prose works have a good many cases of derivatives from the substantive cornu with reference to the moon: cornutus (ThlL IV 976,23ff.), corniculatus (ThlL IV 958,45ff.), corniger (ThlL IV 960,14f.: only example Sedul. op. pasch. 1,2 p. 179,8 Hue. cornigeros lunae uultus; cornigerae lunae uultus Lambertz, in Thesaurus linguae Latinae—cornigerae is due perhaps to an oversight—cf. however Maneton, IV C. E., 4,91 where the moon is referred to as κερατῶπις “which shows itself or comes out horned”); Syn. Hymn. 3 (= 5), 22 ἁ ταυρῶπις μήνα “the moon which shows its bull face” (cf. Hymn. mag. 18,32 II, p. 254 Preis.2 = LIX 10,32 p. 192 Heitsch2 ταυρῶπι). Cf. ex. gr. LD 1,664 aurea luna; ThlL II, 1491, 24ff. s.v. aureus; Carter, Epitheta deorum quae apud poetas Latinos leguntur, 28 and 62; C. F. H. Bruchmann, Epitheta deorum quae apud poetas Graecos leguntur, 35, 51, 150, 210; moreover cf. PMG IV 2271 (I p. 142 Preis.2) χρυσοστεφή “crowned with gold” (the reference is made to the moon, σελήνη, not to the sun, as misinterpreted by Montanari (Vocabolario della lingua greca, 2nd ed. [Torino: Loescher Editore, 2004], s.v. χρυσοστεφής, p. 2381). For the prerogatives of the moon in classical and modern literature see Photina Rech, Inbild des Kosmos. Eine Symbolik der Schöpfung, vol. II (Salzburg and Freilassing: O. Müller Verlag, 1966), s.v. Mond, 128–57, and the introductive essay of M. Peri, “Nasos Vaghenàs: un alchimista per caso?,” in La luna nel pozzo: 27 poesie di Nasos Vaghenàs, by O. Longo and M. P. (Torino: Genesi, stampa, 2008), 7–70. See the databases Library of Latin texts and Musisque deoque. In Eugenius’s Hexameron there is exactly the same line. I follow the text edited by J.-B. Guillaumin, Martianus Capella, Les noces de Philologie et de Mercure, Livre IX, L’Harmonie (Paris: Les Belles Lettres 2011), 18 (cf. app. ad l.: reuehit G, reuit codd. nonnulli), and see comm. ad l. pp. 114f. The poet says that the moon returns with his golden horns (= “bright horns”) the light got by Iuppiter-Sol. L. Cristante, Martiani Capellae De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii liber IX (Padova: Antenore, 1987), in his commentary, pp. 238ff., compares (p. 243 ad l.) this line with two other passages of the same work, VIII, 808 flammantia cornua Lunae and IX 919, v. 10 (Selene) pulso et luminis auro. Cf. further Calc. fr. 18,2 Blänsd. (gr. δῖα Σεληναίη); AL 772,6 Riese2. The Ovidian iunctura of met. 10,448f. recurs again in Drac. LD 1,663 perit aurea luna and in Mart. Cap. IX 902, v. 1 aurea . . . luna. For the use of aureus and auratus referred in general to the stars see J. André, Étude sur les termes de couleur dans la langue latine, Études et commentaires 7 (Paris: Librairie Klincksieck, 1949), 155–57. It is interesting to note that Cynthia in her own epitaph

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33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

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refers to herself using the adjective aurea, cf. Prop. 4,7,85 hic Tiburtina iacet aurea Cynthia terra and see G. Hutchinson, Propertius Elegies Book IV (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 187 ad l.; moreover Methodius, symp. V,8,130 f. p. 62f. Bonwetsch = p. 160–62 Musurillo establishes a close connection between gold (= light, sun) and virginity. These versions about the capture of the hind/deer (necat, cornua abstulisse) are testified to also by iconographic material. For a detailed discussion of the important passage of Valerius Flaccus see H. J. W. Wijsman, Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica, Book VI, A Commenntary (Leiden, Boston, and Köln: Brill, 2000), 46f.; Th. Baier, Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica Buch VI, Einleitung und Kommentar (München: Beck, 2001), 140f.; M. Fucecchi, Una guerra in Colchide. Valerio Flacco, Argonautiche 6,1–246, intr., transl. and comm. (Pisa: ETS, 2006), 125–27, who, agreeing with Langen ad Val. Fl. 1,89, points out that “le corna d’oro hanno anche un particolare significato votivo.” The proper noun Phrixus is obelized by many scholars because it is believed to be wrong; it may well be, however, a simple case of homonymy. On the Ausonius’s passage see R. P. H. Green, The works of Ausonius, edited with introd. and comm. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 432; P. Dräger, Decimus Magnus Ausonius, Sämtliche Werke (Trier: Kliomedia, 2011), 273. The title is meaningful, De aerumnis Herculis; Hercules’ labors are a true topos, cf. e.g. AP XVI (= App. Plan.) 92, 4 “in the fourth labour he captured the hind with horns of gold” (cf. ibid. 91,6 “the Maenalian hind,” 93,5 “the hind did not escape me”). Third according to other mythological sources, see e.g. Ps.-Apollod. Bibl. 2,5,3, where the hind is said to have been seized alive: “As a third labour he ordered him to bring the Cerynitian hind alive to Mycenae” (J. G. Frazer, Apollodorus, The Library, vol. I, [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univiversity Press; London: Heinemann, 1921; repr., 1954], 191); see also Iohannes Pediasimus, p. 251f. Wagner, who depends on Ps.-Apollodorus. For his part Hyg. fab. 30,5 agrees with Ps.-Apollodorus on this particular, but mentions it as the fourth labor, see G. Guidorizzi, Igino, I miti (Milano: Adelphi, 2000), 29 and 244f. n. 227. F. Spaltenstein, Commentaire des Punica des Silius Italicus (Livres 1 à 8) (Genève: Droz 1986), 182 ad l. thinks that Silius has preferred to use the prerogative of the huge horns, that is “un trait topique et general” rather than the prerogative of the golden horns. Which proves to be partly unrealistic, indeed Augustus did not extend the boundaries of the Roman empire any farther, see E. Norden, P. Vergilius Maro, Aeneis Buch VI, 3rd ed. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1927 = Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1984, 8th ed.), 324 f. ad l. Martial seems to have remembered this Virgilian passage in his eulogy of the Domitian’s acta, considered greater than the deeds of Hercules, 9,101,7 (another selective catalogue of the deeds of the hero) aeripedem siluis ceruum . . . / abstulit: on the line see Ch. Henriksén, A Commentary on Martial, Epigrams Book 9 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 389–413. We can consider this particular kind of hyperbolic comparison, involving well-known mythological figures, as a version of the topos parua componere magnis “to compare small to great,” that is often attested to in the poetry of late antiquity, see Roberts, The Jeweled Style, 22 n. 28. A similar stylistic feature has appeared also, but to different purpose, since ancient comedy, as everybody knows, cf. for instance Plaut. Epid. 178 f. (cr4, ia7) Hercules ego fui, dum illa mecum fuit; / neque sexta aerumna acerbior Herculi quam illa mihi obiectast; Pers. 1 f.; Pseud. 1244.

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38. And for this killing Artemis got angry. The account of Servius, who explains ad l.: “fixerit: statuerit, delassauerit,” is quite different, being closer to the version given by Ps.-Apollod. Bibl. 2,5,3: see Norden, P. Vergilius Maro, Aeneis Buch VI, p. 325. Ennodius dict. 27, CSEL VI/1882, p. 504,14f. Hartel (= MGH, Auct. Ant. VII/1885 = 1961, p. 300 Vogel), limits himself to saying that Hercules ceruam uelocitate praecessit. For the version, given by Eur. Her. 375ff. “having killed the hind with golden horns and dappled hide, etc.,” see text and comm. ad l. of U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Euripides, Herakles, vol. III (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 18952 = reprint Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1959), 91; G. W. Bond, Euripides, Heracles (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 159. 39. See ThlL I, 1061,61ff. 40. Cf. e.g. Hom. Il. 8,41; 13,23; Soph. El. 491, O.C. 57 (figuratively); Eur. Suppl. 1197; etc. 41. What is surprising in relation to this hind is the ἀδύνατον of the horns themselves, all the more so because they are horns of gold: it is not without reason that we find a stag in some authors. W. Ridgeway, The Early Age of Greece, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931), 360ff. thinks, firstly, that the poets lack scientific accuracy (cf. for instance Aristot. hist. anim. IV 538b 19) and, secondly, that the horned hind may suggest that it actually is a reindeer of N Asia and Europe; see also Guidorizzi, Miti, 245. As regards the ancient sources, Aelianus, nat. anim. 7, 39 p. 193 Herch., quotes several fragments of Greek authors in order to testify that the hinds also were horned, among which Pind. Ol. 3, 28f., Anacr. fr. 28 p. 22 Gent. = 408 p. 203 Page (cf. Schol. Pind. Ol. 3,52; Eust. in Il. 711,34), Eur. 740 N.2 = 740 Kannicht (a pointed reference to Hercules’ fourth labor); see K. Meuli, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II (Basel and Stuttgart: Schwabe, 1975), 797–813, esp. 802f.; W. Felten, LIMC V 1 (1990), s.v. Heracles and Kerynitian Deer (labour IV), 48f. A final observation: this was one of the five hinds, all with horns of gold, which were seen by Artemis on the bank of the Thessalian river Anaurus. The goddess seized four of them and yoked them together, and only one of them was able to run away beyond the Arcadian river Celadon and to take to the forest of Mt. Cerynaia (cf. Ps.-Apoll. 2,81; Seru. Aen. 6,802, who mentions Cerynitin ceruam), thus fulfilling Juno’s will, as this hind was designed to be one of the labors of Hercules. Cf. Call. In Dianam 105ff. 42. It must be remembered that periphrasis is, at least from Ennius on, one of the favorite stylistic devices for translating the Greek poetic compounds: in this case Dracontius had examples before him such as Sen. H. f. 222f. (iamb. trim.) Maenali pernix fera / multo decorum praeferens auro caput, / deprensa cursu; H. O. 1238f. (iamb. trim.) feram / radiante clarum fronte gestantem caput. 43. The third Olympian ode celebrates the victory of Theron, tyrant of Agrigento, in 476 B.C. in the quadriga races. V. 28: νιν Mommsen, μιν codd.; v. 29: χρυσεόκερων cod. A (= Ambr. C 222 saec. XIII-XIV); v. 30: Ὀρθωσίᾳ Ahrens. 44. Trans. of J. Sandys (London: W. Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1915; repr., 1957), 37 with some little adaptation. On Mt. Keryneia see Bölte, RE XI 1 (1921), col. 347. 45. A positive precedent in relation to Hercules is to a certain extent offered by the Daniel episode, LD 3,191–214. See in this respect the convincing analysis of Roswitha Simons, Dracontius und der Mythos. Christliche Weltsicht und pagane Kultur in der ausgehenden Spätantike (Leipzig: Saur, 2005), 97f.: “Trotz aller von Dracontius geäußerten Zweifel am Wahrheitsgehalt der Mythologie wird das mythische Ereignis selbst, die Tötung des Löwen durch Hercules,

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46.

47.

48.

49.

50.

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nicht ganz ins Reich der Fiktion verwiesen . . . denn er soll hier ja als exemplum ex minore ad maius die Größe der Gefahr für Daniel und des Wunders seiner Rettung durch Gott herausarbeiten, ein im Gegensatz zu Hercules’ Tat zurecht rühmenswertes Geschehen.” On the contrary, Arweiler, Semiotics and Exegesis on Dracontius’ De laudibus Dei, in Interpreting Cultural Change: Semiotics and Exegesis in Dracontius’ De Laudibus Dei, in Poetry and Exegesis in Premodern Latin Christianity: The Encounter between Classical and Christian Strategies of Interpretation, edited by W. Otten and Karla Pollmann, Supplement to Vigiliae Christianae 87 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007), 157 n. 35 recognizes a “marker of a sceptical or polemical position” and considers interesting “the use of the long age of the myth (per saecula) as argument to weaken the story’s credibility.” As is well-known, the question related to the horns has favored the change of gender of the animal (see n. 41 above); indeed, some sources mention a stag/deer instead of a hind, cf. for instance Heracl. Quaest. Hom. 49,6; Hyg. Fab. 30,5; Sil. 3,39; Mart. 9,101,7; Aus. ecl. 17,4 p. 103 Green = 24,4 p. 314 Past.; AL 627,4 Riese2; Myth.Vat. 1,63 p. 28 Kulcsár. In addition, we know that the chariot of the moon was drawn by stags or bucks. See Gury, LIMC VII 1 (1994), s.v. Selene/luna, 712. Cf. Cic. nat. deor. 2,68 and Pease II, 728ff. ad l. As for the relation of Artemis with the moon, which is not original, but modeled on that of Apollo ~ sun (Lydus, for instance, borrows such a correspondence from Porphyrius), see Wernicke, s.v. Artemis, RE II 1 (1896) col. 1354; Rahner, Simboli della Chiesa, 245f. and cf. Eus. Praep. Euang. III,11,32 p. 141 Mras-des Places = 222–24 des Places: “Hekate again is the moon, to symbolize her transformations and the strenght of her different shapes.” Nonn. Dion. V 165 “when Mene newkindled distils her horn’s liquid light and milks out the self-gotten fire of Father Helios” (trans. of W. H. D. Rouse, vol. I [London: W. Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956], 181). About the theory of moonlight in antiquity, see for instance Plat. Rep. 10,616 e; Plut. De plac. phil. 2,28 (891 D); De facie in orbe Lunae 16 (929 A-D: see P. Donini, Plutarco, Il volto della luna [Napoli: D’Auria, 2011], pp. 289ff. comm. ad l.). Cf. for instance Ambr. Hex. 4,8,32 Et merito sicut luna Ecclesia . . . Fulget enim Ecclesia non suo, sed Christi lumine; Arat. 2,1152 Hinc etiam Ecclesiae gerit aurea luna figuram. On the church as mother of Christ like Mary, see Rahner, Simboli della Chiesa, 48ff., 91ff.; ThlL VII,2, 1830,23ff. Regarding the feminine character of the moon and its light see Plin. 2,223; Cornutus Theol. Graecae comp. 32,4 p. 110 Nesselrath; Plut. De facie 5 (921F-922A), see comm. of Donini, p. 258 f., nn. 36–41, ad l.; Apul. met. 11,2,1 luce feminea; Macr. sat. 1,17,53 lunam uero umidiore et uelut femineo sexu naturali quodam pressam tepore. We must never forget that among Artemis/Diana’s characteristics there are also those of suckling wild animals and protecting the young. For the epithets “huntress” and “virgin” compare for instance AL 939,6 Riese2 uenatrix ceruas uirgo Diana tenet. Cornutus ibid. 34,6 p. 118 Ness., stresses the point that the goddess is at the same time virgin and protector of the parturients; cf. also Euseb. Praep. Euang. 3,11,30,2f., p. 140f. Mras-des Places = 222 des Places. Cf. Iustin. Apol. I, 32,13 p. 216 Munier; Clem. Al. Protrept. 11,114,3 p. 80 St.-Treu (Χριστός) δικαιοσύνης ἥλιος [cf. Malach. III,20], Rufin., Orig. Homil. Num. 23,5,2 pp. 126–128 Doutreleau ‘Sol iustitiae’ Christus est; huic si luna, id est Ecclesia sua, quae lumine ipsius repletur, iuncta fuerit et penitus ei adhaeserit,

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51.

52.

53.

54.

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Medievalia et Humanistica ita ut, secundum uerbum Apostoli [1 Cor. 6,17] “quis se iungit Domino, unus cum eo spiritus fiat,” tunc festiuitatem Neomeniae agit (cf. Philo Al. spec. leg. II,140 p. 316 Daniel): Ambr. Hex. 4,8,32 fulget enim Ecclesia non suo, sed Christi lumine et splendorem sibi arcessit de sole iustitiae. Theophilus of Antioch, Ad Autol. 2,15,2 p. 52 Grant, p. 62 Marc., says that ἥλιος ἐν τύπῳ θεοῦ ἐστιν, ἡ δὲ σελήνη ἀνθρώπου. On the mystical moon theology of the Church Fathers and the relationship with classical sources see Rahner, Simboli della Chiesa, 157–287; Miti greci nell’interpretazione cristiana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1971), 107–97. Cf. respectively Ad Autol. I,13,8 p. 18 Grant (p. 33 Marc.) “If you wish to behold a still more marvellous sight, taking place to provide proof of resurrection not only from matters on earth but also from those in heaven, consider the montly resurrection of the moon, how it wanes, dies, and rises again”; ibid. 2,15,2 p. 52 Grant (= 2,15,3 p. 62 Marc.) “For the sun exists as a type of God, and the moon as a type of man. . . . But the moon wanes every month and virtually dies, for it exists as a type of man; the nit is reborn and waxes as a pattern of the future resurrection”; Catech. 18,10 (PG XXXIII, col. 1028 C; W. C. Reischl-J. Rupp, Cyrilli Hierosolymarum archiepiscopi opera quae supersunt omnia, vol. II [München: Sumtibus Librariae Lentnerianae, 1860; repr., Hildesheim: G. Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung], 310; C. Riggi, Cirillo di Gerusalemme, Le catechesis [Roma: Città nuova, 1993], 413f.). The same concept recurs also in Tert. resurr. 12,3 redornantur et specula lunae, quae menstruus numerus adtriuerat . . . 12,7. Totus igitur hic ordo reuolubilis rerum testatio est resurrectionis mortuorum. Cf. ex. gr. Basil. Hex. 6,10,4–7 pp. 200–202 Naldini and comm. p. 374 ad l.; Ambr. Hex. 4,7,29f. Rahner, Simboli della Chiesa, 233, reminds us that Selene/moon is, according to philosophers, the boundary between the upper unchangeable cosmos and the sublunary region, characterized by the exclusion of any providence, “il μέσον nell’armonia della sinfonia universale”; therefore, “il compito di Selene è, per usare un termine di Plutarco, συναρμόττειν [Is. et Osir. 54 (II, Bernardakis, p. 528,8f.)],” and, as Xenocrates states, “Selene è mediatrice tra l’Olimpo e la terra” (ibid., p. 234). Besides the philosophical field, it is interesting to note that in the visual arts the waxing moon placed at the Blessed Virgin’s feet symbolizes chastity, see J. Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art (London: J. Murray, 1974 = Dizionario dei soggetti e dei simboli nell’arte, Milano: Longanesi, 1983 = repr. 2002), 250. Cf. for instance Cypr. Ad Donat. 3 p. 4 Sim. (CC s.L. III A) difficile prorsus ac durum . . . opinabar, . . . , ut quis renasci denuo posset utque in nouam uitam lauacro aquae salutaris animatus, quod prius fuerat, exponeret et corporis licet manente compage hominem animo ac mente mutaret; Firm. err. 2,5 alia est aqua qua renouati homines renascuntur . . . Illam quam despicis ignitam uenerandi spiritus maiestate decoratur, ut ex ipsa per ueteres conscientiae cicatrices credentibus hominibus salutaris sanitas inrigetur; Max. Taur. Serm. 31,2 (CC s.L. XXIII, p. 121f. Mutzenbecher: cf. Ambr. Hex. 4,2,7; 4,8,32f.) Vnde si Christus dominus soli rectius comparatur [cf. Theoph. Ant. Ad Autol. 2,22], lunae quid nisi ecclesiam comparabimus? . . . Recte plane lunae conparatur ecclesia, quoniam et ipsa nos lauacri rore perfundit et terram corporis nostri baptismatis humore uiuificat. Recte lunae conparatur ecclesia, quia et ipsa augmentum adquirit patiturque defectum. . . . minuitur persecutionibus, praedicationibus ampliatur; decrescit cum uiduatur filiis, crescit cum martyribus coronatur. About regeneration obtained thanks to baptism see Rahner, Simboli della Chiesa, 231–68. Translation of M. L. West, Homeric Hymns, Homeric Apocrypha, Lives of Homer (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2003), 209.

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55.

56.

57.

58.

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Among the enemies of wildlife we must number for instance the giant Orion, the hunter, who, according to one of the versions of the myth, wanted to wipe out all the wild animals. Besides, cf. Soph. El. 563 τὴν κυνεγὸν Ἄρτεμιν, Aristid. Apol. 11,2 (p. 274 Pouderon-Pierre-Outtier-Guiorg.) “they (Greeks) say that he (Artemis) was a huntress; and went about on mountains leading dogs, either to hunt the deer or the wild boars” (from the Siriac text J. A. Robinson [Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2004], 44). In a passage from Homer, Il. 21,482ff., however, all the main prerogatives of Artemis are already summarized. It is useful to remember that among the common epithets applied to the goddess there are precisely ἀγροτέρα (Hom. Il. 21,471, Aristoph. Eq, 660, Lys. 1262, Pollucis Onomast. V 13, I p. 264 Bethe ἀγροτέρα καὶ κυνηγέτις καὶ φιλόθερος, VIII 91, II, p. 129 B. (cf. Anacr. 348, 1 Page; Soph. Tr. 214; Hom. Hymn. 27,2), ἐλαφοκτόνος (Eur. IT 1113), θηροφόνος (Eur. H. f. 378; -φόνη Theogn. 11, see comm. ad l. by T. Hudson-Williams, The Elegies of Theognis [London: Arno, 1910; repr., New York, 1979], 173f.), σηροκτόνος (Aristoph. Lys. 1262); ἰοχέαιρα (Hom. Il. 5,54 and 447; 6,428 etc.; Nonn. Dion. 33,126), κυναγός (Soph. El. 563, Aristoph. Lys. 1272), κυνηγέτις (Orph. Fragm. 36,5 Qu.; Corn. Theol. 34 p. 116 Ness., Pollucis Onomast. V 13 p. 264 B.), τοξοφόρος (Hom. Il. 21,483), τοξότις (Orph. Fragm. 36,2 Qu.3); iaculatrix Ou. epist. 20,229 (cf. Hor. carm. 4,6,33f.); met. 5,375; fast. 2,155; pharetrata Ou. met. 3,252, Stat. Theb. 1,535, Sid. Apoll. Carm. 7,30, Drac. Rom. 10,64; diues praedae Stat. silu. 1,4,33; etc. On the other hand Cornutus, ibid. 32,3 p. 110 Ness., gives the following etimology of Artemis (cf. Plat. Crat. 406b, Strabo XIV, 635c: the parallel with the etimology of Apollo Oúlios is evident): οἴονται . . . Ἄρτεμιν ἀπὸ τοῦ ἀρτεμεῖς ποιεῖν, ὅ ἐστιν ὑγιεῖς, ὠνομάσθαι. Cf. Cornutus 31,1ff., p. 106ff. Ness.; Sen. benef. 1,13,3; Epict. 3,22,57; 3,24,13; 3,26,31f.; Seru. Aen. 6,392 sane Alciden uolunt quidam ἀπὸ τῆς ἀλκῆς dictum, id est a uirtute. On this question see M. Simon, Hercule et le Christianisme (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1955), which still makes interesting reading; G. K. Galinsky, The Herakles Theme (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1972), esp. 101–8; Margarethe Billerbeck, Seneca, Hercules furens, Mnemosyne Supplementum vol. 187 (Leiden, Boston, and Köln: Brill, 1999), 25–29 (= Bern: P. Lang, 2002 in coll. with Sophie Guex, 21–25: a concise, but dense introduction). It is no accident that Lactantius, inst. I,9 debases this hero figure and his worship. Cf. Ambr. Hexam. 4.8.32 where he compares the church with the moon: ecclesia sicut luna defectus habet et ortus frequentes, sed defectibus suis creuit et his meruit ampliari, dum persecutionibus minuitur et confessorum martyriis coronatur. Haec est uera luna, quae de fraterni sui luce perpetua sibi lumen immortalitatis et gratiae mutuatur. Cf. once again Ambr. Hexam. 4.8.32 fulget enim ecclesia non suo, sed Christi lumine et splendorem sibi arcessit de sole iustitiae. As regards Christian symbology related to the stag/hind see J. Strzygowski, Der Bibelkreis des griechischen Physiologus, Byzantinisches Archiv (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1899), 37 and 66; Photina Rech, Inbild des Kosmos: Eine Symbolik der Schöpfung, vol. I (Salzburg and Freilassing: O. Müller, 1966), s.v. Hirsch, 221–40; L. Charbonneau-Lassay, Il bestiario del Cristo, vol. I (Roma: Edizioni Arkeios, 1994 = Le bestiaire du Christ, Milano: Arche, 1975), s.v. Il cervo, and La cerva, 357–84; Maria Pia Ciccarese, Animali simbolici. Alle origini del bestiario Cristiano, vol. I (Bologna: EDB, 2002 = repr. 2005), s.v. Cervo, 313–34. Indeed it appears to have a close connection with Apollo and Diana. See Charbonneau-Lassay, Il bestiario del Cristo, vol. I, 364ff. Photina Rech, Inbild des Kosmos, vol. I, 230, says that “geht . . . das Bild vom laufenden und spring-

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Medievalia et Humanistica enden Hirsch in ein anderes über: in die Vorstellung vom auf- und untergehenden Licht. Der Logos-Hirsch, der in seinem Sprung das All durchmißt, schwingt sich am Himmel empor wie die Sonne, wie die auf- und niedersteigenden Gestirne. Hinter diesen Analogien steht die weitverbreitete und sehr alte Lichtsymbolik des Hirsches.” Likewise, according to a few authors, the horns also of Pan symbolize the sun and the moon, cf. Eus. Praep. Euang. III,11,44 p. 142 Mras-des Places = p. 226 des Places. Cf. ex. gr. II Sm 22,33f. p. 451 W.-Gr. Deus . . . coaequans pedes meos ceruis et su- / per excelsa mea statuens me; psalm. 18(17), 34 p. 788 W.- Gr. (LXX) qui perfecit pedes meos tamquam ceruorum (coaequans pedes meos ceruis Hebr., N. Vulg.) et super excelsa statuens me; Habac. 3,19 p. 1411 W.-Gr. Dominus Deus fortitudo mea / et ponet pedes meos quasi ceruorum / et super excelsa mea deducet me / uictori in psalmis canentem; Paul. Nol. epist. 9,4 tunc ipse Dominus, qui est uia et ueritas [Ioh. 14:6], perficiet pedes nostros sicut cerui et super excelsa statuet nos. [Psalm. 18 (17), 34] Montes . . . excelsi ceruis . . . refugium . . . , quia si super iniquitatem alacritate ceruorum fugiamus Nebroth uenatorem [Gen. 10,9] qui, ut scriptura designat, contra Dominum uenator fuit, et cooperante Christo piis actibus adscendamus excelsa uirtutum per doctrinas prophetarum et apostolorum, qui sunt montes Dei, montes illi uberes. The pii actus as well as the bona opera are symbolized of course in this context by the horns of the animal, and are the weapons of the believers, cf. Id., ibid., 4–5 Ita per obseruantiam spiritalem et directam fidem et erinacei pariter erimus et cerui eqs. It is worth remembering that the hind is the symbol of speed in classical poetry, cf. for instance Catull. 64,341 flammea . . . celeris uestigia ceruae, see commentaries by Friedrich (1908), p. 384; Fordyce (1973), p. 319; Kroll (19806), p. 188; Thomson (1997), p. 430 ad l. Cf. Apon. in Cant. 4,5 p. 91 de Vregille-Neyrand (CC s.L. XIX = SC 421, vol. II, Livres IV-VIII, p. 14) Cerui autem uidentur intellegi qui in ipsa philosophia suae uelocitate doctrinae non multos sed unum Deum inuisibilem, immensum, inaestimabilem omniumque creatorem, totum ubique mundum implentem, confessi sunt. The stag was a pure food for the Hebrew people (cf. Lev. 11, 3; Deut. 14,5), and it is, therefore, also among Christians a symbol of purity, cf. for instance Rufin. Orig. Comm. in cant. 3,13,1 (II, p. 624 Brésard-CrouzelBorret) caprea uel ceruus, quod inter munda habeantur animalia; Apon. 4,6 in Cant. p. 91 de Vregille-Neyrand (= SC II, p. 16: literally and figuratively) Et quantum mundiora uel simpliciora sunt caprearum et ceruorum animalia saeuissimis et immundissimis bestiis. Cf. Apon. in Cant. 4,8 p. 92 de Vregille-Neyrand (= SC 421, vol. II, p. 18) Quae (scil. animae) disputationis suae cursu, grauibus bestiis, gentilibus uel haereticis, immissis a diabolo uenatore, insequentibus, ad montes confugiunt—hoc est unum Deum omnium creatorem apostolico dogmate confitentes in caelo—et acumine sensus, more caprearum uel ceruorum, prospiciunt aduersariorum insidias. For the stag as image and symbol of the Christian soul cf. Psalm. 42(41),2 (LXX, W.-Gr., N. Vulg.) Quemadmodum desiderat ceruus ad / fontes aquarum, / ita desiderat anima mea ad te, Deus, and see Charbonneau-Lassay, Il bestiario del Cristo, vol. I, 373–75. See Charbonneau-Lassay, Il bestiario del Cristo, vol. I, 371: “Il cervo condivide con il toro e l’ariete l’onore di rappresentare Gesù Cristo nella sua triplice qualità di Padre, di Capo, di Guida vigilante della famiglia Cristiana composta dalla Chiesa, sua sposa, e dai fedeli, loro figli.” The author reminds us further that the hind-stag/deer (especially the white type) is one of the more widespread symbols of Christ in iconography also and that the mythological sources, concerning Hercules’ fourth labor, talk of animals of both sexes,

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hind and stag-deer. Cf. Ambr. Iob 4,1,4 pp. 269f. Schenkl (CSEL XXXIII, Pars II) sed etiam cerui similitudinem suscepit Christus; Iob 4,1,5 p. 271; in psalm. 118, serm. 6,13 p. 114 Petsch.-Zelz.; Rufin. Orig. Comm. in cant. III,11,12 p. 602 Brésard-Crouzel-Borret In his enim similis efficitur (scil. Christus) caprae et hinnulo ceruorum (Cant. 2,9) . . . ceruo, quod ad interitum serpentis aduenit [cf. Hom. Cant. II,11 p. 140 O. Rousseau2]; Cyr. Alex. Psalm. XVII, PG LXIX, col. 825 A [cf. Luc. X,19 W.-Gr., N. Vulg. ecce dedi uobis potestatem calcandi supra serpentes et scorpiones et supra omnem uirtutem inimici et nihil uobis nocebit]. 64. Such a peculiarity of stags is remembered also by Ambr. Iob 4,1,5 p. 271 Schenkl; Isid. orig. 12,1,18: there are good authorities about that, see for instance Aristoph. Byz. hist. anim. epit. 2,500 (ed. Spyr. P. Lambros [Berlin: Reimer, 1885], 129); Nic. Ther. 2,139–144; Lucr. 6,765; Mart. 12,28,5; Plin. 11,279 Elephantorum anima serpentes extrahit, ceruorum urit; 8,118; 28,149 (cf. Ael. nat. anim. 2,9; 8,6; Plut. soll. anim. 24, (Mor. 976 D); Solin. 19,15) Et his cum serpente pugna. Vestigant cauernas nariumque spiritu extrahunt renitentes; Oppian of Apamea (third century C.E.) cyn. 2,233–50; hal. 2,289ff. (simile); Geop. XIX,5,3; Et. M. 326, s.v. ἔλαφος. A few of the authors testify that the stags eat the snakes: in addition to the passages quoted above, see Lucan 6,673; Plin. 28,149 exitio his (sc. serpentibus) esse ceruos nemo ignorat ut, si quae sunt, extractas cauernis mandentes; Tat. orat. ad Gr. 18,4 p. 132 Trelenberg, p. 38 Marcovich; Theodoret. Psalm. XLI, PG LXXX, col. 1169 B; Physiol. Gr. I, 30; II,4: cf. F. Sbordone, Physiologus (Mediolani, Genuae, Romae, and Neapoli: in edibus Societatis “Dante Alighieri, Albrighi, Segati e C.”, 1936 = repr. Hildesheim, Zürich, and New York: Verlag G. Olms, 1991), 97–101; 170–74 (with a rich collection of material); D. Offermanns, Der Physiologus nach den Handschriften G U N D M, Beiträge zur klassischen Philologie 22 (Meisenheim am Glan: Verlag A. Hain, 1966), 100–101; F. Zambon, Il Fisiologo (Milano: Adelphi Edizioni, 1975), 66–67; G. Muradyan, Physiologus: The Greek and Armenian versions (Leuven and Paris: Peeters, 2005), 161f.; Physiol. Lat. 43,2; Drac. LD 1,639f. Frontibus arboreis amittunt cornua cerui, / anguibus assumptis sed mox palmata resurgunt; satisf. 67 s. cerua salutares pasto serpente medellas / conficit. Other literary sources, for instance the Commenta Bernensia on the quoted passage of Lucan, attest that the stags eat the snakes in order either to treat themselves or to rejuvenate; cf. further Tert. pall. 3,2; Verec. sup. cant. Az. 22 p. 106 Demeulenaere (CC s.L. XCIII). To my knowledge, the only source that disagrees with these is Solin. 52,33 enormitas in serpentibus tanta est, ut ceruos . . . hauriant. On all these matters see Charbonneau-Lassay, Il bestiario del Cristo, 403–20: 410–12, 415; Photina Rech, Inbild des Kosmos, vol. I, 224f.; Ciccarese, Animali simbolici, vol. II (Bologna: EDB, 2007), s.v. Serpente, 253–83. 65. Further cf. Habac. III, 19 p. 1411 W.-Gr. et ponet pedes meos quasi ceruorum / et super excelsa mea deducet me / uictori in psalmis canentem (cf. Hier. in Hab., CC s.L. LXXVI A, pars I,6 p. 653 Adr.); Ambr. Iob 4,1,4 p. 271f. Schenkl simus ergo et nos cerui, ut super serpentes ambulare possimus; ibid. 4,1,5 [Marc. 16,17f.]; in psalm. 118 serm. 6,12 p. 114 Petsch.-Zelz. et uidebis Dominum Iesum similem capreolo aut hinulo ceruorum super montes Bethel eqs.; Greg. Ilib., in cant. 4,27 l. 200ff., p. 206 Bulhart ceruam hoc in loco carnem Christi appellat, quae serpentem diabolum absorbens omne veneni illius uirus extinguit; Rufin. Orig. Comm. in cant. 3,13,2 (II, p. 624 Brésard-Crouzel-Borret) sed et quod sanctus ceruo comparetur in multis scripturae diuinae locis refertur, ut in psalmo [42 (41), 2]; ibid. 3,13,.41 (II, p. 646 B.-Cr.-B.) et forte possunt cerui accipi sancti quique, ut Abraham et Isaac et Iacob et David et Solomon et omnes ex quorum semine Christus secundum carnem descendit; ibid. 3,13,42 (II, p. 646); Beda in prou. Salom. 1,5, l. 127ff., p. 51

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Medievalia et Humanistica Hurst “cerua carissima et gratissimus hinulus” (Prou. 5,19) . . .“cerua carissima” siue gratissima . . . sancta est ecclesia, quae serpentinam solet odio habere et conterere doctrinam; “gratissimus hinulus” populus est eius uirtutum uarietate delectabilis et eadem castae fidei semper aemulatione succensus. Venemous snakes are par exellence the symbol of Satan, as is well-known. But Verecundus sup. cant. Hab. 1,2 p. 125 Demeul., commenting on this passage “cornua sunt in manibus eius” indulges in the following intepretations: (a) futuri iudicii uentilatio in eius est arbitrio sita; (b) uel certe cornua crucis in manibus eius fuerunt, quando ferratis adfixus est clauis; (c) uel certe potestas et misericordia in operibus eius, sicut proheta testatur: “Quia potestas Dei est et tibi, Domine, misericordia” [Psalm. 61 (62),12f.]; (d) Cornua supereminent carnem et quadam naturali soliditate firmata sunt. Per cornua supereminentiam intellege diuinarum uirtutum (cf. the passage of Primasius, below sub c). For this prerogative of the stag’s horn see Aristot. hist. anim. 481a 27; Aristoph. Byz. hist. anim. epit. 2,498 and 500 pp. 128f. Lambros; Ael. nat. anim. 9,20 II, p. 240 Scholfield = p. 216 García Valdés, Llera-Fueyo, RodríguezNoriega Guillén; Et. M. 326,2. Cf. 1 Cor. 2,15 W.-Gr., N. Vulg., Spiritalis autem omnia iudicat et ipse a nemine iudicatur; Rom. 8,9 Vos autem in carne non estis, sed in spiritu, si tamen Spiritus Dei habitat in uobis. Cf. Fest. 460 L. quod eo die Ser. Tullius, natus seruus, aedem Dianae dedicauerit in Auentino, cuius tutelae sint cerui; a quo celeritate fugitiuos uocent ceruos. Ed. Berlin: Weidmann 1905, MGH, Auct. Ant. t. XIV, p. 28; ed. PLM, vol. V, Leipzig: Teubner 1914, p. 6. Cf. further LD 1,125 lux magni temporis index; 3,1 s. Luminis aeterni lumen, lux lucis origo / orbis et astrorum, iubar aetheris. V. 128 aeui: (a)eui Eug. rec. (ebi F), J. Sirmond, “Dracontii Hexaemeron,” in Eug. Tol. Opusc. (Paris1619), 23; cui B (fortasse eui legendum est) M V R U || media : Eug. rec. (męthis F [h del.], meta P, Sirmond p. 23); media es B (M V R U), media est Vollmer, Corsaro, Moussy-Camus || lux quae dat: dat lux quoque Eug. Z || metis: moetis Eug. Ma, męthis Eug. F (h del.); m(o)estis B (MVRU). See the very few examples indicated by Vollmer himself in his edition of Berlin, p. 442, under the heading De re metrica: with some slight emendations of the handed-down text (for instance LD 2.11 e Or. 359) the cases could be even fewer. See Vollmer’s editions: 1905, p. 225; 1914, p. 232 app. ad l. For similar meanings see ThlL V 1, 1205,30ff. and 64ff. Worthy of mention is the gloss of Isidorus, diff. 1,164 (= 146 Arev.) p. 168 Cod. (= p. 52,25 Beck) dimidium est aequa pars diuisa, dimidiatum utique pars, sed non aequalis. On this point cf. for example Apoc. 22,13 W.-Gr. ego A et ω, primus et nouissimus, principium et finis, Prud. cathem. 9,11f. alfa et ω cognominatus, ipse fons et clausula / omnium quae sunt fuerunt quaeque post futura sunt; Tert. apol. 48,11 Quae ratio uniuersitatem ex diuersitate composuit, ut omnia aemulis substantiis sub unitate constarent, ex uacuo et solido, ex animali et inanimali, ex comprehensibili et incomprehensibili, ex luce et tenebris, ex ipsa uita et morte, eadem aeuum quoque ita distincta condicione conseruit, ut prima haec pars, ab exordio rerum quam incolimus, temporali aetate ad finem defluat, sequens uero, quam exspectamus, in infinitam aeternitatem propagetur. Moreover, we must not forget from the literary point of view that to say that one begins with somebody or something is a form of praise typical of the prayers and hymns, going back to Homer, cf. ex. gr. Il. 9,96f. (Nestor is speaking) “Most glorious son of Atreus with you will I begin and with you make an end”; Arat. 1 “From Zeus let us begin.”

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76. Let us remember an analogous structure (praise + didactic part) traceable for instance in psalm 34(33): 1–11 (praise), 12–23 (instruction), cf. WeberGryson5 pp. 806–8; Nova Vulgata pp. 858f. 77. We should remember also the Laus uidendi we read in Plat. Tim. 46e-47 a (= Cic. Tim. 52; Calc. 47 a-c; comm. 2, 264). On this passage see Béatrice Bakhouche, Calcidius, Commentaire au ‘Timée’ de Platon, vol. II (Paris: Vrin, 2011), 809–12. 78. See for instance M. Peri, Ma il quarto dov’è? Indagine sul ‘topos’ delle bellezze femminili (Pisa: ETS, 2004), 364f.: “in tutto il pensiero cristiano il cerchio è figura dell’Uno, cioè di Dio. . . . Il cerchio è l’uno indiviso (Dio prima della creazione o qualunque realtà concepita come totalità).” The same goes for the sphere, cf. Plat. Tim. 33b, 40a; Cic. Tim. 17; nat. deor. 2,47f., 115f.; Plin. 2,5; Athenag. Suppl. 6,3 p. 14 Schoedel (= 6,4 p. 33 Marcovich), p. 90 Pouderon; 8,4 p. 16–18 Sch. (= 8,3 p. 36 Marc.), pp. 94–96 Poud.; 13,2 p. 28 Sch. (= p. 46f. Marc.), pp. 110–112 Poud.; 16,1 καὶ τῷ σχήματι σφαιρικῷ ὅντι (see B. Pouderon’s comm. ad l., (Paris: Les éditions du Cerf 1992), 118 n. 1), Diog. Laert. 8,35 (Pythagoras’s thought: “the most beautiful figure is the sphere among solids, and the circle among plane figures”) Lact. opif. 8,4 Hanc eius aulam deus non obductam porrectamque formauit ut in mutis animalibus, sed orbi et globo similem, quod orbis rutunditas perfectae rationis est ac figurae; Boeth. cons. 3,12,37. See West, “Towards Monotheism,” in Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity, ed. Polymnia Athanassiadi and M. Frede (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 35. 79. See E. A. Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern: Francke Verlag, 19542), 291f. = Letteratura europea e medioevo latino, Italian edition by R. Antonelli (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1992), 321f. 80. Cf. ex. gr. Lucan. 10,201f. sol tempora diuidit aeui, / mutat nocte diem and see Housman’s commentary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 19272 = repr. 1950), 310 ad l.); but we must remember that usually aeuum (/-us) indicates a time-continuum, that is a time considered in its unlimited duration (cf. gr. αἰών, got. aiws), whereas tempus has a more precise meaning, indicating in the strict sense of the word a part of time, cf. for instance Varro ling. 6,2; Cic. Inu. 1,36,39 tempus est . . . pars quaedam aeternitatis cum alicuius annui, menstrui, diurni nocturniue spatii certa significatione; Ambr. hymn. 1,3 Charl. = 2,3 Walp. et temporum das tempora (there the double meaning of tempus is at stake—that is, “season” and “duration”). On this topic see E. Degani, ΑΙΩΝ da Omero ad Aristotele (Padova: CEDAM, 1961); Id. ΑΙΩΝ (Bologna: Pàtron, 2001); R. Chevalier, ed., AIÔN: Le temps chez les Romains (Paris: A. & J. Picard, 1976); M. Le Glay, “AION,” in LIMC I, 1–2 (Zürich and München: Artemis Verlag, 1981), 399–411; G. Zuntz, Aion Gott des Römerreichs, Abh. Heidelb. Akad. Wiss., Philos.-hist. Kl. 1989.2 (Heidelberg: Winter Universtätsverlag, 1989); Id., ΑΙΩΝ in der Literatur der Kaiserzeit, Wiener Studien Beih. 17 (Wien: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1992); Annapaola Zaccaria Ruggiu, “Appendice: Aion, Chronos, Kairos. L’immagine del tempo nel mondo greco e romano,” in Filosofia del tempo, ed. L. Ruggiu (Milano: B. Mondadori, 1998), 293–343; Ead., Le forme del tempo: Aion, Chronos, Kairos (Padova: Il Poligrafo,, 2006), esp. 13–53; E. Rudolph, “Der neue Timaios ‘nach’ Calcidius,” in Le Timée de Platon. Contribution à l’histoire de sa réception, Colloque international sur la réception de Platon 2, Lausanne 1997, Bibliothèque philosophique de Louvain 53, ed. Ada Neschke-Hentschke (Leuven and Paris: Peeters, 2000), 97–108.

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81. See for instance Irwin, Liber I De laudibus Dei, 31: “light is the half of time, light which assigns limits to the seasons”; F. Corsaro, Blossii Aemilii Dracontii De laudibus Dei libri tres, Centro di studi sull’antico Cristianesimo (Catania: Università di Catania,1962), 31: “essa rappresenta la metà del tempo e segna il tempo al termine delle cose”; Camus, Dracontius, Louanges de Dieu, Livres I-II, p. 156: “la lumière qui occupe la moitié du temps, la lumière dont la carrière forme les divisions de la durée.” 82. Cf. ex. gr. Drac. Satisf. 248ff. tempus habent noctes, tempus et ipse dies; / accipiunt augmenta dies noctesque uicissim / ac minuunt cursus perpete lege poli; further Varro ling. 6,2 Id (scil. tempus) diuisum in partes aliquot maxime ab solis et lunae cursu; Hor. carm. 4,6,39f. (Sapphic strophe) celeremque (scil. lunam) pronos / uoluere menses; Plin. 2,13; 18,220 cardines temporum quadripertita anni distinctione constant per incrementa lucis; 18,264; Nouat. spect. 9 globum lunae temporum cursus incrementis suis decrementisque signantem; Basil. Hex. 2,8,5 p. 64–66 Nald.; ibid. 6,3,7 p. 175; ibid. 6,3,10 p. 176; Basil. c. Eun. I,21; Cyril of Jerusalem, Catech. IX,8, vol. I p. 248 Reischl-Rupp [München: Sumtibus Librariae Lentnerianae, 1848; repr., Hildesheim: G. Olms Verlagsb., 1967]; p. 189 McCauley (-Stephenson, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1969; cf. also Riggi, Roma: Città Nuova, 1993, p. 173): the entire passage must be considered. The flow of water is one of the favorite images employed in Latin poetry to indicate the unstoppable march of time, cf. ex. gr. Ou. ars 3,62ff. eunt anni more fluentis aquae, / nec quae praeteriit iterum reuocabitur unda / nec quae praeteriit hora redire potest; met. 15,178–85; etc. 83. See Drac. LD 2,20ff. non ausus (scil. sol) transire uices sub lege perenni / praefixas dicione tua; Ad Diogn. 7,2 p. 68 Marrou2 (cf. Norelli p. 105 comm. ad l.) “from whom (scil. Christ) the sun was ordered to guard the courses that it follows during the day, whom the moon obeys when he commands it to shine at night”; ThlL I, 1169,52ff. s.v. aeuum (cf. gr. αἰών) and ex. gr. Heracl. 94 D.-K. (= 45 Diano-Serra, Milano: Mondadori 1980, see comm. p. 151 ad l.) “The sun will never overstep its own measure,” Plat. Tim. 37d–38b; Apul. Plat. 1,10 tempus . . . aeui esse imaginem, si quidem tempus mouetur, perennitatis fixa et immota natura est; et ire in eam (sc. perennitatem) tempus et in eius magnitudinem fluere ac dissolui posse, si hoc quando decreuerit fabricator mundi deus; Nouat. Trin. 11,57 p. 28 Diercks aeuorum omnium et temporum regem (scil. Christum, assimilated to God the Father); Cens. 16,3; Cyril of Jerusalem, Catech. IX,6 (PG XXXIII, 644C– 645A; I, p. 245f. Reischl-Rupp; cf. also Riggi’s transl. p. 172); Calc. comm. 25 Et perpetuitas in aeuo . . . Et temporis quidem proprium progredi, aeui propria mansio semperque in idem perseueratio, temporis item partes, dies et noctes, menses et anni, aeui partes nullae; temporis item species . . . , aeui substantia uniformis in solo perpetuoque praesenti; comm. 101; 105; 108; Boeth. cons. 3 m 9,1–3 (dactylic hexameters: see J. Gruber, Kommentar zu Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae [Berlin: W. De Gruyter, 2006²], p. 277 ad l.); Isid. orig. 5,38,4 (the first part of the explanation up to noscitur coincides with Seru. auct. Aen. 7,776) Nam aeuum est aetas perpetua, cuius neque initium neque extremum noscitur, quod Graeci uocant αἰῶνας, quod aliquando apud eos pro saeculo, aliquando pro aeterno ponitur. Vnde et apud Latinos est deriuatum (an opposite explanation of the word in diff. 1,6 p. 88 Codoñer: see comm. relating to this passage, p. 306). 84. For this conceptual antithesis cf. for example Lucr. 3,605f.; Varro ling. 5,12; Tiberian. carm. 4, 1ff. (dactylic hexameters) Omnipotens . . . / quem . . . / nec numero quisquam poterit pensare nec aeuo / . . . nam sine fine tui labentia tempora finis; Ambr. Hex. 1,9,33 (power of God’s performing word) Naturae opifex lucem locutus est et creauit. Sermo Dei uoluntas est, opus Dei natura est: lucem creauit,

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85.

86.

87.

88.

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tenebras inluminauit; Prud. Apoth. 89f.; Cathem. 9,13f. (catalectic trochaic tetrameters) Ipse iussit et creata, dixit ipse et facta sunt / terra, caelum, fossa ponti, trina rerum machina; Paul. Nol. carm. 5,10f.; Drac. LD 3,1 f. Luminis aeterni lumen, lux lucis origo / orbis et astrorum, iubar aetheris; Calc. comm. 23 Deus autem ante institutionem temporis et per aeuum—simulacrum est enim tempus aeui (see Bakhouche comm. ad l., II, pp. 640f.). For the theological implications relating to the Holy Trinity see below. For the philosophical distinction between “time in motion” and “immobile eternity,” cf. also Aug. conf. 11,13,16 Sed praecedis omnia [tempora] praeterita celsitudine semper praesentis aeternitatis et superas omnia futura, quia [et] illa futura sunt et cum uenerint, praeterita erunt; Tu autem idem ipse es et anni tui non deficiunt (-ient pars codd.). Anni tui nec eunt nec ueniunt, isti enim nostri et eunt et ueniunt, ut omnes ueniant; 11,14,17; ciu. 11,6 p. 468 D.-K. and see J. Guitton, Le temps et l’éternité chez Plotin et saint Augustin (Paris: Vrin, 1971), esp. 406; G. Verbeke, “Le statut ontologique du temps selon quelques penseurs grecs,” in Zetesis. Album amicorum: door Vrienden en Collegas aangeboden aan Prof. E. De Strycker, (Antwerpen and Utrecht: De Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1973), 188–205; G. J. P. O’Daly, entry Aeternitas, Aug. Lex. I (Basel and Stuttgart: Schwabe, 1986), coll. 159–64; Id., Platonism Pagan and Christian: Studies in Plotinus and Augustine (Aldershot, Burlington, Vt., Singapore, and Sydney: Ashgate, 2001), esp. 171–79; W. Beierwaltes, Eternità e tempo: Plotino Enneade 3,7 (Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1995); D. Nikulin, “Plotinus on Eternity,” in Le Timée de Platon. Platos Timaios, ed. Ada Neschke-Hentschke (Louvain-Paris: Peeters, 2000), 15–38. However, already Plato maintains in Timaeus (37d–e; 38a–b) that God created time together with the sky, so that it should be “a mobile imitation of eternity” (Tim. 37d) and that time is intended to disappear together with the sky (Tim. 38b): cf. Calc. comm. 101–5 (and Eus. Praep. euang. XI,32,3 p. 68 Mras-des Places = p. 206 des Places-Favrelle, who quotes Plato’s passage). The reading of O. Cullmann’s book, Christus und die Zeit, 2nd ed. (Zürich: EVZ Verlag, 1962 = Italian edition: Cristo e il tempo, by B. Ulianich, Bologna: Il Mulino,1965) is still useful; see esp. the part relating to the time notion peculiar to early Christianity, 39–119. Aug. conf. 12,9,9 Nimirum enim caelum caeli, quod in principio fecisti, creatura est aliqua intellectualis: quamquam nequaquam tibi, Trinitati, coeterna, particeps tamen aeternitatis tuae, ualde mutabilitatem suam prae dulcedine felicissimae contemplationis tuae cohibet et sine ullo lapsu, ex quo facta est, inhaerendo tibi excedit omnem uolubilem uicissitudinem temporum; gen. ad litt. 1,17 (p. 24 Zycha) in principio fecit Deus caelum et terram, non corporeum caelum, sed caelum incorporeum caeli corporei, hoc est super omne corpus non locorum gradibus, sed naturae sublimitate praepositum. Cf. St. Paul 1 Tim., 6,16; Athenag. Suppl. 16,3 p. 118 Pouderon, p. 32 Sch., p. 51 Marc.; Ambr. Hexam. 1,9,33; further Ps.-Paul. Nol. carm. 32, 188 = Poem. ult. p. 74 Palla lucis inaccessae domus and Corsano’s comm. ad l. p. 162. Tatian. Orat. 20,4 refers the same epithet to the worlds placed above the visible sky: “and light inaccessible to men from here” (trans. Molly Whittaker [Oxford: Clarendon, 1982], 41); see Trelenberg’s comm. p. 140 n. 226 ad l.: “Partielle Zitation von 1 Tim 6,16.” Aug. conf. 12,15,20ff. Quibus caelis, nisi qui Te laudant caeli caelorum [Psalm. 148,4], quia hoc est et caelum caeli Domino [Psalm. 114 (113),4]? Etsi non inuenimus tempus ante illam (scil. sapientiam), quia et creaturam temporis antecedit, quae prior omnium creata est, ante illam tamen est ipsius Creatoris aeternitas, a quo facta sumpsit exordium, quamuis non temporis, quia (quoniam pars codd.) nondum erat

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89.

90.

91.

92.

93.

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Medievalia et Humanistica tempus, ipsius tamen conditionis suae. Ibid. 21; 22; cf. also nat. bon. 1 Summum bonum, quo superius non est, Deus est; ac per hoc incommutabile bonum est, ideo uere aeternum et uere immortale. For the Christian also a new eternal life will open after the earthly one, cf. Tert. Apol. 48,11 eadem (scil. ratio) aeuum quoque ita distincta condicione conseruit, ut prima haec pars, ab exordio rerum quam incolimus, temporali aetate ad finem defluat, sequens uero, quam expectamus, in infinitam aeternitatem propagetur; 48,13 Dei quidem cultores apud Deum semper, superinduti substantia propria aeternitatis. See p. 11 Terzaghi2, p. 48 Gruber-Strohm: πάντων κέντρον. No less telling is the way Commodian, an author with sympathies for monarchist doctrine, speaks about this theme, apol. (/ c. de duob. pop.) 105–26 illic dei uas (Dombart, nous Salvatore) est tantum sine cognita forma, / illa sunt secreta solo deo nota caelorum / . . . hoc deus est lucis aeternae, hoc spiritus aeui / . . . quidquid est, unum est, inmenso lumine solus / . . . hic sine initio semper est deus et sine fine, / qui, prius quam faceret caelum, ferebatur in aeuum. The concept is not extraneous to pagan theology, cf. for instance Chrysippus, ap. Stob. Eclog. I., p. 31,11 W. = SVF II, 1062, p. 312,21ff. v. A. (Ζεὺς) πάντων (ἐστὶν) αἴτιος, cf. further frr. 1063 and 1076 (p. 315,6ff.); Varro fr. 235 Card. (ap. Aug. ciu. 7,9 D.-K.) Deus est . . . habens potestatem causarum, quibus aliquid fit in mundo and see the comm. ad l. p. 228. Cf. ex. gr. Iustin. Apol. I, 41,2 p. 236 Munier “to the Lord, the Father of the ages”; Aug. conf. 11,13,15 Nam unde poterant innumerabilia saecula praeterire, quae ipse non feceras, cum sis omnium saeculorum auctor et conditor? Aut quae tempora fuissent, quae abs Te condita non essent ? . . . Id ipsum enim tempus Tu feceras nec praeterire potuerunt tempora antequam faceres tempora; Syn. hymn. 1 (= 3), 162 αἰωνοτόκε, 1, 267 e 2 (= 4), 71 πάτερ αἰώνων, 5 (= 2), 67 αἰῶνος αἰών (see comm. ad l.: Terzaghi2 pp. 82ff., 104f., 243; Gruber-Strohm, pp. 152, 160, 213). It is worth remembering, from the structural point of view, the centrality also of Christ’s figure in the LD, Christ, the subject matter of book II, concerning the mystery of his incarnation and resurrection. On the different idea of the generated Logos by God the Father between pagans and Christians see F. Ferrari, “Il tema della filiazione nella teologia medioplatonica,” Orpheus 26 (2005): 104–23. For an overall idea of the philosophical issues in general and of Platonism in particular between the fourth and fifth centuries, see Moreschini, Storia della filosofia patristica (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2004), esp. ch. VII. And finally, we remember that Synesius, hymn. 2,97ff. (see n. 97 more below), highlights in a perfectly orthodox way the reciprocal relation among the Persons of the Holy Trinity (on the “Christozentrische Tendenz” of Synesios vd. S. Vollenweider, Neuplatonische und christliche Theologie bei Synessius von Kyrene [Göttingen: Wandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985], 173ff.). I would remember also, by the way, an important expression used by Gregory Nazianzen in the Hymn to Christ (carm. II,1,38 = PG XXXVII, col. 1326 A), v. 9 αἰῶνος πείρημα (I mean to treat this point more extensively at the next opportunity). See Silvia Mattiacci, I carmi e i frammenti di Tiberiano, Introduzione, edizione critica, traduzione e commento di S.M., Studi XCVIII (Firenze: L. S. Olschki 1990), 178ff., where other orphic texts are quoted. On the other hand the influence of Cleanthes’ hymn on that of Tiberianus is well-known. Cf. also fr. 168, pp. 201f. Kern2. Maria Grazia Bajoni, Apuleio, De mundo (Pordenone: Edizioni Studio Tesi, 1991), 154, thinks that the variant reading ἀρχικέραυνος, approved by Thomas and Beaujeu (p. 156 = 372 Oud.), could be a lectio difficilior compared to ἀργικέραυνος (this is, however, the reading

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94.

95.

96.

97.

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also of the Derveni papyrus, cf. col. XIX,10), which is suspected of being an “omerismo esornativo.” Τελεῖται is Diels’s conjecture, on the contrary the Scholiast of Plato (p. 317 Greene) and mss of Apuleius read τέτυκται, cf. the editions by Beaujeau p. 156 (see following note) and Moreschini (Stutgardiae et Lipsiae: Teubner, 1991), 186; in addition see Kern2 p. 92 app. ad l. It is to take into account also Aesch. fr. 70 Nauck2, 70 Radt; Val. Sor. fr. 2 Blänsdorf Iuppiter omnipotens regum rerumque deumque / progenitor genetrixque, deum deus unus et omnes (u.l. idem). See on this point J. Beaujeu, Apulée, Opuscules philosophiques et fragments (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1973), 337; E. des Places, “La tradition indirecte des ‘Lois’ de Platon, Livres I–VI,” in Mélanges J. Saunier, Facultés catholiques (Lyon: Librairie des Facultés Joseph Gibert, 1944), 34f.; P. Boyancé, “Échos des exégèses de la mythologie grecque chez Philon,” in Philon d’Alexandre. Colloque de Lyon 11–15 sept. 1966 (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la recherche scientifique, 1967), 175; A. Marchetta, L’autenticità apuleiana del De mundo (L’Aquila and Roma: Japadre, 1991), 95ff. See J. Soubiran, Aviénus, Les phénomènes d’Aratos (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1981), 177f. comm. ad l.; P. Villalba Varneda, Ruf Fest Aviè, Fenòmens d’Arat (Barcelona, Fundació Bernat Metge: Editorial Alpha, 2012), 49f. nn. 38–40. This philosophic pattern has also a rhetoric-poetic application, cf. ex. gr. Theogn. 3; Stat. Silu. 1,3,34 Quid primum mediumue canam, quo fine quiescam? Initially, the stylistic feature was of a binary kind, cf. Hesiod. Theog. 34 πρῶτόν τε καὶ ὕστατον (“first and last”), Hymn. Hom. 21, 3 f. (ad Apoll. II). We find this binary feature also in a theological passage of Clement of Alexandria, Paed. II,8,75,2 p. 203 St.-Treu (cf. also Mondésert-Marrou II, p. 150 n. 1) ἀρχὴ καὶ τέλος αἰῶνος (cf. Apoc. 22,13; Prud. Cath. 9,11: see above n. 75). Cf. comm. 38 rursus enim tria numerus alio quodam genere habetur optimus. Primus enim et ante omnes perfectus est habens initium, finem, medietatem quibus crescunt corpora et iuxta quae corporea incrementa progrediuntur, quippe cum interuallum unum lineam faciat, duo superficiem, tria corpus indiuisum atque indiuiduum, quo nihil est perfectius; tria enim haec interualla corpus absoluunt, longitudo, latitudo, soliditas. See comm. ad l. of Béatrice Bakhouche, Calcidius, Commentaire au ‘Timée’ de Platon, vol. II, p. 656. As for the theological thought relating to the persons of the Holy Trinity, the notions of “halfway, middle, midway, in-between, central,” which can fulfil the function of connecting, of uniting together, are very important: cf. ex. gr. what Marius Victorinus states with reference to the Holy Spirit, hymn. 1,3 p. 285 Henry-Hadot (= pp. 572–74 Moreschini, Opere teologiche di Mario Vittorino, Torino: UTET, 2007) adesto, sancte spiritus, patris et filii copula; ibid., 3,242ff. p. 303 Tu, spiritus sancte, conexio es . . . esque ipsa tertia complexio duorum; see further Syn., hymn. 1,220ff. (= 3,220ff.) p. 13 Terzaghi2, p. 50 Gruber-Strohm (the mediating will between Father and Son) μέσα / φύσις ἄφθεγκτος, 234f. p. 13 Terz., p. 52 Gr.-Str. χωρεῖ τι μέσον / οὐκ ἀποταχθέν (Volkmann, ἀτεχθέν Wilamowitz, καταχ(υ)θὲν codd.: see comm. ad l. p. 158); 2,97ff. (= 4,97ff.) p. 29 Terz.2, p. 82 Gr.-Str.; 2,108ff.; 3,53 f. (= 5,53f.) p. 37 Terz.2, p. 96 Gr.-Str.: see Gruber-Strohm’s comm. ad l. A mediatorial function between God the Father and mankind is carried out by Jesus Christ, as St. Augustine tells us several times, cf. conf. 11,29,39 me suscepit dextera tua in domino meo, mediatore filio hominis inter te unum et nos multos, in multis per multa; ciu. 11,2 p. 463 D.-K. Hic est enim mediator Dei et hominum, homo Christus Iesus. Per hoc enim mediator, per quod homo, per hoc et uia; but we read this same concept long before, for

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instance in St. Paul, 1 Tim. 2,5 W.-Gr., N. Vulg. Vnus enim Deus, unus et mediator Dei et hominum, homo Christus Iesus; 1 Clem. 20,11; 36,2; 43,1; 59,2; 61,3; 64; 65,2; in addition cf. Ioh. 14,9–11 W.-Gr. qui uidit me uidit et Patrem etc., Iren. 4,20,7 (IV.2, p. 646ff Rousseau-Hemmerdinger-Doutreleau-Mercier; IV, p. 166 Brox) Enarrator ergo ab initio Filius Patris, quippe qui ab initio est cum Patre . . . multo magis ea quae est per Verbum manifestatio Patris uitam praestat his qui uident Deum; Lactantius inst. 4,25,5 Fuit igitur et Deus et homo, inter Deum atque hominem medius constitutus, unde illum Graeci μεσίτην uocant; Rufin., Orig. princ. 2,6,1 p. 139,15 Crouz.-Sim., p. 356 Görgemanns-Karpp3 creaturarum et dei medium id est mediatorem (sc. Christum); Greg. Naz. orat. 1,5 p. 78 Bernardi; carm. II,1,38 (PG XXXVII, col. 1325f.: Hymn to Christ: elegiac couplets) v. 5f.; Prud. psych. 764ff. (dactylic hexameters) utque homini atque deo medius interuenit Hiesus, / qui sociat mortale patri ne carnea distent / spiritui aeterno sitque ut deus unus utrumque; Paul. Nol. carm. 19,726 II, p. 143 De Hartel-Kamptner (praise of the cross: dactylic hexameters) humanae concors tu fibula pacis / concilians hominem medii per foedera Christi; ecc. 98. It is well-known that this order, called also “heliocentric” and favored by the Stoics (Diogenes of Babylon, Panaetius of Rhode, Posidonius of Apamea), contrasts with the Egyptian one, followed with few variations by Plato, Aristotle, and Eratosthenes (moreover cf. Cic. nat. deor. 2,51 and 119; Apul. mund. 2, p. 293 Oud.; Auien. phaen. 1510–1521; Macr. somn. 1,19,2; 2,3,14; Mart. Cap. 8,851): moon, sun, Venus, Mercury (or vice versa Mercury Venus), then Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. The Chaldean order, testified from second century B.C., is attributed to various men of learning: to Pythagoras by Pliny the Elder 2,84; generically to some Pythagoreans by Theon of Smyrna, second century C.E., p. 138,9ff. Hiller; to Archimedes by Macrobius, somn. 1,19,2; 2,3,13. Cicero’s and Pliny’s words, however, aim to highlight the idea that the sun plays a leading role in the universe, cf. nat. 2,12 Eorum (scil. “planets”) medius sol fertur, amplissima magnitudine ac potestate nec temporum modo terrarumque, sed siderum etiam ipsorum caelique rector. We find a similar concept, although in embryonic form, already in the pre-Socratic philosophers and we read in Plato’s Phaedrus, 246e that Zeus is ὁ μέγας ἡγεμὼν ἐν οὐρονῷ (cf. Macr. Sat. 1,23,5 where Iuppiter is identified with Sol, his enim uerbis magnum in caelo ducem solem uult [scil. Plato] sub appellatione Iouis intellegi). The metaphor of the sol dux, sol moderator (SVF I,499 v. Arn.; Cic. rep. 6,17) would go back to the Stoics, precisely to Cleanthes, as P. Boyancé, Études sur le ‘Songe de Scipion’ (Paris: E. De Boccard and C. Klincksieck, 1936; repr., New York and London: Garland, 1987), 78–104, has proved with good arguments. On this topic see J. Beaujeu, Pline l’Ancien, Histoire naturelle livre II (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1950), 123–26; Id., Apulée, Opuscules philosophiques et fragments, 336f.; J. Soubiran, Vitruve, De l’architecture livre IX (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1969), 86f.; 99. As regards the sun symbolizing the “heart of the world,” another metaphor employed by the Stoics, see Plut. Mor. (De facie in orbe Lunae) 15, 928B (Bernardakis, V, p. 424,24ff., p. 162 Donini) ἥλιος . . . καρδίας ἔχων δύναμιν, Macr. Somn. 1,20,6 physici eum (scil. Solem) cor caeli uocauerunt . . . iure ergo cor caeli dicitur, per quem fiunt omnia quae diuina ratione fieri uidemus . . . hoc est ergo sol in aethere quod in animali cor; Calc. Tim. comm. 100 [I, p. 334 Bakhouche; cf. also F. W. A. Mullach, Fragmenta philosophorum Graecorum, vol. II (Paris: Firmin-Didot et soc., 1867 = Aalen: Scientia, 1968), 204] ideoque solem cordis obtinere rationem et uitalia mundi totius in hoc igni posita esse dicunt. On this point see Rahner, Simboli della Chiesa, pp. 233 s.; J. H. Waszink, Studien zu Timaioskommentar des Calcidius (Leiden: Brill, 1964), 35f.;

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Béatrice Bakhouche, Calcidius, Commentaire au “Timée” de Platon, vol. II, 701f. Lastly, for the allegory of the Sol auriga see for instance Soph. Aiax 857 τὸν διφρευτὴν Ἥλιον, Orph. Hymn. 8,6; 8,18 ἐλάσιππε, and Gabriella Ricciardelli, Inni orfici, 262–64 comm. ad l.; Doreen Selent, Allegorische Mythenerklärung in der Spätantike: Wege zum Werk des Dracontius (Rahden, Westf.: Verlag Marie Leidorf GmbH, 2011), 250–55. Dracontius, LD 2,15, states that God himself exhortes us to call the sun charioteer, Tu Deus inspiras ut sol auriga uocetur. Similarly Theophilus of Antioch. Ad Autol. 1,5,2 p. 6 Grant, p. 20 Marc., calls God “the pilot of the universe” (cf. Plat. Polit. 272e; further Hippolytus Ant. 59,1 p. 138 Norelli; Eus. Praep.euang. XI,34,1: II, p. 72 Mras-des Places, p. 214 des Places-Favrelle; Ps.-Paul. Nol. carm. 32,161ff. = Poem. ult. p. 72 Palla Rector enim noster sic undique cuncta gubernat / ut modo qui nobis errorem mentis ademit / hic meliore uia paradisi limina pandat) and Clement the Alexandrian describes Christ, the Sun of justice, as “the noble charioteer of men” (Protrept. 121,1 p. 85 St.-Treu). On the other hand the metaphor of sol as oculus caeli, mundi is only poetic cf. ex. gr. Aristoph. Nub. 285; Drac. Satisf. 243 sol oculus caeli radians; ThlL IX 2,452,33ff. 99. At least if we follow the rendering of Th. Kouremenos, G. M. Parássoglou, and K. Tsantsanoglou, The Derveni Papyrus, Studi e testi per il corpus dei pa piri filosofici greci e latini 13 (Firenze: Olschki, 2006), 206 s., who also point out the great importance attributed by the anonymous author [IV2 B.C.] to the “stable size” of the Sun and to the fixed and central position held in the cosmos (on the opposite position see G. Betegh, The Derveni Papyrus. Cosmology, Theology, and Interpretation [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 235, interprets in a different way and argues that “the phrase does not mean that the sun was placed in the middle, but that it was encircled”; see also Fabienne Jourdan, Le papyrus de Derveni (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2003), 15f. and 70f.). We wish to call to mind that the heliocentric theory, supported by Aristarchus of Samos, pupil of Strato of Lampsachus (third century B.C.), is mentioned for instance by Sen. nat. 7,2,3 and Plut., De facie 923A. In addition, it is worth remembering that modern scholars agree to recognize in Macr. somn. 1,19,7 a clear reference to the “semiheliocentric” theory of Heraclides Ponticus (fourth century B.C.), a distinguished pupil of Plato and in this respect a forerunner of Aristarchus. 100. Trans. of B. Jowett, The Dialogues of Plato, vol. III [Oxford: Clarendon, 19534], 723f. Cf. Calcidius’s comm. 25, 105, and above n. 83; further cf. comm. 108 Genituram uero temporis necessario dicit esse institutam, ut tam eadem tempora sub dimensionem uenirent quam dierum mensiumque et annorum dinumerari spatia possent proptereaque solis lunaeque illustrationes et occasus necessarios fuisse ceterasque erraticas stellas superimpositas esse gyris circulorum iussasque agere motum septemplicem diuersis et dissimilibus maeandris in ea regione quae sub zodiaci orbis circumflexum (-u cd. I; Bakhouche I, p. 342) iacet. On this theme see F. Ferrari, Interpretare il Timeo, in Platons Timaios als Grundtext der Kosmologie in Spätantik, Mittelalter und Renaissance, ed. T. Leinkauf and C. Steel (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2005), 1–12; Béatrice Bakhouche, Calcidius, Commentaire au ‘Timée’ de Platon, vol. II, 709f.; J. H. Waszink, Studien zu Timaioskommentar des Calcidius (Leiden: Brill, 1964), 37ff. On the use of the terms in Latin see ThlL I, 1168,43ff. s.v. aeuum and Drac. satisf. 247 ss. Alternant elementa uices et tempora mutant eqs., see above nn. 82, 83, 88. 101. Plotin, on the contrary, after criticizing the idea of time expressed by the previous philosophers, deals in his turn with the theme “eternity vs time” (Enn. III 7,11–13); in particular he states (7,13,1ff.) that “The Spheral

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Circuit, then, performed in Time, indicates it: but when we come to Time itself there is no question of its being ‘within’ something else: it must be primary, a thing ‘within itself.’ It is that in which all the rest happens, in which all movement and rest exist smoothly and under order”; “for Movement better moves Time into our ken than rest can, and it is easier to estimate distance traversed then repose maintained. This last fact has led to Time being called a measure of Movement when it should have been described as something measured by Movement and then defined in its essential nature”; “Plato does not make the essence of Time consist in its being either a measure or a thing measured by something else. Upon the point of the means by which it is known, he remarks that the Circuit advances an infinitesimal distance for every infinitesimal segment of Time, so that from that observation it is possible to estimate what the Time is, how much it amounts to”; “Simply, that the Soul-Movement has for its Prior (not Time but) Eternity which knows neither its progression nor its extension. The descent towards Time begins with this Soul-Movement; it made Time and harbours Time as a concomitant to its Act” (trans. of MacKenna-Page, Plotinus, The Enneads, 2nd ed. [London: Faber and Faber, 1956; repr., 1962], 237f., abridged with an intr. and notes by J. Dillon [London: Penguin, 1991], 230–32). See Beierwaltes, Eternità e tempo, 85–97 and comm. 215f.; G. Reale, ibid., Introd., 22–24. 102. God, the eternal light par excellence, made the wonders of Creation in the light and by means of the light and thanks to it He continues to appear to man as light and illuminates his darkness: Ps. 36[35],10 W.-Gr., N. Vulg. in lumine tuo uidebimus lumen; Aug. conf. 13,12,13 Et ecce fuimus “aliquando tenebrae, nunc autem lux in Domino” (cf. Eph. 5,8). For the topic of the seasonal variations and the changes of day and night produced by the luminaries, in particular by the sun and the moon, cf. for instance Theoph. Ant. Ad Autol. 1,4,4; 2,11,2 pp. 6 and 42 Grant, pp. 19 and 55 Marc.; Clem. Alex. Protrept. 102,1 p. 73 St.-Treu; Lact. ira 13,4; etc. 103. See F.-N. Klein, Die Lichtterminologie bei Philon von Alexandrien und in den hermetischen Schriften (Leiden: Brill, 1962), esp. 58ff. In this regard it is useful to remember what Plato writes in the Timaeus 29 c; he states that thanks to the action of the demiurge, who imitates what is unchangeable and always the same, the sensible world is somehow involved in its eternal model, which is the intelligible world; cf. further Cic. Tim. 6f. On this question see Noemi Lambardi, Il “Timaeus” ciceroniano: arte e tecnica del “uertere” (Firenze: F. Le Monnier 1982), 124ff. We must not forget that there were two controversial problems among the followers of Plato: first, if the world has to be understood as created or not and, second, if the world, although built out of created things, must be considered eternal thanks to the divine protection of Providence. On this point see for instance C. Moreschini, Studi sul ‘De dogmate Platonis’ di Apuleio (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1966), 47ff. 104. “He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the seasons and the years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and in a certain way the cause of all things which he and his fellows have been accustomed to behold?” (trans. of Jowett, vol. II, p. 378). Cf. also Manil. 3,515 annua quod lustrans consumit (scil. sol) tempora mundum. We must also remember the different views on the time of the other philosophers (Aristotle, Stoics, and especially Plotin, who first brings up the question of the origin of time); see above nn. 85, 86, 88, 101, and 103. The line ending repeats precisely Stat. Ach. 1,673 plenis donec stata tempora metis / attulit et partus in-

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105. 106.

107.

108. 109.

110.

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dex Lucina resoluit; Rut. Nam. 1,137 quae (scil. saecula) restant nullis obnoxia tempora metis; Paul. Petr. Mart. 4,306 certis concludens tempora metis, but in all three cases metae mean “time-limits.” Trans. G. H. Whitaker, Loeb edition, vol. I, 5th ed. (London: W. Heinwmann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 27 (cf. edn of L. Cohn, Breslau: apud G. Koebner 1889 = repr. Hildesheim 1967, p. 10). Manilius is dealing with the question of the χρονοκτατορία, χρονοκράτορες “time lords.” See Katharina Volk, Manilius and His Intellectual Background (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 93; cf. further Firm. math. 4,20,2 tempus ergo uitae a Sole [years] et Luna [months] et ab horoscopi parte [days and hours] et, quod est potissimum, [et] a domino geniturae debes diligenti ratione discutere. For other examples of the verb dare with this meaning see Rubenbauer, ThLL V 1, 1683,64ff., heading “dant μετέωρα.” On this Dracontius’s hemistich see the precise comment of Smolak, Die Stellung der Hexamerondichtung, 382: “Der Relativsatz in 128 lux quae—metis, ist zwar inhaltlich nichts anderes als ein substantivischer Begriff (‘Licht als Zeitmesser,’ fängt aber formal die Nominalreihe auf und leitet zu 129 ff. über. Dadurch, daß in der ersten und letzten Epiklese je eine Form von dare steht, wird die Reihe abgerundet.” We must never forget that cyclicity is the same as eternity, according to the Greek philosophical thought: Beierwaltes, Eternità e tempo, 41: “Il cerchio rappresenta nella maniera più chiara in che modo la riflessione assoluta riconduce la sua molteplicità al Principio, si raccoglie nel Principio. Principio e fine del cerchio è il centro, nel quale tutti i raggi convergono, poiché da esso ottengono il loro essere e il senso del loro movimento, Nel dispiegamento viene alla luce l’essenza e la forza del cerchio; esso è, per così dire, ‘dispiegato non dispiegato’ (‘the development of that undeveloped’) [Enn. VI 8,18,18].” In addition, see Luisa Musso, “Il sole è misura del tempo,” in Sentinum 295 a.C., Sassoferrato 2006: 2300 anni dopo la battaglia. Una città romana tra storia e archeologia, Convegno internazionale, Sassoferrato 21–23 settembre 2006, a cura di Maura Medri (Roma: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2008), 159: “L’ellisse è elemento caratterizzante della figura allegorica del tempo, che è e sostanzialmente rimane fino ad epoca imperiale avanzata un’astrazione personificata, e non una divinità personalizzata dotata di un culto specifico.” P. Kretschmer, “Zu den latein. Postverbalien,” Glotta 31 (1951): 152–58, here 153f., reminds us rightly that two metae, prima and secunda, were on the course, both of which the carts had to turn sevenfold around (154). The term can refer both to the seasonal turning point of the sun and to its position during the daily path in the sky, as is common knowledge. Cf. ex. gr. Lucr. 5,617 (sol) se ut uertat metas ad solstitiales; Ou. met. 3,144f. iamque dies medius rerum contraxerat umbras / et sol ex aequo meta distabat utraque; Germ. 6 s. qua sol ardentem Cancrum rapidissimus ambit / diuersasque secat metas gelidi Capricorni; etc. Account needs to be taken also of the iuncturae with the verbs ambire, flectere, deflectere (= uitare), peruenire (ad), tangere. Among the Christian authors compare for example Nouat. Trin. 8,45 p. 24 Diercks Mundum enim istum currum Dei cum omnibus et ipsi angeli ducunt et astra, quorum uarios licet meatus, certis tamen legibus uinctos, inspicimus ad metas definiti sibi temporis ducere; Ps.-Eusth. Bas. Hex. 6,3 cum sol cursui suo metas posuerit (= occiderit); etc. To quote a few examples: Tert. Spect. 9; Cassiod. Var. 3,51; Isid. Orig. 18,27– 41; Coripp. Iust. 1,314–344; Anth. Lat. 197 R.2; and so on. On this kind of analogy see P. Wuilleumier, “Cirque et astrologie,” Mélanges d’archéologie et

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d’histoire 44 (1927): 184–209; E. B. Lyle, “The Circus as Cosmos,” Latomus 43 (1984): 827–41; Daria Gigli Piccardi, Metafora e poetica in Nonno di Panopoli, Studi e testi vol. 7 (Firenze: Università degli Studi, Dipartimento di scienze dell’antichità G. Pasquali, 1985), 180f.; Monique Clavel-Lévêque, “L’espace des jeux dans le monde romain: hégémonie, symbolique et pratique sociale,” ANRW II 16, no 3 (1986): 2405–563, 2555f.; A. Carile, Circo-ippodromo e la città, in La città gioiosa, by C. Bertelli (Milano: Credito italiano, Garzanti, Scheiwiller, 1996 [but 1997]), 109–38, esp. 130–32; Peri, Ma il quarto dov’è? (Pisa: ETS, 2004), 174, 195, 198, 300; Chiara O. Tommasi Moreschini, “The Role and Function of Ecphrasis in Latin North African Poetry (5th–6th Century),” in Text und Bild. Tagungsbeiträge, ed. Victoria Zimmerl-Panagl and Dorothea Weber (Wien: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2010), 255–87, esp. 268ff. The work of J. Jarry, Hérésies et factions dans l’Empire byzantin du IVe au VIIe siècle, Publications de l’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale du Caire. Recherches d’archéologie, de philologie et d’histoire vol. 14 (Le Caire: Imprimerie de l’ I.F.A.O., 1968), is given a poor review by G.-M. de Durand, RSPh 58 (1974): 479–83. 111. Cf. n. 51, and see E. Evans, Tertullian’s Treatise on the Resurrection (London: S.P.C.K., 1960), 225f.; P. Podolak, Tertulliano, La resurrezione (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2004), 185ff. comm. ad l.; P. Siniscalco, Ricerche sul “De resurrectione” di Tertulliano, “Verba seniorum,” Collana di testi e studi patristici, n.s., 6 (Roma: Editrice Studium, 1966), 143–45. 112. Cf. ex. gr. Dittmann, ThlL VIII, 866, 14ff.; 41ff.; PGM VIII 76f. (II, p. 49 Preis.2) αἰθερίαις τροπαῖς μέγαν πόλον ἀμφὶς ἐλάων. We have an analogous metaphorical use of the substantive cardo, cf. for instance Manil. 2,788ff. (about the quattuor cardines mundi) ergo age noscendis animum compone sagacem / cardinibus, qui per mundum sunt quattuor omnes / dispositi semper mutantque uolantia signa; Plin. 18,220 (the seasons) cardines temporum quadripartita anni distinctione constant per incrementa lucis; 18,264 (the summer solstice) magnus hic anni cardo, magna res mundi; moreover see Bannier, ThLL III 443, 80ff.; Drac. LD I 126 lux cardo pudoris, where the term is employed in the moral sense. 113. See also D. J. Nodes, “Benevolent Winds and the Spirit of God in De Laudibus Dei of Dracontius,” Vigiliae Christianae 43 (1989): 282–92, here 288: “On the one hand he successfully emulated the lofty rhetoric and formal motifs of the pagan epic poets. But on the other hand, he carefully developed the theological potential of his material.”

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“Even Children and the Uneducated Know Them” The Medieval Trojan Legends in Dante’s Commedia VA L E N T I N A P R O S P E R I

Abstract This paper aims to demonstrate that Dante knew the medieval corpus of legends derived from the Latin “Trojan chronicles” of Dictys Cretensis and Dares the Phrygian, texts of immense success and circulation in Dante’s age and in fact the only source for centuries for the Western knowledge of Trojan history. Despite common belief that Dante was at best simply unaware of them, the analysis of relevant passages in the Commedia and other works, combined with the first commentaries on the poem, show Dante knew them. However, it is true that he deliberately chose to suppress them whenever their version of the Trojan myth did not comply with his Virgilian-based eschatological view of the translatio imperii. In the end, restoring these texts to Dante’s knowledge gives us a new chance to appreciate his complete independence from even the most pervasive sources in favor of consistent artistic and ideological creation.

In the centuries that separate us from Dante’s era, the Commedia’s classical-mythical universe has made an impact through the sheer force of its genius: thus the perplexities of the first commentators, retracing and pointing out the inconsistencies between the version of the myths best known to them and Dante’s own, have quickly dissolved under the mythopoeic force of Ulysses dying in order to pursue virtue and knowledge, of Sinon the Greek betraying the Trojans, of Achilles fighting with love, and of proud Ilium burned to ashes. However, in our eagerness to recognize exactly how extraordinary Dante’s universe was, for a long time we have risked denying Dante Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 40 (Reinhold F. Glei and Wolfgang Polleichtner, eds.), Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

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“what we concede for all men of genius: the right to appropriate the preexisting tradition.”1 Today, almost a century since Zabughin’s warning, this danger seems largely overcome thanks to the progress of the philological approach in Dantean scholarship. The moment has thus come to investigate what kind of relationship links Dante’s oeuvre with the medieval legends on the Trojan myth.2 It is a topic limited in scope but not irrelevant in the grand plan of the Commedia. In fact, it has so far been relegated to those research areas that are considered unworthy of further investigation, due—as the saying goes—to Dante’s ignorance or indifference to it.3 In complete contrast, my analysis shall demonstrate how Dante’s approach toward the medieval Trojan myth is affected neither by ignorance nor by indifference but is derived from a radically free creative and ideological choice. To fully appreciate this radicality in Dante’s approach we must first decipher the barely visible sketch of the mythical and legendary material behind the Commedia’s vivid colors, bearing in mind that in Dante’s time and for centuries after him, it was on this material that the Trojan myth was grounded. As we shall see, to disprove the “ignorance” of Dante in terms of the medieval version of the Trojan legends will be straightforward. On the other hand, mining the Commedia for traces of the myth will prove more painstaking: such is the seamlessness of Dante’s innovative reworking of the sources he had available. Dante’s way of weaving new threads into the pattern of the ancient myths is never more striking than in Ulysses’ episode of Inferno XXVI: indeed, the final design comes out as unexpected as it is seamlessly consistent. The luminous and almost preternatural way that this episode reflects the spirit of Homer’s hero, certainly superior to the totality of Homeric fragments available to Dante from other Latin sources, has for some time led critics to assume that there was some kind of direct contact between Dante and a now-lost Latin version of the Odyssey.4 With this hypothesis now debunked, the backdrop of the episode has been linked back to classical Latin sources that Dante would certainly have had access to: Virgil for the Trojan horse scheme and the stealing of the Palladium,5 Statius for Achilles’ abduction from Scyros, Ovidian Metamorphoses for Circe’s reference, and Ovidian Heroids for Ulysses’ familial affections and conjugal love. However, the episode’s real focus—that is, Ulysses’ death, his last fatal journey from Ithaca—has nothing to do with this backdrop, nor is it linked in any way to classical sources whatsoever.6

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It is the mystery surrounding Ulysses’ death that kindles Dante’s curiosity, and Virgil, his guide, perceives it without the need for an explicit request: “lascia parlar a me, ch’io ho concetto / ciò che tu vuo.’ . . . O voi che siete due dentro ad un foco, . . . non vi movete: ma l’un di voi dica / dove per lui perduto a morir gissi” (“leave speech to me, for I have understood what you wish. . . . O you who are two within one fire . . . move not; but let one of you tell where he went, lost, to die”).7 Now, scholarship concurs that, since in Dante’s time there was a widely circulated version of Ulysses’ death, one that was completely different from the one made up in Inferno XXVI, this is a sure sign that Dante did not know it or else he would have drawn from it, leaving us robbed of the miracle of this Dantesque Ulysses, literally dying for knowledge and virtue, more Odyssean in spirit than any other of his ancient reincarnations. It was in the spurious Trojan journal of Dictys the Cretan that medieval readers found a detailed account of Ulysses’ death: at the end of his peregrinations, Ulysses was killed by Telegonus—the son that Circe had borne him unbeknownst to him—after vainly attempting to neutralize the prophecy that warned him of death by parricide.8 This version of the story migrated to all medieval Troy-related texts, starting with Benoît de Sainte Maure’s Roman de Troie, which served in turn as an inspiration for essential sources to the Italian circulation of the legends, such as Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae.9 Should we then rejoice in “Dante’s ignorance” and agree that “a more precise knowledge of Ulysses’ fate . . . would have probably hindered his sweeping creative fantasy”?10 If truth be told, the already feeble case for a Dantesque inventio born out of ignorance simply does not hold because a version of Ulysses’ death perfectly identical with the one in medieval Troy legends was available to Dante. It was recorded in the Servian commentary to Aeneid II, as D’Arco Silvio Avalle noticed years ago.11 Hic sane Ulixes, filius Laertae, Penelope maritus fuit. qui filios habuit Telemachum ex Penelope, ex Circe vero Telegonum, a quo etiam inscio, cum is ipse patrem quaereret, occisus est. . . . huius post Iliense bellum errores Homerus notos omnibus fecit. de hoc quoque alia fabula narratur. nam cum Ithacam post errores fuisset reversus, invenisse Pana fertur in penatibus suis, qui dicitur ex Penelope et procis omnibus natus, sicut nomen Pan videtur declarare.12 [This Ulysses, the son of Laertes, was Penelope’s husband, that, as children, had had Telemachus from Penelope, whereas from Circe, he had had Telegonus. By the latter, unaware and just as he was in search of his father, he was killed. . . . Homer disclosed to everyone Ulysses’ wanderings after the war at Ilium; another story goes like this: when he reached Ithaca, after his wanderings, allegedly he found among his family Pan, who was said to have been conceived by Penelope and all of the Suitors, as the name Pan seems to indicate.]

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In complete contrast, in the Ulysses episode the memory of Servius’s gloss seems to surface in the form of an implicit polemic stance on the part of Dante. When Ulysses stresses the fidelity of Penelope, abandoned by him although worthy of her husband’s love (“il debito amore / lo qual dovea Penelopé far lieta”), Dante is in fact discarding Servius’s malicious gossip about Penelope’s faithfulness in favor of another source (probably Ovid’s Heroid 1). To sum up my argument so far: Dante discarded the version of Ulysses being murdered by Telegonus that was recounted in the same way in two different sources: Servius and the medieval Trojan traditions. Dante certainly knew Servius’s version but clearly made a conscious decision not to use it. He was also very possibly aware of the medieval Trojan legends—again his silence points to his deciding not to use it rather than to him not actually knowing about the source. This was also the conviction of Dante’s first commentators, who in the glosses to Inferno XXVI never fail to mention Dictys’s version: quamvis communiter teneatur quod scribit Dares et Dites, scilicet quod Telagon, filius dicti Ulixis natus ex dicta Circe, illum occidit sagittando inscienter.13 [However, it is commonly believed what Dictys and Dares wrote: that Telegonus, son of said Ulysses by said Circe, killed him inadvertently with an arrow.] Est autem his ultimo toto animo advertendum, quod illud quod autor hic scribit de morte Ulyxis non habet verum neque secundum poeticam fictionem Homeri vel alterius poetae. Dixerunt ergo aliqui et famosi quod Dantes non vidit Homerum et quod expresse erravit; nam, ut tradit Dites graecus et Dares phrygius in troiana historia, Ulyxes fuit interfectus a Telegono. . . . Verumtamen quicquid dicatur, nulla persuasione possum adduci ad credendum quod ignoraverit illud quod sciunt etiam pueri et ignari; ideo dico quod hoc potius autor de industria finxit.14 [Finally, it must be strongly stressed that what the author writes here about the death of Ulysses has no truth in it: not according to Homer’s fiction nor of any other poet. According to some illustrious authors, Dante did not read Homer and intentionally gave a wrong account; indeed, as the Greek Dictys and the Phrygian Dares report in the Trojan History, Ulysses was killed by Telegonus. . . . However, no matter what anyone says, I cannot be persuaded to believe that Dante ignored what even children and the uneducated know: therefore I say that Dante has made up this story of his own initiative.]

The Ulysses episode steers us in the right direction as we turn to the more general question of the presence of the Trojan legends in the Commedia. Proving that, in Ulysses’ case, Dante’s invention did not respond to a lack of information was straightforward: the information was readily available in Servius. This leads us to another general assumption: inferring Dante’s ignorance of a given source based merely on his choice not to use it is not justifiable. Therefore, not even the repeated omission of an

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expected source from a series of contexts in the Commedia can be taken as sufficient proof of Dante’s ignorance. Again: it may be choice on his part—though this is clearly harder to prove. Before proceeding to examine other passages of the Commedia, it is worthwhile to include the rest of Dante’s oeuvre in the analysis in search of evidence of his familiarity with the Trojan legends. The quest should not prove too tiresome: in fact Dante makes his direct knowledge of these traditions explicit in the De vulgari eloquentia. In the De vulgari eloquentia, Dante illustrates the respective qualities and advantages of the main vernaculars: d’oc, d’oïl, del sì; he then rules the d’oïl vernacular the best and most expressive of the three and remembers that all that has ever been composed in vernacular prose belongs to it: Quelibet enim partium largo testimonio se tuetur. Allegat ergo pro se lingua oïl, quod propter sui faciliorem ac delectabiliorem vulgaritatem quicquid redactum sive inventum est ad vulgare prosaycum, suum est: videlicet Biblia cum Troianorum Romanorumque gestibus compilata et Arturi regis ambages pulcerrime et quamplures alie ystorie ac doctrine. [Indeed, each of the three divisions can claim much evidence in its favor. The langue d’oïl alleges for itself, since it is the easiest, most pleasant, and most widely known, whatever is written in or translated into vernacular prose as most particularly its own, that is, biblical compilations with the histories of Troy and Rome, and the lovely digressions in the fables of King Arthur, and other works of history and knowledge.]15

What is then this monstrous chimera—Biblia cum Troianorum Romanorumque gestibus compilata—that Dante brings up in passing, as if he were mentioning things that were well-known to his audience? It is in all likelihood the compilation of two French works that were well-known in Dante’s times: L’histoire ancienne jusqu’à César and Les Fait des Romains, both often translated into the vernacular and transcribed together in manuscripts. The first, L’histoire ancienne, was a universal history made up of different pagan and Christian sources: it opened with a summary of Genesis based on Petrus Comestor’s Historia scholastica16—hence the reference to the Biblia in Dante’s passage—and it ended with a summary of Julius Caesar’s Gallic campaign.17 The second work, Les Fait, was a summa of translated texts, albeit with original insertions and abridgements, mainly “de Saluste et de Suetoine et de Lucain”18 but also from other classic as well as modern authors including the romans; its narrative covered the years up until Domitian’s principate. In the first text, the Histoire ancienne, the section on the Trojan War is entirely taken from Dares’ text, as the opening, dealing with the quest for the Golden Fleece, clearly demonstrates. The anonymous author was quite familiar with Dictys as well:

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Peleus [a common mistake for Pelias] ot .j. frere qui ot nom Euson. . . . Quant li roys Peleus vist que Jason estoit si preux et si vaillans et amez plus que nuls hom par sa prouesce, si le doubta moult qu’il ne li feïst tort et qu’il encore ne li toulsist son regne: si le appella et li dist que en l’isle de Colcon avoit .j. mouton qui avoit la toison d’or.19 [Peleus had a brother whose name was Aeson. . . . When king Peleus saw that Jason was so brave and valiant and well liked above all others for his courage, he feared that he might attack him and oust him of his kingdom: thus he summoned him and told him that in the island of Colchis there was a goldenfleeced ram.]

At the end of the Trojan section the author declares his sources under the telling caption “Qui ceste hystoire escript et pour quoy on la tient a si vraie,” thus showing his knowledge of Dictys and Dares and his full belief in their reliability: Ceste hystoire escript Daires qui estoit manens avec Anthenor a Troie. Cilz Daires estoit moult bon clers: si vist moult grant la meslée, et pour ce y mist il toute s’entente. En l’ost des Grex avoit aussi .j. autre maistre qui Ditis avoit nom, preux et courtois et sages. Ces .ij. s’assemblierent dès le commencement ensemble; si se penerent tant que ce qui dehors avint et dedans mistrent en escripture en grec; puis la translata de grec en latin Crispus20 qui la trouva a Athenes.21 [This history was written by Dares, who had been at Troy with Antenor. This Dares was a very learned man: he saw that the war was very important and put all his skills at describing it. In the Greek army there was another skilled man, whose name was Dictys, valiant, brave, courteous and wise. These two got to work together from the beginning: they exerted so much attention that they put down in Greek writing what happened outside and inside; later, these writings were translated by Sallust, who found them in Athens.]

Such is the author’s faith in his chosen sources that, by mentioning for the sake of completeness what most sources (“li pluseur”) told of the Trojan Horse, he stresses that Dares says nothing on this count: Par ceste maniere dient li pluseur que Troie fu seurprinse et destruicte et que Anthenor et Eneas le consentirent pour ce qu’il fussent delivre. Ainsi ne le conte mie Daires la qui hystoire vous avez ouye.22 [Accordingly, most sources say that Troy was taken by surprise and destroyed by this ploy, and that Antenor and Aeneas agreed to it in order to be free to go. But Dares, whose story you have heard, says nothing of the kind.]

Therefore, Dante’s reference in the De vulgari eloquentia to the Biblia cum Troianorum Romanorumque gestibus compilata is in all likelihood to one of the many manuscripts, perhaps to a volgarizzamento, where the two works were transcribed one after the other.23 Although nothing prevents us from restricting Dante’s knowledge to the Histoire ancienne alone, since it covers both the “Bible” (Book of Genesis) and the feats of the Trojans and Romans, nevertheless the Fait des Romains was certainly well-known to Dante’s teacher, Brunetto

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Latini.24 In Tresor, paragraph I.32, Dou regne de Troie, Brunetto recounts the genealogy of Troy’s kings starting with the founder Dardanus. Brunetto describes the main events leading to the city’s destruction: how Laomedon refused to let Jason and his comrades land on the Trojan shores; how Jason then razed the city to the ground, killed Laomedon, and seized his daughter Hesion, sister of Priam; and how in the next generation the rape of Helen brought about the war and the final annihilation of Troy. For all these facts, the Tresor referred its readers to a “grant livre des troians.”25 We cannot say with absolute certainty what this “grant livre des troians” is, but the chain of events recounted in Brunetto’s paragraph is the same as in Dares.26 In fact, Brunetto may have read about Trojan history in the new, fascinating rendering of Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie, a work more suited to the definition of a grant livre than Dares’ dry summary on which the Fait are based. However, Brunetto’s scanty report is more in line with the dry Fait than with Benoît’s luxuriant architecture. In the end, then, whatever Brunetto’s direct source might have been (Roman de Troie, Fait des Romains, or even a manuscript of Dares), the ultimate source of his version of the Trojan War is to be found in Dares, at times supplemented with Dictys, as in the Fait.27 On the scalding hot sand (sabbione) of Inferno XV, the character of Brunetto entrusts his work both to Dante as a character and to Dante as a poet: “Sieti raccomandato il mio Tesoro, / nel quale io vivo ancora: e più non cheggio” (“Let my Treasure, in which I yet live, be commended to you, and I ask no more,” Inferno XV 119–20.) Brunetto had been “the founder of Florentine civic culture” and, in Giovanni Villani’s words, he had been “beginner and master in refining the Florentines.”28 With the Tresor he transmitted to the next generation, Dante’s own, the main medieval tradition on the war of Troy. Turning back now to the passage in the De vulgari eloquentia, the sentence is evidence enough that the Trojan legends were part of Dante’s cultural baggage. But another task still remains: I shall endeavor to demonstrate that the Trojan legends are an active presence in the Commedia and that not all of the Troy-related features of the poem should be traced back to Virgilian (or classical) sources. There is no doubt that in the late Latin and medieval form of the Trojan myth one element was especially hard to swallow in terms of Dante’s ideology: Aeneas’s betrayal of his city. This version of the myth circulated in antiquity29 and was known to Virgil, as Servius reports;30 more importantly, it is also very much emphasized in the Trojan chronicles of Dictys and Dares and in the ensuing tradition.

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In these texts Aeneas, alongside Antenor, is the proditor who pushes Priam to surrender and sells his country to the Greeks for the price of immunity; his treachery is such that he even hands Polyxena over to her slaughterers, breaking his promise to Hecuba to protect her daughter from the Greeks. In Dante’s personal chronology, the advent of Christ and Aeneas’s landing on the shores of Latium overlapped programmatically, thus highlighting the messianic nature of the translatio imperii from Troy to Rome.31 In Inferno XXVI 59–60 the Trojan hero is defined as “la porta / onde uscì de’ Romani il gentil seme”; no wonder the Commedia had no room for a treacherous Aeneas. The anti-Aeneadic tradition enjoyed vast credence in the Middle Ages: thus, we must read Virgil’s self-presentation in Inferno I 72–74 as an implicit refutation of it, as Giorgio Inglese has shown in an insightful contribution:32 Poeta fui e cantai di quel giusto figliuol d’Anchise che venne da Troia poi che ‘l superbo Ilïòn fu combusto. [“I was a poet, and I sang of that just / son of Anchises who came from Troy / after proud Ilium was burned.”]

Lines 73–74, as the medieval commentators remarked, are reminiscent of a Virgilian passage from the Aeneid well known to Dante, as the Monarchia further testifies: Quantum ergo ad propriam eius [of Aeneas] nobilitatem audiendus est Poeta noster introducens in primo Ilioneum orantem sic: Rex erat Eneas nobis, quo iustior alter nec pietate fuit nec bello maior et armis. [As to his personal nobility, hearken to our poet in the first book of the Aeneid, introducing Ilioneus with the plea, “Aeneas was our king, than whom none other was more just and pious, none greater in war and arms.”]33

However, to fully understand their meaning, the focus should be on the metric relevance of giusto34 rather than the Virgilian subtext. At the end of the enjambement, (contre-rejet), giusto highlights Dante’s polemic stance on the sensitive topic of Aeneas’s loyalty. It is as though Dante foresaw the objections of contemporary readers—readers who had no qualms in blaming Troy’s fall on Aeneas, readers who could refer to the appropriate historical source of Dictys and Dares, readers, in fact, so close to Dante himself in background and culture as his own children might be: Dares vero et Dictys, historici magni Graecorum et Troianorum, dicunt fuisse hoc quod Graeci introierunt inductu et proditione Aeneae et Antenoris per portam Troiae, ubi erat signum equi.35

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[However, Dares and Dictys, great historians among the Greeks and Romans, say that this was because the Greeks—at the instigation and through the betrayal of Aeneas and Antenor—broke in through the gate of Troy where the sign of the Horse was.]

Again, as in Ulysses’ case, the datum of Aeneas’s betrayal had an independent source in Servius, as Benvenuto da Imola noticed at a very early date. di quel giusto, scilicet Enea. Sed contra Servius commentator Virgilii dicit quod Eneas fuit proditor patriae, ergo non justus, imo injustissimus; et dicit Servius Titum Livium hoc dicere. Dico breviter quod Servius non bene dicit, sicut et in multis; fuit enim bonus gramaticus, sed saepe non intellexit mentem Virgilii, imo interdum literam pervertit, et trahit ad reprobum et turpem sensum, sicut in libro Bucolicorum in multis. Dico ergo quod Titus Livius dicit totum contrarium libro primo de origine urbis circa principium, scilicet quod Eenas non fuit proditor. Et posito quod fuerit verum Eneam fuisse proditorem, ut aliqui volunt, tamen Virgilius intendit ostendere ipsum justum, ut per hoc ostendat Augusto, in cujus honorem scribit, qualis debet esse princeps, quia scilicet justus, clemens, et probus; unde ipse dicit de Enea: Rex erat Eneas nobis, quo justior alter Nec pietate fuit, nec bello major et armis.36 [Of that just man: that is Aeneas. On the opposite Servius, Virgil’s commentator, says that Aeneas was a traitor to his country and therefore not just, but indeed extremely unjust; Servius also claims that Livy agrees on this. I will just say that Servius is wrong, as in many instances; in fact he was a good scholar, but he often misunderstood Virgil’s meaning; indeed at times he perverted the sense and turned it into something shameful and foul, as in many instances in the Bucolics. Thus I say that Livy in his first book states exactly the opposite for what concerns the city’s origins at the beginning. That is that Aeneas was not a traitor. And even if we accept, as some maintain, that Aeneas was really a traitor, however Virgil wanted to present him as a just man, so that through the example he could show to Augustus, on whose behalf he writes, what a prince should be like, that is just, merciful and virtuous. Hence he says about Aeneas: “Aeneas was our king, than whom none other was more just and pious, none greater in war and arms.”]

On the other hand, as we have seen in Ulysses’ case, the Trojan legends of the Dictys-Dares mold were too widely circulated and trusted at the time for a reader as sensitive as Benvenuto not to ascribe the Commedia’s silence on them to a conscious decision on the part of the author. To prove that Trojan stories in the form of anonymous legends could not be ignored even by children and the uneducated, we can turn to what Dante himself says, when in Paradiso XV 126 Cacciaguida remembers the modest Florence of his days. In that blessed city of yore, women were wont to accompany their domestic chores with fables “of Trojans, and Fiesole, and Rome.”37 In the medieval and prehumanistic age, in Italy, Trojan stories did indeed circulate widely at an oral and popular level in the form of

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the so-called cantari. The cantari were metric narratives on a number of set topics (episodes from contemporary chronicles, classical myth, Arthurian and Carolingian romances), and they were meant to be performed in the streets; of the cantari, the Trojan-themed ones are a significant group.38 An oral, ephemeral genre such as the cantari39 is very difficult to date or quantify. We do not have much documentary evidence of their success—although what little we do have is quite significant, as in the case of the simple man, immortalized in Poggio Bracciolini’s Facezie, who paid the performer from his pocket so as to delay as much as possible the inevitable “Death of Hector,” subject of one of the most famous Trojan cantari.40 The significance of the cantari is in fact mainly reflected by their continuance into the ensuing age,41 where they were a heavy influence on the written, artistically ambitious poems that were being composed in Italy on themes both “Arthurian” and classical. However, an examination of the manuscripts helps us to date the most important of the Trojan cantari—that is, the cantari identified by Rajna with the title Cantari della Guerra di Troia—to an age immediately following Dante’s. This lengthy composition comes before 1369 (the date on the manuscript) but after 1325, as the inclusion of a passage from Paradiso demonstrates.42 Even more important to our analysis is a printed poem that is heavily dependent on the cantari: the so-called Troiano, a work of immense success and a source so far overlooked of much Renaissance epic.43 Neither the author nor the date of the Troiano are known: the first known printed version is 1483 (there are no extant manuscripts), but even a superficial reading reveals its indebtness to the oral cantari, of which it seems a longer and more ambitious version. With the cantari it shares a pedestrian style, the limping metric, and all the specific techniques of the genre: repeated addresses to the audience, fictional references to an ancient documentary source, and repetitions. Although certainly written after Petrarch’s Triumphus Cupidinis, from which our unnamed author boldly appropriates the proem,44 it seems safe to claim that the Troiano records traditions from a much earlier era. And never as in the Troiano’s clumsy stanzas are the competing versions of Aeneas’s character more clearly expressed, with the Virgilian, “fictional” version heavily losing against the Dictys-Dares “historical” approach. Or qui vo dichiarato di che cava usci Enea con sua faccia bella. E cio disse dares che non fallava Pero vedete per fama novella

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Si come enea di vero fu bastardo Chi altro crede si crede bugiardo Ben che virgilio e alquanti poeti D’enea parlan fabulosamente Che figlio fusse di venus discreti Per levargli la infamia violente Esser bastardo per li sir mansueti Che nasceron di lui ciaschun valente E anco lo scusan desser traditore Per torre a descendenti il disonore. Ma el vero fu che enea fu bastardo Et a priamo fu traditore.45 [I have here declared what kind of man this handsome Aeneas was. And this has said Dares who did not fail. Therefore you see from this new evidence that in reality Aeneas was a bastard: whoever thinks different avows to be a liar. Although Virgil and several poets speak fictionally of Aeneas, saying he was the son of wise Venus, this is only to clear him from the brutal felony of being a bastard. They say so for the sake of his descendants, those valiant lords who were born from him. What’s more, they deny he was a traitor so as to clear his descendants of this infamy. But the truth is, Aeneas was a bastard and a traitor to Priam. ]

The “truth” for Troiano’s author is that Aeneas was a bastard and a traitor: a conviction shared by the majority of Dante’s contemporaries. Returning now to Dante: Benvenuto da Imola’s claim that Dante had consciously innovated in Ulysses’ episode (autor de industria finxit), departing from the universally known sources, receives further substantiation from an examination of other Troy-related passages in the Commedia. I shall start, for self-evident reasons, from Inferno XXXII. It is the circle destined to traitors of the country or political faction; here one of the damned souls plunged in the ice thus addresses Dante: “Or tu chi sè che vai per l’Antenora, percotendo—rispuose—altrui le gote, sì che, se foss’i’ vivo, troppo fora?” (Inferno XXXII 88–90) [“Nay, who are you,” he answered, “that go through Antenora smiting the cheeks of others, so that, were I alive, it would be too much?”]

The soul belongs to Bocca degli Abati: his betrayal in the battle of Montaperti has led him to eternal damnation in the region of Antenora. What is striking for the reader is that Dante gives no clarification of the region’s name, which for Dante’s perspective audience we must therefore assume would be immediately evocative of treason against one’s country. This interpretation would seem to be supported by Dante’s early commentators: Ad quod notandum quod secunda pars sive regio istius lacus gelati vocatur Anthenorea, ab Anthenore troiano, qui prodidit nobilissimam patriam suam hostibus crudelissimis, qui illam ferro et igne funditus everterunt, viris trucidatis,

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mulieribus, pueris et turba imbelli in servitutem adductis, ex quo natio troianorum dispersa est per mundum, et facta est fabula poetarum graecorum. Ad propositum ergo in ista parte secunda punitur secunda species proditorum, qui prodiderunt patriam et commune suum.46 [It should be noted that the second part or region of this frozen lake is called Antenora, from the Trojan Antenor, who betrayed his noblest country to its merciless foes; they crushed it and burned it to the ground, killing the men, enslaving the women, children and helpless plebs. Hence the Trojan people were scattered over the world and became the subject for the fables of the Greek poets. It is therefore appropriate that in this second division the second kind of traitors are punished: those who betrayed their country and political faction.] . . . cioè per questo secondo giro, che finge l’autore che si chiami l’Antenora da Antenore troiano che, come scrive messer Guido della Colonna nel suo trattato, anzi Troiano, tradì e diede Troia a’ Greci; onde scritto è in sulla sua sepoltura, secondo che si dice e che si vede: Hic iacet Antenor paduanae conditor urbis: Proditor ille fuit, et qui sequuntur eum. (Francesco da Buti: ad Inferno XXXII 82–96)47 [. . . that is in this second circle, that the author has named Antenora, from the Trojan Antenor, that—as master Guido delle Colonne says in his treatise or rather Troiano—betrayed Troy and gave it to the Greeks; hence on his tombstone, as it is known and visible, we can read: “Here lies Antenor, founder of the city of Padua: he himself was a traitor and those who came with him.”]

In the medieval tradition of the Dictys-Dares mould, Antenor is almost Aeneas’s double: they are both Priam’s counselors, both are princes but not of the reigning family, both are traitors to their country for the petty price of immunity and riches and—in Dictys—of Troy’s throne. Dante’s commentator Francesco da Buti, who we just read above, drew his information on the Trojan War from a source of the utmost importance in medieval Italy: Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae, which combined Dictys and Dares on the subject of Antenor’s (and Aeneas’s) betrayal: Dares et Ditis, qui tempore ipsius Troyani belli in ipso bello fuere presentes, in composicione operum eorum inventi sunt pro maiori parte concordes et in paucis inventi sunt discordantes. Quod autem Anthenor et Heneas fuerunt actores prodicionis ipsius bene conveniunt. . . . Dixit eciam quod Greci de nocte Troyam intraverunt, nec intrasse per murum ruptum occasione equi erei facti per Grecos . . . sed fuisse dixit ingressus per portam Sceam, unam de portis civitatis Troye. In cuius porte summitate erat fabricatum et infixum de marmore quoddam magnum caput equi, licet Virgilius de equo ereo cum Dite concordet. Et in hanc portam Sceam dixit Dares Anthenorem et Heneam cum Pollidama recepisse Grecos.48 [Dares and Dictys, who were active in the war at the very time of the Trojan war, can be seen agreeing in most parts of their works and disagreeing in few. But what they fully agree on is that Antenor and Aeneas were the promoters of the treason. . . . Dares also said that the Greeks seized Troy at nighttime, but that they didn’t enter through a break in the wall which had been made for letting in the bronze horse built by the Greeks . . . he said instead that the entrance was

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through the Scean Gate, one of the gates of the city of Troy, over which a big horse’s head made of marble was suspended (although Virgil agrees with Dictys on the subject of the bronze horse). Dares said that Antenor and Aeneas with Polidamas received the Greeks at this Scean Gate.]

Indeed, in medieval as in early modern ages, the tradition of Aeneas’s and Antenor’s double betrayal was very much alive. So much so, in fact, that a later commentator on Dante, Anonimo Fiorentino, freely mentions it in the least appropriate—or most appropriate, as we have seen—context: lines I 73–74 of the Inferno, Virgil’s self-presentation as the poet who sang “the righteous son of Anchises.”49 As Braccesi has pointed out, the traditions regarding the two heroes’ disloyalty run parallel from antiquity to the early modern age, displaying at the same time a certain degree of antagonism: fractures in the Graeco-Roman world seem to revive them; times of peace and cultural integration such as the Pax Augustea see them quiescent.50 It falls on Virgil to clear Aeneas of every suspicion, on Livy to celebrate Antenor as founder of Padua, on Horace to sing of Troy fallen sine fraude.51 However, as a result of the Aeneid’s unprecedented success and greatness, the Antenor side of the tradition became more vulnerable over time, and accusations of treason concentrated on Antenor also as a means to clear the more illustrious Aeneas. This fact perhaps helped to reinforce Dante’s instrumental suppression of the impius Aeneas; on the other hand, he is much more tolerant of the Antenor tradition, which was not at all central to his design and can thus freely surface in the poem.52 Already in Dante’s times however, things were changing for Antenor as well, as Padua challenged the current defamation of its founder through a series of highly symbolic initiatives.53 As early as 1283, the Paduan protohumanist Lovato Lovati, who had named one of his children Polidamas, like the hero’s son,54 identified the imposing remains from an ancient tomb in Padua as belonging to Antenor. He made the city erect a monument to the hero, for which he composed a Latin poetic inscription.55 In the next generation of Paduans, Lovato’s pupil, Albertino Mussato, lamented from exile the fate of his city as altera Troia.56 In 1334, on the day of his election, Alberto della Scala, lord of Padua, had Antenor’s monument opened up and the hero’s sword extracted from it in an ideal succession from the first lord of Padua to his best heir.57 Padua’s mythopoeia had more than a passing success in reversing Antenor’s reputation, if we only think that Francesco Bolognetti, a distinguished poet and man of letters, attended in the Cinquecento to a poem on Antenore.58 And the Estense Ferrara followed the Paduan example, making up its own Trojan founder and providing him with all the due paraphernalia of monument and epigraph:

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et nella divisione fatta da Augusto in undici regioni, questa [la provincia veneta] fu la decima: la quale allargandosi hebbe i confini sopra l’Olio; e quantunque contenesse Vicenza, Padova, Monselice, Uderzo, Belluno, Trivigi, Altino e Adria tutte città molto nobili; nondimeno Este vi fu capo. percioche si come appare per un epitafio scritto in versi elegi latini et molto puri, ritrovato sotterra da lavoratori de campi in un candido e duro marmo; Ateste Signore de gli Heneti dopo le ruine di Troia venne con potente armata: et asceso in quella parte vi edificò questa città, che in espressione del proprio nome chiamò Atestia. Ne da Antenore, se ben uscito dalle medesime calamità, et ivi pervenuto, vi fondò Padova: ma da Ateste, per rispetto della gente Heneta che il seguì.59 [And when Augustus divided the territory into eleven regions, this one was the tenth: as it expanded, its borders touched the Olio; and although this region comprised Vicenza, Padua, Monselice, Uderzo, Belluno, Trivigi, Altino e Adria, all very noble cities, nonetheless Este was made the capital. And the reason is clear from some exquisite Latin elegiac verses carved on a slate of immaculate marble, which was unearthed by some peasants; Ateste lord of the Heneti came to this region with a powerful army after the ruin of Troy and he built this city that he named Atestia after himself. All that region was then called Venetia not after Antenor, although he had escaped from the same calamities and founded Padua, but after Ateste, in consideration of the Henetian people who came with him.]

Again, as in Ulysses’ case, assessing Dante’s potential sources on the topic of Antenor’s betrayal is complicated by Servius’s obtrusive presence. It is in fact true that in his commentary to the Aeneid Servius exposes Antenor as a traitor and the Augustan authors who wrote in his defense as unreliable. Antenor potuit non sine causa Antenoris posuit exemplum, cum multi evaserint Troianorum periculum, ut Capys qui Campaniam tenuit, ut Helenus qui Macedoniam, ut alii qui Sardiniam secundum Sallustium; sed propter hoc, ne forte illud occurreret, iure hunc vexari tamquam proditorem patriae. elegit ergo similem personam; hi enim duo Troiam prodidisse dicuntur secundum Livium, quod et Vergilius per transitum tangit . . . , et excusat Horatius dicens ardentem sine fraude Troiam, hoc est sine proditione: quae quidem excusatio non vacat; nemo enim excusat nisi rem plenam suspicionis. Sisenna tamen dicit solum Antenorem prodidisse.60 [Antenor managed: not without cause Virgil chose Antenor as an example, even if many were those that escaped the Trojan ruin: like Capys who then took possession of Campania, like Helenus who went to Macedonia, like others that according to Sallust went to Sardinia. But in order to save Aeneas from the accusation of betraying his country, Virgil chose someone similar to him. According to Livy, in fact, these two were said to have betrayed Troy, a fact that Virgil also touches upon in passing . . . Horace also defends Aeneas when he says that “Troy burned without fraud,” that is without betrayal. A defense that doesn’t quite add up: only what gives rise to suspicion needs excuses. Sisenna on the other hand says that only Antenor betrayed.]

Assuming as we should that Dante was aware of this piece of information in Servius, I still do not think we should consider Servius as essential to

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explaining the name “Antenora” in Inferno XXXII: “Antenora” was a self-explanatory name to Dante’s readers, like the names of the other divisions of the lowest infernal circle: Tolomea, Caina, and Giudecca. In Inferno V Virgil summons Dante to behold the soul of the “grande Achille / che con amore al fine combatteo” (“the great Achilles, who fought at the last with love”). Now, an Achilles damned on the grounds of excessive lust toward women is perhaps surprising to us, as he was to some later commentators, who expected to find him among sodomites. It would not however elicit any surprise from Dante’s readers, who were familiar with a different kind of hero, one burned by the passion of love as much as by the passion for glory. Medieval readers knew of the adolescent hero’s love for Deidamia from Statius’s Achilleid, an extremely widespread text at the time.61 They could no longer read Homer’s Iliad, but they remembered Achilles’ connection with Briseis, which, thanks to Ovid’s Heroids, had bloomed into a fully fledged love story, well exceeding Homer’s austere narrative. Most of all, readers could easily identify which passion it was that had consumed Achilles (“combatteo”) and caused his death (“al fine”). Achilles’ sudden and fatal love for Polyxena, one of Priam’s daughters, was already part of the ancient tradition. In fact, in one ancient version of events, Achilles was struck by Polyxena’s beauty when he saw her at Hector’s mourning rites. In order to have her, he promised Hecuba that he would withdraw from the war and convince the Greek army to surrender. When Achilles killed Troilus, thus breaking his promise, Priam and Hecuba lured him into an ambush under the false pretense of an immediate wedding with Polyxena and had him killed by Paris. In retribution, at the end of the war the Greeks immolated Polyxena on Achilles’ tomb. This last part of the story is recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which is why the majority of modern commentaries on Dante refer to it when dealing with Inferno V 65.62 Ovid however says nothing of Achilles’ love for Polyxena, nor of the fatal consequences of his passion.63 Thus, again, should we look for Dante’s source in Servius? This is how Servius spelled out the story: Priameia virgo. Achilles dum circa muros Troiae bellum gereret, Polyxenam visam adamavit et conditione pacis in matrimonium postulavit . . . quam cum Troiani fraude promisissent, Paris post Thymbrey Apollinis simulacrum latuit et venientem Achillem ad foedus missa vulneravit sagitta. Tum Achilles moriens petiit, ut evicta Troia ad eius sepulcrum Polyxena immolaretur: quod Pyrrhus implevit.64 [Priam’s maiden daughter. As Achilles was waging war under the walls of Troy, he saw Polyxena and fell in love with her: so he asked her in marriage in exchange for peace. . . . When the Trojans falsely promised her to him, Paris hid behind the

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statue of Apollo Thymbreus and when Achilles arrived to marry her he wounded him with an arrow. Thus, as he was dying, Achilles demanded that Polyxena be sacrificed on his tomb when Troy would fall. Pyrrus fulfilled his wish.]

Again, in explaining the passage, Dante’s first commentators pointed to the late Latin and medieval tradition over Servius. The Polyxena episode recurs with minimal differences in both Dictys and Dares,65 from which it passed on to Benoît and in turn to Guido delle Colonne and the rest of the medieval Trojan-themed texts.66 This should be taken as a sign that the Dictys-Dares line, rather than Servius, was the source the commentators were most familiar with. It was also the one that best fit their cultural mold, which in any case did not differ very much from Dante’s, since Dante’s own son, Pietro, a reader of Dictys and Dares, mixes the medieval with the Virgilian element in the commentary on this passage.67 If we take a quick look at the commentaries that are chronologically closest to Dante—that is, those written by the end of the Trecento68—we shall see how the medieval prevails over the Servian element. This is the commentary to the passage of Francesco da Buti (1396), who knew well Guido delle Colonne’s Historia, a work that he simply doubles as Il Troiano:69 E perché nella morte d’Ettor si fe tregua, et Achille andò a vedere l’esequie che si faceano d’Ettor, vedendo Polissena sirocchia d’Ettor, la quale era bellissima, s’innamorò di lei e fecela domandare al re Priamo, e promise di non combattere più contra li Troiani, se gliela dessono per moglie. Ma essendo un di’ molti dei suoi morti, non lo attenne et andò a combattere, et allora uccise Troiolo. Onde la reina Ecuba madre d’Ettor e di Troiolo, sempre cercò la morte d’Achille; onde un di’ li mandò a dire che venesse a parlamentare col re Priamo nel tempio d‘Appolline, per accordarsi con lui del matrimonio di Polissena, che liela voleano dare per moglie. Et allora vi venne accompagnato con alquanti de’ suoi, e Paris allora si pose in aguato, e saettollo et ucciselo.70 [Since a truce was made for the death of Hector, Achilles went to see the funerals. There he saw the beautiful Polyxena, Hector’s sister, fell in love with her and asked king Priam for her hand: he promised not to fight against the Trojans if Priam gave her to him in marriage. But one day, as many of his army had been killed, he broke the promise and went to fight, killing Troilus. Since then Hecuba, mother of Hector and Troilus, always tried to have him killed; and one day sent for him to go to the temple of Apollo to discuss with king Priam the terms of his marriage with Polyxena, for they consented to the union. And Achilles thus went with some of his companions, and Paris ambushed him and killed him with his arrows.]

Again, Guido da Pisa (1333–1340) explicitly names Dares,71 and so does Benvenuto da Imola (1379–1383), who is also at pains to prove that Achilles was not a sodomite and therefore should not be punished in the third division of the seventh circle.72

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Dante’s lovelorn Achilles has led us to say something about the presence of Trojan legends in Petrarch and Boccaccio, Italy’s two leading protohumanists. The topic is too broad to be reduced to a few pages, and I shall limit the present discussion to the subject of Achilles’ love(s). Suffice it to say that even after they jointly rediscovered Homer, as far as Boccaccio and Petrarch were concerned, Dictys and Dares remained a trusted and preferred source of “historical evidence” on the war of Troy. Petrarch had doubtlessly read Dictys’s Ephemeris, which was copied in the Codex Parisinus Latinus 5690.73 He also made use of Dares in his manuscript notes to his Ambrosian manuscript of Virgil, and again in those to Servius’s scholia to the Aeneid.74 The inconsistencies between Dictys’s and Dares’ narratives did not fail to perplex him, as a discarded draft of the Trionfo della Fama highlights: e Dare e Dite fra loro discordi e non è chi ’l ver cribri; così rimansi ancor l’antica lite di questi e d’altri e gli argomenti interi, ché le certe notizie son fallite.75 [and Dares and Dictys / at odds with each other and no one can discern the truth; / thus the ancient disagreement remains / about these ones and others, and the disputes stay untouched / since evidence has failed.]

After all, what better sign of a common and shared tradition on the lovesick Achilles than Petrarch’s mention of the hero in Triumphus Cupidinis? Famously reluctant to recognize his predecessor’s greatness, Petrarch was certainly the least inclined to have an explicit literary debt with Dante, and yet the Triumphus passage is strikingly similar to that of Inferno V: Colui ch’è seco è quel possente e forte Ercole, ch’Amor prese, e l’altro è Achille, ch’ebbe in suo amar assai dogliose sorte.76 [The one with him is the powerful and strong / Hercules, who was seized by Love, and the other is Achilles, / who met with a painful fate in his loving.]

On the other hand, Boccaccio’s relationship with the Trojan theme and its various sources was continuing and ever changing. It is a well-known fact that the Trojan legends as reworked by Benoît de Sainte-Maure were Boccaccio’s source for his early poem Filostrato;77 later on, his knowledge of Dictys and Dares is proved by direct quotations in the Genealogie deorum gentilium.78 However, in the Esposizioni sopra la Comedia, there are precious few hints at the Trojan legends, even where they should be expected.79 Homeric poems instead become the main term of comparison—maybe a sign of the pride on Boccaccio’s part for his recent rescue of the Greek poet.

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One noticeable exception is the passage from Esposizioni on Inferno V 65: here, Boccaccio dwells on the story of Achilles’ passion for Polyxena, again without mentioning any particular source, but the details are selfexplanatory: Amava Achille Polisena maravigliosamente, per ciò che ne’ tempi delle triegue veduta l’avea. . . . Ed essendo dunque esso in convenzione con Ecuba, secondo che ella gli mandò dicendo, solo e disarmato andò una notte nel tempio d’Appollo Timbreo, il quale era quasi allato alle mura d’Ilione, credendosi quivi trovare Ecuba e Polisena; ma come egli fu in esso, gli uscì sopra Parìs con certi compagni, ed essendo Parìs mirabilmente ammaestrato nell’arte del saettare, aperto l’arco, il ferì d’una saetta nel calcagno, per ciò che sapeva lui in altra parte non potere esser ferito: per che Acchille, fatta alcuna ma piccola difesa, cadde e fu ucciso e poi sepellito sopra l’uno de’ promontori di Troia chiamato Sigeo.80 [Achilles was madly enamoured of Polyxena, for he had seen her during the truces. . . . In accordance with the compact he had with Hecuba, one night, as he was told to do, he went alone and unarmed to the temple of Apollo Thymbreus, which was very close to the walls of Ilium, sure of meeting Hecuba and Polyxena there. But as soon as he arrived, Paris was over him with some companions and, Paris being an excellent archer, he bent his bow and wounded Achilles in the heel, because he knew that that was the only vulnerable part of him. Therefore Achilles attempted a feeble defense but fell and was killed and was then buried on one of the promontories of Troy, called Sygaeum.]

In general, in Italy, the legend of Achilles and Polyxena proved to be one of the most successful and lasting of the entire medieval corpus. Its survival was not limited to prehumanism nor to oral or lesser genres, such as the cantari or the anonymous Troiano. Already in the fourteenth century the humanist Antonio Loschi reworked the episode in a Latin tragedy.81 As late as the 1520s, Lodovico Dolce composed L’Achille et l’Enea, a free ottava rima reworking of the Iliad and the Aeneid. To fill the narrative gap between the plots so as to obtain a seamless narrative “weaving” (as the poem’s subtitle makes clear), Dolce turned yet again to medieval legends and especially to the one concerning Achilles’ death.82 Indeed, an ambitious baroque poem of mid-Seicento still focused on the legend of Polyxena: Musa . . . Tu spiega a me quel volontario errore, Quell’incendio fatal d’Achille amante, Quando per Polissena il nobil core Ritratto rassembrò d’Ilio brugiante.83 [Muse . . . explain to me that willing error, that fatal blaze of the loving Achilles, when his noble heart because of Polyxena resembled the image of burning Ilium.]

But, lest we lose sight of our aim, it is time to turn to Dante in order to make an initial tentative assessment of his relationship with the medieval corpus on the Trojan myth.

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In the course of this “Trojan expedition” across the Commedia, my aim so far has been to depict an Italian cultural landscape that has been saturated beyond belief with Trojan stories and myths over a span of several centuries. Within this framework, the unlikelihood of singling out Dante as the only man of letters of his age to ignore what was common currency at the time simply does not stand to reason. First of all, Dante’s familiarity with medieval versions of the Trojan legends is proved with absolute certainty by what Dante himself affirms in the De vulgari eloquentia, as well as, albeit indirectly, by his close relationship with Brunetto Latini and his writings. Secondly, as regards Servius’s possible interference: it is true that for each Trojan passage under examination in this paper, Dante had an alternative source in Servius. Nevertheless, both in Inferno V 65 (Achilles fighting with love) and in Inferno XXXII 88–90 (the Antenora as realm of the traitors of the country) the text’s extreme briefness can only be explained if Dante shared the same cultural references as his readers. In other words, Dante was aware that even a simple hint at the myth of Antenor’s disloyalty, or at Achilles’ fatal passion, could be easily filled in by his readers. And of these, not only the “pueri et ignari” but the large majority would not have been familiar with Servius. The early commentaries to the Commedia are indeed proof enough. The time has come therefore to wrap up our short perusal of Trojan references in the Commedia and to suggest why medieval Trojan legends are undoubtedly marginal in the Commedia. The key is I think in the providential and finalistic role that Dante attributed to the fall of Troy. This was the event that for Dante was the necessary premise to the founding of the Roman Empire (viz. Inferno XXVI 59–60 “la porta / onde uscì de’ romani ‘l gentil seme”; “the gate by which the noble seed of the Romans went forth”). Accordingly, he had to play down the whole Trojan medieval tradition that pictured Aeneas as an unworthy traitor: hence the insistence in the Commedia—but also in the rest of Dante’s oeuvre—on Aeneas’s virtue and piety. In the Monarchia Aeneas is piissimus pater: Qui quidem invictissimus atque piissimus pater quante nobilitatis vir fuerit, non solum sua considerata virtute sed progenitorum suorum atque uxorum, quorum utrumque nobilitas hereditario iure in ipso confluxit, explicare nequirem: sed “summa sequar vestigia rerum.” [So great was the nobleness of this man, our ancestor most invincible and most pious, nobleness not only of his considerable virtue, but that of his progenitors and consorts, which was transferred to him by hereditary right, that I cannot unfold it in detail, “I can but trace the main outlines of truth.”]84

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In Inferno II 13–24 the Dante character marvels at the special grace that has been granted him to visit the netherworld while still living. He knows from Virgil that the same grace was granted to Aeneas, on whom depended the fate of the empire and, in turn, the mission of the church. Tu dici che di Silvïo il parente, corruttibile ancora, ad immortale secolo andò, e fu sensibilmente. Però, se l’Avversario d’ogni male cortese i fu, pensando l’alto effetto ch’uscir dovea di lui e ‘l chi e ‘l quale, non pare indegno ad omo d’intelletto, ch’e’ fu dell’alma Roma e di suo impero nello ‘mpireo ciel per padre eletto: lo quale al quale, a voler dir lo vero, fu stabilito per lo loco santo u’ siede il successor del maggior Piero. Per questa andata, onde li dai tu vanto, intese cose che furon cagione di sua vittoria e del papale ammanto.85 [You tell how the father of Silvius went, while still mortal, to the immortal world and was there in his bodily senses. But that the Adversary of all evil should show him such favor seems not unfitting to an understanding mind, considering the high effect that was to spring from him, and who and what he was; for in the Empyrean heaven he was chosen as father of glorious Rome and of her empire, and both, to say the truth, were established as the holy place where the successor of great Peter has his seat. In this journey, which you affirm he made, he learned things that were the cause of his victory and of the papal mantle.]

The Convivio offers further evidence of the significance with which Dante charged Aeneas’s mission. In one passage, the end of Troy and Aeneas’s landing in Italy are presented as coincidental with the preparation of Christ’s advent in Palestine. E tutto questo fu in uno temporale, che David nacque e nacque Roma, cioè che Enea venne di Troia in Italia, che fu origine de la cittade romana, sì come testimoniano le scritture. Per che assai è manifesto la divina elezione del romano imperio per lo nascimento de la santa cittade che fu contemporaneo a la radice de la progenie di Maria. [And it was all at the same point of time wherein David was born and Rome was born, that is to say Aeneas came into Italy from Troy, which was the origin of the most noble city of Rome, as testify the scriptures. Whereby the divine election of the Roman empire is manifest enough; to wit by the birth of the holy city being at the same time as the root of the family of Mary.]86

By the same token, in Convivio IV iv 10, Dante had claimed that God had assigned universal rule over the world “a quello popolo santo nel quale l’alto sangue troiano era mischiato, cioè Roma” (“the hallowed people in whom the high Trojan blood was infused, that is Rome”).

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But, even as he chose the Pius Aeneas over the Proditor Aeneas and therefore Virgil over Dictys-Dares, Dante completed his personal redesigning of the Trojan myth with a further ideological twist. In order to justify the Commedia’s providential scheme, the fall of Troy had to acquire a moral and Christian value that could not be found in Virgil,87 where the city’s ruin was a necessary but nevertheless brutal attack on the innocent Trojans. Therefore, by a simple shift in meaning Dante transforms Troy into the Auerbachian figura of justly crushed pride. Virgil had lamented the undeserved fate of the magnificent (superbum) city: Dante picks up this word and gives it a moral nuance that was completely absent in the original.88 Hence the “superbo Ilïòn” of Inferno I 75; hence, most noticeably, Troy as the utmost example of humbled pride in Purgatorio XII 61–63: Vedeva Troia in cenere e in caverne; o Ilïòn come te basso e vile mostrava il segno che lì si discerne! [I saw Troy in ashes and in caverns: O Ilion, how cast down and vile it showed you—the sculpture which is there discerned!)]

This is how, in Dante’s providential scheme, the fall of Troy acquires a Christian and moral connotation completely lacking in Virgil.89 What’s more, the same passage in Aeneid III makes it clear that the Trojan people are innocent victims, undeserving of their fate (gentem immeritam): Postquam res Asiae Priamique evertere gentem immeritam visum superis ceciditque superbum Ilium et omnis humo fumat Neptunia Troia. [After it pleased the gods above to overthrow the power of Asia and Priam’s guiltless race, after proud Ilium fell, and all Neptune’s Troy smokes from the ground.]

The distance between the Virgilian and the Dantean approaches to explaining the end of Troy could not be wider, especially if we think that the very “unfairness” of Troy’s and Aeneas’s fate has always represented one of the main charms of reading the Aeneid. How is it then that the early commentators did not discern anything amiss in the characterization of Troy as being proud? Indeed, the majority of comments on these lines emphasize the “notorious” Trojan pride: In questi tre ternari lo nostro autore finge che vedesse la destruzione di Troia scolpita ne lo spasso preditto, perché li Troiani funno superbi, e per la loro superbia fu disfatta la loro città et arsa da’ Greci. Questa istoria è sì nota, che non è mestieri descriverla, et anco n’è fatto menzione di sopra ne la prima cantica e però la lasso!90 [In these three tercets our author imagines to see Troy’s destruction sculpted in this space, because the Trojans were proud; because of their pride their city

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was crushed and burnt by the Greeks. This story is so famous that it needs no retelling, and it was mentioned above in the first cantica and therefore I won’t go into it!]

Once again, the answer must be found in medieval versions of the Trojan War rather than in the Homeric-Virgilian account. Early commentators were projecting onto Dante’s lines what they knew from medieval accounts (based on Dares’ version) about the first destruction of the city. According to Dares’ version of the story, the Trojan king Laomedon, Priam’s father, had denied Jason and the other Argonauts access to the shores of Troy on their way to Colchis. In retribution for this act of Trojan pride, on their way back Hercules and other Argonauts razed Troy to the ground, killed Laomedon, and seized his daughter Hesione—an abduction that would in turn lead to Helen’s in the next generation. Dante was aware of this part of the story: as the Epistola V to the Princes of Italy91 of 1310 makes clear, he identified “the first little spark” of the chain of events that would lead to the Roman Empire with the “denial of hospitality” to Jason on the part of the Phrygians. As it happens, Dante could not find any useful elements in Servius for his interpretation of the Laomedon episode, which Servius did in fact mention, but only to highlight the offense suffered by the Trojans—that is, Hesione’s abduction. In Servius’s opinion, the “true cause” (vera causa) for the fall of Troy is revealed in this hostile act. Foedera solvere furto: legitur in historiis quod Troiani cum Graecis foedus habuerunt. tunc etiam Paris est susceptus hospitio et commisit adulterium . . . et eversi Ilii haec est vera causa: nam foedera quae inter Graecos et Troianos fuerunt, ita soluta sunt. Hercules cum expugnato Ilio filiam Laomedontis Hesionam, Priami sororem, Telamoni dedisset, profecti sunt legati cum Priamo et eam minime repetere potuerunt, illis dicentibus se eam habere iure bellorum. unde commotus Priamus misit Paridem cum exercitu, ut aliquid tale abduceret, aut uxorem regis, aut filiam. (Servius ad Aen. X 91)92 [To break a covenant with an abduction: we read in the stories that the Trojans had an agreement with the Greeks, but then Paris was received as a guest and committed adultery. . . . But this was the real reason of Troy’s destruction: in fact this is how the covenant between Greeks and Trojans was dissolved. When Hercules conquered Ilium, he gave Hesione, daughter of Laomedon and sister of Priam, to Telamon. Ambassadors were sent, with Priam, but could not retrieve her and were told that the Greeks were entitled to keep Hesione by the law of war. Hence Priam reacted and sent Paris with an army, entrusting him with the mission of abducting either the wife or the daughter of a king.]

And as for the notion of Trojan pride, Servius left no room for doubt: superbum in Aeneid III 2 should be taken as noble.93 We saw earlier that Dante was aware of the Dares version of the Trojan myth, which had merged in the Histoire ancienne and in Brunetto’s Tresor.94 But what is important to stress is the fact that, regardless of its

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provenance, Dante put this notion to use in order to reinforce the notion of a superbo Ilion, which had only a marginal role95 in his preferred source, Virgil. This is a sign, once again, of how inner consistency is the only constituting principle of Dante’s construction, beyond any consideration for the sources, which nevertheless he knows and masters.

Notes My thanks go to Paolo Falzone for many helpful corrections and insightful suggestions as I was writing this paper. 1. Vladimiro Zabughin, L’oltretomba classico medievale dantesco nel Rinascimento. Parte Prima: Italia sec. XIV e XV (Firenze and Roma: Olschki, 1922), 22. 2. For the circulation in Italy of Daretian Trojan legends, cf. Arianna Punzi, “Le metamorfosi di Darete Frigio: la materia troiana in Italia (con un’appendice sul ms. Vat Barb. lat. 3953),” in Storia, geografia, tradizioni manoscritte, ed. Gioia Paradisi and Arianna Punzi, Critica del testo VII/1 (Roma:Viella 2004), 163–211. Arianna Punzi, “La circolazione della materia troiana nell’Europa del ’200: da Darete Frigio al Roman de Troie en prose,” Messana 6 (1991): 69–108. 3. Giorgio Padoan, “Ulisse ‘fandi fictor’ e le vie della sapienza: Momenti di una tradizione (da Virgilio a Dante),” Studi Danteschi 37 (1960): 21–61, at 35 and footnote, reprinted in Padoan, Il pio Enea, l’empio Ulisse: Tradizione classica e intendimento medievale in Dante (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1977): 169–204, at 179 n 24. Of the same opinion is Bruno Nardi, “La tragedia di Ulisse,” Studi Danteschi 20 (1937): 1–15, reprinted in Nardi, Dante e la cultura medievale (Bari: Laterza 1942): 153–65, at 154: “Se ai medievali fu precluso l’accesso al poema omerico celebrante le peregrinazioni del figlio di Laerte fino al ritorno nella sua petrosa Itaca, par sicuro che a Dante restassero ignoti anche il Roman de Troie di Benoît de Sainte Maure e il De bello troiano del giudice Guido della Colonna . . . e ignoti gli furon pure l’Eccidio di Troia di Darete e le Efemeridi della guerra troiana di Ditti.” 4. Several interpreters have even supposed that Dante knew the plot of the Odyssey through other (unknown) sources. On this topic and the related bibliography cf. the rich and informed contribution by Carla Forti, “Ulisse dal Nostos al Folle volo: Fonti classiche e Tradizione medievale in If. XXVI,” Nuova Rivista di Letteratura Italiana 9, no. 2 (2006): 9–24; Antonino Pagliaro, “Fabula e parabola nell’Ulisse dantesco,” Rivista di cultura classica e medievale 7 (1965): 785–815; Giovanni Cerri, Dante e Omero: Il volto di Medusa (Lecce: Argo 2007). Ernesto G. Parodi, “L’‘Odissea’ nella poesia medievale,” Atene e Roma n.s. 1 (1920): 89–112, examines sources related to the Odyssey that were available in the Middle Ages (93–96 on Benoît’s reworking of Dictys’ book VI); Giorgio Brugnoli, Studi danteschi III. Dante filologo: l’esempio di Ulisse (Pisa: ETS 1998). 5. On the Palladium, see Servius’s lengthy note ad Aen. II, 166. 6. D’Arco Silvio Avalle noticed how since antiquity the question of Ulysses’ death had aroused the commentators’ curiosity: D’Arco Silvio Avalle, “L’ultimo viaggio di Ulisse,” Studi Danteschi 43 (1966): 35–67, at 35–37; discussed in Forti, “Ulisse dal Nostos al Folle volo,” 20–21.

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7. All translations from the Divina Commedia are from Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans., with commentary, Charles S. Singleton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970–75). 8. The episode of Ulysses’ death takes up most of the Ephemeris’s last book. If we are to believe Lucius Septimius, the purported Latin translator, the Ephemeris’s sixth and last book is a compendium of no less than five of the Greek original’s books, dealing with the nostoi of the Greek heroes. Therefore, the space reserved for Ulysses’ death must be taken as a sign of the episode’s relevance, not least because of its reminiscence of Oedipus’s fate. 9. Guido De Columnis, Historia destructionis Troiae, ed. Nathaniel Edward Griffin (Cambridge, Mass.: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1936; repr., New York: Kraus Reprint, 1970), liber Ultimus de morte Ulixi (XXXV): 269–72. 10. Nardi, “La tragedia di Ulisse,” 155. 11. Avalle, “L’ultimo viaggio di Ulisse,” 37: “Dante dunque ha deciso di rispondere nella seconda parte del XXVI dell’Inferno alla domanda lasciata in sospeso da Servio nel commento, a lui ben noto, dell’opera maggiore del suo maestro: dove e come è morto Ulisse.” On Dante’s knowledge and use of Servius’s commentary on the Aeneid see Erich von Richthofen, “Traces of Servius in Dante,” Dante Studies 92 (1974): 117–28; Edward Kennard Rand, “Dante and Servius,” Annual Reports of the Dante Society 33 (1914): 1–11. 12. Servius, ad Aen. II, v. 44. 13. Pietro Alighieri III redazione 1: ad Inferno XXVI 88–142. (Unless otherwise stated all quotations from Dante’s early commentators are from the digital edition by Paolo Procaccioli, I commenti danteschi dei secoli XIV, XV e XVI [Roma: Lexis 1999], cd rom.) 14. Benvenuto Da Imola, ad Inferno XXVI 99 ss. 15. Dante, De vulgari eloquentia I.x.2, transl. Marianne Shapiro, De Vulgari Eloquentia: Dante’s Book of Exile (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 57. 16. Paul Meyer, “Les premières compilations françaises d’histoire ancienne,” Romania 14 (1885): 1–81, at 38. 17. Meyer, “Les premières compilations,” 36–75, at 37, on the Histoire’s manuscripts and their differences. 18. Meyer, “Les premières compilations,” 1–35; Sergio Marroni, I fatti dei Romani—Saggio di edizione critica di un volgarizzamento fiorentino del Duecento (Roma: Viella 2004), 1–12. For an account of events narrated in the Fait see Ernesto G. Parodi, “Le storie di Cesare nella letteratura italiana dei primi secoli,” Studj di filologia romanza 4 (1889): 237–501, at 241–49. 19. Meyer, “Les premières compilations,” 42. On this text and its ensuing metamorphoses see Maria Laura Palermi, “Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César: forme e percorsi del testo,” in Storia, geografia, tradizioni manoscritte, ed. Gioia Paradisi and Arianna Punzi, Critica del testo 7, no. 1 (Roma: Viella, 2004): 213–56. 20. The anonymous author mistakes “sender” for “addressee,” referring to the (spurious) prefatory letter that precedes Dares’ text: “Cornelius Nepos Sallustio Crispo suo salutem.” 21. Meyer, “Les premières compilations,” 43. 22. Meyer, “Les premières compilations,” 43. 23. Cf. Meyer, “Les premières compilations,” 58–59. Cf. Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, commentary ad De vulgari eloquentia, I,x,2, in Dante Alighieri, Opere minori, vol. V, t. II (Milano and Napoli: Ricciardi, 1974): “le due opere andavano spesso insieme nei codici, e conobbero vasta popolarità, come

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24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

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attestano anche i volgarizzamenti, in Italia: anche l’intitolazione perifrastica di Dante corrisponde abbastanza da vicino ad analoghe di manoscritti dell’Histoire ancienne . . . , ivi compreso il verbo compilare.” On Brunetto’s magisterial role in Dante’s life and works, cf. most recently Marco Santagata, Dante—il romanzo della sua vita (Milano: Mondadori 2012), 71–72: “Possiamo affermare con sicurezza che il maestro del giovane Dante fu Brunetto Latini . . . l’intellettuale più rappresentativo della Firenze comunale . . . Brunetto avrà esercitato il suo tutorato culturale e spirituale con l’esempio, con gli scritti, ma anche, possiamo presumere, con vere e proprie lezioni di lingua e stile latini e con consigli di lettura.” Brunetto Latini, Tresor, ed. Pietro G. Beltrami et al. (Torino: Einaudi 2007), 61, Dou regne de Troie. Sundby, taking the opposite standpoint, identifies the “grant livre” with a compendium of Dictys and Dares: Thor Sundby, Della vita e delle opere di Brunetto Latini (Firenze: Le Monnier 1884), 94. Punzi, “La circolazione della materia troiana.” Giovanni Villani, Cronica, VIII.10: “Fu mondano uomo, ma di lui avemo fatta menzione perocch’egli fu cominciatore e maestro in digrossare i Fiorentini, e fargli scorti in bene parlare, e in sapere guidare e reggere la nostra repubblica secondo la politica.” Jean-Pierre Callu, “‘Impius Aeneas?’ Echos Virgiliens du Bas-Empire,” in Présence de Virgile (Actes du Colloque des 9, 11 e 12 Décembre 1976, Paris E.N.S., Tours), ed. Raymond Chevallier (Paris: Les Belles Lettres 1978), 161–74; Francesco Chiappinelli, Impius Aeneas (Acireale: Bonanno 2007); Maurizio Bettini and Mario Lentano, Il mito di Enea: Immagini e racconti dalla Grecia a oggi (Torino: Einaudi, 2013), chap. 6, “Impius Aeneas: Controstoria di un eroe,” 190–221. Servius, ad Aen. 1.242–49. Dante, Convivio IV v 6; in Convivio IV iv 10 Dante claims that God assigned dominance over the world to “quello popolo santo nel quale l’alto sangue troiano era mischiato, cioè Roma.” See Giorgio Inglese, “Storia e Comedìa: Enea,” in Inglese, L’intelletto e l’amore—Studi sulla letteratura italiana del Due e Trecento (Milano: La Nuova Italia 2000), 123–64, at 123. On the notion of Aeneas as a traitor in the culture of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and Dante’s reaction to it see Inglese, “Una pagina di Guido delle Colonne e l’Enea dantesco (con una postilla a If II 23 ‘per lo loco santo’),” La cultura 35, no. 3 (1997): 403–33, at 405–8. Ilaria Tufano, “Dal tradimento alla negromanzia: la vicenda di Enea nel Trecento italiano,” Critica del testo 13, no. 2 (2010): 235–56. Dante, Monarchia, II, iii, 8; trans. Aurelia Henry, The De Monarchia of Dante Alighieri (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin 1904), 79. Inglese, L’intelletto e l’amore, 123. Pietro Alighieri prima redazione 3: ad Inferno XXVI. Benvenuto da Imola, ad Inferno I 72. Dante, Paradiso XV 121–126: “L’una vegghiava a studio de la culla, / e, consolando, usava l’idioma / che prima i padri e le madri trastulla; / l’altra, traendo a la rocca la chioma, favoleggiava con la sua famiglia / d’i Troiani, di Fiesole e di Roma.” (“The one kept watch in minding the cradle, and, soothing, spoke that speech which first delights fathers and mothers. Another, as she drew the threads from the distaff, would tell her household about the Trojans, and Fiesole, and Rome.”)

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38. The only relevant monograph on the topic is still Egidio Gorra, Testi inediti di storia trojana—preceduti da uno studio sulla leggenda trojana in Italia (Torino: C. Triverio 1887). 39. On the cantare form see Francesco Antonio Ugolini, I cantari d’argomento classico—con un’appendice di testi inediti (Firenze and Genève: Olschki, 1933); Carlo Dionisotti, “Appunti su cantari e romanzi,” Italia Medioevale e Umanistica 32 (1989): 227–61; Maria Cristina Cabani, Le forme del cantare epicocavalleresco (Lucca: Maria Pacini Fazzi 1988). Marco Villoresi, La fabbrica dei cavalieri: cantari poemi romanzi in prosa tra Medioevo e Rinascimento (Roma: Salerno 2005) does not examine the mythical-Trojan thread of the cantari. 40. Poggio Bracciolini, “De cantore qui praedixit Mortem Hectoris recitaturum,” in Facezie, ed. Stefano Pittaluga (Milano: Garzanti, 1995), 90. 41. Ugolini, I cantari, 43–44. 42. Cf. Ugolini, I cantari, 29–36. On the Cantari della Guerra di Troia cf. Pio Rajna, “Il Cantare dei Cantari e il Serventese del Maestro di tutte l’Arti,” Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie 2 (1878): 220–54; Gorra, Testi inediti di storia trojana. 43. On the Troiano as a source for Boiardo’s Innamorato cf. Antonia Tissoni Benvenuti, “Rugiero o la fabbrica dell’‘Innamoramento de Orlando’,” in Per Cesare Bozzetti: Studi di letteratura e filologia italiana, ed. Simone Albonico et al. (Milano: Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori 1996), 69–89; Antonia Tissoni Benvenuti, “Presenza dell’antico nell’‘Inamoramento de Orlando,’” in Intertestualità e smontaggi, ed. Roberto Cardini and Mariangela Regoliosi (Roma: Bulzoni, 1998), 77–109. 44. Carlo Dionisotti, “Fortuna del Boiardo nel Cinquecento,” in Boiardo e altri studi cavallereschi, ed. Giuseppe Anceschi and Antonia Tissoni Benvenuti (Novara: Interlinea, 2003), 163–91, at 148–49. Dionisotti dismisses Rajna’s tentative attributions of the Troiano; Parodi had already disproved Rajna’s theory of two different authors for the two sections of the Troiano, “Iliadic” and “Aeneadic.” Ernesto G. Parodi, “Le storie di Cesare nella letteratura italiana dei primi secoli,” Studj di filologia romanza 4 (1889): 237–501, at 240ff. 45. I quote from one of the many printings of the poem: Libro dicto Troiano, novamente historiado et correcto: Impresso in Venetia per Maestro manfrino de monte Ferato da Strevo nel: anno del nostro Signore. M.CCCCCIX. Adi. xx Marzo Regnante lo Inclito Principe Leonardo Lauredano Duce Veneciano. (Unnumbered pages). 46. Benvenuto da Imola, Comentum super Dantis Comoediam, ed. Giacomo Filippo Lacaita, (Firenze, 1887), t. II: 507–8. 47. Francesco da Buti, ad Inferno XXXII 82–96; cf. also ad Inferno XXXII 16–24: “nel secondo giro che si chiama Antenora da Antenore troiano, che per invidia ch’ebbe contra lo re Priamo tradì Troia sua città.” 48. Guido De Columnis, Historia destructionis Troiae, 273. As it happens, Dares does not mention Hecuba: at the end of the war Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, requires the Trojans to hand over Polyxena, who had been hidden away by Aeneas. The overzealous Antenor finds her and hands her over to Agamemnon so that she be slain on Achilles’ tomb. Aeneas’s reluctance in this last betrayal against Priam’s family leads to his exile from Troy (De excidio Troiae Historia XLIII). In Dictys, Aeneas has no role in Polyxena’s fate but cooperates with Antenor in plotting against Troy in order to share the kingdom with him; a failed attempt to push Antenor out results in his exile from Troy. (Ephemeris Belli Troiani V.11–17) 49. Anonimo Fiorentino, ad Inferno I 73–74. 50. Lorenzo Braccesi, La leggenda di Antenore da Troia a Padova (Padova: Signum Edizioni 1984), 123ff. On the Trojan myth in the ancient world see Emilio

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51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

56.

57.

58.

59.

60. 61.

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Gabba, “Sulla valorizzazione politica della leggenda delle origini troiane di Roma fra III e II secolo a. C.,” in I canali della propaganda nel mondo antico, ed. Marta Sordi (Milano: Vita e Pensiero 1976), 84–101; and Rita Scuderi, “Il tradimento di Antenore. Evoluzione di un mito attraverso la propaganda politica,” in Sordi, I canali della propaganda nel mondo antico, 28–49. Horace, Carmen Saeculare, 41–44: “cui per ardentem sine fraude Troiam / castus Aeneas patriae superstes / liberum munivit iter, daturus / plura relictis.” Cf. Purgatorio V 75: “ma li profondi fori / . . . fatti mi fuoro in grembo a li Antenori” (“but the deep wounds . . . were dealt me in the bosom of the Antenori”). Iacopo del Cassero complains of the betrayal he has suffered in Padua: the periphrasis is a clear hint at the founder’s shady fame. Braccesi, La leggenda di Antenore, 141. Benjamin G. Kohl, “Lovati, Lovato,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Roma: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 2006), 66:215–20. Roberto Weiss, “Lovato Lovati (1241–1309),” Italian Studies 6 (1951): 8; Ronald G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden, Boston, and Köln: Brill, 2000), 56; Kohl, “Lovati, Lovato,” 215. “Heccine altera illa Troia est que Anthenore profugo condita secus mare Venetum Timavo ambita fluvio cis montes tam longa pace sedet Euganeos,” Albertino Mussato, De lite inter Naturam et Fortunam, quoted in Witt, In the Footsteps, 148n86; the De lite was partially published by Andrea Moschetti, “Il De lite inter Naturam et Fortunam e il Contra casus fortuitos di Albertino Mussato,” in Miscellanea di studi critici e ricerche erudite in onore di V. Crescini (Cividale del Friuli: Fratelli Stagni 1927), 567–99. On Padua and Antenor, see Philip Jacks, The Antiquarian and the Myth of Antiquity: The Origins of Rome in Renaissance Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993), 43. Padua fostered the construction of its identity also by exploiting the figure of Livy; see Berthold Louis Ullman, “The Post-Mortem adventures of Livy,” in Studies in the Italian Renaissance, by Ullman, 2nd ed. with additions and corrections (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura 1973), 55–70. Giulio Bodon, “Tra Padova e Venezia: tombe e immagini eroiche nella cultura antiquaria rinascimentale,” in Eroi, eroismi, eroizzazioni: Dalla Grecia antica a Padova e Venezia, Atti del convegno internazionale (Padova, 18–19 settembre 2006), ed. Alessandra Coppola (Padova: Sargon, 2007), 45–65. Bolognetti’s Antenore, dedicated to Domenico Venier, remained however unfinished: Remo Ceserani, “Bolognetti, Francesco,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Roma: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1969), 11:320–23, at 322. Cf. also Marina Beer, “Poemi cavallereschi, poemi epici e poemi eroici negli anni di elaborazione della Gerusalemme Liberata (1559–1581): Gli orizzonti della scrittura,” in Torquato Tasso e la cultura estense, vol. 1, ed. Gianni Venturi (Città di Castello: Olschki, 1999), 63. Giovan Battista Pigna, Historia de Principi di Este di Gio: Battista Pigna a Donno Alfonso Secondo Duca di Ferrara primo volume Nel quale si contengono congiuntamente le cose principali della rivolutione del Romano Imp. in fino al MCCCCLXXVI, in Ferrara Appresso Francesco Rossi Stampator Ducale. MDLXX, 1. Servius, ad Aen. I, 242. To Braccesi, Servius’s gloss is witness to the lateantique vogue for gossip and scandal, which rereads Virgil to make him say things he never meant (Braccesi, La leggenda troiana, 138). Paul Maurice Clogan, ed., The Medieval Achilleid of Statius (Leiden: Brill 1998). Cf. Inferno XXVI 61–62: “Piangevisi entro l’arte per che, morta, /

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62. 63.

64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73.

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Medievalia et Humanistica Deïdamia ancor si duol d’Achille” (“Within it they lament the craft, because of which the dead Deidamia still mourns Achilles”). Edward Moore points to Servius in Studies in Dante, First Series: Scripture and Classical Authors in Dante (Oxford 1896), 189. Among modern commentaries, most erroneously indicate Ovid, Metamorphoses XIII. Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi is the only one to my knowledge to refer the line to Servius in her commentary to Inferno (Milano: Mondadori 1991), 148; Natalino Sapegno points to medieval sources in his commentary to Inferno (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1985), 58–59), as does Charles Singleton: “Dante’s allusion to his death refers not to the Homeric story but rather to the accounts of the Trojan War current in the Middle Ages. According to this medieval version of the story, Achilles was killed by treachery in the temple of Apollo Thymbraeus, to which Paris lured him by the promise of a meeting with Polyxena, with whom Achilles was in love. (See Dictys Cretensis, Ephemeris belli Troiani IV, 11; and Dares Phrygius, De excidio Troiae XXXIV). Singleton, Commentary on Dante’s Inferno I 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 80. Servius, ad Aen. III.321. The episode is also briefly touched on in VI.57. Cf. Dares 27, 30–34; Dictys 3.II-III, 4.10–11. Giorgio Inglese’s commentary ad Inferno V 65 (Roma: Carocci, 2007) recalls the version of the story told in the medieval narrative Storie de Troja e de Roma (modern edition: Storie de Troja et de Roma, altrimenti dette Liber Ystoriarum Romanorum, ed. Ernesto Monaci (Roma: Alla Biblioteca Vallicelliana, 1920). Pietro Alighieri, ad Inferno V 52–142. For the chronology of Dante’s early commentators, cf. the chronological synopsis in Salvatore Bellomo, Dizionario dei commentatori danteschi: L’esegesi della Commedia da Iacopo Alighieri a Nidobeato (Firenze: Olschki 2004), 17–19. Cf. Francesco da Buti ad Inferno XXXII 82–96: “come scrive messer Guido della Colonna nel suo trattato, anzi Troiano.” Francesco da Buti, ad. If. V 65–66. Guido da Pisa, Expositiones et Glose super Comediam Dantis or Commentary on Dante’s Inferno, ed. Vincenzo Cioffari (Albany: State University of New York Press 1974), ad Inferno V 65–66, 110–11. Benvenuto da Imola, ad Inferno V 65–66: “Hic autor, nominatis primo mulieribus, in quibus magis viget luxuria, nunc nominat aliquot viros, et primo virum fortissimum Grecorum, scilicet Achillem, quem autor describit ab interitu suo, quia mortuus est propter amorem. Iste enim stupravit Deydamiam, rapuit Briseidem, et ultimo captus amore Polissenae filiae Priami, fuit sagittatus a Paride furtive; . . . Dicunt etiam aliqui quod Achilles amavit Patroclum inhoneste, quod est falsum, quia tunc poneretur alibi, ubi punitur luxuria innaturalis inter flammas.” (“Here the author, after naming some women, in which lust is more powerful, now names some men, and first of all the strongest among the Greeks, Achilles, that the author describes based on his death, since he died because of love. Achilles in fact raped Deidamia, kidnapped Briseis and at last, enamoured of Polyxena, daughter of Priam, was surreptitiously killed by Paris’ arrows. . . . Others say that Achilles loved Patroclus of a shameful love, which is false, because then he would be punished elsewhere, where unnatural lust is punished among the flames.”) On Petrarch’s collaboration in the making of Parisinus Latinus 5690, cf. Giuseppe Billanovich, Itinera: Vicende di libri e di testi, ed. Mariarosa Cortesi (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2004), vol. I, chap. IV: “La biblio-

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74. 75. 76. 77.

78.

79. 80. 81.

82.

83.

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teca papale,” 238. Cf. ibid., chap. I: “Petrarch and the Textual Tradition of Livy,” 1–101, at 33. Cf. Francesco Petrarch, Le postille del Virgilio Ambrosiano, ed. Marco Baglio et al. (Padova: Antenore, 2006), II, 916–17. Francesco Petrarch, Triumphus Fame, IIa, 107–11, in Petrarch, Trionfi, rime estravaganti, codice degli abbozzi, ed. Vinicio Pacca and Laura Paolino (Milano: Mondadori 1996), 622. Francesco Petrarch, Triumphus Cupidinis I, 124–26; in Trionfi, rime estravaganti, codice degli abbozzi, 82. On the Filostrato within the European tradition on Troilus, see Piero Boitani, ed., The European Tragedy of Troilus (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1989). On Boccaccio’s sources see Manlio Pastore-Stocchi, “Il primo Omero del Boccaccio,” Studi sul Boccaccio 5 (1969): 99–122; Maria Gozzi, “Sulle fonti del Filostrato: Le narrazioni di argomento troiano,” Studi sul Boccaccio 5 (1969): 123–210. Cf. Boccaccio, Genealogie deorum gentilium I.9 on Dictys; in chapter XII (“De Menelao Phystenis filio, qui genuit Hermionam et Megapentim”) Boccaccio compares Dictys’s and Dares’ versions with Homer’s on the topics of the rape of Helen, Menelaus’s descendants, and the fate of Agamemnon. Boccaccio also personally transcribed a large fragment of one of the texts derived from Dares: Joseph of Exeter’s Ylias. Ioseph Iscanus was an Englishman living in Reims in the second half of the seventh century. His poem, full of classical reminiscences, programatically appropriates Dares’ narrative against Homer and Virgil (cf. Punzi, “La circolazione della materia troiana”). There is no reference for example in Esposizioni XV 8–10, where Antenor’s founding of Padua is entirely based on Virgil and Livy, with no mention of the hero’s proditio of Troy. Giovanni Boccaccio, Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante, ed. Giorgio Padoan, in Boccaccio, Tutte le opere, vol. 6, ed. Vittore Branca (Milano: Mondadori 1965), 309. Loschi’s Achilles dates before 1390: cf. Paolo Viti, “Loschi, Antonio,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Roma: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia italiana, 2006), 66:154–60. For the text of the Achilles, see Jean-Frédéric Chevalier, ed. and trans., Trois Tragédies Latines Humanistes, Achilles Antonio Loschi, Progne Gregorio Correr, Hiensal Leonardo Dati (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2010). On the Achilles see Guido Paduano, “La prototragedia e le categorie del discorso drammatico,” in La rinascita della tragedia nell’Italia dell’Umanesimo (Centro di Studi sul teatro medioevale e rinascimentale, Viterbo: Union Printing, 1980), 99–118. Lodovico Dolce, L’Achille et l’Enea di Messer Lodovico Dolce, dove egli tessendo l’historia della Iliade d’Homero a quella dell’Eneide di Virgilio, ambedue l’ha divinamente ridotte in ottava rima (Venezia: appresso Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1522); cf. the argomento to canto XXVI, p. 249: “Dopo l’essequie, e dopo i giochi fatti / In honor di Patroclo, il Re Troiano / D’Ettor riceve il corpo, e dare a patti / La terra vuole a’ suoi nimici in mano: / Lo dissuade Pari, et ha gia fatti/ I disegni d’uccider l’inhumano / Achille, il qual per Polissena a volo / Entra in un Tempio, e disarmato e solo.” Scipione Errico, Della guerra troiana, in Messina, Nella Stamperia Camerale, Per la Vedova di Bianco, con L’Allegoria universale ed argomenti in ottava rima a ciascun canto di Antonino Gotho 1640, canto I, 1–2. For biographical notes and bibliography on this still neglected author cf. Rosario Contarino, “Errico,

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84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

92. 93. 94. 95.

Medievalia et Humanistica Scipione,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Roma: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1993), 43:261–64; and Daniela Foltran, “Calliope ed Erato: stile e struttura nella Babilonia distrutta di Scipione Errico,” Schifanoia 26–27 (2004): 39–99. Notes on “Della guerra troiana” in Scipione Errico, Le guerre di Parnaso, ed. Gino Rizzo (Lecce: Argo 2004); on Errico as an anti-Sarpi essayist see Hubert Jedin, Das Konzil von Trient (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura 1948), 116. Dante, Monarchia II iii 6, trans. Aurelia Henry (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904), 79. Inferno II. 13–24. Cf. Inglese ad loc. Convivio IV v 6, trans. Ph. H. Wickstool (London: J. M. Dent, 1903), 247. Dante’s modification of his sources’ chronology (Jerome, Isidorus, Vincent of Beauvais) is arbitrary and due to ideological reasons. Paul Renucci, Dante disciple et juge du monde Gréco-Latin (Paris: Les Belles Lettres 1954), 247ff.: “La nouvelle Iliade” (248). Cf. Inglese, Storia e Comedìa: Enea, 124. Renucci, Dante disciple et juge, 247ff. Francesco da Buti, Ad Purg. XII, 62–63. “Nam si a prima scintillula huius ignis revolvamus preterita, ex quo scilicet Argis hospitalitas est a Frigibus denegata . . .” (“In fact if we look back at the first little spark of this fire, that is the fact that the Greeks were denied shelter by the Phrygians . . .”) Dante, Epistole, V, 24; in Opere minori, ed. Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo et al. (Napoli: Ricciardi, 1979), book 2, 546. On this question cf. John A. Scott, “Canto XII,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: “Purgatorio,” ed. Georges Güntert et al. (Firenze: Cesati 2001), 173–97, at 182–83. Servius, Ad Aen. I.619, briefly mentions Laomedon’s offense to Hercules and the latter’s subsequent revenge. Servius, Ad Aen. III.3. Brunetto Latini, Tresor, 61: “Dou regne de Troie.” It is true, as Scott points out, that Virgil mentions Laomedon’s ‘periuria’ and that in the Aeneid it is made clear that all of his descendants will be punished for these ‘periuria.’ However, it is undeniable that in the Aeneid the fall of Troy is eminently immerita.

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The Art of Clerkly Love: Drouart la Vache Translates Andreas Capellanus LUCAS WOOD

Abstract Within the frame of a largely faithful Old French verse adaptation of Andreas Capellanus’s treatise De amore, Li Livres d’Amours (1290) by Drouart la Vache uses the processes of translation and textual emendation to reorient its source’s ironic and at times highly critical account of love. Identifying the authoritative magister amoris with the lover, Drouart affirms the value and probity of love as a way of life, but redefines the love in question as “amour pure”: a virtuously chaste, though still erotic, passion associated by Drouart with the traditionally suspect figure of the amorous clerk, whom the translator vindicates and glorifies. Although Drouart’s play to make love compatible with clerks’ religious vocation is not entirely unproblematic, it marks an important turn in De amore’s reception history toward an attempt to harmonize Christian morality with the profane ethics of refined love.

Over the course of the last few decades, Andreas Capellanus and his famous treatise on love have become increasingly difficult to read, which is probably a good thing. Once routinely cited as a codification of the ideological principles informing the vernacular literature of “courtly love,” Andreas’s late twelfth-century or early thirteenth-century Latin De amore1 is now recognized to be, for better or for worse, something far more challenging. The work’s theory of love is at least highly original and perhaps sui generis, if indeed any coherent theory or ideology of love, “courtly” or otherwise, can be distilled from it. Elliptical, internally heterogeneous, and often self-contradictory, its discourse splinters into the voices of proliferating fictional interlocutors and an ambiguously multifaceted authorfigure who can neither unify nor authorize the doctrines expounded in Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 40 (Reinhold F. Glei and Wolfgang Polleichtner, eds.), Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

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the text. In his various personae, “Andreas” praises, blames, and pragmatically analyzes human desire and its slippery language, constructing and deconstructing models of erotic relations and their rhetoric in ways that indefinitely defer hermeneutic and moral certainty. Especially disconcerting is the about-face executed in book III of De amore, which vituperatively and misogynistically condemns the love described and to some extent vindicated in the first two books.2 The text’s provocative discrepancies lead most critics to adopt at least one of two basic defensive postures: either the work is a fascinating but disjointed summa or “jumble of sentiments explaining, defining, arguing about . . . refined love”3 in the Latin and vernacular traditions, or it is wholly or partly ironic, “ludic,” or “comic.”4 In its various versions, the popular thesis of partial irony disciplines the unruly text by identifying one strand of its argumentation as a master discourse that undermines or invalidates the other. A third possibility is that De amore is really a metadiscursive reflection on amatory fictions5 or even a subversive critique of all “sacred and secular institutions (the authorities that conscript desire, erotic or otherwise) and the [social and discursive] mechanisms that create and maintain them.”6 In the absence of conclusive reasons to discount any of these readings, it is extremely difficult to establish what Andreas really thinks about whether, how, and by whom the game of love ought to be played. If the questions posed by Andreas’s text remain unresolved, this mosaic of interpretive perspectives suggests that reading De amore may always, to a greater or lesser degree, involve rewriting it, synthesizing its apparent contradictions to produce a serviceable ethics. Indeed, not only critics but also “the many [medieval] copies, translations, and imitations of the text respond to its provocative structure in multiple ways, each of which remakes the De amore and in a very material sense answers its quaestio” concerning the nature and value of love.7 It is therefore surprising that Drouart la Vache, who produced the first more or less complete vernacular translation of De amore in 1290,8 continues to be so grudgingly credited as a critical reader of his source. Drouart’s Livres d’Amours (or, in its explicit, Li Roumans d’Amours)9 capably transposes Andreas’s Latin prose into Old French octosyllabic couplets that can and often do convey the sense of the original despite the constraints of meter and rhyme. However, Drouart deliberately reshapes his material in various ways, starting with the suppression of all references to De amore, Andreas Capellanus (both author and character), and the Latin text’s inscribed addressee, Gualterius (or Gualterus). The translator abridges De amore’s book III and the lengthy dialogues of book I, omits both of Andreas’s courtly exempla, and replaces the original preface and conclusion with new ones of his own, as well as deleting, modifying,

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displacing, and adding other short passages. Drouart’s attitude toward his source clearly situates the Livres d’Amours within the “mixed genre of recasting/adaptation/translation”10 frequently used by medieval writers to simultaneously transmit and appropriate older texts, adapting them to new cultural contexts, literary tastes, and ideological ends. Some attention has been paid to Drouart la Vache as a modernizer of De amore, but the translator-remanieur’s relationship with the academy has been inauspicious from the start. Li Livres d’Amours was no sooner identified by Gaston Paris in 1884 than summarily condemned by the eminent medievalist as “médiocre,” distinguished by “aucun trait ajouté à l’original et qui ait de l’intérêt pour les mœurs et les idées de l’époque où vivait le traducteur.”11 Although Robert Bossuat’s 1926 edition and study of the poem demonstrate that it does substantially refashion its source text, Bossuat portrays Drouart as a workmanlike adaptor, responsive to the literary vogues of his day and to the tastes of a late thirteenthcentury “public moyen” seeking entertainment over edification, but still undoubtedly mediocre.12 This portrait of the versifier as a vulgarizer persists in representations of Drouart as a frivolous amateur, a derivative trivializer either of the noble and subtle doctrine of courtly love or, for more recent critics, of Andreas’s enigmatic rhetorical and ethical gambits. Correspondingly, the Livres d’Amours is generally held to be at best an adaptation with no systematic agenda beyond an aspiration to increased accessibility, concision, and consistency,13 or at worst a product of self-conscious epigonism without a raison d’être, half-heartedly papering over “l’absolue gratuité de son entreprise”14—an enterprise undertaken, just as an uncomprehending Drouart is imagined enjoying De amore, “primarily for the laughs it provides.”15 There can be little doubt that an important aim of the Livres d’Amours is to recast De amore in a form both more accessible and more agreeable to a late thirteenth-century francophone audience or that this involves identifying and attempting to eliminate or downplay the internal contradictions of Andreas’s text so as to render it more univocally didactic (and, concomitantly, more favorable to the love it teaches). Within the frame of this general project, however, the Livres d’Amours undertakes a much more complex engagement with De amore and with the questions it raises concerning the nature, value, and proper practice of love. Conflating the persona of the authoritative magister amoris with that of the lover, Drouart figures his (re)writing of the treatise as a form of love service. Accordingly, he distances himself from the misogynistic and anti-erotic discourses in De amore, but not in order to endorse a simplistic, positive view of love reductively gleaned from the first part of the Latin text. Where Andreas ironically juxtaposes condemnations

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of love with neutral and positive portrayals of it, Drouart translates book III’s anti-erotic palinode as a critique of carnal lust that complements, rather than contradicting, his overarching advocacy of an ideal of “pure”—that is, chaste, albeit still sexual and not spiritual—love adapted from one of De amore’s dialogues. In Drouart’s hands, the concept of “pure love” vindicates not only profane love but also the vulnerable figure of the amorous clerk, the bilingual man of letters whose mastery of erotic theory and practice, the author argues, is compatible with his moral obligations as a man of God. If a new self-contradictory textuality arises along with the logic that turns the Livres d’Amours into a manual of and manifesto for, not “courtly,” but clerkly love, Drouart is content to leave his claims suspended in a realm of pleasurable indecision, protected by the atmosphere of enjoyment—of writing, of reading, of love—that, as much as its didactic content and indissociably from it, his translation exists to convey.

I. Teaching Like a Lover The enduring image of Drouart as a fatuously chuckling vulgarizer derives from the translator’s 105-line prologue to the Livres d’Amours. The poet describes his first encounter with De amore in the context of a presumably fictional outing to the countryside undertaken “por esbanoier” (“for recreation,” v. 31) with a friend. Upon the pleasure-seekers’ return from their rural locus amoenus, they drop in on a powerful acquaintance who shows them a wonderful Latin book, to Drouart’s great delight: Quant je l’oi veü et il en ot .I. poi leü, la matere trop durement me plot, sachiez, certainement, tant, que j’en commençai a rire. (vv. 47–51) [When I had seen it / and he had read a little of it, / the subject so greatly / pleased me, you see, without a doubt, / that I began to laugh.]

Sargent correctly contends that Drouart’s rire indicates enjoyment and approval rather than a perception of Andreas’s book as humorous or patently ironic.16 Still, the terms in which the volume’s owner then requests a French translation do suggest that the text delights at least as much as it instructs: Compainz, je vous pri et commans que le translatés en rommans, si ferez trop grant cortoisie, car la matere est renvoisie et assés de biaus mos i a.

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The Art of Clerkly Love: Drouart la Vache Translates Andreas Capellanus 117 [Friend, I pray and enjoin you / to translate it into the vernacular; / it would be a deed of great courtesy, / for the subject is a joyful one, / and it is full of fair words.]

Drouart has previously admitted to taking immediate, irrepressible pleasure in the craft of poetry for its own sake. He confesses in his first few lines that J’ai si apris a rymoier, que je ne m’en puis chastoier por nul home qui m’en repregne; encor weil je, aveigne qu’aveigne, tranlater en françois .I. livre, qui enseigne comment doit vivre cil qui veut amours maintenir. (vv. 1–7) [I have so learned to rhyme / that now I can’t help doing it, / whoever might reproach me for it; / come what may, I want / to translate into French a book / that teaches how a man should live / if he wants to uphold the ways of love.]

The desire to translate and the pleasure of the text seem to precede and exceed any interest in the particular work chosen to be rimoié, and the appeal of the livre itself is subsequently articulated as aesthetic rather than intellectual or moral. Neither endorsing nor reproving love as a lifestyle in absolute terms, Drouart simply indicates that those amorously inclined will find useful advice in the text. If “amours maintenir” is to be taken in a broad sense as not just sustaining existing love (the topic of Andreas’s book II) but adopting love as a way of life, then the translator apparently sees in Andreas’s treatise nothing other than a comprehensive, straightforward user’s manual to erotic life. This is indeed how Andreas describes his own work in his preface and accessus to his book I, even though such a characterization glosses over the inconclusiveness of Andreas’s “instructive” model seduction dialogues and ignores the anti-erotic vitriol introduced in book III. But is Drouart really so inattentive or willfully reductive an interpreter of his source? For all its lighthearted tone, his prologue hints that the book’s contents may be no laughing matere after all. Later on, Drouart will not scruple to take credit for the text’s wisdom, transferring the authority of Andreas Capellanus onto his own authorial persona and often speaking directly to the reader in the first person. His vague, fictional-sounding account of the poem’s genesis invites an uninformed reader to dismiss the frame narrative and putative Latin source as literary topoi. Toward the end of the prologue, however, the usually bold remanieur takes refuge behind the mask of the servile translator. He is, he says, personally responsible for the quality of his French verse, Mais, se vos parole i oez, qui soit digne d’estre reprise,

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je m’en met en vostre franchise et en vostre correction, car je n’ai pas entencion de dire nule vilonie. Et s’il avient que je li die, por ce qu’elle a mon livre affiere, prenez vous en a la matiere, non pas a moi qui l’arai dite. (vv. 92–101) [But, if you hear anything in it / that deserves reproach, / I rely on your generosity of spirit / and submit myself to your correction, / for I do not intend / to say anything rude or shameful, / and if it happens that I do say such a thing / because it is relevant to my book, / take issue with the subject matter, not with me who says the words.]

What is it in the text that Drouart deems so potentially offensive? Drouart would not be the first reader to view parts of De amore with suspicion. The treatise was famously one of only two books cited by name in Bishop Étienne Tempier’s Paris condemnation of 1277, which indicates that someone found it to be morally or doctrinally unacceptable.17 However, Drouart’s preemptive apology says nothing about Christian dogma or about the sinful nature of love, although it is noteworthy that he sets his pleasure-jaunt—apparently undertaken “par grant devocion” (“out of great piety,” v. 30)—on the Sunday after the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross and expresses, albeit tersely, the hope that God will look favorably upon his work: “Or doint Diex que ma rime plaise / a lui, s’en serai plus aayse” (“May God grant that my rhymes should please him, which will please me all the more,” vv. 77–78). What Drouart apologizes for is neither immorality nor heresy, but rather vilonie, a term that also appears twenty-five lines earlier in the context of yet another justification for his translation project. This final reason is not religious, but evidently courtly: A ce me muet meësmement cele qui j’aimme entierement et amerai toute ma vie, sans penser nule vilonie; et se je pooie tant faire que mes rimes peüssent plaire a ma tres douce chiere amie, bien seroit ma rime emploïe. (vv. 69–76) [To this end I am also moved / by her whom I love unreservedly / and will love all my life / without a shameful thought; / and if I could succeed / in pleasing, with my rhymes, / my dear, most sweet beloved, / my rhymes would truly be well used.]

In the context of vernacular love literature, vilonie is a catch-all term for transgressions against the rules of polite amorous conduct. Drouart is therefore anything but a disinterested, let alone uninterested, transla-

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tor of De amore. He endorses the practice of “amours maintenir” and is ostensibly himself a lover operating within the “courtly” system and worried about offending his lady by reproducing Andreas’s rather cynical vision of erotic relations. The fact that Drouart’s beloved is probably a poetic fiction is irrelevant, or rather, highly relevant insofar as the poet is deliberately constructing his inscribed translator-cum-author-figure as an active lover even if, as he insists, “je n’ai pas entencion / de parler ausi com amerres, / ains weil parler com enseignerres” (“I do not intend to speak like a lover; rather, I want to speak as a teacher,” vv. 134–36). In Andreas’s preface, by contrast, the magister has no need to switch personae in order to speak as a teacher rather than a lover. On the contrary, the teacher claims that “dwelling on [erotic] topics seems hardly advisable, and . . . the man of sense shows impropriety in making time for such hunting as this” (“non multum videatur expediens huiusmodi rebus insistere, nec deceat quemquam prudentem huiusmodi vacare venatibus”).18 Accordingly, he grants Gualterius’s importunate request for information about love only out of friendship and in order to help the young man endure and eventually escape his infatuation. The master mentions his personal experience of “Venus’s slavery” (“Veneris . . . servituti,” DA 0.3) but situates it firmly in the past as a source of hard-won knowledge of love’s joys and especially pains that reinforces his authority as a wise and cynical Ovidian magister amoris.19 Where lovers or potential lovers are made to speak in the dialogues of book I, their non-authorial voices are demarcated from the magister’s commentary, and their nonauthoritative, contradictory propositions are implicitly ironized. Andreas’s magisterial discourse about love is thus not conflated with the discourse of an active lover. Drouart, however, distinguishes his project from Andreas’s by gratuitously identifying himself as a lover and thus as the paradigmatic addressee of the instruction he will purvey. He even replaces the smitten Gualterius’s plea for advice with the powerful patron’s commission as the pretext for the production of the Livres d’Amours so as to appropriate unchallenged the role of amerres. In figuring himself as an author-lover, Drouart reframes Andreas’s Latin treatise to resemble more closely the model of vernacular arts d’aimer popularized in the thirteenth century by Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la Rose. By identifying himself as author-figure with the questing lover, “Guillaume assures at once the unity and sincerity of the poem.”20 However, like Guillaume’s continuator—and Drouart la Vache’s near-contemporary and literary influence—Jean de Meun,21 Drouart finds it necessary to reintroduce a distinction between the lover and the magister, probably for some of the same reasons. By stepping outside the persona of the lover,22 Jean de Meun liberates his discourse

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from the constraints imposed on a sworn servant of love. He opens up his text to the consideration of various arguments for, against, and around love and allows himself to engage precisely in what many medieval readers grasped as vilonie—notably by putting coilles in the mouth of Reason.23 But Drouart does not go as far as Jean in separating his two personae. Jean de Mean shows his reader that he speaks as a scholar rather than a lover even when he speaks like a lover in order to ventriloquize the fictionalized character of Guillaume/Amant, just as the magister Andreas animates the puppet suitors and ladies of his dialogues. Drouart, on the other hand, continues to speak as a lover even if, adopting a suitably didactic tone, he does not explicitly speak like one,24 and he is aware that this obligation may be problematic given the nature of the text he is about to translate. This is the first sign of the subtle but systematic rewriting to which Drouart will subject the text and ideology (or ideologies, or lack thereof) of Andreas’s treatise. How, then, should an amerres who is also an enseignerres properly talk about love? He ought to avoid vilonie, as we have seen, but Drouart elaborates further on what he as a lover-teacher finds troublesome about Andreas’s text: Se je avoie Amour descrite au plus bel que je saveroie, plus legierement parleroie, si com moi samble, de ses mours.

(vv. 102–5)

[If I had described love / as well as I knew how, / I would have spoken more gently, / it seems to me, of its ways.]

Drouart registers discomfort with something about Andreas’s treatment of love that persists in his own Livres d’Amours, but it is unclear just what adjustments would be involved in describing love’s mores “plus legierement.” The intrinsic desirability of a writing that might be called legier— “light” in the sense of pleasant, adroit, capricious, frivolous, or even imprudent—is hardly obvious in a piece of didactic literature. Sargent suggests that Drouart is complaining about Andreas’s overly serious or stylistically heavy-handed treatment of his subject.25 However, following as it does directly upon Drouart’s request that disgruntled readers should address their complaints to the matiere rather than to the messenger since he himself intends no vilonie, it seems more plausible that the translator’s disclaimer takes issue with a different aspect of the ungentle tone and content of Andreas’s portrayal of love’s “mours”: the harsh condemnation of love as physically, emotionally, socially, and spiritually destructive that dominates book III. Drouart wishes that De amore’s conclusion had come down more “lightly” on love and on women, whose

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hyperbolic vilification is certainly an example of the vilonie Drouart claims to eschew for the sake of his own beloved. That Drouart perceives and disapproves of a sincere denunciation of love at the end of Andreas’s text is attested by his substantial reworking of book III and especially of its conclusion. After cataloguing love’s many pernicious effects, Andreas acknowledges that although he opposed the amorous life from the beginning on practical grounds, his book presents “two differing views” (“duplicem sententiam”):26 first, the art of love requested by Gualterius, which allows its practitioner to obtain “all bodily pleasures” (“omnes corporis voluptates”) accompanied by suffering in both this life and the next, and, second, appended on Andreas’s own initiative, the reasons why the young man ought to “beware of carrying out Love’s commands” lest “the sudden arrival of the Bridegroom” find him “asleep in sins” (“Cave . . . amoris exercere mandata . . . ne in peccatis dormiendo te inveniat sponsi repentinus adventus,” DA 3.117–21). There is no internal indication that this passage is insincere, and the overarching condemnation of erotic love when it is (re)placed in a soteriological context is compatible with the statements of Andreas’s author-figure.27 Of course, as in Jean de Meun’s Rose, many implicit questions remain regarding the overall real or intended effect that study of the whole text may have on the reader.28 Nevertheless, “Andreas” explicitly stands behind the anti-courtly and Christian messages of book III and disavows any unconditional valorization of earthly love that might be derived from books I and II, and Drouart seems to have taken him at his word. In response, the Livres d’Amours replaces De amore’s conclusion with a new epilogue that attempts to avoid ideological inconsistency by qualifying overly categorical statements instead of repudiating any of them wholesale. Drouart again apologizes for anything offensive in the text, this time suppressing any mention of another author and instead asking the generous reader, “s’il trueve que g’i aie mise / chose qui doie estre reprise, / qu’il m’escuse courtoisement” (“if he should find that I have included anything worthy of reproach, to grant me his courteous pardon,” vv. 7559–61)—the adverb courtoisement reinforces the impression that what might be found reprehensible is anti-courtly vilonie—since it would be virtually impossible to execute such a long and intricate work without erring on a few points. Misogyny, however, is a charge of which Drouart’s version at least should be acquitted, since he meant to criticize only bad women: Après ce que j’ai dit des dames, vous devez des mauvaises fames entendre, qui sont diffamees; . . . car omques n’oi entencion

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que je des bonnes mesdeïsse, qu’il n’est chose que ne feïsse por les bonnes, se je savoie qu’elles dou faire eüssent joie. (vv. 7533–46) [But what I have said about women / applies, you must understand, only to / bad women, who are the ones maligned; / . . . because I never intended / to speak ill of good women, / for there is nothing I would not do / for the good ones, if I knew / the deed would bring them joy.]

Where good women are concerned, book III’s critiques of women and, by extension, of love do not hold. The “bonnes dames et glorieuses” are accordingly encouraged to “maintenir bonne amour pure” (“good and glorious ladies . . . uphold good, pure love,” vv. 7537–40).29 A similar distinction between virtuous and vicious women followed by a panegyric on the excellence of the former occurs, and is translated by Drouart, at the end of Andreas’s chapter vituperating gold diggers (DA 1.9.19–20). Andreas’s hyperbolic praise of honorable women is partly overshadowed, however, by the blistering invective against duplicitous “leeches” and “scorpions” that precedes it, especially given that his distinction between deceitful and honest women is caught in what Moi calls “a particularly unpleasant paradox”: the deceitful woman is cleverer even than the devil, to the point that her guile is virtually undetectable, so that a wise man ought really to mistrust his own powers of discernment and avoid women altogether.30 Drouart’s conclusion, on the other hand, defends good women and good love unequivocally and apparently sincerely, perhaps espousing the precept, advanced by the noblewoman in Andreas’s third dialogue, that the lover “a toutes fames doit servir, / por amour d’une deservir” (“should serve all women so as to deserve the love of one,” vv. 2201–2; cf. DA 1.6.155). As Karnein has pointed out, it is possible that Drouart found a version of his self-exculpatory stratagem in his Latin manuscript source, since Johann Hartlieb’s German translation of De amore (ca. 1440) ends with a strikingly similar gesture.31 On the other hand, the two translators’ circumscriptions of their source’s misogyny differ in their precise content and wording. Hartlieb is interested primarily in assuring virtuous noblewomen—probably an important segment of his audience at the court of Albert IV of Austria—that he (or rather “Ovidius”) loves and honors them and means to vilify, as he repeats three times, only women who sell their love for money. In other words, Hartlieb elaborately vindicates good women, not good love, which he mentions only to stress the difference between devious gold diggers and “pure, honorable” (“rain, erbern”) ladies, whose “wholesome love” (“hailsam lieb”) is desirable because freely given.32 Moreover, he does little more than recall and reiter-

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ate the distinction made by Andreas himself following the tirade against mercenary women in De amore 1.9. Hartlieb makes no mention here of the contrast between “pure” and “mixed” love (“lautter lieb” vs. “gemischt” or “gemengt lieb” in Hartlieb’s German)33 introduced in Andreas’s eighth dialogue and appropriated, as we shall see momentarily, as the central component of Drouart’s closing defense of love. Thus, whether Hartlieb and Drouart adapted similar concluding passages from their source manuscripts or simply responded independently to the problem of book III in ways inspired by parts of Andreas’s book I, nothing proves that the specific form of Drouart’s conclusion does not originate with him, let alone that it “n’est pas caractéristique de la façon dont Drouart comprend le traité [d’André].”34 On the contrary, the translator’s epilogue is one indication that, in his role as a remanieur whose literary endeavor constitutes an act of “grant cortoisie” (“great courtesy,” v. 55), Drouart renders a literary service both to virtuous ladies and to an ideal of courteous love that goes far beyond wishful thinking about how Andreas might have softened his critique of them. In addition to eliminating Andreas’s ultimate repudiation of love, Drouart reduces book III’s misogynistic arguments for avoiding love to a single short subchapter in which De amore’s constant, hyperbolic attacks on “every woman . . . without exception” (“mulier omnis . . . sine omni exceptione,” DA 3.73–74) are replaced by more vaguely categorical statements about “fame” or “la feme.” (By contrast, Hartlieb sets book III off from the rest of De amore as a separate treatise in its own right.) More significant, however, is the way Drouart qualifies the sweeping attack on love seemingly contained even in his abbreviated version of Andreas’s book De reprobatione amoris. At the beginning of book III, Andreas prepares for his concluding argument by telling Gualterius to read the foregoing treatise only for recreation and so that, knowing how to seduce women, he can get greater credit for refraining from doing so.35 Love may be enjoyable, but only a mad wretch would trade eternal bliss for the “momentary pleasure of the flesh” (“momentanea carnis delectatione gaudia”) followed by the hellfire reserved for “those whom He sees committed to Venus’ tasks” (“quos . . . agnoscit Veneris operibus obligari,” DA 3.4–5). Drouart paraphrases most of this material very faithfully, ultimately getting just as agitated as Andreas about the folly of ceulz qui, par costume, as oevres luxure s’aerdent, par qoy Dieu et Paradis perdent! Las! com je sui dolans por eus! Las! com cil est maleüreus et plus que beste, non mie hom,

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qui, pour la delectacion de la char qui plaine est d’ordure et qui par .I. seul moment dure, au feu d’Enfer se rent et loie. (vv. 6630–39) [those who customarily / burn themselves in the labors of lust, / thereby losing God and Paradise! / Alas! How I lament for them! / Alas! How unhappy is the man, / nay, no man at all, but worse than a beast, / who, for the pleasure / of the flesh, which is full of filth / and lasts only a single moment, / consigns himself to the fire of Hell.]

However, he tempers Andreas’s repudiation of the parts of the poem favorable to love, remarking simply that after having spoken “d’Amours / cortoisement et de ses mours” (“courteously of love and its ways,” vv. 6573–74), he will now explain why the reader ought, for his soul’s sake, to shun “d’Amours la vie, / qui n’est pas bonne ne honeste” (“the life of love, which is neither good nor righteous,” vv. 6590–92). This phrase may appear to translate Andreas’s negative sentiments about love in general, but it can also be read as singling out erotic immorality for censure instead of disparaging love per se. The latter reading is the one Drouart goes on to endorse in his epilogue. Just as his criticism of reprehensible women did not apply to good ladies, he says, there are good and bad kinds of love. “Ou je vous ai amour blamee, / j’enten d’amour qui est mellee” (“Where I have condemned love to you, I mean mixed love,” vv. 7531–32), which is to be avoided; on the other hand, good ladies (and presumably gentlemen) should “mestre lor cure / a maintenir bonne amour pure, / par loial delectacion” (“strive to uphold good, pure love in loyal/licit delight,” vv. 7539–41). The polyvalent adjective loial connects fidelity in love, a key value within the ethical paradigm of fin’amors, to the more generally honorable or licit character of love’s delight. The enseignerres is still speaking as an amerres after all.

II. “Double Amour” Drouart’s epilogue thus flatly contradicts Andreas’s own conclusion.36 It does not, however, mean that Drouart rejects the overtly Christian frame of Andreas’s book III while buying into a coherent doctrine of “courtly love” (or any other kind of love) supposedly set forth by Andreas in books I and II, as Sargent seems to think. Nor does it suggest simply that “Drouart called [Andreas’s] work cupidinous, and in his paraphrase it is so.”37 Drouart deliberately endorses a synthesis of his own making, one foreshadowed in his prologue and cultivated in both his abridgment of book III and his remaniement of the dialogues in book I. This synthesis is based on a reinterpretation and authorization of the

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contrast between amour pure and amour mellee to which Drouart refers in the epilogue. These terms are introduced in Andreas’s eighth dialogue by a male speaker who distinguishes pure love, amor purus, from mixed or compounded love, amor mixtus: There is such a thing as chaste love, and what is called compounded love. Pure love is that which joins the hearts of two lovers with universal feelings of affection. It embraces the contemplation of the mind and the feeling of the heart. It goes as far as kissing on the mouth, embracing with the arms, and chaste contact with the unclothed lover, but the final consolation is avoided, for this practice is not permitted for those who wish to love chastely. . . . This love is recognised as having such virtue that the source of all moral worth derives from it, and no injustice springs from it. God sees in it only a minor offence. . . . This is the love, then, that I espouse, follow, continually venerate, and pressingly demand of you. By compounded love is meant that which affords its outlet to every pleasure of the flesh, ending in the final act of love. (DA 1.6.470–73)38 [amor quidam est purus, et quidam dicitur esse mixtus. Et purus quidem amor est, qui omnimoda dilectionis affectione duorum amantium corda coniungit. Hic autem in mentis contemplatione cordisque consistit affectu; procedit autem usque ad oris osculum lacertique amplexum et verecundum amantis nudae contactum, extremo praetermisso solatio; nam illud pure amare volentibus exercere non licet. . . . Amor iste tantae dignoscitur esse virtutis quod ex eo totius probitatis origo descendit, et nulla inde procedit iniuria, et modicam in ipso Deus recognoscit offensam. . . . Hunc ergo colo amorem, hunc sequor et semper adoro et instanter vobis postulare non cesso. Mixtus vero amor dicitur ille, qui omni carnis delectationi suum praestat effectum et in extremo Veneris opere terminatur.]

Unlike pure love, mixed love can have negative consequences—the man’s quick overview of these refers back to the lady’s comments on the subject (DA 1.6.411–12) and forward to book III—but it is not intrinsically bad, and although pure love is of course preferable, to an important extent they overlap.39 Mixed love, too, is “a love which is true and merits praise, and is said to be the source of all blessings” (“verus est amor atque laudandus et cunctorum esse dicitur origo bonum,” DA 1.6.474). The Livres d’Amours omits almost the entirety of Andreas’s lengthy eighth dialogue, including the discussion of the two kinds of love. However, a translation of the key definitional passage is transposed into a short question-and-answer exchange between a “maistre” and his “deciple” invented by Drouart and appended to an accurate translation of Andreas’s eyebrow-raising chapter “On Loving Nuns” (men ought not seduce nuns, but Andreas himself once barely escaped deflowering one), separated from the vestigial eighth dialogue by another short chapter “On the Love of Clerks.”40 There can exist in this world, the master tells his student, Double amour, ce dois tu savoir. La premiere est pure apelee

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et la seconde amour mellee. Cil qui s’entraiment d’amour pure, dou delit de la char n’ont cure, ains wellent sanz plus acoler et baisier sanz outre couler. Et tele amour est vertueuse, ne n’est a son proime greveuse. De tele amour vient grant proece et Diex gaires ne s’en courece . . . Mais l’amour, qui mellee est dite, ou pechiet de char se dellite Et tele amour, qui n’est pas fine, en l’uevre de luxure fine . . . et Diex en est trop courouciez. (vv. 4084–106) [Two kinds of love, as you must realize. / The first is called “pure” / and the second “mixed love.” / Those who love each other purely / care not for carnal pleasure; / rather, they want only to embrace / and kiss without going any further. / Such love is virtuous / and does not harm one’s neighbors. / From such love comes great prowess / and God is hardly angered by it . . . / But the love that is called “mixed” / delights in carnal sin, / and such love, which is not refined, / tends toward the works of lust . . . / and it greatly angers God.]

Anticipating the endorsement of this line of thinking in the epilogue, the master stresses that differentiating the two kinds of love is the key to understanding “sainement / ma doctrine qui pas ne ment” (“correctly my doctrine, which never lies,” vv. 4107–8). The crux of this doctrine is that while mixed love is forbidden to clerks and nuns and presumably reprehensible in others, pure love, “sans qui nus hom ne puet bien faire, / ne bien govrener son affaire” (“without which no man can act well or properly manage his affairs,” vv. 4119–20), is an absolute good; “de moy deveëe / ne sera a nule personne,” the master affirms, “car, si com j’ai dit, elle est bonne” (“I will not forbid it to anyone, for as I said, it is good,” vv. 4112–14). Although the definitions of the two types of love are very similar in French and Latin, Drouart makes no mention of any “modest” nude contact following upon the pure lovers’ hugs and kisses. This is consistent with his programmatic radicalization of the moral contrast between chaste, pure love and mixed love. For him, the latter is no longer a relatively praiseworthy fusion or continuum of physical and higher passions, but rather a sinful capitulation to luxuria. The elimination of nude contact as a discrete stage of love also brings Drouart’s description closer to the version of the gradus amoris (hoping, kissing, hugging, and finally sex) he translated earlier,41 thus highlighting the revision that turns the fourth stage of the ascent to what was formerly called “bonne amour” (“good love,” v. 1173) into a step off into the abyss. Such a revision may already be foreshadowed in the definition of love that opens

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the Livres d’Amours. In Andreas’s transparently euphemistic formulation, the lover yearns for “the embraces of the other sex, and to achieve the utter fulfilment of the commands of love in the other’s embrace by their common desire” (“alterius potiri amplexibus et omnia de utriusque voluntate in ipsius amplexu amoris præcepta compleri,” DA 1.1.1). Where the famously controversial adaptation of this sentence uttered by Jean de Meun’s personified Reason—whose characterization of love as a maladie finds its way into Drouart’s translation—has the lovers “acoler et . . . baisier, / pour euls charnelment aaisier” (“embrace and . . . kiss in pursuit of carnal pleasure”),42 Drouart’s lover innocently desires “plus l’acoler et le baisier / que lui d’autre chose aaisier” (“embraces and kisses rather than seeking other pleasures,” vv. 145–46). In any case, love without sex, Drouart’s maistre insists, is good for everybody, whereas the only alternative, love for the sole sake of sex, is unconditionally bad.43 Indeed, while Drouart continues to refer to mixed love as a type of amour, it seems doubtful whether it even qualifies as “love” at all. One of Drouart’s rules of love is, after all, that “mestre en amer ne puet sa cure, / qui est plains de trop grant luxure” (“he who is full of excessive lust cannot devote himself to love,” vv. 6561–62), a significantly stronger formulation of Andreas’s rule (really more of an observation) that “the man affected by excessive sensuality is usually not in love” (“Non solet amare quem nimia voluptatis abundantia vexat,” DA 2.8.48). The ambiguity surrounding the term “love” sometimes raises questions in Andreas’s text as well, but Drouart functionalizes it in his translation of book III so as to give credence to his epilogue’s assertion that only mixed love—that is, carnal love—is criticized in the Livres d’Amours.44 Drouart’s reprobatio chapter starts out by explaining that the fact that previous chapters have “loee bonne Amour vraie” (“praised good, true love”) does not mean “que maintenir Amour doiés” (“that you should uphold the ways of love,” vv. 6576–80). Because the French text, unlike the Latin, continues to characterize the love discussed earlier as good and true, this sentence evidently uses the term “amour” in two different senses: bonne Amour vraie, whose well-deserved praise is not retracted, and another, carnal kind of (so-called) love that is really mere luxure. Without explicitly distinguishing amour from baser passions, Drouart inveighs specifically against “cele ordure / que chascuns apele luxure” (“the filth that is called lust,” vv. 6623–24)45 and connects it to “la delectacion / de la char qui plaine est d’ordure” (“the pleasure of the flesh, which is full of filth,” vv. 6636–37), stressing the inherent foulness of Andreas’s more neutral “pleasure of the flesh” (“carnis delectatione gaudia,” DA 3.5). Reproducing a formula used by Andreas, Drouart proceeds to introduce various reasons why “bon fait Amours fuïr” (“it is good to flee love,”

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v. 6751) or “por quoi Amours est deffendue” (“why love is forbidden,” v. 6792). However, these phrases tend to preface morally innocuous negative consequences of human passion. Amours, for example, causes war, strife, adultery, and perjury and makes lovers servile, antisocial, profligate, sickly, lazy, unreasonable, disreputable, and miserable. These are debatable, secular reasons why love might be undesirable, not theologically authoritative proof that it is evil. In the Latin text, they are not differentiated from more powerfully Christian arguments against love, and both types of arguments use amor and other terms like luxuria and delectatio as near-synonyms. When Drouart engages in earnest with the problem of sin, he suppresses the introductory formula referring to love and fulminates specifically against lust. Thus, where Andreas writes that “the sin of love” (“crimen . . . amoris,” DA 3.13) is graver than other crimes because it alone pollutes the soul as well as the body, Drouart proposes that “luxure d’omme ou de fame” is “li plus ors pechiez / qui soit” (“lust in both men and women . . . the foulest sin there is,” vv. 6739– 45). Andreas advises avoiding amor completely on the grounds that since carnal continence is considered a virtue, “sexual indulgence and the pleasure of the flesh” (“luxuria . . . et carnis voluptas,” DA 3.24) must be vices; Drouart substitutes “cele science” (“this science”) for amor, but retains “luxure” (“lust,” v. 6865–69) as the vice in question. And where Andreas’s salvo against fornication produces the general conclusion that “every wickedness is the outcome of love” (“omnia sequantur ex amore nefanda,” DA 3.48), Drouart’s version inserts extra lines condemning sex for pleasure even within marriage but then restricts Andreas’s statement about love’s dire consequences to “tele amour” and “tele vie” (“such love . . . such a life,” vv. 7102–7) before enthusiastically seconding the Latin text’s exhortation to chastity. Throughout his denunciation of “love,” then, Drouart translates Andreas’s Latin so as to leave open the possibility that only unchaste or mixed love is morally reprehensible, while chaste, pure love is exonerated of sinful luxure. This possibility is actualized in the epilogue, where the “loial delectacion” recommended to all “bonnes dames” (“loyal/ licit delight . . . good ladies,” vv. 7537–41) must be contrasted with “la delectacion mauvaise” (“evil pleasure,” v. 7136)—that is, “les delectacions / de la char” (“the pleasures of the flesh,” vv. 7111–12)—which was the subject of the reprobatio. Moreover, if the reversal of Andreas’s negative stance regarding love is bound up with Drouart’s self-appointed role as the champion of cortoisie against vilonie, then the vilonie rejected in the Livres d’Amours includes both ways in which the morality of love can be misapprehended, namely the belief that all forms of love (and all women) are bad and the equally unrefined notion that crude sexual

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love is good, as well as the related idea that love is by definition at least partly carnal—all of which are positions to be found in De amore. This is why Drouart, who represents himself as a lover, could wax dramatic about his pity for (mixed) love’s deluded servants. When he says in the prologue that he loves his lady wholly and for life “sans penser nule vilonie” (“without a shameful thought,” v. 72), he means not only that his love is polite but also and primarily that it does not involve lust or, a fortiori, illicit sex. And this, presumably, is why Drouart thinks that his (re)writing project will please both his lady and God, whom the translator also loves “loyaument” (“loyally”) in this life and hopes eventually to join in heaven (vv. 7591–606). Pleasing everybody, however, is rarely an easy feat. As Andreas’s third rule of love has it, “no one can be bound by two loves” (“nemo duplici potest amore ligari,” DA 2.8.44), and it is unclear that Drouart succeeds in proving him wrong by swearing fealty to both God and Eros. There remains something distinctly troubling about Drouart’s suggestion that the doctrine of pure and mixed love, a “contrast . . . not between heavenly and earthly love, but between two earthly loves,”46 satisfactorily resolves the antagonism between Christian morality and the amorous life. Pure lovers do not have sex, but they do trade erotically charged hugs and kisses, and nothing indicates that their love for each other is somehow sublimated into a form of divine love or universal caritas. Nor can amour pure easily be glossed as a form of “nonlibidinous desire”—in Paulinus of Nola’s expression, “chaste voluptuousness” (casta voluptas)—akin to those analyzed by Jaeger in his wide-ranging study of “ennobling love” in the Middle Ages.47 The nonsexual erotic paradigms reconstructed by Jaeger are modes of politicizing the passions, disciplining mores. Without excluding private emotional experience, they are essentially public and performative ways of loving with important roles in the formation of social identities and relationships, for example at court or in monastic communities. The most coherent models of “ennobling love” are also, not coincidentally, based on ideals of passionate friendship between men. Even after a kind of heterosexual love “asserted its ability to ennoble” in the late eleventh century, “virtue and sex formed a precarious union.” What Jaeger calls “the romantic dilemma” constantly threatened the compatibility of love with morality because sexuality, a natural component even of male-female erotic relationships that aspired or claimed to be chaste, was widely considered to be inherently debasing.48 At both the theoretical and the practical levels, this dilemma certainly haunts Drouart’s advocacy of an apparently private, apolitical, “chaste” heterosexuality whose main benefit to the lovers—aside from the vague suggestions that love increases proece and helps a man “bien

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faire” or “bien govrener son affaire” (“act well . . . properly manage his affairs,” vv. 4119–20)—seems to be the pleasure it provides. To be sure, it is conceivable that the point of chaste love in the Livres d’Amours, as in certain other vernacular treatments, is “to stoke . . . [and] maximize desire so that the victory over it will appear all the greater” in the context of a moral training aimed at acculturating and disciplining instinctual drives.49 If so, however, Drouart is strangely noncommittal about the concrete positive value of this erotic practice, which is constructed almost entirely by negation: it is not mellee, it allows kisses but does not go so far as sexual intercourse, it does not harm one’s neighbor or destroy ladies’ reputations, it hardly arouses God’s wrath. When Drouart insists that pure lovers “wellent sanz plus acoler / et baisier sanz outre couler” and that “dou delit de la char n’ont cure” (“want only to embrace and kiss without going any further . . . they care not for carnal pleasure,” vv. 4088–90), he fails to specify whether their abstinence is spontaneous and natural or, on the contrary, achieved through an effort of moral will. This leaves open the possibility of plotting acts of pure love on a continuum with sex and thus of celebrating for their own sake, under cover of the demonization of a “carnal sin” identified principally with coitus, the venereal pleasures that lie this side of the “final consolation.”50 The opposition of “loial delectacion” to mixed love affirmed in Drouart’s conclusion may thus be less categorical than it seems, especially given that all of the text’s other references to delectacion link it to “la char” and its iniquitous lust.51 A reader of the Livres d’Amours familiar with Andreas’s Latin or with Jean de Meun’s Rose—Nicole de Margival certainly knew all three52—or, for that matter, with real men and women might well recall that hugs and kisses often lead to or transparently metonymize less chaste activities. As Andreas’s noblewoman drily quips in direct response to her interlocutor’s exposition of pure and mixed love, “I am startled that in any person such abstinence of the flesh has been observed. . . . Everyone accounts it a prodigy if a man is placed on a fire and does not burn” (“miror enim si in quoquam tanta sit abstinentia carnis inventa. . . . Monstrosum namque iudicatur a cunctis, si quis in igne positus non uratur,” DA 1.6.476). Indeed, one of the few points on which all three books of De amore agree is that love is inherently immoderatus and the lover “cannot observe moderation” (“nescit habere modum,” DA 3.62).53 Nevertheless, with every opportunity to proclaim that pure love catapults the spirit past the flesh and up to God, or at least to insist on the moral value of inviting carnal temptation so as to overcome it,54 Drouart chooses instead to translate unadorned Andreas’s much more modest, even flimsy vindication of erotic love: “Diex gaires ne s’en courece” (“God is hardly angered by it,” v. 4094).

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III. Clerkly Love Some of the ambiguities in Drouart’s text result, as the prologue suggests, from tensions between the translator’s agenda and that of his matiere, but the more overarching ones are created by Drouart himself. He goes some way toward Christianizing the cynical and worldly-wise Ovidian ideas expressed in De amore, but stops short of moving his account of pure love beyond earthly relations between men and women or expressing the value of such relations in strictly moral terms. At the same time, though, he develops a version of legitimate heterosexual desire not easily mapped onto the secular “courtly” models offered by late twelfthcentury aristocratic culture, troubadour lyric, or chivalric romance. As in earlier thirteenth-century vernacular arts of love, “l’utilisation d’une langue nouvelle, romane et non latine, permet, . . . dans le jeu qui s’instaure entre les modèles convoqués, d’énoncer un discours ni ovidien, ni courtois, ni scolastique.”55 Who, then, is the “pure lover” of Drouart’s Livres d’Amours—and the ideal audience for the delicately balanced doctrine of sustained ambiguity that allows it to keep both of its demanding inscribed readers, God and the poet’s lady, in view? Drouart’s epilogue provides one answer that critics have unanimously found at once entirely plausible and hollowly or even risibly formulaic. The poet declares que j’ai por les clers fait ce livre qui est par raison biaus et gens, et non pas por les laies gens qui sont .I. peu nices et foles, car ou livre a plusors paroles que lai ne porroient entendre, qui les devroit noier ou pendre. Mais li clerc qui i penseront, le livre bien entenderont, car assez i a de delit. (vv. 7548–57) [that I wrote this book, / which is naturally fair and noble, / for clerks and not for laymen, / who are a bit naïve and foolish, / for the book contains some things / that laymen could not understand, / which might get them drowned or hanged. / But clerks who meditate on it / will understand the book aright, / for there is in it much delight.]

Given his command of Latin, the parameters of his evident but unexceptional erudition, his apparent personal acquaintance with Nicole de Margival (who gives him the title of “mestre”), and the overall tone of the Livres d’Amours, the historical Drouart was very probably a member of the secular clergy writing primarily for his peers.56 It is less obvious which difficult paroles the poet might have in mind as being dangerously unintelligible to foolish laymen. We have seen that there is indeed a

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doctrinally dubious current flowing through Drouart’s text, but it would seem to be hidden from the inattentive reader and revealed to the careful one—who might, for example, pay closer attention to Drouart’s manipulation of the multiple meanings of amour—rather than vice versa.57 Certainly the text contains no arcane allegory in need of a sophisticated gloss. Perhaps, then, the exclusion of a lay audience is merely a selfaggrandizing topos, albeit one that sits a bit strangely in the epilogue to a vernacular translation of a widely circulated treatise that educated clerks could presumably consult in the original Latin. If so, the enigma of Drouart’s dangerous paroles might be no mystery after all, just as the epilogue ends by conveying the translator’s name to the reader through a supposedly daunting “Latin” riddle—its solution involves nothing more than assembling, according to clear instructions, the first letter of “Deus,” the first letter of “reus,” the second letter of “dominus,” and so forth—that puzzles nobody who is not truly “plus rudes c’une vache” (“more ignorant than a cow,” v. 7629). But what if the text does need clerkly readers, perhaps less to interpret it than to enjoy its teaching (Drouart links understanding to delight) as its author would wish, to be interpellated by the text and to receive the gift of the delit it encloses? For unlike De amore, the Livres d’Amours does offer something to clerks more than to all others: the privileged persona of the pure lover. At the same time, Drouart develops a model of clerkly identity triangulated between his poem’s multiple ideological and literary poles. Drouart’s term “clerc,” which consistently renders Capellanus’s “clericus,” connotes not only secular bilingual Latin and French erudition, as in vernacular literature from Chrétien de Troyes to the Rose,58 but also an important religious commitment that brings with it definite duties and prerogatives, as in De amore. Nevertheless, like the clerc of courtly-chivalric romance, Drouart’s clerk is favorably disposed to erotic love and to women. His view contrasts in this respect with the theologically determined tradition of clerical misogyny—possibly connected to a fear of emasculation imposed by the “vocational impediment” of consecration to God59—that informs Andreas’s book III, among many other patristic and medieval antifeminist texts.60 These include vernacular and cynically secular works like Jean de Meun’s Rose, which rules out any simple formula for relating the opposed pairs Latin/vernacular, religious/secular, and anti-love/pro-love (or misogynistic/non-misogynistic, which often amounts to the same thing). Still, Drouart’s negotiation of clerkly identity is clearly entangled in the work of translating from Latin “en rommans” (“into the vernacular,” v. 54), and his advocacy of a polite, virtuous love both theorized and practiced by the clerkly class draws on a theme closely connected to the vernacular

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treatments of the ars amatoria in which the clergy simultaneously lays claim to a courtly poetic voice. Drouart’s representation of clergie thus complements his play to reverse De amore’s ambiguous condemnation of love, but it also contributes to the threat of ideological incoherence with which the Livres d’Amours contends. According to Andreas’s social hierarchy, the cleric is nobilissimus (DA 1.6.20), above even the highest temporal lord. However, clerks’ status as lovers is tenuous at best. The questionable propriety of clerkly love is debated at some length in book I’s eighth dialogue, to which we shall return momentarily, and then taken up by Andreas in a special section entitled De amore clericorum. The magister concludes that since a clergyman’s nobility derives from his consecration to God, he “ought not to devote himself to labours of love, but rather is constrained utterly to forgo all delight in the flesh and to preserve himself pure of all bodily defilement for the Lord” (“non debet amoris operibus deservire, sed omnem carnis delectationem tenetur penitus declinare, et ab omni corporis inquinamento immaculatum se Domino custodire,” DA 1.7.2). However, given that clerks are men and “there is scarcely a man who ever lived without sinning in the flesh” (“vix . . . unquam aliquis sine carnis crimine vivit”), clerks may decide to participate in “the struggles of love” (“amoris . . . certamina,” DA 1.7.4), in which case they should behave in accordance with the social rank of their parents. While Andreas may be engaging in some indulgent “special pleading” to excuse the illicit pursuit of love by his own clerkly caste,61 his theoretical position here is orthodox and in line with the clerical misogyny and the “pastoral” critique of love that will erupt in book III. Drouart takes a much bolder stand on the contested issue of clerkly love.62 After translating Andreas’s thoughts on the different classes of men and women, Drouart elaborates on the superlative nobility of clerks: Clerc sont tres noble gent; clerc se maintiennent bel et gent, car bonne amour fust or perdue, se clerc ne l’eussent soustenue. (vv. 715–18) [Clerks are very noble folk; / clerks conduct themselves well and graciously, / for good love would be lost by now / if clerks had not sustained it.]

For Drouart, the “vocational impediment” of clerkdom is no impediment at all. Not only are clerks allowed to love, they are noble precisely because they are the pillars of “good” (that is, we now understand, pure and chaste) love solely responsible for its survival in this immoral world.63 In his own later chapter De l’amour as clercs, Drouart nevertheless reproduces Andreas’s statement that “nus clers ne doit avoir regart / a fame amer” (“no clerk should concern himself with loving women,”

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vv. 3883–84). However, just as in his translation of book III, the poet denounces amour but focuses his criticism on carnal lust, stressing that clerks’ duty to “vivre a Dieu nestement” means avoiding “de char la delectacion / et toute fornicacion” (“living immaculately for God . . . carnal pleasure and all fornication,” vv. 3885–88). There follows a faithful rendering of Andreas’s chapter on—or rather against—loving nuns, wherein it is made clear that although nuns are certainly capable of loving and being loved, becoming amorously involved with a nun is a despicable act that merits “the death-sentence” (“damnatio mortis,” DA 1.8.3), presumably in this world and the next. This is a sentence that Andreas (or, in Drouart, the magisterial “je”) once almost called down upon himself by ill-advisedly frequenting and, inevitably, seducing a bride of Christ. It is at this point that Drouart abruptly inserts the student’s objection and his teacher’s response. The student expresses great surprise, itself unexpected given the persuasive theological underpinnings of the foregoing arguments against clerks’ and nuns’ participation in the games of love, que tele amour avez blamee, qui de tout le monde est loee; car vous volez que clerc ne soient tel que par amours amer doient. Vostre sentence trop me blece, car li clerc ont plus de noblece, plus de sens et de cortoisie, comme gent sage et envoisie, k’avoir ne pueent autre gent . . . Ce me samble qu’il sont plus digne de maintenir bonne amor fine que nus qui au siecle repaire. (vv. 4019–35) [that you have condemned a love / praised by everyone, / for you claim that clerks’ nature / is not fit for love. / Your assertion pains me greatly, / for clerks possess more nobility, / good sense and courtesy, / being both wise and joyous folk, / than any other group of people can have . . . / I think they are worthier / to uphold good, refined love / than anyone living in the world.]

No doubt the student finds his teacher’s pronouncements especially hurtful because the young man himself is both a clerk and someone who obviously aspires to be a lover. In this respect, he and not the master seems to be Drouart’s avatar in the exchange. By identifying himself temporarily with the student rather than with the voice of authority, the poet retroactively displaces the unsavory personal anecdote about seducing nuns onto a fictional “maistre” character, which will not prevent him from immediately resuming the magister’s mantle when the teacher unfolds the doctrine of pure and mixed love. The student character is in

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any case hardly intellectually submissive. He quotes verbatim Drouart’s earlier statement about the excellent conduct of clerks and adds that their wisdom, measured generosity, skill in ordering themselves and their affairs, and, most importantly, universal knowledge make them the world’s worthiest practitioners of refined love. The student then goes on to chastise his master for having argued “vilment” (“shamefully”) and far from “soutilment” (“shrewdly,” vv. 4041–42)—that is, in a manner befitting neither a courteous lover nor a clever clerk. And, taking no offense, the master agrees that excluding clerks from the lists of love would indeed be wrong; there is no contradiction, however, because he was talking about mixed love, whereas pure love “est bonne / et la doyvent clerc embracier” (“is good, and clerks should embrace it,” vv. 4114–15). Such is of course the position that Drouart will explicitly endorse later on. This already striking assertion of the erotic rights of clerks is especially interesting in light of its relationship to the Latin text of De amore. We have seen that the doctrine of double amour is adapted by Drouart from Andreas’s eighth dialogue. So too is the deciple’s case for the clerkly caste’s preeminence in love. His arguments (and others) are adduced by the male speaker immediately after the passage on pure and mixed love to refute the lady’s claim that while “both these kinds of love win approval, it does not befit [him] to seek service in either” (“licet uterque sit amor electus, vos tamen neutrius decet affectare militiam”); because he is a clerk, he ought to devote himself to God and “be a stranger to all pleasure” so as to “preserve his body spotless for the Lord” (“delectatione alienus exsistere et suum prae omnibus corpus immaculatum Domino custodire,” DA 1.6.478). Notwithstanding the difficulty of interpreting De amore, there are a number of strong indications that the lady is right, and not only because her reasoning accords with what Andreas will assert in the upcoming chapter on the love of clerks. It is clear in this dialogue that, as Andreas says when introducing it, what is being staged is an example of attempted seduction that also serves as a particularly self-conscious example of rhetorical language. The dialogues as a whole insist that rhetoric and casuistry are an inalienable part of seductive discourse, but rhetoric’s importance is especially pronounced when the lady being targeted is a high noblewoman because such women are figured as masterful debaters who delight in discomfiting suitors by deconstructing the fallacious grounds of male claims on female favors (DA 1.6.401–2). Accordingly, the nobilior suitor is presented as an immensely resourceful rhetorician who turns verbal somersaults in an ultimately inconclusive effort to coax his interlocutor into bed. This clerkly would-be lover is, in other words, a sophist of the most hypocritical stripe. His untrustworthiness is ironically signposted near

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the beginning of the dialogue, just before he uses a morally dubious piece of kettle logic to show that “God cannot be gravely angered by love” (“in amore Deum graviter offendi non posse,” DA 1.6.417) because it is natural, but even if he is offended, the lady cannot devote herself entirely to obeying God without giving up all secular concerns, so she might as well practice love rather than vainly pursuing a virtue she cannot perfect. A few lines earlier, while reproaching the lady for acting friendly and then rejecting his amorous advances, the man has compared her to a self-interested hypocrite, “a bad priest who [feigns] numerous good qualities, and reminds others of the works which win eternal life, but condemns himself out of his own mouth while showing others how to obtain their reward” (“est enim malo similis sacerdoti qui de ipso plurima bona simulando et alios aeternae vitae opera commonendo propria se ipsum damnat sententia et aliis modum remunerationis ostendit,” DA 1.6.415). The shrewd lady, however, suspects that her suitor himself is precisely such a priest, a false friend who sings the praises and whitewashes the sinful side of love for his own advantage (DA 1.6.466). Indeed, while defending the right of clerks to serve love, the man even identifies himself with the image of the hypocritical priest, recast as a sympathetic figure who manages to fulfill his pastoral duties despite the understandable human frailty that spurs him on to the labors of Venus: The Lord saw that His clerics, by reason of the weakness of human nature, would fall into various excesses, and so he says . . . “You must believe the words of clerics because they are God’s ambassadors, but because they are subject to the temptations of the flesh like other men, do not eye their deeds in case they happen to go astray in some respect.” So it is enough for me if I stand at the altar and can announce the word of God to my people. (DA 1.6.486–87) [Videns enim Dominus suos clericos iuxta humanae naturae infirmitatem in varios lapsuros excessus, ait . . . : “Credendum est dictis clericorum quasi legatorum Dei, sed quia carnis tentationi sicut homines ceteri supponuntur, eorum non inspiciatis opera, si eos contigerit in aliquo deviare.” Sufficit ergo mihi, si altari assistens meae plebe Dei studeam verbum annuntiare.]

The woman is surely not alone in finding these words surprising, and her legitimate skepticism sheds an extremely negative light on the entire defense of clerkly love. It sounds like part of the discourse of a seductive sophist, and so too does the doctrine of pure and mixed love, which the lady likewise finds “scarcely . . . credible” (“vix . . . credibilia,” DA 1.6.476)—not because she takes issue with the valorization of mixed as well as pure love but because it seems implausible that pure love has ever been successfully maintained by lovers “chastely” kissing and hugging while nude in bed. In other words, in detailing the difference between pure and mixed love and then asking the lady to choose between them,

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the suitor is again being selfishly manipulative. He hopes that the lady will fall first into the trap of choosing one of the two types of love rather than no love at all, and then down the slippery slope from chaste kisses to consensual sex.64 And when this fails, the disappointed “courtly” lover ultimately resorts to misogynistic abuse (DA 1.6.499–501). It should now be obvious what motives, beyond a literary concern for concision and generic uniformity, might have led Drouart la Vache to eliminate virtually all of Dialogue Eight in order to extract and recontextualize key ideas articulated therein. As a clerk arguing for the erotic supremacy of clerks on the basis of their aptitude for a “vertueuse” (“virtuous,” v. 4091) pure love opposed to—and not, as in De amore, continuous with—the mere luxure to which mixed love boils down, the poet needs to distance himself and his arguments as much as possible from Andreas’s lecherous sophist. Reconfigured in the exchange between Drouart’s master and student, the seduction strategies of Andreas’s tonsured hypocrite trace the apparently disinterested portrait of chaste Eros that forms the very core of Drouart’s ideology of clerkly love. Moreover, the amicable and intellectually honest, truthgenerating dialectic of the maistre and his deciple vindicates the figure of the clerk as both amorous subject and logician. The representation of these characters gainsays a suspicious view of clerkly lovers as unscrupulous seducers who misuse their mastery of rhetoric to lascivious ends. The currency of such a view is suggested not only by Andreas’s dialogue and Jean de Meun’s personified Faus Semblant, but also, for example, by the anonymous Response (mid- to late thirteenth century) to Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaires d’amours (before 1252). The female speaker of the Response accuses “chil clerc qui . . . s’afaitent en cointise et en leur beles paroles” of being “li plus soutil en malisse” (“those clerks who . . . dress themselves up in elegant appearances and fine words . . . the subtlest in malice”) to prey on naive women.65 A short verse Art d’amors by one Guiart, probably Drouart’s near-contemporary, attributes a similar insight to none other than Aristotle: Aristote en son livre nos aprent a savoir qu’un clerc puet par fallace son amie decevoir, En cel mëisme livre aprent a parcevoir de cele fausseté a conoistre le voir.66 [Aristotle teaches in his book that a clerk / can trick his girlfriend with fallacies; / in the same book he shows how to / discern the truth of these falsehoods.]

In Drouart’s text, the amorous clerk himself parses truth from falsehood and clears up the confusion surrounding the real nature and value of pure love, whose champion he is. The figure of the clerkly reader as a discerning student of the ars amatoria, capable of understanding the whole

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art but selectively acting only on those precepts that are morally innocent, is thus not so much presupposed as produced by the Livres d’Amours.

IV. Contradictory Pleasures There remains, however, the question of nuns and the rather astonishing role reserved for them in Drouart’s exposition of his doctrine. The student who questions the prohibition on the love of clerks stands up for the love of nuns as well, citing the anecdote of his master’s own near-escape from undertaking “l’uevre de luxure” (“lust’s labor,” v. 4009) with an amenable sister as proof that the teacher “erra malement” (“erred badly,” v. 4045) in forbidding men to court such attractive and worthy women: Vous moustrez par vostre sentence qu’il a en eles grant science, et qu’elles estre amees doient et en la sale d’Amours soient. (vv. 4071–74) [Your own statement demonstrates / that they possess great learning / and that they ought to be loved / and to sit in the hall of Love.]

The idea that nuns’ science qualifies them for love accords well with the student’s claim that clerks are great lovers thanks to their universal knowledge, especially if science implies an understanding of how not to love as much as a command of permissible erotic practice. Still, this is a risqué conclusion to draw from the teacher’s description of how, during his dalliance with a bride of Christ, sa grant biauté tant regardai que je certes ne me gardai, devant que j’en fui si soupris que j’en fui ausi com touz pris. Et si m’esmut trop durement ce qu’elle parla doucement . . . Et, ja soit ce que je creüsse que toute l’art d’Amours seüsse, a paines eschivai ses las, sans faire d’Amours le solas. (vv. 3975–92) [I gazed so long upon her great beauty / that I was truly off my guard, / so that it caught me so unawares / that I was entirely captivated by it. / And I was greatly moved / by her sweet words . . . / And although I thought / that I knew the whole art of love, / I barely escaped her snares without / performing love’s consolation.]

Andreas Capellanus never glorifies such liaisons, at least on the moralizing and religious surface of his comments about the heinous crime of loving nuns, although the jocular tone in which Andreas recounts his

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own dangerously pleasant experience with a beautiful, eloquent, and willing monacha undeniably keeps the specter of irony close at hand. Drouart’s maistre, however, again qualifies his condemnation of romances with nuns at the urging of his indignant student. As usual with Drouart, the problem is lust, not love. Provided that the passion in question is pure, it is positively enjoined upon both nuns and clerks. “Deveëe / ne sera,” he says, “a nule personne . . . et la doyvent clerc embracier / et nonnains, et l’autre enchacier . . . et doyvent bonne amour suïr” (“It will not be forbidden . . . to anyone . . . and clerks and nuns ought to embrace it, and banish the other [kind of love] . . . and they should follow the path of good love,” vv. 4112–18).67 The doctrine of a universally sanctioned chaste love, the keystone of Drouart’s ars amatoria, thus immediately follows and to an important extent derives from a moment of near-capitulation to the most unacceptable kind of desire, the carnal passion that flouts the laws of both God and man, a desire that almost overwhelmed the magister despite all he knew (or thought he knew) about the art of love. This ars is born faltering, tenuously poised on a tightrope of virtuous purity over the lust with which amour pure always seems suspiciously contiguous, even continuous, no matter how cleverly Drouart contrasts these two forms of passionate connection between irreducibly embodied human beings. Even the maistre’s effort to reconcile amour pure with Christian morality goes no farther than the weak claim, borrowed from Andreas’s sophist, that “Diex gaires ne s’en courece” (“God is hardly angered by it,” v. 4094), perhaps because Drouart, for all his hostility to the delectacion de la char, is unwilling to commit the vilonie of prohibiting noncoital caresses within virtuous love relationships. Does Drouart’s gratuitous insistence on the erotic availability of nuns, which appears ultimately—and scandalously—to propose two lovers in religious orders as the ideal amorous couple, draw the reader’s attention to a consciously transgressive program flickering within the text’s good-humored attempt to satisfy everybody? Is the poet’s exposition of an irreproachable profane love, like the blandishments of women in book III of De amore and perhaps like Andreas’s entire text, spoken “with a false”—or double—“heart and ambivalent mind” (“in duplicitate cordis . . . et mentis plica,” DA 3.86–87)? Or does the ambiguous, even self-contradictory quality of Drouart’s doctrine, very different from the ironic slipperiness of his source, stem rather from a refusal to set limits on the circulation of pleasure, on the pursuit of a particularly clerkly joy distinct from the values of troubadour lyric and chivalric romance? In theory, the poet agrees with Andreas that a good clerk should “preserve his body spotless for the Lord,” but the corollary that he should “be a stranger to all

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pleasure” is antithetical to the whole spirit of Drouart’s project, a project that begins and ends with pleasure of all kinds: the pleasures of rhyming, of friendship, of love, of interpretive reading, of pleasing others in this life and then passing on to “cele joie / que Dex a ses amis otroie” (“the joy God grants his friends,” vv. 7595–96). The Livres d’Amours relishes its own equivocal, impossible dedication to both Eros and caritas, between which it creates a space for clerkly love to thrive in an atmosphere of blissful indeterminacy. It is perhaps appropriate that the resulting affirmation of the clerk’s role as lover doubles as a kind of self-emasculation after all. Licensed to love but forbidden to consummate his chaste passion, he—like the furiously writing lover-scribe exhorted by Jean de Meun’s Genius to ply his phallic stylus68—is at once empowered and condemned to conflate the sexual with the textual, the practice of love with the transmission of knowledge about it. With regard to Andreas Capellanus and his De amore, Drouart is evidently more than an exhausted epigone nostalgically self-inscribed into a dying tradition of didactic love literature whose reworking in the Livres d’Amours “en signale le déclin et la perte de sens.”69 Drouart is no more a codifier of “courtly love” than is Andreas, but in the history of De amore’s reception, Drouart’s art of clerkly love stands closer to a beginning than to an end. Although the influence of the Livres d’Amours itself can have been modest at best, “la traduction de Drouart ouvre une nouvelle phase dans l’histoire de la réception du De Amore.”70 If this interpretive movement is often dominated by the banalizing representation of Andreas’s text as a manual of “courtly love,” at the same time it innovatively “entérine de fait l’existence d’un discours théorique et didactique sur l’amour humain” free of the frame of fiction.71 It also moves past the prevailing thirteenthcentury view of De amore as a reflection on culpable cupiditas72 to seek, in and through Andreas’s arguments, an elusive synthesis of Christian morality and an idea of profane, yet righteous and even ennobling love between men and women, not limited in its ideological function to feudal aristocratic self-fashioning and self-glorification, that might resolve the “romantic dilemma” arising from the high medieval “attempt to reconcile virtue with sex.” Drouart la Vache’s Livres d’Amours undertakes such an uncertain, sometimes uneasy exploration of “the territory stretching between spiritual and carnal love”73—and enjoys it to the hilt, “car assez i a de delit” (“for there is in it much delight,” v. 7557).

Notes 1. I follow convention in referring to the “De amore” of “Andreas Capellanus” as such, although neither the text’s original title nor its authorship can be

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2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

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known with any certainty. Nor is its traditional attribution to the late twelfthcentury court of Marie de Champagne beyond dispute. See P. G. Walsh, introduction to Andreas Capellanus on Love, ed. and trans. Walsh (London: Duckworth, 1982), 1–3; John F. Benton, “The Court of Champagne as a Literary Center,“ Speculum 36, no. 4 (1961): 578–82; and Peter Dronke, “‘Andreas Capellanus,’” Journal of Medieval Latin 4 (1994): 51–63. Although Andreas is no doubt inspired by the Ovidian tradition of tripartite erotological poems, his book III goes much further than Ovid’s Remedia amoris in offering not “cures” to liberate unhappy lovers from unrequited passions by dispelling their amorous illusions, but rather blistering invective directed categorically against love and women. C. Stephen Jaeger, Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 114. Gregory M. Sadlek, Idleness Working: The Discourse of Love’s Labor from Ovid through Chaucer and Gower (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 57–58; Michael D. Cherniss, “The Literary Comedy of Andreas Capellanus,” Modern Philology 72, no. 3 (1975): 223–37. A thorough review of critical responses to Capellanus is to be found in Kathleen Andersen-Wyman, Andreas Capellanus on Love? Desire, Seduction, and Subversion in a Twelfth-Century Latin Text (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 18–25. See also Don A. Monson, “Andreas Capellanus and the Problem of Irony,” Speculum 63, no. 3 (1988): 539–72, and Toril Moi, “Desire in Language: Andreas Capellanus and the Controversy of Courtly Love,” in Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology and History, ed. David Aers (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986), 11–16. For Allen, the text’s choral voices “present both sides of a discussion and acknowledge—even emphasize—the gap between them” so as ultimately to “teach lessons not about life but about art,” not about how to love but about how to understand the rhetoric of love and love as rhetoric. The resulting ironization of love’s literary conventions potentially creates a space for amatory fiction without contesting Christian morality’s jurisdiction over sexual relations beyond the limits of literature (Peter Allen, The Art of Love: Amatory Fiction from Ovid to the Romance of the Rose [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992], 9–13, 72). Compare Classen’s contention that Andreas’s enterprise is an “analysis of human language, communication, and the multiple functions of discourse” (Albrecht Classen, “Epistemology at the Courts: The Discussion of Love by Andreas Capellanus and Juan Ruiz,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 103, no. 3 [2002]: 342), and Mackey’s view that “the medium has become the message,” the “reality of sex . . . sublated and sublimated in the discourse of love” (Louis Mackey, “Eros into Logos: The Rhetoric of Courtly Love,” in The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love, ed. Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins [Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991], 341). Andersen-Wyman, Andreas Capellanus on Love?, 3. Catherine Brown, Contrary Things: Exegesis, Dialectic, and the Poetics of Didacticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 96. According to Brown, this is precisely the kind of active reading deliberately solicited by De amore’s presentation of “opposing propositions . . . at once mutually exclusive and mutually coimplicated,” which imposes on the reader the hermeneutic and moral responsibility for constructing “something truthlike” from the text’s “contradictory shards” (Brown, Contrary Things, 91–115). Compare Allen, The Art of Love, 68–78. De amore’s manuscript tradition and reception history suggest that many medieval readers and translators were uncomfortable with the text’s self-contradictions and especially with book III. See Bruno Roy,

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8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

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Medievalia et Humanistica “À la recherche des lecteurs médiévaux du De amore d’André le Chapelain,” Revue de l’Université d’Ottawa 55, no. 1 (1985): 45–73, and Alfred Karnein, “La Réception du De Amore d’André le Chapelain au XIIIe siècle,” Romania 102 (1981): 324–51, 501–42. This date of composition is given twice within Drouart’s translation; see Robert Bossuat, ed., Li Livres d’Amours de Drouart la Vache (Paris: Champion, 1926), vv. 25, 7575. Subsequent references to this edition are given parenthetically; all translations are my own. Whereas Capellanus’s De amore is divided into three books, of which the first two are subdivided into titled chapters, Drouart’s poem is rubricated only with chapter headings, which do not always correspond to those of the Latin text. Dembowski makes much—probably too much—of the link between the linguistic and generic senses of romans as a guiding principle of Drouart’s vernacular translation (Peter F. Dembowski, “Two Old French Recastings/ Translations of Andreas Capellanus’s De Amore,” in Medieval Translators and Their Craft, ed. Jeanette Beer [Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University, 1989], 185–212). Dembowski, “Two Old French Recastings,” 190. Gaston Paris, “Une traduction d’André le Chapelain au XIIIe siècle,” Romania 13 (1884): 404. The manuscript consulted by Paris (Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 3122), probably produced within a decade or two of 1290, remains the only witness to Li Livres d’Amours. Robert Bossuat, Drouart la Vache, traducteur d’André le Chapelain (1290) (Paris: Champion, 1926), 55–65, 74. According to Bossuat, Drouart deliberately tones down Andreas’s lofty ideas and austere language and reshapes De amore into a straightforward late thirteenth-century ars amatoria, emphasizing the text’s Ovidianism while effacing or minimizing the traces of refined curial mores, pagan references, and potentially heretical precepts tying it to a late twelfth-century courtly context. Karnein similarly emphasizes Drouart’s “Ovidianization” of Capellanus while distinguishing it from a genuine popularization (Karnein, “Réception,” 526–28). Don A. Monson, “Censorship and Self-Censorship? The Case of Drouart la Vache, Translator of Andreas Capellanus,” Mediaeval Studies 74 (2012): 259–61. After crediting Drouart with a “lecture lucide” of De amore as an ambiguous exposé of the aporias of erotic discourse that simultaneously begins to legitimate profane love as a subject of scientific and legalistic study, Gally reduces Drouart’s project to a well-intentioned effort to “l’assainir, le récrire . . . pour en corriger les ambiguïtés, effacer précisément les ‘bons mots’ et le ramener au sein d’une tradition ovidienne et érudite . . . plus conforme à l’ordonnance scolastique, moins équivoque, en un mot moins séductrice” (Michèle Gally, “Quand l’art d’aimer était mis à l’index . . . ,” Romania 113 [1992–1995]: 436–37). Anne Berthelot, “La ‘Vulgarisation’ de l’idéologie courtoise: Drouart la Vache traducteur d’André le Chapelain,” in Zum Traditionsverständnis in der mittelalterlichen Literatur: Funktion und Werkung. Actes du colloque, Greifswald, 30 et 31 mai 1989, ed. Danielle Buschinger and Wolfgang Spiewok (Amiens: Université de Picardie, 1991), 52. Andersen-Wyman, Andreas Capellanus on Love?, 2. Barbara Nelson Sargent, “A Medieval Commentary on Andreas Capellanus,” Romania 94 (1973): 530–34. On Capellanus and the condemnation of 1277, see A. J. Denomy, “The De Amore of Andreas Capellanus and the Condemnation of 1277,” Medi-

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18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

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aeval Studies 8 (1946): 107–49; Roland Hissette, “Étienne Tempier et les menaces contre l’éthique chrétienne,” Bulletin de philosophie médiévale 21 (1979): 68–72; Gally, “Quand l’art d’aimer était mis à l’index . . . ,” 421–40; Brown, Contrary Things, 108–9; and Andersen-Wyman, Andreas Capellanus on Love?, 12–18. Bowden argues that the condemnation motivated Drouart la Vache’s modification of his Latin source (Betsy Bowden, “The Art of Courtly Copulation,” Medievalia et Humanistica n.s. 9 [1979]: 70), which Bowden believes to be a tissue of ribald puns. However, this account of Drouart’s objectives is thoughtfully rebutted by Monson, “Censorship and Self-Censorship?,” 243–61. Walsh, ed. and trans., Andreas Capellanus on Love, § 0.4. Subsequently cited parenthetically, as DA, by book, chapter, and section; only book and section numbers are given for book III, which has no chapters, and for Andreas’s prefatory letter to “Gualterius,” to which I assign the chapter number 0. The magister’s past as a lover lends his theoretical knowledge the support of unimpeachable eyewitness testimony, but theoretical mastery of the erotic ars—or any other intellectual discipline—is incompatible with the state of being in love because “the man subject to Venus’ slavery can give really earnest thought to nothing except the perpetual attempt to . . . [become] further enchained in her fetters” (“qui Veneris est servituti obnoxius nil valet perpensius cogitare nisi ut aliquid semper valeat suis actibus operari, quo magis possit ipsius illaqueari catenis,” DA 0.3). The text mentions the magister’s personal knowledge of love as a source of authority on a few other occasions, but these passing references to “the teaching of the lover Andreas” (“amatoris Andreae . . . doctrina,” DA 1.6.385; cf. DA 0.3, 1.2.7, 1.8.1–6, 2.6.22) do not seriously undermine Andreas’s status as a dispassionate pedagogue. Andreas is also the declared “lover”—although he refers to friendly dilectio and affectum, not amor (DA 0.1–4, 3.1)—and rhetorical “seducer” of his inscribed addressee, Gualterius, but again, this highlights his mastery of love’s language, not his subservience to its commands. On “Andreas” as lover, see Peter Allen, “Ars amandi, ars legendi: Love Poetry and Literary Theory in Ovid, Andreas Capellanus, and Jean de Meun,” Exemplaria 1, no. 1 (1989): 189; Dronke, “‘Andreas Capellanus,’” 53–55; and Brown, Contrary Things, 104–6, 113. Stephen G. Nichols, “The Rhetoric of Sincerity in the Roman de la Rose,” in Romance Studies in Memory of Edward Billings Ham, ed. Urban Tigner Holmes (Hayward: California State College, 1967), 118. Cf. Paul Strohm, “Guillaume as Narrator and Lover in the Roman de la Rose,” Romanic Review 59, no. 1 (1968): 3–9, and Evelyn Birge Vitz, “The I of the Roman de la Rose,” Genre 6 (1973): 49–75. On Drouart’s debts to Jean de Meun, see Bossuat, Drouart la Vache, 104–14. At the midpoint of the Rose, the God of Love names Jean de Meun and “prophesies” that he will take over the narration of Guillaume’s/Amant’s exploits after the original lover-author’s death, but reveals that the pen had already been passed some sixty-five hundred lines earlier (Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. and trans. Armand Strubel [Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1992], vv. 10551–658). On this muchglossed passage and on the relationship between the Rose’s two authorfigures, see among others David F. Hult, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: Readership and Authority in the First Roman de la Rose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 10–24; Nichols, “Rhetoric of Sincerity,” 118–29; Kevin Brownlee, “Jean de Meun and the Limits of Romance: Genius as Rewriter

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23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

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Medievalia et Humanistica of Guillaume de Lorris,” in Romance: Generic Transformation from Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Marina Scordilis Brownlee (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 114–34; Eva Martin, “Away from Self-Authorship: Multiplying the ‘Author’ in Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose,” Modern Philology 96, no. 1 (1998): 1–15; and Sylvia Huot, “‘Ci parle l’aucteur’: The Rubrication of Voice and Authorship in Roman de la Rose Manuscripts,” SubStance 17, no. 2 (1988): 42–48. This much-discussed issue is concisely treated in Alastair Minnis, Fallible Authors: Chaucer’s Pardoner and Wife of Bath (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 295–98. Drouart’s point is that “il ne s’agit pas d’une oeuvre de fiction, mais d’un écrit didactique. L’amant (amerres) se placerait sur le premier terrain, le pédagogue (enseignerres) se situe sur le second” (Karnein, “Réception,” 524). Sargent, “A Medieval Commentary on Andreas Capellanus,” 535. On Andreas’s duplex sententia, probably better translated as “double teaching” or “double meaning,” in the context of contemporary dialectical and exegetical practices, see Brown, Contrary Things, 94–101, 112–15. For Kelly, “Andreas’ double intention and his [negative] attitude towards courtly love in relation to the teachings of the Church are conspicuous and consistent throughout the treatise” (Douglas Kelly, “Courtly Love in Perspective: The Hierarchy of Love in Andreas Capellanus,” Traditio 24 [1968]: 121). This view is supported by Frappier, for whom book III is “moins une palinodie qu’une guerre déclarée après une contestation adroitement déguisée” (Jean Frappier, Amour courtois et Table Ronde [Geneva: Droz, 1973], 81; see 80–87), and by Gally. Monson takes seriously “Andreas’s commitment to moralizing love” throughout his text but suggests that the rejection of love in book III “constitutes the admission of . . . Andreas’s own failure to achieve the synthesis between the secular and Christian traditions that he had undertaken in the first two books” (Don A. Monson, Andreas Capellanus, Scholasticism, and the Courtly Tradition [Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2005], 340–43). Allen suggests that “Andreas’s narrator goes too far” in support of both courtly and Christian views “to be a trustworthy spokesman for either cause,” but he concludes that the “finite, fictive domain” of love is “contained within a moral parenthesis” that the careful reader is not allowed to forget (Allen, Art of Love, 59, 62). The idea of a “moral parenthesis” helps to explain why Andreas, usually suspicious of love for both pious and secular reasons, can occasionally wax lyrical about its (profane and performative) virtues: “What a remarkable thing is love, for it invests a man with such shining virtues”—the ones mentioned are comeliness, courtesy, humility, and complaisance—“and there is no-one whom it does not instruct to have these great and good habits in plenty” (“O, quam mira res est amor, qui tantis facit hominem fulgere virtutibus, tantisque docet quemlibet bonis moribus abundare!” DA 1.4.1). See Douglas Kelly, Internal Difference and Meanings in the Roman de la rose (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); Allen, “Ars amandi, ars legendi”; Brown, Contrary Things, 106–8. Cf. Brownlee’s reading of the fifteenthcentury Spanish Corbacho by Alfonso Martínez de Toledo, archpriest of Talavera, a text deeply influenced by De amore: first condemning the love of women and then recanting his didactic (and misogynistic) perspective, the archpriest reverses the structure of De amore while “employing Capellanus as a privileged [structural and hermeneutic] model to undermine his own ostensibly misogynistic discourse” (Marina Scordilis Brownlee, “Hermeneutics

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29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

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of Reading in the Corbacho,” in Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers, ed. Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987], 221). Drouart’s frequent use of the seemingly banal adjective bonne to qualify the love he deems praiseworthy may be significant given Corbellari’s observation that in Old French love literature, “la bone amor”—as opposed to the elitist fine or the excessively sensual fole amor—“finit par s’assimiler à un type d’amour quasiment conjugal, d’une stabilité totalement opposée à l’inquiétude troubadouresque, et où la misogynie est, de surcroît, exprimée de plus en plus clairement, en particulier dans les poèmes liés à la mouvance cléricale” (Alain Corbellari, “Retour sur l’amour courtois,” Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes 17 [2009]: 379). Moi, “Desire in Language,” 29. Alfred Karnein, ed., De Amore deutsch: Der Tractatus des Andreas Capellanus in der Übersetzung Johann Hartliebs (Munich: Beck, 1970), 17–20; Karnein, “Réception,” 526. Drouart probably worked from a lost De amore manuscript in the family of the one used by Hartlieb (Bossuat, Drouart la Vache, 67–71). Karnein, De Amore deutsch, 258. My translation. Karnein, De Amore deutsch, 166–68. Karnein, “Réception,” 526. Compare the “cautionary” (“ad cautelam”) teaching of the ars amatoria recommended in a quaestio attributed to Peter the Chanter, described and published by John W. Baldwin, The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France around 1200 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 24, 251. Sargent, “Medieval Commentary on Andreas Capellanus,” 538. Andersen-Wyman, Andreas Capellanus on Love?, 16. Compare Monson’s suggestion that Drouart “saw in [Andreas’s] treatise a secular summa on sexual love” (Monson, Andreas Capellanus, 142). On chaste heterosexual love as a concept or value occurring elsewhere in the medieval erotological tradition, see Jaeger, Ennobling Love, 117–22. The relationship between mixed and pure love is portrayed in the same way in the two other passages where these terms are mentioned by Andreas (DA 2.6.23–25, 2.6.38–39). Drouart’s faithful translations of these quaestiones (vv. 5311–54, 5531–60) shed no light on his own views. A considerably abbreviated version of the dialogue’s subsequent section, a casuistic appraisal of the relative desirability of the pleasures associated with the upper and lower parts of the body (DA 1.6.533–50), is likewise resituated by Drouart among the love-judgments he translates from Andreas’s book II (vv. 6271–414). The earlier passage occurs in a dialogue between a lowborn man and woman (vv. 1173–81; compare DA 1.6.60–61). See Monson, Andreas Capellanus, 308; Lionel J. Friedman, “Gradus Amoris,” Romance Philology 19, no. 2 (1965): 167–77; and Baldwin, Language of Sex, 164. Rose, vv. 4379–80; my translation. In a letter belonging to the Querelle de la Rose, Christine de Pizan reproves Jean de Meun’s defender Pierre Col for asserting “that all those who have been or who are truly in love find all their happiness in striving to go to bed with their ladies . . . for I believe that there are many men who have loved loyally and impeccably without ever going to bed with them . . . for their principal intention was that their morals be improved through this experience” (Christine de Pizan et al., Debate of the Romance of the Rose, ed. and trans. David F. Hult [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010], 172–73). On the medieval reception

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44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

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Medievalia et Humanistica of Andreas’s definition of love, see Don A. Monson, “Andreas Capellanus and His Medieval Translators: The Definition of Love,” Mediaevalia 26, no. 2 (2005): 155–68, and Alfred Karnein, “Amor est passio—A Definition of Courtly Love?,” in Court and Poet: Selected Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society (Liverpool 1980), ed. Glyn S. Burgess (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1981), 215–21. Drouart’s idea of double amour thus differs from the medieval distinction between “two Venuses”—legitimate, sacramental, reproductive sexuality as opposed to perverted, postlapsarian lust—analyzed by George D. Economou, “The Two Venuses and Courtly Love,” in In Pursuit of Perfection: Courtly Love in Medieval Literature, ed. Joan M. Ferrante and George D. Economou (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1975), 17–50. Mackey attempts to integrate the conflicting strands of Andreas’s text by arguing along similar lines that books I and II represent a love “spiritualized” (not necessarily in a Christian sense) “by its translation into language” and dedicated, despite appearances, to the deferral of sexual consummation in favor of interminable erotic language games; book III’s litany against “love” then confronts the rhetorical “ideal of love with the brutal actuality of sex” before both are trumped by the image of the heavenly kingdom where “the cravings of the flesh and the needs of the spirit are proleptically reconciled” (Mackey, 341–50). Andreas’s parallel passage (DA 3.4–5) refers euphemistically to Veneris opera and Veneris actus, which certainly signifies sex but perhaps less clearly excludes chaste erotic relations. Sargent, “Medieval Commentary on Andreas Capellanus,” 537. Jaeger, Ennobling Love, 14–15. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 121. Compare especially song 88 (“Amor habet superos”) of the Carmina Burana, in P. G. Walsh, ed. and trans., Love Lyrics from the Carmina Burana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 94–97. The text describes in provocative terms the poet’s chaste “play” with the young virgin Cecilia, loveplay that includes the first four stages of love (contemplari, loqui, tangere, osculari) but excludes the fifth, the sexual act itself (“quintum, quod est agere, / noli suspicari!”). Although the poet declares himself content to enjoy “love’s solaces” in paradoxically shared virginity (“amoris solamine / virgino cum virgine”) and appoints himself “custodian” of the “lily of [Cecilia’s] chastity,” he also flirts with the danger of his “crimeless sin” (“pecco,” he says, “sine crimine”) and hints that he may be postponing sexual gratification only until the girl is old enough for decency to allow the consummation anticipated by her suitor: “I let the grape swell until it becomes ripe . . .” (“Uvam sino crescere / donec sit matura . . .”). See vv. 3887, 3950, 5410, 6351, 6636, 6690, 7111, 7136, 7143. On delectatio as a physiological term for particularly carnal delight, see Baldwin, Language of Sex, 127–39. In his Dit de la Panthère, or Panthère d’amours, Nicole de Margival eulogizes Drouart, whom he identifies as the translator of the Gautier (a common name for De amore): “Et celui livre translata / cilz qui onques jor ne flata / ne blandist homme, que je sache: / ce fu mestre Drouars La Vache. / A chascun plaisoit son afaire, / tant estoit dous et debonaire / (je ne t’en ay dit que le voir); / si n’estoit mie a decevoir, / ne par promesse ne par don.

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53.

54.

55. 56. 57.

58.

59.

60. 61.

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/ Mors est, or ait s’ame pardon” (Nicole de Margival, Le Dit de la panthère, ed. Bernard Ribémont (Paris: Champion, 2000), vv. 1717–26). Since Drouart suppresses all references to Andreas and Gualterius/Gautier in his translation, Nicole obviously knew the Latin text, but he seems nevertheless to have made use of Drouart’s Livres d’Amours instead (Karnein, “Réception,” 528– 31). The stakes of Nicole’s turn to vernacular authorities are investigated by Eliza Zingesser, “The Vernacular Panther: Encyclopedism, Citation, and French Authority in Nicole de Margival’s Dit de la panthère,” Modern Philology 109, no. 3 (2012): 301–11. Cf. DA 1.1.1, 1.1.13, 1.6.376. On “immoderatus,” see Don A. Monson, “Immoderatus in Andreas Capellanus’ Definition of Love,” in Études de langue et de littérature médiévales offertes à Peter T. Ricketts à l’occasion de son 70ème anniversaire, ed. Dominique Billy and Ann Buckley (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 293–302. According to Matfre Ermengaud’s Breviari d’amor (ca. 1288–92), “es le carnels movemens / de mout gran merit a las gens / que·l sabo be tener reglat / e restrenher lur voluntat / e venser la temtacio / carnal ab sen et ab razo” (Peter T. Ricketts, ed. Le Breviari d’amor de Matfre Ermengaud. vol. 5 [Leiden: Brill, 1976], vv. 27323–28). See Michelle Bolduc, “A Theological Defense of Courtly Love: Matfre Ermengaud’s Breviari d’Amor,” Tenso 20, no. 2 (2005): 26–47. Michèle Gally, “Le Huitième Art: Les clercs du XIIIe siècle nouveaux maîtres du discours amoureux,” Poétique 75 (1988): 291. Bossuat, Drouart la Vache, 244–46. On the other hand, Drouart’s idea may be that a clerical audience would possess “the training and vocation necessary to avoid abusing the work’s more controversial teachings on love,” in which case his “disclaimer . . . appears to be aimed at countering any possible accusation that through his translation he runs the risk of corrupting the morals of the laity” presumably targeted by vernacular didactic literature (Monson, “Censorship and Self-Censorship?,” 249). “Clerks were above all men of education, who need not have identified strongly with the Church and its teachings. . . . [T]he very fact of having more than one allegiance would enable them to distance themselves ironically from any” (Sarah Kay, “Courts, Clerks, and Courtly Love,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Roberta L. Krueger [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 87–94). Alastair J. Minnis, Magister Amoris: The Roman de la Rose and Vernacular Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 191; see 164–92. Also pervasive in clerkly culture is the inverse fear (with classical antecedents) of phallogocentric savoir’s intellectual “emasculation” by ensorcelling female wiles, as emblematized by Merlin entombed alive, Aristotle ridden by Phyllis, and—closer to home—Abelard castrated by Heloise’s angry uncle; whether the studious life is positioned as a threat to masculinity or as its threatened source, the clerk’s relationship to women and love is troubled by an underlying anxiety about becoming ridiculous. See Alain Corbellari, La Voix des clercs: Littérature et savoir universitaire autour des dits du XIIIe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 2005), 40–52, 59–60. See Corbellari, La Voix des clercs, 85–111, and R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Monson, Andreas Capellanus, 331, 342. Contrast the view of Baldwin, Language of Sex, 25.

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62. On the conflicted medieval representation of clerical sexuality, see Jacques Voisenet, “Figure de la virginité ou image de la paillardise: La sexualité du clerc au Moyen Âge,” in Le Clerc au Moyen Âge, Senefiances 37 (Aix-enProvence: CUER MA, 1995), 571–78. 63. Comparable elevations of clerkly lovers occur in the earlier vernacular texts on love analyzed by Gally, “Le Huitième Art,” 279–95. See also Christopher Lucken, “Richard de Fournival, ou le clerc de l’amour,” and Marie-Geneviève Grossel, “‘Savoir aimer, savoir le dire,’ notes sur les Débats du clerc et du chevalier,” both in Le Clerc au Moyen Âge, 401–16 and 279–93. Might it be to aggrandize the figure of the amorous clerk at the expense of the knightly lover, and not only to avoid outdated literary motifs, that Drouart eliminates Andreas’s references to the “court” or “palace of Love” (amoris aula) and the story of the Breton knight that introduces the Rules of Love in De amore (Bossuat, Drouart la Vache, 44–47)? 64. Monson, Andreas Capellanus, 308–14; Moi, “Desire in Language,” 24; and Frappier, Amour courtois et Table Ronde, 83–84. Jaeger reads the same passage as an account of ennobling “chaste love” requiring “a self-mastery of which few are capable and creat[ing] a category of noble victors over the flesh” (Jaeger, Ennobling Love, 115), though not necessarily as Andreas’s final word on the subject. 65. Richard de Fournival, Le Bestiaire d’amour et la Response du Bestiaire, ed. and trans. Gabriel Bianciotto (Paris: Champion, 2009), 326–28; my translation. On the Response, see Jeanette M. A. Beer, Beasts of Love: Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amour and a Woman’s Response (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 111–48. 66. Louis Karl, ed., “L’Art d’Amors par Guiart,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 44, no. 1 (1925): vv. 21–24 (full text 181–87); my translation. For accompanying commentary, see Louis Karl, “L’Art d’Amour de Guiart,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 44, no. 1 (1925): 66–80. Here, Guiart seems to reimagine Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations as an Ovidian textbook of erotic rhetoric. 67. A few lines earlier, Drouart’s maistre claims that “pucele et fame mariee, / et nonnain a Dieu dediee” (vv. 4097–98) can all love purely without injury, directly translating Andreas’s assertion regarding “a previously undefiled maiden [or] a widow or married woman” (DA 1.6.472)—but not nuns, whom Andreas never mentions outside of the chapter specifically devoted to their case. 68. In his long speech—called the poem’s “diffinitive sentence”—to the army of Love, Genius praises “cil . . . qui de bien amer paine / sanz nulle pensee vilaine” and chastises “cil qui des greffes n’escrivent / par coi li mortel toz jors vivent, / es beles tables precieuses / —que nature . . . leur avoit pour ce prestees / que tuit i fussent escrivain” (Rose, vv. 19509, 19537–40, 19633–39). Although Genius unequivocally advocates sexual reproduction as a morally neutral or even virtuous human activity, he never abandons the rhetorical veil of redundantly proliferating metaphors (“Greffes, tables, martiaus, enclumes, / . . . et sos a pointes bien agues / . . . et jaschieres,” Rose, vv. 19549–53), just as the ultimate penetration of the vaginal Rose consummates Amant’s allegorical quest without moving beyond the poem’s allegorical system. From this perspective, the phallic “penmanship” that transparently encodes coitus seems to be definitively substituted for the literal act it signifies (rather than, as traditional allegorical interpretation would have it, vice versa)—at least for Jean de Meun, the inscribed poet-author and

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69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

magister amoris, who is after all not a lover but only a writer about love. On the Rose’s conclusions and (ir)resolution, see Kevin Brownlee, “Pygmalion, Mimesis, and the Multiple Endings of the Roman de la Rose,” Yale French Studies 95 (1999): 193–211, and Minnis, Magister Amoris, 164–208. Berthelot, “La ‘Vulgarisation’ de l’idéologie courtoise,” 61. Karnein, “Réception,” 527. Gally, “Quand l’art d’aimer était mis à l’index . . . ,” 438. Karnein, “Réception,” 326–38. Jaeger, Ennobling Love, 7.

[email protected]

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Review Notices E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken, eds., From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 269, 24 figures (illustrations).

What should be made of a contribution in which our knowledge of stone artifacts is called “lithic intimacy”? In “The Sex Life of Stones” Jeffrey J. Cohen explores what Tobias Hill called “the love of stones” in his novel of the same title. Unfortunately, the pickings are not that rich in medieval literature, and Cohen has little more to work with than the confusion between diamonds and adamants (lodestones) that attract each other. Consequently, there is much theorizing, but the sex life of stones remains somewhat flaccid, confined largely to a discussion of its appearance in a version of The Book of John Mandeville (defective version) for which no source has so far been found. Cohen’s is the first of a total of eight contributions in the field of posthumanism. All the essays explore examples of the fluid boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, and all take the rejection of an androcentric-anthropocentric perspective for granted, although none go quite as far as Donna Haraway and others have recently gone by wholeheartedly embracing a postanthropocentric approach to the natural world.1 The aim of the present volume is “to ask how medieval cultural representations of nonhuman or partially human creatures, whether literary, visual, religious, or theological, give us new ways to think about gender and embodiment on a broader theoretical spectrum” (7). The editors have grouped the contributions into three sections, “Intimate Connections,” “Embodied Souls,” and “Institutional Effects.” The volume has a strong French bias, which reflects the area of expertise of four of its contributors. (Late) Middle English texts feature in two of the articles, whereas the two remaining deal with Latin texts and historical artifacts respectively. I was particularly impressed by the second and the last articles. In “Nursing Animals and Cross-Species Intimacy” Peggy McCracken considers what makes a mother. The first three narratives in the Old French Crusade Cycle (La naissance du Chevalier au cygne, Le Chevalier au cygne, Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 40 (Reinhold F. Glei and Wolfgang Polleichtner, eds.), Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

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and Les enfances de Godefroi) recount the somewhat curious ancestry and early years of Godefroy de Bouillon. In the first of these Beatrix’s six children are nursed by a doe and raised by a hermit. When the one child that has not been transformed into a swan later has to defend his mother, his first question is to ask what a mother is. The answer that it is a woman who carried him in her womb carefully skirts around the crucial issue addressed by MacCracken—that is, to what extent the characteristics of the nursing donor are transferred to the recipient, as in Valentin et Orson where the child nursed by a bear became as hairy as the animal. In the case of Godefroy’s ancestors this would mean some of the characteristics of the doe who nursed them would have been transferred to Beatrix’s children and consequently some contamination of the human by the animal would have taken place, resulting in what Deleuze and Guattari have called “becoming animal.” Yet, as McCracken shows, La naissance du Chevalier au cygne carefully avoids this contamination. In fact, in the two narratives that follow it, the emphasis is firmly on “saintly mothers” who take great pains to avoid such contamination by insisting on nursing their children themselves, thus ensuring the nobility of the lineage. When in Les enfances de Godefroi the countess Yde discovers that her son had been fed by another woman, she actually forcefully expels the milk from him. The nursing mother motif is given a new twist in Boccaccio’s tale of Madonna Beritola in the Decameron, who finds herself stranded and deprived of her children on the island of Ponza. Driven by hunger, she is forced to eat grass or green herbs (“l’erbe”; Dec. 2.6.142), and when she happens upon two newly born roebucks in a cave she suckles them. Although it is not suggested that the roebucks acquire human characteristics as a result, Madonna Beritola herself does “become animal,” as witnessed by the food she consumes and the adoption of a lifestyle that turns her into a wild animal (“fiera”; Dec. 2.6.17), both of which earn her the nickname “Cavriuola.” When she is later reunited with one of her sons, he only recognizes her by her smell (“l’odor materno”; Dec. 2.6.67) when she embraces him, although he had seen her many times before. This incident then suggests the passing of animality from mother to son through contagion rather than by blood or milk. However, just like La naissance du Chevalier au cygne, the notion of contagion of animality is contained and does not reappear after she rejoins human society. In Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, a twelfth-century philosophical tale composed in Arabic in Andalusia, the protagonist is nursed and raised by a doe whose behavior he imitates. When the doe eventually dies, Hayy’s grief reveals his humanity and eventually leads him to discover the doe’s soul and what ultimately animates it (God). As in La naissance du Chevalier au cygne, Hayy does not become animal as

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the result of nursing, but he paradoxically discovers his humanity (and God) through his having become animal and his affection for the one who nursed and raised him. McCracken rounds off her meticulous and sensitive reading of these texts with a consideration of an early sixteenthcentury altarpiece from Krakow devoted to St. Stanislaus that shows adulterous women being punished by King Boleslaw, who forces them to nurse puppies and their newborn children to be suckled by bitches, thereby revealing to all how these women had betrayed their human nature by acting like animals. The human-animal intimacy depicted here (and in the vita on which it is based) receives a much less favorable treatment than in the other examples adduced earlier, yet, as McCracken has shown, they all associate becoming animal with the figure of a lactating mother and thereby suggest that “animality may be transmitted through the intimate proximity of suckling.” In their representation of gendered access to becoming animal, “narratives about nursing animals point to the intimate configurations of maternity and animality that persists in noble genealogies” (61). Ann Marie Rasmussen’s “Moving beyond Sexuality in Medieval Sexual Badges” throws a fascinating light on a specific subtype of medieval badges. Pilgrim badges are familiar objects from the later Middle Ages. One of these small pieces made from lead and tin, recovered from the Seine in Paris in the nineteenth century, bears the inscription “bien ait qui ma fet, qui me vent et qui me porte” (“good fortune to who made me, who sold me and who wore me”).3 Although pilgrim badges were worn pinned to an overcoat or hung as a pendant from a chain, it stretches the imagination more than a little to imagine that anyone would openly wear any of the sexual badges that also enjoyed some popularity at the end of the Middle Ages and in the early Renaissance, particularly in the Low Countries. Vulvas on stilts wearing clogs and little else; winged penises; copulating couples with and without dogs and spectators; women planting, harvesting, and even roasting penises; others pushing wheelbarrows filled with the same across a huge walking hairy phallus; vulvas and penises sprouting from or resting on trees; vulvas climbing ladders, on horseback, or traversing the seas in boats; mussel shells with an engraved vulva—all (and more) can be found on badges.4 In many cases they are also accompanied by other attributes like crowns or, in the case of penises, bells. Secular and sexual badges are much less known than their religious counterparts but are “of a disproportionate importance for the understanding of late medieval popular culture”5 and consequently deserve much more attention than they have received so far. One reason for this relative neglect may well be the fact that it is not easy to make sense of either their meaning or their

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purpose. Rasmussen focusses on the gender aspect of sexual badges and concludes that they show above all the instability of gender as a category. She argues that highly sexed wandering penises and pudenda have little to do with either heterosexual or homosexual desire, but instead appear to advance a kind of female masculinity. Citing Bynum, she notes that the composite nature of many of them is both revelatory and destabilizing at the same time. The evidence, though necessarily selective, is compelling. One of the most striking aspects of many of the sexual badges, for example, is their mobility, their agitation. Both vulvas and penises are supplied with legs, wings, or both, and some even make use of other means of transport like horses or ships. They are also often crowned, which links them to elite power, while their distinct furriness in the form of hair underscores their animality. When it comes to differences between the male and female creatures, it is striking that only the penises have tails and bells, whereas the vulva badges often have hands and arms, rare among penis badges. Even more extraordinary are the scenes in which women appear together with autonomous penises. Almost all sexual badges in which human beings appear together with autonomous sexual organs are of this type; female figures near a detached vulva are extremely rare; recognizably male figures together with detached phalluses are also quite rare, and so far no badges have been found in which male figures appear with an autonomous vulva. The women who appear on badges together with autonomous phalluses are normally engaged in quotidian activities, like cooking, holding a harp, working at a forge, or pushing a handcart, and the penises have normally lost their former autonomy: they are worn in crowns (?), ridden, planted, harvested, transported, or cooked. To use Rasmussen’s words, the women in these badges “wield symbolic, agentive, and dominant power using the phallus” (227). These phalluses are the raw material, it is argued, of a sphere in which sex and food, and hence sex as reproduction, are closely linked. That, in turn, suggests that such badges were not primarily about sexual pleasure or even female sexuality but were closely associated with female fertility and may well have been used as a kind of charm or amulet (terms not used by Rasmussen). Whether or not they were worn is a question not addressed by Rasmussen, but Malcolm Jones, who also suggested the badges may have been worn “in the hope of attracting good sexual luck,” speculates they might have been worn secretly, perhaps between skin and clothing.6 More important in the present context is that the badges show “a way of understanding the female body that is not hostile or eroticized, that may even be humorous and positive. They represent a gendered mode of asserting power and control over the inscrutable, vital, yet precarious forces of sex, fertility,

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and reproduction” (241). If one should wonder why Rasmussen did not address the possibility that at least some of the badges may have been inspired by proverbs and proverbial sayings, the answer would be that this had been done in an earlier paper.7 Dyan Elliott discusses the important and quite ambivalent issue of the corporeality and gender of the soul in “Rubber Soul: Theology, Hagiography, and the Spirit World of the High Middle Ages.” As Elliott shows, the corporeality of the soul was much discussed by Christian theologians, with orthodox theologians advancing the immutability of gender and body at the resurrection. These same orthodox theologians also generally held that the soul was incorporeal yet inhabited an aerial body that could not just feel pain but could also be recognized and even have a name. This was also the position of those, such as Jacques de Vitry and Thomas of Cantimpré, who supported the Beguine movement in their writings. Elliott argues that their hagiographical works played an important role in consolidating the view that after death the soul’s identity and gender was stable even if incorporeal. Unfortunately, as Elliott claims, there was a price to pay in that the inequality imposed on the sexes on earth could be extended to the afterlife as well. The problematic relationship between the body and the soul and the notion that the resurrected body is gendered are the starting points for Elizabeth Robertson’s analysis of the late Middle English poetic debate, the Disputacion betwyx the Body and the Wormes. This fifteenth-century poem appears in British Library, Additional MS 30749, where it is preceded by an image of a so-called transi-tomb on the upper tier of which lies the effigy of a richly dressed woman, below her a decomposing body surrounded by worms and other vermin. Such a tomb is precisely what the narrator of the poem describes seeing in a church and what sets off his pious meditative dream on death and the last things made up of a dialogue between the corpse in the lower tier of the tomb and the “worms” surrounding it. The poem itself is also accompanied by several marginal illustrations of a skeleton with a woman’s headdress confronted by four serpents or worms, as well as one of the narrator kneeling in front of a crucifix. Robertson argues that the dialogue makes use of gendered vocabulary both in conveying the abject plight of the female corpse and in its use of the erotic language of rape to which the woman eventually gives in when she seizes and kisses the (phallic) worms. This, it is argued, symbolizes “the radical submission of the will to God necessary for salvation” (142). The problem with this interpretation is not just that the notion of tumescent worms in both text and illuminations is not immediately obvious, but also that a sexual interpretation of the passage is unnecessary and unwarranted. The woman in the vision is

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coming to terms with death, even embraces it, and in such a context the kiss is much more likely to allude to the liturgical kiss of peace regarded by Augustine as a sacrament and a sign of the unity and faith among Christians, or its more secular equivalent with which a reconciliation is sealed. One could even argue that it alludes to the kiss of death signifying the rapturous union of the soul and God. Finally, and possibly most convincing of all, the woman’s invitation to kiss her may be an invitation to the worms to cleanse her bones from the corruptible flesh and thus cleanse both body and soul in preparation for the Day of Judgment. Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Noah D. Guynn, and E. Jane Burns focus on Chrétien’s Chevalier au lion, Marie de France’s Bisclavret and the anonymous Melion, and the Roman de Mélusine respectively. In the Chevalier au lion Yvain first comes across the lion when he hears a cry and finds a serpent holding the lion by the tail, scorching its haunches with fire. After a brief deliberation reminiscent of Lancelot in Le chevalier de la charrette, Yvain decides to help the lion by killing the dragon because the dragon with its venom and treachery was unworthy of his help. This passage is central in the reading offered by Bruckner of the Chevalier au lion, a reading that aims to explore the borders between animals and humans, between men and women, between the animal within and without. If we regard the lion as the animal in Yvain and the dragon as that in Laudine, then the text offers rich pickings and allows us to read in the final scenes of the romance “how the dragon still has the lion by the tail” (82). Yet, the evidence offered for such a reading is largely associative and contextual and ultimately fails to convince. Gyunn reads the two twelfth-century French lycanthropic lays as casuistic texts that do not only offer a moral lesson but through their narrative form engage in a form of casuistry that resembles what Newton called narrative ethics.8 Marie’s Prologue to the lais offers some support for this approach with its juxtaposition of “lettre” and “surplus” that signals the limits of interpretation and understanding. As the narrative of both lais unfolds, it emerges that by betraying their husbands by stealing their clothes and condemning them to their animal state the wives of the protagonists are not only ultimately responsible for their rehabilitation but are also instrumental in questioning feudal loyalty among men and female subservience. This argument, which is somewhat reminiscent of Adam’s happy sin (felix culpa), leaves something to be desired, and so do some of the methods used to support it. One example of this is the way in which the servile behavior of the werewolf in both tales is interpreted. Both show loyalty to their overlord in a doglike fashion. In Bisclavret this is interpreted as a positive example of feudal homage, whereas in Melion the same homage becomes a form of “bestial abasement” (176) that

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humbles him “as both knight and wolf” (172). Why these two incidents warrant such different interpretations remains unclear. Similarly, the conclusion in which the tales’ indeterminacy, their deferral of meaning, and their “narrative opacity” (180) are argued is somewhat lackluster because it adds little to what we already know—these same claims can be made about many fictional narrative texts and fail to distinguish these two tales from any others. In “A Snake-Tailed Woman: Hybridity and Dynasty in the Roman de Mélusine” Burns argues convincingly that in Jean d’Arras’s prose narrative Melusine’s hybrid nature—part woman, part serpent—is intimately tied to the dynastic expansion of the Lusignan family. In addition, unlike the Roman’s three known Latin ancestors that align the fairy figures with Eve, Jean d’Arras’s heroine is far from the Eve-like temptress so familiar from the pictorial tradition of the Fall with which sirens and mermaids are also associated in the writings of the Church Fathers. In fact, Jean seems to rewrite the story of Adam and Eve and to turn Mélusine into someone who poses no lascivious threat to the institution of marriage and whose fertility, despite her serpentine body, produces sons “who become kings of Cyprus and Armenia, Luxembourg, and Bohemia, and lords of La Marche, Parthenay, and Lusignan” (207). This volume is a bit of a mixed bag. It offers a few very stimulating analyses and genuine explorations of the posthumanist world, as well as some exciting new insights into well-established texts. Unfortunately, this does not hold true for all contributions.

Notes 1. Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet, Posthumanities 3 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.). Cf. also Monika Bakke, “The Predicament of Zoopleasures: Human-Nonhuman Libidinal Pleasures,” in Animal Encounters, ed. Tom Tyler and Manuela Rossini (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 221–42. 2. All references are to the Decameron Web, “Seconda Giornata—Novella Sesta,” www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/texts/DecShow Text.php?myID=nov0206&lang=it. 3. A. M. Koldeweij, “Insignes, religieus en profaan,” in Heilig en profaan: 1000 laatmiddeleeuwse insignes uit de collectie H. J. E. van Beuningen (Cothen: Stichting Middeleeuwse religieuze en profane insignes, 1993), 11–15, at 11. 4. For examples of the badges mentioned here and in the article, see the “Badges” section of the Religious and Profane Medieval Badges Foundation, www.medievalbadges.org/mb_index_UK.php, and the “Search Badges and Ampulla” section of the Kunera database, www.kunera.nl/kunerapage .aspx?From=Default. 5. Malcolm Jones, “The Sexual and the Secular Badges,” in Heilig en profaan 2: 1200 laatmiddeleeuwse insignes uit openbare en particuliere collecties, Rotterdam

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papers 12, ed. H. J. E. van Beuningen, A. M. Koldeweij, and Dory Kicken (Cothen: Stichting Middeleeuwse Religieuze en Profane Insignes, 2001), 196–206, at 196. 6. Jones, “Sexual and the Secular Badges,” 200, 205. It is somewhat surprising that although Rasmussen acknowledges the existence of the three-volume standard work in this field by van Beuningen and Koldeweij, she does not once refer to Jones’s articles on the secular and sexual badges, nor for that matter any of the other articles that precede the catalogs in these volumes. The first two volumes have been mentioned in notes 3 and 5. For the third volume see H. J. E. van Beuningen, A. M. Koldeweij et al., eds., Heilig en profaan 3: 1300 laatmiddeleeuwse insignes uit openbare en particuliere collecties, Rotterdam Papers 13 (Cothen: Stichting Middeleeuwse Religieuze en Profane Insignes, 2012). 7. Ann Marie Rasmussen, Wandering Genitalia: Sexuality and the Body in German Culture between the Late Middle Ages and Early Modernity, KCLMS Occasional Publications 2 (London: King’s College, 2009). 8. The reference is to Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).

Luuk Houwen [email protected]

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Vicent Ferrer, Quaestio de Unitate Universalis. ‫( מאמר נכבד כבולל‬Ma’amar nikhbad bakolel). Latin text and medieval Hebrew version with Catalan and English translations. Bibliotheca Philosophorum Medii Aevi Cataloniae 1. Edited by Alexander Fidora and Mauro Zonta in collaboration with Josep Batalla and Robert D. Hughes. Santa Coloma de Queralt: Obrador edèndum, 2010. Pp. 367.

The Catalan Dominican friar and saint Vicent Ferrer (1350–1419) is best known for his abundant sermons, which he delivered beginning in the 1380s and continuing into the fifteenth century, well after the antiJewish pogroms of 1391 that led to mass forced conversions to Christianity. Less attention has been paid to Ferrer’s few philosophical works in Latin, composed in the early period of his career, in the 1370s, before he began his years of active preaching. This edition by Alexander Fidora and Mauro Zonta and their collaborators offers the Latin text of one of those works, that commonly known as Quaestio de unitate universalis (Question on the Unity of the Universal), composed in 1370 to 1372 when Ferrer, only twenty years old, was a student in Lleida. Yet the editors present much more than an updated edition of the Quaestio, which has been edited twice in the last century (in 1909 to 1911 by Pierre Henri Fages, who rediscovered the text after it had fallen into oblivion for centuries, and again by John Trentman in a 1982 critical edition). It also brings to light a hitherto unknown Hebrew translation of the work that contains much more text than the Latin copy known to the previous editors. By editing and translating the Hebrew text for the first time and by translating the Hebrew rendition into Latin for comparison with the known version, Alexander Fidora and Mauro Zonta have provided a tremendously valuable and erudite work that forces us to rethink the content of Ferrer’s philosophical thought as well as the extent of his impact and reception among both Christian and Jewish thinkers of the period. Vicent Ferrer began his career as a Dominican friar in 1367, spending his initial years in Valencia and Barcelona before being sent to Lleida in 1369 to pursue studies in natural philosophy. There, he was soon distinguished for his abilities and became a lecturer in logic. As Fidora explains in his general introduction to the volume, the intellectual ambiance in which Ferrer found himself was one dominated by questions of nominalism and the ongoing conflict between Franciscans and Dominicans, embodied in the rival interpretations of followers of Thomas Aquinas on the one hand and Duns Scotus and William of Ockham on the other. It was within these debates that Ferrer received his intellectual Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 40 (Reinhold F. Glei and Wolfgang Polleichtner, eds.), Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

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formation and eventually participated as a defender of Aquinas’s legacy in contemplating the question of universal and particular existence. Following Aquinas, Ferrer proposed “a middle path between extreme realism on the one hand, and nominalism, on the other” (47). The Quaestio in its surviving Latin version first lays out the extreme rationalist position, similar to that of fourteenth-century “realist” philosopher Walter Burley, proposing that universals exist and possess a certain real unity. Ferrer then presents an extreme nominalist position, similar to that espoused by Ockham and his disciples, in which the unity and even the existence of the universal is denied as unreal. Against these two extreme views, Ferrer follows Aquinas in proposing that universal natures do indeed exist but that their alleged unity does not, being instead a product of intellectual generalization. Ferrer’s argument thus addresses one of the central questions of fourteenth-century philosophical debates while at the same time connecting this philosophical discussion in a unique way with what would become one of his overarching concerns in later years—namely, a defense of the uniqueness of human beings and “the metaphysical and theological principles of individuality and moral accountability” (63). Fidora’s introduction provides a clear and concise overview of this philosophical and intellectual milieu, as well as a brief overview of Ferrer’s life and a consideration of the philosophical themes at play in the work. The first half of the book after the introduction offers a new edition, prepared by Josep M. Llobet and Alexander Fidora, of the familiar version of the Latin text, which only survives in one fifteenthcentury manuscript (Vienna, Dominikanerkloster 49/271, ff. 237r– 241v) that has served as the basis of both published editions. Their version corrects a few points from Trentman’s 1982 edition and further offers a translation of this text by Josep Batalla into Catalan and by Alexander Fidora into English. The quality of the edition is high, and I could find no errors large or small in either the Latin text or the Catalan or English translations. This new Latin version not only provides an updated text of the version that has been known to scholars for the last century and offers what is to my knowledge the first translation of this text into either English or Catalan, but it also establishes a necessary base text for comparison with the Hebrew version that follows in the second half of the volume. Earlier editors of Ferrer’s philosophical work were apparently unaware that it was cited in the fifteenth century by Dominican Peter Schwarz (Petrus Nigri) in his Clipeus thomistarum. Even more importantly, this overlooked passage in Schwarz’s work does not correspond to the surviving text of the Latin in the Vienna manuscript and thus

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points mysteriously to an alternate text other than the standard Latin version. Fidora and Zonta have found that this unidentified citation of Ferrer’s work by Schwartz actually appears in a hitherto unknown Hebrew translation of the Quaestio, which Zonta has discovered in a late fifteenth-century manuscript now held in the Biblioteca Palatina de Parma (MS Parmense 2631 fol. 126v, l. 20–144r, l. 24). This text constitutes a Hebrew translation of Ferrer’s work made by Aragonese Jewish philosopher ‘Eli Habillo in the 1470s, who translated and studied numerous works of Latin Scholasticism. Zonta clearly summarizes the history of this discovery, then provides the first edition of Habillo’s Hebrew text and translates that text back into Latin on the basis of the existing Latin translation and Schwartz’s citation. The latter corresponds to Question 23 of the work, preserved also in the Hebrew version, which deals with the critical issue considered by Ferrer of the reality of universals. While this translation might seem at first a strange addition to the volume, it offers a critically important vision of what the original Latin may have looked like. At the same time, Zonta is careful to stress that his version is a preliminary, “very tentative” rendering and does not pretend to represent the original Latin text (185). In addition to Zonta’s Latin version of the Hebrew, the edition also offers a Catalan and English translation version for easy reference. The significance of Habillo’s Hebrew translation for a proper understanding of Ferrer’s text is hard to overestimate. Not only does it show that the version preserved in the Vienna manuscript is incomplete and probably represents a condensed copy of the original made by Ferrer’s student or a copyist, but it also suggests that the work may not have been titled Quaestio de unitate universalis as it has been received but instead may have been titled Tractatus sollemnis de universalis (Solemn Treatise on the Universal). This suggests also that Ferrer was not concerned merely with the particular question of the unity of the universal, as he is in the Latin text of the Vienna manuscript, but that he engaged more generally with the theme of the universal, considering related issues such as the location of the universal and its particular relation to the individual soul. If this extensive and thorough presentation of the Latin and Hebrew texts, both in their medieval forms and in English and Catalan translation, were not sufficient, Fidora also provides an intelligent and wellwritten introduction in Catalan to the philosophical background and contents of the volume, itself accompanied by a facing-page English translation provided by Robert D. Hughes. In the second part of the volume, Zonta’s helpful introduction to the Hebrew text and its editorial fate is likewise offered in facing Catalan and English. The edition

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finally includes a Hebrew-Latin glossary and a complete index of sources and references found within the text. The care taken in preparing each of these sections—I can find virtually nothing to criticize or question in its organization or execution—is consistently evident. The only point I find worthy of comment is the repetition of the same bibliographical entries in the facing Catalan-English translations of the notes. It may have saved space to provide a single bibliography and use short-title or date references in the corresponding notes. This little quibble does not represent a criticism at all, but merely a suggestion for streamlining the scholarly apparatus. This impressive collaborative effort represents a philological and philosophical tour de force that obliges us to revise what we thought we knew about Vicent Ferrer’s philosophical work and its dissemination among contemporary Jewish and Christian intellectual circles. What is perhaps most significant and valuable about this work is its method. By presenting multiple versions of the same work and noting the correspondences between them in the notes, this edition highlights the importance of considering medieval philosophical writing, like medieval polemics, from a multilingual and, when possible, multidisciplinary perspective rather than simply from a single scholarly or linguistic angle. In offering this as the inaugural volume of the Bibliotheca philosophorum medii Aevi Cataloniae, which seeks to edit and translate works of medieval Catalan philosophy, the editors have produced a work of the highest intellectual caliber, setting the standard for future editions in the series very high indeed. Ryan Szpiech [email protected]

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Franz Fuchs, ed., Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften in der Zeit von Philipp Melanchthon: Akten des gemeinsam mit dem Cauchy-Forum-Nürnberg e.V. am 12./13. November 2010 veranstalteten Symposions in Nürnberg. Pirckheimer Jahrbuch für Renaissance- und Humanismusforschung 26 (2012). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2012. Pp. 172.

This volume collects a number of papers delivered at a 2010 conference held in Nuremberg dedicated to the role of mathematics and natural sciences in the work of Melanchthon and related humanists, especially those from sixteenth-century Nuremberg. In the opening article by Günter Frank, “Natur als Offenbarung— Philipp Melanchthons Naturbild” (“Nature as Revelation—The Image of Nature in Philipp Melanchthon,” 9–25), the author first discusses Melanchthon’s opposition to the heliocentric theory put forward by Copernicus and suggests that his rejection was due not to an irrational religious traditionalism but rather to the fact that the heliocentric system was, at least until Galileo’s discoveries in the seventeenth century, nothing but a hypothesis, unconfirmed so far by empiric observations. The author stresses that Melanchthon’s idea of god is a (neo-)Platonic one, god being a mens aeterna, causa boni in natura, who therefore is also the architect (that is, Timaeus’s demiourgós) of nature. Nature, then, as a creation of god, is a kind of revelation. Consequently, there cannot be a contradiction between natural sciences and religion, but just the reverse is true: god’s existence can be proved by understanding nature as a machina mundi (Kant’s so-called physico-theological proof). Human beings can understand god’s creation, for the human is god’s image—that is, humans and god are, in a way, relatives. Natural theology, then, is a possible source of knowledge about god. The human mind is, however, darkened by original sin and therefore needs salvation coming from outside. The author states that this is the point where Melanchthon’s natural philosophy is blended with the Lutheran doctrine of grace: there is an analogy between natural (or creational) theology and soteriology, on the one hand, and the Lutheran (or Pauline) concept of lex and evangelium, on the other. The author’s résumé is that nature in Melanchthon is a kind of revelation (“Book of Nature”), one which is, however, soteriologically insufficient and must be completed by Scripture. The second article, “Philipp Melanchthon im Dialog mit Astronomen und Mathematikern: Ausgewählte Beispiele” (“Philipp Melanchthon in Dialogue with Astronomers and Mathematicians: Selected Examples,” Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 40 (Reinhold F. Glei and Wolfgang Polleichtner, eds.), Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

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27–58), which was written by Karin Reich, is a prosopographical tour de force that cannot be reported in detail here. The author primarily discusses Melanchthon’s relationship to his teachers, costudents, colleagues, and other scholars. A special focus is laid on prefaces to editions of mathematical works (from Euclid to contemporary mathematicians), but the descriptions are confined to brief summaries and do not provide us with deeper insights into Melanchthon’s understanding of mathematics, which makes this contribution somewhat disappointing. In his lengthy article “Sternenlauf und göttliche Vorsehung. Philipp Melanchthon als Förderer der mathematischen Lehre” (“Celestial Movements and Divine Providence. Philipp Melanchthon as Promotor of Mathematical Teaching,” 59–98), Georg Singer gives an overview of mathematical teaching in Wittenberg during the time of Melanchthon. In his introduction the author states that Melanchthon’s positive attitude to mathematics was quite unusual among the early humanists and that Melanchthon’s motivation behind strengthening mathematical education was not the metaphysical value of mathematics (as a key to the realm of knowledge as in Plato’s line simile, for example) but its practical usage. The most important benefit that can be taken from mathematics is, however, its relevance for astronomy, which is, in turn, a tool to understand god’s creation (see Frank’s article, described above). Singer’s detailed presentation of the mathematical curriculum in Wittenberg is a useful contribution to educational history, albeit not to the history of mathematics. In his last chapter the author discusses once more Melanchthon and his circle’s attitude toward Copernicus and claims that the “Wittenberg interpretation” (Robert Westman) tried to apply Copernicus’s methods to the geocentric system. This also influenced, the author suggests, Tycho Brahe and, by consequence, Kepler. Therefore, paradoxically enough, the Wittenberg opposition to Copernicus allegedly became a milestone on the way to the heliocentric system. This seems, however, too fantastic to be true: in light of Melanchthon’s work Initia Doctrinae Physicae (1549), one is rather inclined to agree with Walther Ludwig, who states that substantial modifications of the traditional worldview were, in fact, “barricaded” by Melanchthon’s theological biases.1 The next contribution “Die Nürnberger Rechenmeister als Mathematiker und Liebhaber der Mathematik” (“The Nuremberg Masters of Calculating as Mathematicians and Enthusiasts of Mathematics,” 99–119, with eight plates), written by Christine Sauer, refers to the fact that the so-called Rechenmeister were often mediators between the art of writing—or, more precisely, graphical illustration—and applied mathematical sciences. By analyzing several portraits of Nuremberg Masters, the

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author shows how they saw and presented themselves while measuring, calculating, and teaching. In any case, the Nuremberg Masters widely promoted mathematical knowledge that found its way into printing, craftsmanship, and arts. The last article “Johannes Schöner—ein angesehener Wissenschaftler und genialer Wissensvermittler” (“Johannes Schöner—a Respected Scholar and Great Mediator of Knowledge,” 121–61, with eight plates), written by Monika Maruska, is an abstract of the author’s unpublished dissertation (Vienna, 2008) and presents a detailed reconstruction of Schöner’s life and work. His most important achievement lies in the construction and fabrication of globes (both of the earth and the sky), thus combining geometry (in the original sense of the word), astronomy, and practical skills. To these five conference papers, a short notice by Franz Josef Worstbrock on two newly found epigrams by Pirckheimer and Celtis is added (163–66).2 Finally, a short review of volume 4 of the Reuchlin Briefwechsel by Antonia Landois (167–69) is included. There is a list of abbreviations, but no index. In sum, the volume contains some useful contributions to our knowledge of mathematical and natural sciences (especially astronomy) in the age of Melanchthon, but it is a random collection that is very selective and does not live up to the promising and exaggerated title given by the editor.

Notes 1. See Walther Ludwig, “Art und Zweck der Lehrmethode Melanchthons: Beobachtungen anlässlich der ersten Übersetzung seiner Initia doctrinae physicae,” in Lehren und Lernen im Zeitalter der Reformation. Methoden und Funktionen, ed. Gerlinde Huber-Rebenich (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 91–113 (esp. 111). See also Ludwig’s translation: Philipp Melanchthon, Initia Doctrinae Physicae: Die Anfänge der physikalischen Lehre, trans. Walther Ludwig, Subsidia Classica 11 (Rahden, Westfalen: Verlag Marie Leidorf, 2008). This important work, though mentioned several times, is not duly appreciated in the volume under review. 2. See the additions and corrections made by Dieter Wuttke, “Dürer-Parodien in Celtis-Drucken und zu einem unbekannt-bekannten Celtis-Epigramm,” Pirckheimer Jahrbuch 27 (2013): 141–50.

Reinhold F. Glei [email protected]

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Helmut Glück, Mark Häberlein, Konrad Schröder, Mehrsprachigkeit in der frühen Neuzeit: Die Reichsstädte Augsburg und Nürnberg vom 15. bis ins frühe 19. Jahrhundert. Unter Mitarbeit von Magdalena Bayreuther, Amelie Ellinger, Nadine Hecht, Johannes Staudenmaier und Judith Walter. Fremdsprachen in Geschichte und Gegenwart 10. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2013. Pp. xiv + 583, 53 illustrations, and 24 tables.

Weighing in at a good three pounds and encompassing in quarto format six hundred pages, this book, which presents the achievements of three editors and five assisting scholars, is ample and considerable in terms of content too: its contribution to our knowledge of multilingualism in the early modern period of European history is, at the very least, wholly in proportion to its bulk. Using Nuremberg and Augsburg as examples—both towns that, in economic and cultural terms, were two of the most important urban centers in the German-speaking lands of the late fourteenth to the early nineteenth centuries—the publication outlines and details the acquisition of foreign languages within that period: which languages the citizens learned, how they learned them, who the teachers were, and what kind of teaching material was available. The vast numbers of documents consulted for the analysis presented on pages 1 through 347 are identified in an appendix that contains not only this finding list but also a bibliography covering the relevant literature, tables for chapters 4 and 5 (see below), and a selection of the actual texts—transcriptions of manuscripts showing pupils at work (learning vocabulary, for instance) and extracts from textbooks; these last are complemented by the illustrations found throughout the entire book. The first of its eleven chapters maps the situation, as it were, by tracing Augsburg’s and Nuremberg’s early modern international links and lines of exchange. The majority of their trading partners were located in Italy, above all in Venice, but many also in France, on the Iberian Peninsula, and in the Low Countries; they had rather fewer business dealings with Eastern Europe and the least of all with England and Scandinavia. Over the course of the five centuries covered by the book, the political and other circumstances under which trade could be carried out and merchants from Augsburg and Nuremberg could spend time abroad were not consistently favorable. Confessional conflict in particular caused massive interference in their contact with certain foreign states. Even a war, however, could prove quite handy when it came to learning another language, as exemplified by the German gunsmiths and cannon casters taken prisoner by the Turks and made to continue practicing their skills (53). Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 40 (Reinhold F. Glei and Wolfgang Polleichtner, eds.), Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

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The normal ways for people from Augsburg and Nuremberg to learn a new language were either to bind themselves as an apprentice in a foreign country—Venice was usually the city of choice—or to spend longer periods of time abroad, studying, for example, or acquiring the kind of refinement a Grand Tour could offer those in a position to afford it. Chapter 2 shows the routine course the first of these options would take. Unlike Latin, which was taught only in schools, Italian, for instance, would be picked up by apprentices in Italy from their masters, their masters’ families, and their fellow workers—primarily auditory learning, then; dictionaries and grammars were also used, but not widely until after 1600. Books played a greater role for pupils from wealthier backgrounds, such as patricians’ sons studying at a university in Italy or France or traveling as Grand Tourists (the largest numbers of those occurring in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). At some of the foreign universities, a language master was to be had, but such teachers were also available in Augsburg and Nuremberg and at Nuremberg’s Altdorf University, the teaching of modern languages there made it one of the most important educational institutions for these disciplines in early modern Europe. Chapter 4 describes the conditions under which those of the language teachers who were immigrants had to work, their problems beginning immediately on arrival because they had to apply for residence permits and continuing, for example, with more of the same red tape when they had to have those extended. The book acquaints us with some of these teachers, first and foremost with Matthias Kramer (ca. 1640–1727), who taught for many years in Nuremberg and who could offer his pupils an impressive array of languages: English, French, Italian, and Spanish. A table charting all teachers found and their subjects is included in the appendix. Teachers also compiled textbooks, and chapter 5 takes an in-depth look at such works. Another useful table in the appendix shows these together with all material on them gathered by the editors. One example from this chapter must stand here for all, albeit a particularly curious one: a book on “Fetu” in West Africa by the preacher Wilhelm Johann Müller from Harburg. This comprised not only a description of the land of the Efutu but also an Efutu-German dictionary, which is probably one of the earliest written records of any language from the Kwa family (264ff.). The overall impression is that Glück, Häberlein, Schröder, and their helpers have been extremely thorough and able to present the large body of findings in a form that is very readable and represents a great leap forward in their field. The skilful way in which they have incorporated as much detail as possible into their description of the learning and teaching situation in Augsburg and Nuremberg will stand both as

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model for any future investigations looking at other towns and cities with comparable history, as a basis for closer, specifically linguistic and didactic analyses of the above-mentioned textbooks, and as the foundation for examination of other questions that arise out of the study of early modern multilingualism. The book is quite simply exemplary and will be indispensable. That said, no amount of research, however meticulous, can ensure that absolutely all relevant minutiae have been covered. And when the sources are as tricky to track down as they certainly were in this case, well, there is a limit to the sleuthing even a team can do. Such omissions, of course, are only going to be detected by a reader who has previously devoted his or her own energies to an aspect of the area under scrutiny, a reader, quite by chance, such as myself. Having made a study of the Nuremberg patrician and humanist Willibald Pirckheimer (1470–1530), I have to say that the source of information about him used in this book—an article written in 1967 by Hans Rupprich (cited on 93–94)—is entirely outdated and in part unreliable, even wrong. I must also beg to differ with what is said (68) about the evidence for young Augsburgers and Nurembergers visiting Spain: the earliest documents are alleged there to date from no earlier than the middle of the sixteenth century, but Pirckheimer’s correspondence in fact includes five letters sent between 1526 and 1528 by his nephews Martin and Sebald Geuder from Seville, Granada, Valladolid, and Orléans. These letters—all, also interesting, in French—have already been edited and are thus easily accessible.1 Less readily accessible and in fact barely known is a holograph manuscript of Pirckheimer’s now preserved in the Stadtbibliothek at Nürnberg (shelf mark PP 98) and containing his draft of a translation from Spanish into German. The text in question is a state paper: an account of the negotiations held on January 22 and 17, 1528, in Burgos between Emperor Charles V and the representatives of the English and French kings.2 How did Pirckheimer, who had never been to Spain, come to understand the language? One explanation could be its similarity to Latin, and that, in turn, opens the door to a number of questions not addressed at all by the editors in this book. Is there, for instance, any evidence to suggest that other Germans used their knowledge of Latin to equip themselves, as this humanist did, with at least a passive command of one or more of the Romance languages? Did any of them deduce their way from their native tongue into reading another Germanic language? How significant was the influence of the Latin taught in schools, the Latin which, in Nuremberg, even a master cobbler such as Hans Sachs had to take for a good few years—from 1501

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until 1509!—on the acquisition of other, modern languages? This last complex is touched on in the book, but only now and again. Nevertheless, if anyone does feel called upon in the future to fill in these little gaps, it will be because Glück, Häberlein, and Schröder have inspired them to do so and have provided the necessary groundwork.

Notes 1. See Helga Scheible, ed., Willibald Pirckheimers Briefwechsel, vols. 6 and 7 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2004 and 2009), nos. 1030, 1043, 1069, 1090, and 1181. 2. On a German version of this printed in Nuremberg by Jobst Gutknecht, but with conspicuous differences to Pirckheimer’s wording, see VD 16 F 2317 (2) and M 538.

Niklas Holzberg [email protected]

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Francis W. Kent (†), Princely Citizen: Lorenzo de’ Medici and Renaissance Florence. Edited by Carolyn James. Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies 24. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. Pp. viii + 369.

Francis W. Kent’s untimely death in 2010 prevented him from completing his biography of Lorenzo de’ Medici on which he had worked for many years. After having learned that he was ill, he worked with his colleague Carolyn James to collect fifteen articles on Lorenzo that James after Kent’s death has edited in the beautiful volume under review. It is both the substitute for the missing biography and a proof of Kent’s uncontested expertise in the field of Quattrocento Florence. Often, volumes consisting of one researcher’s collected works are above all a token of appreciation and honor but no must-read for a broader audience. In the case of Princely Citizen, things are different: the concentration on Lorenzo makes the volume homogenous, and through its broad perspective (spanning the period from Lorenzo’s youth to his rise to power to his death, with an unsurprising focus on questions of patronage and political communication) it can indeed serve very well as a first approach to the fascinating figure of “il Magnifico.” Fourteen of the fifteen articles had been published earlier and represent more than thirty years of study (the earliest article is from 1979 and the latest from 2010, though most were written in the 1990s and 2000s), but there is also one new chapter on Lorenzo’s death. Some of the articles have hugely influenced further research on fifteenthcentury Florence (especially Kent’s work on Lorenzo’s patronage that culminated in the 2004 monograph Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence, and indeed some of the articles republished here invite the reader to read them almost as a “making-of” this important book); others, however, might rather surprise (who would have known or remembered that Kent wrote a note on the musician Heinrich Isaak?). Duplications of the addressed material or within the argumentation are agreeably few and only very minuscule. As a whole, the volume testifies to Kent’s admirably widespread knowledge and curiosity. The articles were not reworked or adapted, but an additional bibliography was added to almost every single one, offering references to selected studies that were published later. In the following, I can only highlight some aspects I consider to represent central elements of Kent’s view on Lorenzo. The volume starts with an article on the young Lorenzo that tries to offer reasons why, Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 40 (Reinhold F. Glei and Wolfgang Polleichtner, eds.), Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

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according to his contemporaries, he was such a precocious adolescent. Two chapters (2 and 3) on the women in Lorenzo’s life follow, the first of them being an overview of his many sexual escapades, his wife Clarice Orsini, and his mother. Here Kent argues that Lorenzo was not so much a romantic lover but behaved more like a “proto-prince” (62) who for his political activities could rely on the support of his female partners. Chapter 3 concentrates only on Lorenzo’s mother, Lucrezia Tornabuoni. It shows that her life, dedicated to her husband and later to her son, was by no means a purely private one; in fact, Lucrezia was not only a good wife and mother but also presented herself as a virile widow, especially through her own biblical poetry. In this aspect, as Kent suggests, her life might have served as an example for Clarice’s role in her marriage with Lorenzo. In the following chapters, Kent analyzes Lorenzo’s political and cultural network. Some approach the topic more generally; for example, chapters 10 to 13 show how the traditional network of the Florentine oligarchy constantly lost its inherited influence and was substituted by Lorenzo’s new system of patronage, which was rather centered around him alone. This increasing hierarchy within the upper class (note, for instance, Kent’s remarks that from the 1480s onward Lorenzo was no longer addressed informally with the Italian tu but was revered as a father and dominus by his contemporaries) was flanked by propagandistic efforts to present Lorenzo as an ideal Platonic philosopher-ruler (his interest in villas, his amateurish interest in art, and his own poetry are part of this image) and to present the Medici as a holy family (stirpe santa; Lorenzo’s patronage of religious institutions and his church buildings can be mentioned here). At the same time, Lorenzo not only invested in relations with the nobility but also included craftsmen, architects, and artists in his network, creating a vertical axis through different social strata. Other chapters concentrate on specific topics, such as Lorenzo’s attempts to transform the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore into a memorial of the Medici dynasty (chapter 5), the history of his villa at Poggio a Caiano (chapter 6), the already-mentioned composer Heinrich Isaak and his sojourn in Florence (chapter 7), the question whether Lorenzo used public money for his financial patronage (chapter 8), and a short research note on the sculptor Bernardo (chapter 9). The final chapter, previously unpublished, collects material on Lorenzo’s death, which was immediately afterward stylized by his contemporaries as a (historical) turning point, partly by comparing the events with those in Rome after the death of Augustus in 14 A.D. Kent shows how the funeral (though not very sumptuous) was a public spectacle and how Lorenzo’s tomb was visited by ten thousands of citizens

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within the first days after his burial. On the other hand, not only his friends but also his adversaries made use of this feeling of extreme loss: whereas Lorenzo’s admirers wanted to propagate the memory of an ideal ruler whose passing away was accompanied by celestial omens, the rivals, already heavily influenced by Savonarola’s religious concepts, interpreted his death and the same supernatural phenomena as a punishment for immorality in the city, and they made use of the opportunity to fight against sodomy. If one wanted to criticize Kent’s approach (which is partly unfair as the volume is no monograph), I think it would be for his relatively scarce use of literary material. To name just a few literary figures, Naldo Naldi, one of the most important panegyrical writers of Lorenzo’s regime, is only mentioned twice (and then only en passant); Ugolino Verino is referred to a little more often, but mostly on the basis of Alfonso Lazzari’s evaluation of his poetry in his Ugolino e Michele Verino, which is more than one hundred years old.1 Even Poliziano’s work, the importance of which is stressed several times, is hardly ever interpreted, although such an analysis could surely have corroborated some of the general claims, such as the growing orientation of Florentine culture on Lorenzo alone, which resulted in the supposed hierarchical system of patronage with Lorenzo on top of the pyramid. Bartolomeo Scala’s Collectiones Cosmianae, clearly meant to underline the dynastic claims of the Medici, is another example of omitted yet influential literary material from the time of Lorenzo’s regime. No mention at all is made of Alessandro Braccesi, who under Lorenzo made a successful political career and whose poetic collection was partly dedicated to Lorenzo in 1477. For anyone interested in such literary aspects of Laurentian Florence, the monograph by Tobias Leuker, Bausteine eines Mythos, might be a useful addition to the book under review.2 To sum up: I feel that we should be very thankful to Carolyn James for having published this book so flawlessly (I could hardly spot any typos—actually the only one I saw, on 305n28, is harmless: “Seutonius” instead of “Suetonius”). Apart from its content, the book can also serve as a kind of methodological testament that represents Kent’s ethos as a researcher. From this point of view, probably the most fascinating aspect of the volume is the sheer amount of archival material that he has read and used. Consequently, the twelfth article—“Unheard Voices from the Medici Family Archive in the Time of Lorenzo de’ Medici,” first published in 2006, in which Kent expresses his admiration for the digitalization of the Archivio Mediceo avanti il Principato (MaP)—is one of the most personal parts of the volume. A second inexhaustible source of material for Kent’s research is the edition of Lorenzo’s correspondence

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that was initiated by Kent’s teacher Nicolai Rubinstein and of which sixteen heavy volumes have been published by now. It is more than a coincidence that the very last sentence of the volume (320) praises this marvelous edition of letters and invites the reader to make the utmost use of it in the future. Likewise, this collection of Kent’s essays is more than a sum of his personal achievements; it is also a baton that is passed on to a new generation of researchers.

Notes 1. A recent and very good reevaluation of Verino’s work and his position within Laurentian Florence can be found in Nikolaus Thurn’s Neulatein und Volkssprache: Beispiele für die Rezeption neusprachlicher Literatur durch die lateinische Dichtung Europas im 15.-16. Jahrhundert (Munich: Wilhelm Fink 2012), 27–117. Of special interest for Kent’s volume are 113–14, which offer some hints at parallels between Verino’s Sylvae in laudem sanctorum and the religious poetry written by Lucrezia Tornabuoni. 2. Tobias Leuker, Bausteine eines Mythos: Die Medici in Dichtung und Kunst des 15. Jahrhunderts (Cologne: Böhlau 2007).

Christoph Pieper [email protected]

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John Marenbon, Abelard in Four Dimensions: A Twelfth-Century Philosopher in His Context and Ours. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Pp. x + 285.

This volume is not so much a mere introduction to or monograph on some interesting medieval thinker but rather is an exposition of a method for dealing with the past in a philosophically and historically satisfying way. It is written by one of the foremost experts on the subject, author of many studies including The Philosophy of Peter Abelard from 1997, and provides the reader with manifold offers and challenges regarding his method of studying the history of philosophy. The book is structured formally in an exemplary and reader-friendly way, providing introductions to all of its parts, a concise conclusion, informative annotations, well-chosen bibliography, and exhaustive index. In his present book originating in three Conway Lectures at the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame from 2009, John Marenbon sets out a manifold enterprise to serve a variety of possible audiences (at least three different sorts of readers). His book includes an introductory account of Abelard’s life and works via a discussion of his semantics, ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion; a reevaluation of arguments about the chronology of Abelard’s authentic logical works; and Abelard’s relation to Anselm and Hugh of St. Victor. An innovative discussion of the possible combination of human freedom and the necessity of God’s actions is announced as well as a reinterpretation of passages in which Abelard discusses semantics and metaphysics. But this is not all: indeed, most importantly, Marenbon introduces his proposal to overcome the academic chasm that exists between those working in the history of philosophy, on the one hand, and proper historians and philologists, on the other. Thus, the study is intended to serve as a guideline for historians of philosophy that does justice to both parts and reconciles their otherwise schizophrenic existence. These aims, which are found in the paratexts of the study, seem to be rather ambitious for a single monograph, but Marenbon has chosen his object of study well and prevails in his endeavor by uncompromisingly and clearly introducing and unfolding his most basic demand. Not unjustifiably, the closeness of Abelard’s thinking to current forms of philosophy, above all to analytic philosophy, has been remarked. The question remains how to deal with that impression historically as well as philosophically. Marenbon’s proposal is frank: for historians of philosophy studying a philosopher, time should have not only one (or Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 40 (Reinhold F. Glei and Wolfgang Polleichtner, eds.), Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

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three as one may suggest) but rather four dimensions—the philosopher’s present, the philosopher’s past, the philosopher’s future, and, finally and most challengingly, the historian’s present in relation to the philosopher’s ideas. One might even be inclined to speculate about the philosopher’s future, then, but these four dimensions provide the basic structure of Marenbon’s study, which relates the first and second chapter to the first dimension, the third chapter to the second, and the fourth chapter to the third. Chapters 5 and 6 are devoted to the fourth dimension: they examine recent comparisons that have been made between Abelard and Gottlob Frege, Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, and contemporary trope theory in metaphysics, and they also include a detailed argument with other leading scholars of Abelard’s thinking, mostly from the English-speaking world, among them Peter King and Christopher Martin. With regard to the first three dimensions the book remains firmly within the limits of the conventional academic approach to the history of philosophy, an approach that is nevertheless “fresh” and pertinent, bringing some strong assertions up for discussion. Above all, Marenborn’s account conveys the nagging intensity of the struggle about Abelard’s notoriously unpopular but innovative argument that God cannot do otherwise than he does. Thus, Marenborn guides the reader through the whole scope of Abelard’s reasoning using the complicated idea of “no alternatives for God” (according to him, among the proposals in the book the most striking difference from the accepted picture of Abelard) to explicate not only Abelard himself but also the discussion about his ideas. As to the fourth dimension, the subject of chapters 5 and 6, which provide the reader with the most fascinating discussions of the study, Marenbon, however, regrettably reduces his approach too intensely to the question whether Abelard’s thinking might be regarded as congruent or even comparable to present positions on certain subjects, such as trope theory or the idea of direct reference in the theory of meaning. Present thinkers considered here include Frege above all, but also Kripke and Putnam, who are already considered to be modern classics in their respective fields. Here, his arguments seem to be enlightening and convincing. The value of past philosophy as suggested by Marenbon is clearly valid today: it contributes to second-order considerations of the character of certain philosophical questions. To me, however, it would have been an even more interesting and intellectually fertile task to evaluate—considering the fact that although the two positions are similar they do not really converge as Marenbon suggests— whether one position of the past might be used either to criticize or to

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supplement the present one and vice versa. There are approaches to a philosopher’s ideas that go beyond the scope of comparisons and the search for influences after all. Through these kinds of fertile marriages (leading to a, hopefully, faithful mutual treatment of both sides) in the sense of William James, a fifth dimension to the historians of philosophy’s time might be introduced that includes the past philosopher in the future process of systematic philosophy. The book is, nevertheless, an inspiring, intriguing, and therefore highly recommendable read for any of its many addressees prepared to look beyond academic borders. Knut Martin Stünkel [email protected]

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Catrien Santing, Barbara Baert, and Anita Traninger, eds., Disembodied Heads in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 28. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Pp. xx + 311.

“Alas, poor Yorick.” When the Royal Shakespeare Company revived Hamlet for the 2008 theater season, leading man David Tennant was wellnigh upstaged by none other than Yorick’s skull. Against common theatrical practice, the play’s director, Greg Doran, did not use an artificial stage prop but a genuine skull bequeathed to the RSC in 1982 by pianist and composer André Tchaikowsky. As a real human body part, the skull served as a powerful memento mori in this twenty-first-century production of an early seventeenth-century play—and made headlines not only on the “arts and entertainment” pages. As Doran reveals in a statement underscoring the importance of the head as the locus of identity, “It was sort of a little shock tactic . . . though, of course, to some extent that wears off and it’s just André, in his box.”1 The story of Yorick’s and André’s skulls reveals the continuing fascination that severed heads have exerted on humans, a fascination that also informs the contributions in this volume. Disembodied Heads in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, the result of an interdisciplinary conference held at the Academia Belgica and the Royal Dutch Institute in Rome, contains ten original articles and an introduction by Catrien Santing and Barbara Baert, who take their cues from the works of Samuel Edgerton, Jonathan Sawday, Mitchell Merback, and Nicholas Terpstra.2 Claiming that the disembodied head has received little attention in critical literature despite the welter of work on the body and interiority in medieval and early modern culture, the editors bring together scholars from the fields of art history, literary studies, cultural history, medical history, and law history. The contributions cover major topics in the history of ideas from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and situate them in classical and scriptural traditions: head relics and reliquaries, cephalophores (martyrs who carry their heads after being decapitated), the caput Johannis in disco (the head of John the Baptist on a platter), speaking heads, Renaissance and Baroque portraiture, medical treatises, devotional practices, penal laws, and the vera icon (Christ’s disembodied head floating in space). The volume begins with a perceptive article in which Marina Montesano seeks to unearth the origin of the late medieval motif of Adam’s skull at the foot of the cross, which symbolizes the successful redemption of humanity. While the relation between cross and skull explicitly Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 40 (Reinhold F. Glei and Wolfgang Polleichtner, eds.), Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

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derives from the Evangelists (Golgotha and Calvary allegedly translate into “skull”), the identification of the skull as Adam’s is moot. Although admitting that the motif may derive from the notion that Adam is a prefiguration of Christ, Montesano contends that Origen, whose Commentary on St. Matthew is the first known textual source, learned about the tradition from Christian Jewish communities. Of course, much of her argument rests on conjecture, but her judicious use of textual, visual, and literary evidence to support it, and not least her etymological derivation of “skull” and “chalice” from the same source word make her contribution an insightful read. Robert Mills’s article “Talking Heads, or, A Tale of Two Clerics” provides a diachronic survey of talking heads from around 1000 to 1700 C.E. The two clerics of the title are Gerbert of Aurillac, who later became Pope Sylvester II, and Abbo of Fleury. Each represents a different variation on the motif of the talking head. As William of Malmesbury narrates, Gerbert used dark magic to manufacture a talking head that could make prophecies, which, however, turned out to be ambiguous and misleading. Quite differently, Abbo of Fleury wrote the famous Passio Sancti Eadmundi, in which King Edmund’s head, after being severed from the body and cast into brambles by the Danish invaders, had the ability to reveal its whereabouts to the search party (“here, here, here”). As Mills demonstrates, talking heads can thus be either devilish, man-made, and hence speak ambiguously; or divine, human, and hence speak the truthful words of God. Mills traces variations on both motifs until the late seventeenth century and astutely observes how these tales change according to the historico-cultural contexts in which they are retold. He is particularly interested in stories that collapse the binary opposition set up in Gerbert’s and Abbo’s narratives, such as in head idols, “speaking reliquaries,” and truth-telling brazen heads. In his eminently readable contribution, Mills finally argues that talking-head stories from the early modern period conjure up the medium aevum as an age of magic and superstition. In “The Meaning of the Head in High Medieval Culture,” Esther Cohen investigates why the imaginative range of executions was reduced to decapitation and hanging in the High Middle Ages. She sees the reason for this development in the attempt at “stopping life at what is considered its center” (63). After surveying anatomical discussions that variously deemed the head or the heart the seat of life (Plato, Aristotle, the Alexandrian school, Galen), she traces the growing importance of the head in the writings of William of Conches, Bartholomeus Anglicus, and Vincent of Beauvais. Cohen regards the chansons de geste as the link

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between anatomical considerations and penal practices because they consider the head “the organ of life” (72). The author wisely eschews explaining such a development as a series of specific causalities and instead foregrounds the interaction between different areas of inquiry and experience that resulted in the concept of the head as the seat of life and identity. Amid many fine observations, her article also contains some potentially controversial hypotheses, such as the claim that the roles of the head in political metaphors and penal practices are the result of disconnected (as opposed to interlinked) developments of twelfth-century traditions. Scott B. Montgomery’s article “Securing the Sacred Head: Cephalophory and Relic Claims” discusses saints who carry their heads after decapitation (cephalophores) and particularly inquires how the cult of their relics is initiated. Citing the legend of St. Just as the prototypical example, Montgomery explains that the saint establishes the cult of his own relic and its locus by asking to have his severed head brought to his mother to be kissed. This and similar narratives could be updated by churches to legitimize their possession of head reliquaries, especially in those cases where various churches claimed ownership. Pace the entrenched view that such relic cults originated from textual sources, Montgomery argues that they were generated by the complex interplay between images, church reliefs, reliquaries, and texts. His article contains incisive commentary on the head as the center of identity, cephalology (speaking heads), and the culture of saint veneration, but it would have benefited from a more rigorous structure. Occasionally, the author gets carried away with Latinate terminology: “post-decapitation self-propulsion and head portage,” “[p]ost-decollation cranial portage,” and “post-mortem ambulations” all appear on a single page (82). Two articles are devoted to the image of the caput Johannis in disco. In her ambitious contribution “The Johannesschüssel as Andachtsbild: The Gaze, the Medium and the Senses,” Barbara Baert particularly treats the fusion between John and Christ on devotional images of the Baptist’s head on a platter. Her explanation is fourfold. First, the bond between the two is established by inscribing Christ’s sayings from the Gospels on the platter. Second, the devotional image captures the Baptist at the moment of his death and hence depicts his crossing the threshold to eternal life, with John’s gaze offering “the indication of the invisible visage of God” (141). Third, John’s head is depicted as an abject “black, devouring orifice” and thus triggers in the viewer “the shock of absorption and abyss,” which Baert calls “apotropaion” (142–43). Finally, she explains that toward the Late Middle Ages and the early modern period,

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the caput motif ceased to be a presentation or idol and became a visual representation much like the vera icon. Thus, the Baptist and the Savior merged into one single prototype. Baert’s article, especially the first half, features a wealth of pertinent observations on the significance of the caput Johannis in disco. The second half gets progressively heavy on jargon and associative arguments, as for instance in the analogy between the throat of John’s severed head and the female uterus (148–49). In “Chasing the Caput: Head Images of John the Baptist in a Political Conflict,” Mateusz Kapustka unfolds the use and function of head images of John the Baptist on public display in sacred and secular spaces in the episcopal see of Wrocław (Breslau). Medieval Wrocław is the ideal ground for such an investigation: not only did the cathedral keep fragments of John’s skull in an in disco reliquary and represent the saint’s head in its outer architecture but the city authorities also displayed the head of St. John in the town hall, on the official seal, and on the city’s coat of arms. Both corporate bodies, church and city, thus used head images of the Baptist to establish their respective supremacy: the authority of the ecclesia and the political power of the municipal council. Kapustka’s focused article is especially successful in tracing the political implications in the continuous reappropriation of the caput Johannis in disco from the representation of true justice to the image of political success. Arjan R. de Koomen’s contribution, “The Self-Portrait ‘En Décapité’: Interpreting Artistic Self-Insertion,” reassesses the motivation of painters to insert self-portraits in the form of severed heads into their paintings. In order to do so, he tests the evidence that cited Donatello’s bronze David, Giorgione’s David and Goliath, Cristofano Allori’s Judith and Holofernes, Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith paintings, and Caravaggio’s David and Goliath as self-portraits “en décapité.” As de Koomen explains, such notions rest almost entirely on conjecture. The same holds true for explanations of the artists’ psychological motivations (such as homosexuality or lovesickness) for inserting their self-portraits because they are often based on surmises and overinterpretation. De Koomen also takes a stab at the Freudian theory that decapitation figures forth castration anxiety. Reducing the catalog of possible self-portraits “en décapité,” he argues that painters inserted their portraits as “a token of professional pride, which implicitly or explicitly functions as a signature” (218). This tradition, he explains, may have its roots in the fifteenth century but only comes to the fore with Caravaggio. This reviewer particularly liked the author’s trenchant metacriticism (for example, on the biographical fallacy), his reassessment of ready-made postmodern theories of decapitation, and his foregrounding of self-reflexive artistic gestures.

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In his historical study “Capita Selecta in Historia Sacra: Head Relics in Counter Reformation Rome (ca. 1570—ca. 1630),” Jetze Touber investigates how the authenticity of head relics was reassessed by the predecessors of the Société des Bollandistes such as Panvinio, Ugonio, and Bosio. During the course of the Counter-Reformation, such a reassessment was tantamount because the veneration of relics had become the subject of theological controversy. As Touber notes, the authenticity of saints and their relics as historical facts was based on the age and trustworthiness of historical documentation (written records, narratives, visual and material evidence). It was only later that the actual skull and its physical features became the object of scrutiny (teeth, beards, etc.), not least because the same head relic existed in doubles and triples in Rome. By 1630, the lists and descriptions of head relics had become progressively accurate and (at least in Rome) resulted in the authentication of a single skull as genuine. Sketching how different specimens of the same head relic became the object of various ecclesiastical claims, Touber’s article offers significant insights into the cultural and theological climate of the early modern period. After eight articles focusing on various aspects of death and decapitation, Bert Watteeuw’s contribution “Framing the Face: Patterns of Presentation and Representation in Early Modern Dress and Portraiture” deals with living human beings. His fascinating article provides a thorough investigation into the sociocultural relevance of the ruff with regard to “status, body, hygiene, manners and gender” (247). Watteeuw interprets the ruff as an image that can be used in bonam and in malam partem. Used in a positive sense, the ruff signifies control over the self, as it helps its wearer to strike a “dignified posture” (255) and represents civilized interaction (such as table manners); it sets off different areas of the body and especially highlights the head as the least impure body part. Moreover, it accentuates borders between different social classes. Used in a negative sense, the ruff becomes the symbol of leisure, vanity, and the satanic, and hence it develops into the object of satire and parody. Watteeuw essentially sees the ruff as the liminal zone separating “public from private, social from intimate, bare from covered up, presentable from taboo” (258). Although his hypothesis that the ruff in portraiture essentially creates “decapitated bodies and disembodied heads” (245) might initially come across as overstated, it results in a much-needed and perceptive reassessment of this important part of Baroque clothing. Catrien Santing’s closing contribution, “‘And I Bear Your Beautiful Face Painted on My Chest’: The Longevity of the Heart as the Primal Organ in the Renaissance,” investigates the battle of the head and the heart

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in the Renaissance from the points of view of religion, politics, natural philosophy, and medicine. Citing sources from Aristotle and St. Paul to Galen, from Gregorius Reisch and Andrea Cesalpino to Descartes, Santing argues that the importance of the heart was fixed once it had been established as the symbol of the soul. One of many consequences was the decline of head saints such as the cephalophores and the rise of heart saints—that is, “holy men or women with miraculous heart trouble” (275)—in the late thirteenth century. In the sixteenth century the physician Andrea Cesalpino rehabilitated Aristotle’s theories that argued for the heart as the seat of the soul on both medical and religious grounds. This only changed in the seventeenth century with Descartes’s discovery of the pinial gland in the brain. As the emotions influencing the rational soul were now located in the brain, the head also became the seat of reason and consciousness. Santing’s multifaceted article is a fit conclusion to the proceedings volume because it underscores that heads may be severed from bodies but are never isolated from larger physical contexts and sociohistorical discourses. The volume is well presented and includes an index of names that makes for easy cross-referencing. The almost ninety images interact well with the often detailed readings proposed in the book chapters; they also demonstrate the volume’s successful merging of textual and visual traditions. The book includes lengthy Latin and other nonEnglish quotations; in a time when many academic publications do almost entirely without them, this comes as a positive surprise, even if they are relegated to the footnotes.3 The volume as such is well edited (layout, spelling, punctuation) and contains only some minor typographical inconsistencies and slips. While the articles gathered together here cover a wide range of topics, a contribution on the use of heads and skulls on the various Renaissance stages or in the poetry of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance would have been an interesting addition. Such minor criticism aside, Disembodied Heads in Medieval and Early Modern Culture is an original collection from which readers in the various disciplines can learn a great deal. The book is recommended reading for scholars interested in interdisciplinary scholarship, corporeal discourses, and the history of ideas.

Notes 1. David Smith, “Pianist’s Skull Plays the Jester,” Observer, November 22, 2008, www.theguardian.com/stage/2008/nov/23/hamlet-rsc-david-tennant-theatre.

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2. Samuel Y. Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995); Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Nicholas Terpstra, ed., The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy (Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2008). 3. An exception is Baert’s article, which features French and German quotations without English translations (149–50, 155).

Maik Goth [email protected]

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Jörg Schulte, Jan Kochanowski und die europäische Renaissance, Acht Studien. Tübinger Schriften zur Renaissanceforschung und Kulturwissenschaft 47. Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz Verlag, 2011. Pp. 263.

The book under review is a collection of eight essays about the greatest poet of the Renaissance in the Slavonic area, Jan Kochanowski, and his connections and dialogue with the literary and cultural contemporary European environment (1). Jörg Schulte shows expertly that Kochanowski’s work constitutes an integral part of European humanism and its literature (1). The eight essays are only loosely connected; they evolve around the poet and humanist Kochanowski in a diversified way. In the first chapter Schulte analyzes new sources for two fraszki. The first part of the chapter concentrates on one enigmatic fraszka that is, as Schulte argues, tightly connected with the contemporary discussions and atmosphere around the apocryphal books of Lazarus, which were vividly reflected upon those days across Europe. Schulte shows how Kochanowski reflected those discussions especially in the context of the Reformation and the critique of the pope. Schulte forwards a hypothesis that besides all cultural and intellectual movements this fraszka about Lazarus’s books stands as well in the direct context of Kochanowski’s imminent environment. Namely, Kochanowski’s collection of fraszki was published by Lazarus Printing House (Drukarnia Łazarzowa), a well-known Cracow publisher. In Schulte’s opinion the fraszka would combine the very different aspects of the contemporary macrocosm and microcosm to build a unique pun. However, this connection seems to me to be a little bit far-fetched. In the second part of the chapter (which is not really connected with the first) Schulte analyzes another fraszka (O koźle i piskorzu). Schulte discusses very elaborately (if not abundantly) the history of the weatherfish (piskorz) in contemporary science and then reflects on the scientific interests of Kochanowski himself. With that excursion Schulte shows that Kochanowski was well versed in all contemporary issues of his time. In the second chapter Schulte only briefly mentions two fraszki of Kochanowski on the poetic enigma and continues with a survey of the history of literature on this particular topic. He starts from antiquity with Aristotle, Plutarch, Strabo, and the Neoplatonist Sallust (he leaves out the Ps.-Platonic Alcibiades on the nature of poetry as riddles) and arrives at Petrarch. Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 40 (Reinhold F. Glei and Wolfgang Polleichtner, eds.), Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

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The third chapter is devoted to the nature of the humanist epigram. Schulte discusses there both the Polish (Fraszki) and Latin epigrams (Foricoenia) of Kochanowski and shows their connections to ancient epigram collections. Schulte argues that Kochanowski’s frequent and very accurate translations from Anthologia Planudea into both Latin and Polish influenced his Polish language far beyond the translations themselves (110). Chapters 4 and 5 introduce the issue of Polish Petrarcism in the context of Kochanowski’s poetry. Chapter 4, discussing the tree epigrams both of Kochanowski (about the lime tree) and Petrarch (about the laurel tree), serves rather as an introduction to the following chapter, which revolves around Petrarch’s mythical date of April 6. After a broad discussion on Petrarch and related issues (like the wood myth of Adam and Jesus) Schulte sporadically returns to Kochanowski and argues that he was perfectly aware of and reflected Petrarch’s myth. This chapter, as well as the second chapter, seems only to touch Kochanowski in passing. The sixth chapter might be especially interesting for those who are interested in mathematical riddles. Schulte reflects on “holy mathematicks” and the geometrical construction of lyric cycles in the Renaissance. He shows what role numbers and the positioning of certain epigrams in certain places in the collection played. He discusses the presence of the Pythagorean theory of the golden section in the awareness of humanist poets. In the first instance it seems almost unbelievable which connections are to be discovered, but Schulte shows very meticulously and impressively how all those geometrical theories are to be employed in the service of poetry. For this chapter a slight background in mathematics can be of great value in order to fully appreciate the work Schulte has done. In chapter 7 Schulte takes the reader on a journey with Kochanowski through France. Therein he discusses two issues: firstly, the exact date of the journey (there is a consensus that the journey itself took place in 1559; Schulte convincingly shows the more exact dating) and, secondly, the companion—only mentioned as Carolus in one of Kochanowski’s fraszki—on his journey. Schulte analyzes every testimony of the journey, including spurious ones, to show the connections to other events that took place in Europe those days and the possibilities of further interpretation of Kochanowski’s poems reflecting on the journey. Schulte suggests another possible companion as well. So far, scholars have agreed on Carolus Utenhove as a candidate. Schulte puts forward as a rather probable candidate the Belgian Charles Delanghe (Carolus Langius), arguing that Utenhove was only twenty-three years old by then whereas Langius was thirty-eight, which made him ten years older than Kochanowski. In the latter case Kochanowski’s attitude towards him as to a guide and teacher would be more convincing.

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Finally, in the last chapter Schulte discusses the connections between Kochanowski and Desiderius Erasmus. Scholars have commonly recognized the historical and intellectual connections between Erasmus and Polish humanism (230). Schulte demonstrates that textual influences and parallels can be traced between Kochanowski’s Fraszki or Foricoenia and Erasmus’s Adagia or Colloquia. Schulte offers the reader mostly very accurate (even though they lose the flavor of the newly born language) translations of the Polish fraszki and both Greek and Latin epigrams. Only in one place did I find him to have missed the point. On page 176 he translates the fraszka II 47: Na wszystkim Patrycemu ten obraz jest rowny, Chyba to, że ten milczy, a owo wymowny.

as: “In allem gleicht dieses Bild dem Patricius, / es sei denn, dass es schweigt, während jener spricht.” It seems that Schulte did not recognize the grammatical reference here. Owo cannot possibly refer to a person (being neutral, even though obraz is masculine in Polish as well but does not refer to living things). The point of the poem is that the picture is more “telling” than the person. In that way Kochanowski achieved a rather unexpected effect. If Schulte’s translation were true, the fraszka would be indeed very flat. There are a few typographical errors in the book, which are sometimes a little annoying (especially, for instance, in the title of the third chapter). Some errors in the accentuation of the Greek and the spelling in the Polish can be found. The book only contains an Index Nominum. It would have been very helpful if the author had included an Index Locorum as well. Without it the book is not very user-friendly. Being a collection of loosely connected essays, the book cannot be evaluated equally. The essays differ among themselves in quality. The first part of the first chapter is in my opinion the most valuable. Other essays vary. Nevertheless, someone who is interested in the European atmosphere of the Renaissance should be enlivened by Schulte’s substantial work on its most prominent member from the Eastern part of Europe. The cultural and intellectual unity of Europe at that time can be felt on almost every page of Schulte’s book. Matylda Obryk [email protected]

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