Reading the World: Encyclopedic Writing in the Scholastic Age 9780226260709

Citation preview

Reading the World

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R EADIN G THE WORLD Encyclopedic Writing in the Scholastic Age

MARY FRANKLIN- BROWN

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

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Mary Franklin-Brown is assistant professor in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Minnesota. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2012 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2012. Printed in the United States of America 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12

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ISBN-13: 978–0-226–26068–6 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0–226–26068–2 (cloth) Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Medieval Academy of America. Frontispiece: The Lion and the Porcupine. From the autograph manuscript of Lambert of Saint-Omer’s Liber Floridus, made at Saint-Omer (Artois), ca. 1125. Ghent, Rijksuniversiteit, MS 92, fol. 56v. Photograph reproduced by permission of University Library Ghent.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Franklin-Brown, Mary. Reading the world : encyclopedic writing in the scholastic age / Mary FranklinBrown. pages. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-26068-6 (hardcover : alkaline paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-26068-2 (hardcover : alkaline paper) 1. Vincent, of Beauvais, d. 1264. Speculum majus. 2. Llull, Ramon, 1232?–1316. Arbre de ciència. 3. Jean, de Meun, d. 1305? Roman de la rose. 4. Llull, Ramon, 1232?–1316. Libre de meravelles. 5. Literature, Medieval—History and criticism. 6. Encyclopedias and dictionaries—History and criticism. I. Title. PN671.F735 2012 809'.02—dc23 2011044420 o This paper meets the requirements of ANSI / NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For D. T. Franklin,

E crezatz qu’amistatz cascun jorn meillura, meilluratz et amatz es cui jois s’aüra. —Peire d’Alvernhe

CON TEN TS

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List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Explanatory Notes xv Introduction

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PART I. THE ARCHIVE

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Chapter 1 The Book of the World: Encyclopedism and Scholastic Ways of Knowing 33

PAR T II.

THE ORDE R OF THE E NC YCLOPEDIA

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Chapter 2 Narrative and Natural History: Vincent of Beauvais’s Ordo juxta Scripturam 95 Chapter 3 The Obscure Figures of the Encyclopedia: Tree Paradigms in the Arbor scientiae 129 Chapter 4 The Order of Nature: Encyclopedic Arrangement and Poetic Recombination in Jean de Meun’s Continuation of the Roman de la Rose 183

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Contents

PART III. HE TE RO TOPIAS

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Chapter 5 A Fissured Mirror: The Speculum maius as Heterotopia 221 Chapter 6 The Phoenix in the Mirror: The Encyclopedic Subject 263 Aerword

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List of Abbreviations 311 Notes 315 Selected Bibliography 393 Index of Names and Titles 423 Index of Manuscripts 435 General Index 439

ILLU STRATION S

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Color Plates ( following p. 170) 1.

Leaf from a bestiary (England, ca. 1200)

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Opening leaf of a Bible moralisée (Paris, ca. 1220–30)

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Tree of vices and virtues illustrating the Old French translation of Ramon Llull’s Libre del gentil (ca. 1274, manuscript Paris, ca. 1300)

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Tree of Love, illustrating the Catalan translation of Matfre Ermengaud’s Breviari d’amor (1288)

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Depiction of the Great Tree of Knowledge, illustrating a fieenth-century manuscript of Ramon Llull’s Arbre de ciència (1295–96) Figures

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Creation, from a Bible moralisée (Paris, ca. 1220–30)

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Pentateuch with Glossa Ordinaria (Paris, ca. 1164–70)

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Allegory and diagram showing the “Aristotelian” classification of disciplines (Italy, ca. 1150–1200)

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4, 5. Lambert of Saint-Omer, Liber Floridus, arbor bona, arbor mala (Artois, ca. 1125) 6.

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Ramon Llull, Arbor medicinae (ca. 1274), Tree of the Principles of Medicine

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7, 8. Figures of the three status, from one of the oldest manuscripts of Joachim of Fiore’s Figurae (Italy, early thirteenth century)

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148–49

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9.

Illustrations

Ramon Llull, Arbor scientiae (1295–96), Tree of Vegetal Life (woodcut Lyon, 1515)

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10. Ramon Llull, Arbor scientiae (1295–96), Tree of Knowledge (woodcut Lyon, 1515) 11.

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Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale (ca. 1240–60), Hd5 (Picardie, ca. 1280), Hrabanus citations

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12. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale (ca. 1240–60), Nb2 (Northern France, ca. 1265–1300), Macer citations

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13. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale (ca. 1240–60), Hd1 (Northern France, ca. 1280–1300), Hrabanus citations

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14. Hrabanus Maurus, In honorem sanctae crucis (ca. 810) 15. Bernard Silvester, Cosmographia (ca. 1247)

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16. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale (ca. 1240–60), Nb19 (ca. 1280–1300), bk. 18, “De animalibus”

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17. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale (ca. 1240–60), Nb7 (ca. 1265–1300), bk. 11, “De seminibus”

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18. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale (ca. 1240–60), Nb19 (ca. 1280–1300), bk. 27, “De viribus animae quas habet quo ad se . . .”

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19. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale (ca. 1240–60), Nb19 (ca. 1280–1300), bk. 20, “De reptilibus”

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20. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale (ca. 1249–60), Nb7 (ca. 1265–1300), detail of decoration

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Tables 1.

Divisions of philosophy according to Hugh of Saint-Victor

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Hexameral organization of the Speculum naturale

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Structure of the Arbor scientiae

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ACKN OWLEDGMENTS

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This book is the culmination of a project that I have carried out while living in three different cities and visiting many more, so I am indebted to individuals and institutions in a number of places. I have now been five years in the Twin Cities, where the Department of French and Italian at the University of Minnesota, under the leadership of Daniel Brewer and Eileen Sivert, has unfailingly supported my long work on medieval encyclopedias. In Minnesota, I owe particular thanks to Susan Noakes, for her wise mentoring, to Juliee Cherbuliez, for reading bits and pieces of my writing and providing astute criticisms, to Oliver Nicholson, for generously answering random queries on Latin literature, to F. R. P. Akehurst, for applying his keen eyes to the proofs, and to John F. Boyle of the University of St. Thomas, for providing a specialist’s critique of my presentation of scholastic philosophy. I owe an older debt of gratitude to scholars at the University of California, Berkeley, who first set me on the path to this project. There I had the good fortune to read Old Occitan with Joseph Duggan, Old French with David Hult, and medieval Catalan with Charles Faulhaber, who remained generous and canny guides even as my research took unexpected turns. Much of my research was done in Paris, where I could work in the great libraries of that city and easily travel (thanks to the wonders of the SNCF) to visit smaller collections elsewhere in France. While there I benefited from the art historical and codicological expertise of Patricia Stirnemann at the Institut d’histoire et de recherche des textes (branch of the CNRS) and from xi

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Monique Paulmier-Foucart’s deep knowledge of Vincent of Beauvais. I thank both Mme Paulmier-Foucart and Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet of the Université de Paris IV for reading and commenting on early versions of several of these chapters and Alison Stones for sharing with me the results of her recent research on the Gothic manuscripts of France. Via correspondence, Mark Johnston of DePaul University has generously shared his expertise on Ramon Llull and Eva Albrecht of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven her recent research on manuscripts of the Speculum naturale. The two readers for the University of Chicago Press—Winthrop Wetherbee and Brian Stock—provided wonderfully helpful responses to the manuscript and suggestions for revisions, and Randy Petilos has guided this neophyte author through the review and publication process. I thank all these correspondents as well as all the audience members and reviewers who have, over the years, shared criticism and suggestions for individual sections of this book. These scholars have saved me from many errors; any that remain are my own. As a scholar whose work is based on early books, I owe a debt of gratitude to all the libraries that have allowed me to consult their manuscripts or incunabula: in Belgium, the Bibliothèque royale, the municipal library of Brugge, the library of Grootseminarie, Brugge, and the Collège de BonneEspérance of Vellereille-les-Brayeux; in France, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, the Bibliothèque de la Mazarine, the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, the Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, and the municipal libraries of Arras, Auxerre, Boulogne-sur-Mer, Chalon-surSaône, Dijon, Lyon, Rouen, Troyes, and Toulouse; in Germany, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek of Munich and the Staatsbibliothek of Berlin; in Great Britain, the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the Cambridge University Library, the Inner Temple Library, the Parker Library, and the libraries of St. John’s College, Cambridge, and Exeter, Lincoln, Magdalen, and Merton Colleges at Oxford. I thank the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes in Paris and the Atelier Vincent de Beauvais of the Université de Nancy II for making available copies of materials to which I would not otherwise have had access. In Minneapolis, the Bakken Museum and the James Ford Bell Library and Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine (both at the University of Minnesota) have given me access to their rare books. Kate Brooks, of the Wilson Library of the University of Minnesota, has been unfailingly helpful, and I owe a great debt to the staff of the Interlibrary Loan Office, who have done some heavy liing for me, both literally and figuratively.

Acknowledgments



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I would like to thank the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, the Collège de Bonne-Espérance, the Rijksuniversiteit (Ghent), the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the municipal libraries of Amiens, Arras, and Laon, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, the Aberdeen University Library, the Bodleian Library, the Library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the James Ford Bell Library for giving permission to reproduce photographs of books in their collections. A number of organizations and institutions have provided financial support for my research for this book. I am grateful for a Chateaubriand Fellowship from the French government, a Georges Lurcy Fellowship, and fellowships from the McKnight and Imagine Funds of the University of Minnesota, which supported my many research trips to Europe; to the College of Liberal Arts of the University of Minnesota, for providing a semester leave so that I could finish revisions to the text; and to the Imagine Fund and the Center for Medieval Studies of the University of Minnesota, for defraying publication costs and making it possible to include illustrations. The Medieval Academy of America has helped fund this project in both its initial and its final stages, most recently with a subsidy for the publication of what has turned out to be a rather hey book, and I thank the Academy for this continuing and invaluable support. Last but certainly not least, I am grateful to DTF, who listened, sympathized, and occasionally suggested just going to a movie. St. Paul June 2011

EXPLAN ATORY N OTES

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Quotations and Typography We are fortunate to have adequate—in some cases excellent—modern editions of the majority of the texts treated in this study, with the conspicuous exception of the main text of the Speculum maius (although the prologue has been edited twice; see below). The most recent printed edition of this encyclopedia constitutes a major obstacle to scholarship.1 The Atelier Vincent de Beauvais at Nancy was established to lay the groundwork for a critical edition, but the work is not complete. My analysis of this text has therefore involved more dependence on the manuscripts than has my work on Llull’s texts or the Roman de la Rose. The way in which I cite from the Speculum maius and the manuscripts of the text to which I have had recourse are detailed below. I cite all other medieval texts from the standard editions, identified below and in the relevant notes. Manuscripts of these texts will also be identified in the notes when they become relevant. What interests me about the copies of the Arbor scientiae (of which there are only a small number) is set out in chapter 3. Ernest Langlois laid the groundwork for the study of the manuscripts of the Roman de la Rose a century ago; their iconography has since been discussed by Alfred Kuhn, Rosemond Tuve, John Fleming, Eberhard König, and Sylvia Huot. This last has also extensively studied the manuscripts’ rubrication, marginal annotations, and codicological structure. Readers interested xv

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in the Rose’s manuscript tradition may refer to this scholarship and view the updated list of extant manuscripts, the illustrations, and the invaluable spreadsheets that are now available from the Roman de la Rose Digital Library, hp: // romandelarose.org. I have lile to add that would be relevant to the subject of encyclopedism. Since I cite Latin texts from a number of editions with different typographic practices as well as from manuscripts, I systematize the orthography. I resolve all abbreviations and employ the v and j in consonantal positions, the u and i in vowel positions. The one exception to this rule is the i in maius when it is part of the title Speculum maius since the use of the i has become the accepted spelling. I indicate Roman numerals with lowercase leers and replace final j with i to conform to the other components of the numeral. Since the e alone was commonly used in medieval texts to indicate what would have been æ or œ in classical Latin, I have not thought it necessary to reproduce the cedilla added to the leer in some manuscripts and older editions. I have similarly replaced ſ with s.

Translations Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of Latin and medieval languages are my own. However, for the sake of familiarity, when translating the Vulgate, I have preserved the language of the Authorized Version except when that would obscure the specific meaning of a Latin word important to my analysis. As an aid to readers not versed in medieval languages, I indicate in the bibliography published English translations of the principal texts (when they are available). When citing modern scholarship for which foreign-language titles are given in the bibliography, I provide my own translations, with one exception: I cite the standard English translations of Foucault since these are the versions with which Anglophones are familiar, although I also indicate the relevant pages of the French original in the notes. On the occasions where the translation is misleadingly inexact or in error, I have made corrections (enclosed in square brackets) to the English quotation.

The Speculum maius My work is historical and theoretical; it is not philological in the traditional sense. Nevertheless, any scholar working on the Speculum maius faces a series of dilemmas in the field of textual criticism. Naturally, no resolution

Explanatory Notes



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can be expected to meet with universal approbation. In the choices I have made, I have aempted to balance the historical ideal of representing the medieval state of the text against the practical needs of a diverse readership, many of whom have access only to printed editions.

Manuscripts Cited I employ the sigla assigned by Hans Voorbij in Het “Speculum historiale” van Vincent van Beauvais for manuscripts of the Speculum doctrinale and the Speculum historiale. Voorbij also assigned sigla to the Speculum naturale manuscripts, but Eva Albrecht has recently revised this schema, identifying five of his twenty-five Nb manuscripts as belonging to a third recension, Nc, and also renumbering fieen of the seventeen remaining Nb manuscripts to fill the lacunae created by removing the Nc manuscripts (Nb3 becomes Nc1, so Nb4 becomes Nb3, etc.). She has kindly communicated the new sigla to me (May 2011), and she plans to publish them online at hp: // www.vincentius belvacensis.eu. I have chosen to revise my manuscript references in accordance with Albrecht’s new sigla because they make it possible to distinguish manuscripts representing the third recension. Nevertheless, I have been obliged to make one further alteration. Albrecht did not create new sigla for the four (originally Nb) manuscripts whose appurtenance to the Nb or Nc recensions could not be determined; she removed them from the renumbered Nb list and enclosed Voorbij’s sigla in parentheses. Thus, in the revised system, Nb7 and (Nb7) identify different manuscripts. This use of punctuation in manuscript sigla would have sown confusion in my text and notes, so I have taken the liberty of eliminating the parentheses and replacing the b with an x: hence Nx7 etc. Finally, readers should be aware that, as Alison Stones has established,2 Nb7 and Nb12 (previously Nb10 and Nb18) are in fact two volumes of the same copy of the Naturale that, like the Minneapolis and London volumes of the Cambron Naturale (now Nb8), have been separated.

Na1 Na2 Nb1 Nb2 Nb3 Nb4

Speculum naturale Brussels, Bibl. roy. 9152 Brussels, Bibl. roy. 18465 Arras, Méd. mun. 795 Arras, Méd. mun. 566 vol. 1 Brugge, Stadsbibl. 504 Brugge, Stadsbibl. 505

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Explanatory Notes

Nb5 Brussels, Bibl. roy. 18466 Nb7/12 Laon, Bibl. mun. 426 (Nb7) and Paris, Bibl. nat. lat. 6428C (Nb12) Nb8 Minneapolis, Bakken Museum (no shelf number) and London, Brit. Libr. Add. MS 15583 Nb9 Paris, Bibl. Mazarine 3574 Nb10 Paris, Bibl. nat. lat. 6428A vols. 1–2 Nb11 Paris, Bibl. nat. lat. 6428B Nb13 Paris, Bibl. nat. lat. 14387 Nb14 Paris, Bibl. nat. lat. 16167 and 16168 Nb16 Paris, Bibl. de la Sorbonne 52 Nb19 Vellereille-les-Brayeux, Abbaye de Bonne-Espérance (3 vols., no shelf numbers) Nc1 Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz lat. fol. 76 Nc2 Dijon, Bibl. mun. 48 Nc4 Paris, Bibl. nat. lat. 14388 Nx7 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 39 Nx14 Oxford, Exeter College 15 Nx25 Vatican, Bibl. Ap. Vat. lat. 7112

D02 Do3 Do5 Do7 Do8 Do9 Do10

Ha3 Hae2 Hcb1 Hd1 Hd4 Hd5

Speculum doctrinale Brugge, Stadsbibl. 251 Brugge, Stadsbibl. 252 Mons (Belgium), Bibliothèque universitaire 32 / 362 Paris, Bibl. de l’Arsenal 1015 and 1016 Paris, Bibl. nat. lat. 6428 Paris, Bibl. nat. lat. 16100 Paris, Bibl. de la Sorbonne 53 Speculum historiale Dijon, Bibl. mun. 568 and 569 Brussels, Bibl. roy. 17970 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 8 Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz lat. fol. 491 Arras, Méd. mun. 566 vol. 2 Boulogne-sur-Mer, Bibl. des Annonciades 132 and 133 Brussels, Bibl. roy. II.941 Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, James Ford Bell Library 1280 f. VI vols. 1 and 2

Explanatory Notes

Hd6 Hde1 He9 He65 He70 He72 He73 He74 He75 He76 He77 He78 He80 He83 He92 Heac1

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Brussels, Bibl. roy. II.1396 London, Brit. Lib. Add. MS 25441 Brussels, Bibl. roy. 118 Oxford, Bodleian Libr. Bodley 287 Paris, Bibl. de l’Arsenal 1010, 1011, 1012, 1013 Paris, Bibl. Mazarine 1551 and 1552 Paris, Bibl. nat. lat. 4898 Paris, Bibl. nat. lat. 4899 Paris, Bibl. nat. lat. 4900 Paris, Bibl. nat. lat. 4901 Paris, Bibl. nat. lat. 4902 Paris, Bibl. nat. lat. 11728 Paris, Bibl. nat. lat. 16014, 16015, 16016 Paris, Bibl. de la Sorbonne 54, 55, 56, 57 Troyes, Méd. mun. 170 vol. 2 Troyes, Méd. mun. 170 vol. 1

References to and Citations of the Text The text of the general prologue (the Libellus apologeticus) saw two editions in the twentieth century; both were published in the 1970s, when scholars were just beginning to sort out the various versions that the text had gone through. The manuscripts chosen for these editions represent the beginning and the endpoint of the text’s elaboration. Serge Lusignan edited the very first version, wrien in the mid-1240s (when Vincent still had in mind a bipartite encyclopedia), and preserved in a manuscript now in Dijon (Ha3): Lusignan, Serge, ed. Préface au “Speculum maius” de Vincent de Beauvais: Réfraction et diffraction. Cahiers d’études médiévales 5. Montréal: Bellarmin; Paris: Vrin, 1979.

Lusignan supplements his edition with the chapters added to a subsequent version announcing a tripartite encyclopedia. This version of the prologue survives in the comparatively small number of copies of the Doctrinale but has never been edited in its entirety (it has, however, recently been translated by Monique Paulmier-Foucart).3 Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken edited the final version of the prologue, which some twentieth-century scholars believed to be apocryphal but which in fact appears to be Vincent’s own work:4

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Explanatory Notes

von den Brincken, Anna-Dorothee, ed. “Geschichtsbetrachtung bei Vincenz von Beauvais: Die ‘Apologia Actoris’ zum Speculum Maius.” Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mielalters 34 (1978): 410–99.

This version is reproduced in the majority of Speculum maius manuscripts and announces a quadripartite encyclopedia (including the Morale, which Vincent never completed). The passages of the penultimate version treating the encyclopedia’s structure have been modified, and a few other passages that Vincent added when first revising the prologue have been eliminated. Unless otherwise indicated, I use the chapter numbers and cite from the latter edition. However, when dealing with the passages eliminated or substantially altered in the final version, I have recourse to Lusignan’s edition of the earlier versions. For the remainder of the text, the situation is even more complex. The most recent edition (1624) of the apocryphal quadripartite encyclopedia is that of Balthazar Bellère of Douai, Speculum quadruplex sive Speculum maius, in four volumes, and this is the only edition of which a facsimile has been printed,5 making it the most widely available. But the tendency of the Douai editors to “correct” Vincent’s quotations using early modern editions of his source texts, their expansion of some citations, and their frequent errors of transcription make it impossible for scholars aending closely to textual details to draw conclusions about the medieval text when working exclusively from the Douai edition. I have checked the Douai text of all the passages relevant to my work against the manuscripts of the Speculum maius available in Paris. For the Naturale and the Doctrinale, which survive in a limited number of manuscripts and which I cite frequently, I have used all the Paris manuscripts listed above. For the Historiale, which survives in numerous manuscripts and which I cite rarely, I have used only six Parisian manuscripts, all representing the final version of the text: He73, He75, He76, He77, He78, and He80. The exact form of a few problematic passages early in the Naturale is significant for my argument. In these cases, I have checked the form of the citation in all the other Naturale manuscripts containing the passages in question. In addition, because the early editions also represent to some degree the manuscripts from which they were drawn, which may themselves have been lost, I have had recourse to the printed editions available to me. This is particularly illuminating because, ironically, the editions that preceded that of Douai generally give a more accurate text. In fact, B. L. Ullman has

Explanatory Notes

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found the earliest Strasbourg editions to be the most accurate.6 The printed editions consulted are the following: Strasbourg: Adulf Rusch, 1478. Strasbourg: printer of the Legenda aurea, 1481. Venice: Hermann Liechstenstein, 1492. Venice: Dominic Nicolinum, 1591.

On the whole, the readings of the manuscripts agree with each other, against the Douai edition. Yet, for most of the passages relevant to my work, the edition’s sins are venial. The editors intentionally intervened very lile in the citations that Vincent borrowed from Patristic or medieval writers, tinkering with word order or altering adverbs and conjunctions only in a way that does not affect the sense of the passages. For the texts of classical authors, on the other hand, and for the Confessiones of Augustine, in cases where Vincent (or the florilegium from which he happened to be citing) abbreviated a passage severely, the editors have frequently restored at least part of the original text. Wishing to cite from a text to which most of my readers (including those in North America) would have access, I have chosen to use the Douai edition, but I have corrected the quotations in cases where that edition offers a serious misrepresentation of the medieval text: that is, in the rare cases where the text has been “restored” and in the more frequent cases where the edition gives what is clearly an error, altering or obscuring the full sense of a passage. (I have not aempted to restore the scholastic word order since I could not, in that case, have cited from the Douai edition at all; I have, on the other hand, modernized the punctuation.) The corrections to the text are indicated in the passage by a leer reference, corresponding to the list of rejected readings given at the beginning of the relevant numbered note. A square bracket (“]”) separates the rejected reading from the sigla of the manuscripts that give the reading that I have retained. When the Douai editors have significantly altered a whole phrase (generally by expanding it), the note will identify the parameters of the corrected phrase by also giving its first and last words before the manuscript sigla. Readers may notice that the manuscripts cited in this apparatus differ depending on the portion of the text cited; this is because so many of the copies survive only in fragmentary form (one volume of an original two- or four-volume set). Among the Parisian Naturale manuscripts, for example, Nb10 is a complete copy of

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Explanatory Notes

the Naturale, and Nb14 is nearly so, but the others contain only half or onequarter of the text. In order to facilitate the location of the passages I cite in other editions or in manuscripts, my references will indicate book and chapter numbers from the Douai edition, rather than column numbers. It should be noted, however, that manuscripts of the various redactions of the Speculum naturale and the earlier print editions distribute the material differently among the chapters and also that many manuscripts now lack significant portions of text. In addition, many manuscript compilers and some printers made the general prologue and table of contents into a first book, so book numbers in the manuscripts oen run one number behind those in the Douai edition, at least for the first portion of the text (some manuscripts give Douai Naturale books 21 and 22 as a single book 22, thus catching up to the Douai book numbers). Nevertheless, the manuscripts of the Speculum maius, with their tables, running headings, and rubrics, are remarkably easy to navigate through, and readers should not have too much difficulty locating the indicated passages. Voorbij’s descriptions and classification of the manuscripts in Het “Speculum historiale” van Vincent van Beauvais are an indispensable starting point for studying the manuscripts, although, because the Naturale was not his focus, his information on these particular codices is sometimes unreliable. Albrecht’s recent dissertation7 would in fact be the beer source for information about Naturale manuscripts, and it is to be hoped that it will soon be published. Aer I had completed my editorial work, Voorbij announced in the Vincent of Beauvais Newsleer that a digital facsimile of the Rusch incunabulum of the Naturale has been made available online by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek of Munich: http: // daten.digitale-sammlungen.de / ~db / 0003 / bsb00035779 / images / index.html (vol. 1) and hp: // daten.digitale -sammlungen.de / ~db / 0003 / bsb00035780 / images / index.html (vol. 2). This edition is much closer to the medieval manuscripts than the Douai, but unfortunately the link does not work consistently, and in any case it was too late for me to reedit my quotations from it. It is to be hoped that the user interface will be improved and the digital facsimile will remain available for future work by scholars everywhere.

IN TRODU CTION

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These days, readers wander in the opalescent labyrinth of Wikipedia as the tomes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica gather dust on neglected shelves. The araction has lile to do with any conviction that the information to be found online is of higher quality than what may be found in print, and many users of Wikipedia can be induced to acknowledge that the Britannica is a more credible source. Even one of the founders of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, has characterized it as “one of those sources regarded as unreliable which people read anyway.”1 It is tempting to aribute this reliance on the online service to physical inertia (why go to the library when you can go to Wikipedia without ever leaving home?), but there are other, perfectly reliable Web sources from which to choose, the Britannica among them. Wikipedia exercises some peculiar fascination over readers—and not only the youngest ones—a fascination that must derive from the characteristics that set it apart. Its designers did not content themselves with simply exploiting the Web’s ability to link topics; they also adopted the relatively new technology of open source soware. Instead of soliciting articles from experts sanctioned by the institutions that currently arbitrate knowledge (university professors, authors of research published in peer-reviewed journals and books, holders of advanced degrees), Wikipedia invites its readers to become contributors, “Wikipedians,” by draing or revising articles of their choice. The wager is that the online community constitutes its own fund of knowledge and that consensus will, eventually, eliminate errors.2 In some cases, 1

2



Introduction

that wager has paid off; there are marvelous articles, draed by serious, learned, and dedicated individuals willing to work without aribution or recompense, and many topics are discussed in a depth that the limitations of space and funding proper to traditional encyclopedias preclude. For medieval topics in particular (oen marginalized in the academy but also the object of renewed interest among a larger public), Wikipedia has been a boon. Still, there is no guarantee of accuracy because Wikipedia depends on consensus, which is not quite the same thing. Furthermore, given the way in which this encyclopedia is constructed, there is no guarantee that consensus can be maintained. In all but a select few articles that have been stabilized by those who oversee the service, errors or misinformation can always be reintroduced. Consensus can be undermined by any obstinate contrarian. The encyclopedia so conceived will never aain stability, and it is subject, to a degree that no prior encyclopedia has been, to the caprice of time. It changes from one moment to the next. The electronic medium makes possible what had never been possible before, a truly protean text, shaped by the accidents of Wikipedians’ own lives, educations, and personalities. Its most apt metaphor is perhaps the image of the bazaar that the programmer and writer Eric Steven Raymond has employed to describe Linux open source soware. Raymond contrasts this bazaar to the cathedral, with which he represents the more traditional approach to developing complex soware. According to his account, the Linux community at first struck him as “a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches . . . out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles,” while traditional soware resembled a cathedral “carefully craed by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation.”3 Although Raymond now argues that the bazaar is singularly effective for soware development, these two opposed images also highlight its instability. Perhaps unbeknownst to Raymond, his imagery intersects the imagery used by Émile Mâle on the eve of the twentieth century to describe the medieval encyclopedia, a carefully constructed intellectual cathedral.4 Such an image could still be used for the work that goes into print encyclopedias and reference dictionaries, although I doubt that all the editors and contributors involved in these projects would welcome the description of “wizards” or “mages.” There is nothing mysterious or magical about academic qualifications acquired with great labor and intelligence from institutions that have been established for the purpose of providing an advanced education. Scholars of some philosophical persuasions may also object to the implication that

Introduction

 3

knowledge is a sanctuary. Nevertheless, these encyclopedias are planned, their realization guided by scholar-architects of extraordinary talent. For obvious reasons, a number of these scholars take exception to Wikipedia. In 2004, Ted Pappas, the executive editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, stated that Wikipedia is not really worthy to be considered an encyclopedia, telling a reporter from the Guardian: “Hyperlinks, bullet points and cut-and-paste press releases do not an encyclopedia entry make.”5 Even some Wikipedians acknowledge the weaknesses of the service and express perplexity about how it should be characterized. One has wrien in a blog entry: “I don’t believe that the goal should be ‘acceptance’ so much as recognition of what Wikipedia is and what it is not. It will never be an encyclopedia, but it will contain extensive knowledge that is quite valuable for different purposes.”6 According to such external and internal critics, Wikipedia does not fit the criteria by which encyclopedias are defined. It lacks many of the characteristics of the encyclopedias created during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. It is not a book or a series of books. It does not have credentialed—or even named—authors. It does not offer reliably accurate and consistent information on any topic, whatever undergraduates may believe. All the expectations to which the Britannica and other print encyclopedias had conditioned readers have been swept aside. Yet Wikipedia still fits the definition offered in its own entry on the encyclopedia at 12:36 pm on Tuesday, 9 August 2011: “a compendium holding a summary of information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge.” Perhaps it is these characteristics that define the encyclopedia, and the rest, the characteristics of the earlier print format, are merely peculiarities of one realization of the genre, susceptible to transformation with changes in technology, in textual culture, or in the institutions of knowledge. We are, in fact, living through a technological transition that is transforming encyclopedism, and our historical situation gives us a rare opportunity to reflect on the different ways in which the encyclopedia can be constructed—and has been over the centuries.7 Moreover, Wikipedia has proved to be a barometer for changes or disjunctions in the way in which knowledge is created. Originally suspect because of its failure to cite reliable print or electronic sources, it now has a stringent citation policy, but that has opened it to the charge that it is retrograde, hobbled by the idea of knowledge that guided print encyclopedias, and, thus, closed to any information that is transmied orally or through traditional practices.8 This closure means that Wikipedia’s coverage is not as universal as its aspirations. As it turns out, because encyclopedists have usually been motivated by three principal goals—to represent

4 

Introduction

all knowledge (or, at least, all the knowledge in a given field), to organize it (or make it, as we now say, “searchable”), and to transmit it to an audience broader than the select group responsible for its creation—changes in the way encyclopedias are constructed indicate nothing less than alterations to the very paradigms of knowledge and its role in the human community.

A Historical View of Encyclopedism One of the objectives of the present book is to show that the Wikipedial paradigm for constructing and construing knowledge is not entirely novel. Wikipedia is certainly different from the encyclopedias of the modern period. Yet in its highly polyvocal nature and tolerance of dissent, even outright inaccuracy, the encyclopedic paradigm it represents is suggestively analogous to the encyclopedism of Western Europe during the period commonly termed scholastic (ca. 1100–ca. 1400). There is no simple relation between the preand the postmodern, and I shall here propound neither the transhistorical continuity of encyclopedism nor a rebirth of scholastic encyclopedism in the postmodern. Readers will have ample opportunity to observe the differences between premodern encyclopedias and Wikipedia. Nonetheless, the limited resemblances that our historical situation and cultural paradigms bear to premodern ones make it possible to perceive aspects of scholastic encyclopedism that were not perceptible before.9 Like our own time, the scholastic period was marked by the proliferation of new or previously unfamiliar knowledge in communities long accustomed to viewing the world in a particular way. As in our own time, this proliferation was related in complex ways to social, cultural, and technological changes. It touched off vociferous debate while creating the need for new educational institutions, venues for publication, and technologies of the word. Renaissance humanism is rightly cited for its influence on what would become modern intellectual culture, yet it was earlier, during the first centuries of the scholastic period, that the institutions and practices necessary to support such culture were created.10 This institutional development accompanied the greatest growth in the population of Europe before the nineteenth century. A larger population created the need for schools to educate more young men for parish ministry and clerical posts in government (monks and nuns were traditionally educated in their monastic communities, and the education of lay persons who required some degree of literacy was generally provided by private tutors or local clerics). Beginning in the eleventh century, the cathedral schools, which had been founded centuries

Introduction

 5

earlier to further Charlemagne’s educational reforms, gained a renewed vitality. But the changes went far beyond the expansion of the clerical class. A new intellectual culture was taking shape in response to the ongoing rediscovery of ancient Greek thought (the writings of Plato and Aristotle) and to the commentaries and treatises of Muslim philosophers that accompanied many of the ancient texts in their transmission.11 While Platonic ideas flourished briefly in the twelh century and continued to exercise considerable influence in some circles, it was the Aristotelian texts on logic, ethics, metaphysics, and the physical sciences that most profoundly transformed thought over the course of the scholastic period.12 Not everyone believed that these new texts could be harmonized with Christian theology, but a number of thinkers made the aempt, creating the atmosphere of dissent and debate that would so mark the period. At the same time, the cities went on growing, and it eventually became evident that the parish clergy and canons regular would not be able to meet the intensifying pastoral needs of urban communities. Although the Cistercians were sometimes called on to preach, the monastic orders were not structurally well suited to assist the clergy in urban ministry, for their members were most oen cloistered in abbeys in the countryside and their daytime occupations were codified by the centuries-old rules they followed. Therefore, in the early thirteenth century, the Franciscan and Dominican orders were established, mendicants whose rules allowed greater latitude for travel and participation in the life of the city. Their calling was to serve the poor and dispossessed, to preach, and to combat heresies of the kind thought to be gathering force in Languedoc. But a renewed ministry of preaching meant providing an advanced education to still larger numbers of young men. Under these diverse pressures, the demand for education became so great that the schools were superseded, absorbed into a new, larger administrative structure, the university, probably modeled on the crasmen’s guilds.13 The universities accumulated larger libraries. With demand increasing from both institutions and individuals, book production expanded, moving from monastic scriptoria to a new commercial book trade that sprang up in the urban centers.14 The Romance languages simultaneously made their appearance—not as spoken languages, for they had already existed as such for centuries, but as wrien ones. Over the course of the twelh century, the formerly oral tradition of Carolingian epic (the chanson de geste) was transformed into a wrien genre by members of the clerical class aached to the secular courts. These same clerics also began to translate Latin epics and Celtic oral tales, first into

6



Introduction

French, then into other vernaculars, creating a new genre, romance. A century or so later, vernacular lyric, which had also blossomed in the twelh century, began to be transcribed and collected in large anthologies. Translators began making Latin historical, legal, philosophical, and scientific texts available in the vernacular, seing the stage for the ascendance of the vernacular as a language for intellectual endeavor in later periods.15 The literary and scholarly community had been transformed from one where a single language, Latin, governed exchange to one where writers could choose among a variety of languages for expression. Although scholasticism lasted for about three centuries (medievalists disagree about its precise beginning and end), the texts chosen for the present study were all wrien during the thirteenth century, which saw such a proliferation of new encyclopedic texts that more than one scholar has been prompted to call it the “century of the encyclopedias.”16 These books oen served as libraries in miniature at a time when learning, in all its plethoric diversity, was in high demand, but the expense of handmade books prohibited smaller foundations or individuals from amassing large libraries. And these books were more like libraries than modern encyclopedias because they reproduced, rather than simply summarizing, parts of prior texts. They were among a diverse group of widely popular books known to modern scholars as florilegia, from the Latin flos, or “flower” (a common medieval term for the extracts of which they were almost entirely composed), and legere, “to choose.”17 There were, naturally, many smaller florilegia, limited to a particular topic (such as moral dicta or elegant turns of phrase useful for leer writing), and many disorganized ones, but a few compilations aained imposing proportions, covered a wide range of topics, and were organized in such a way that a reader could easily locate a collection of authoritative statements on any given topic. These books came to function as encyclopedias.18 The thirteenth century was also a great period for cathedrals—hence Mâle’s intuition that the two phenomena must be related. To Mâle’s mind, medieval art was encyclopedic, a comprehensive program of teaching shaped by the scholastic passion for proportion, symmetry, and order. The encyclopedic impulse could thus express itself through any number of media, not all of them verbal. These observations have provided the seeds of my own work. But Mâle read the encyclopedia through the lens of his own era, and he had no reason to ask whether the proportions and symmetry he discovered there were really as perfect, the order as stable, as the columns and buresses of his beloved churches. Twentieth-century developments in philosophy, literary theory, textual criticism, and codicology, as well as the

Introduction

 7

popular revolution of Wikipedia, have made it possible to recognize in these medieval texts a conflict between the order to which the compilers aspired and the disruptive elements introduced through their practice of citation. Also newly apparent is the degree to which the later interventions of patrons and copyists further shaped (or fragmented) these texts. In a manuscript era, every individual copy would have already been unique, with its own set of unintentional errors, but conscious intervention by those wishing to modify texts magnified this phenomenon. As it turns out, the cathedral of the encyclopedic florilegium is not as solidly mortared as that image may imply; in some ways, it more closely resembles the bazaar. The project that I have defined for the present book is therefore this: to set out a historical and theoretically self-conscious view of scholastic encyclopedism, based on careful readings of selected texts, that will provide a counterpoint to the encyclopedism of the present day and other periods while also suggesting a new way for us to understand scholasticism and late medieval literature.19 I shall advance an argument in two parts. First, because the scholastic intellectual revolution was created by reading new texts (rather than by conducting new experiments or observations of natural phenomena), knowledge was created through the myriad forms of textual practice. In this situation, the discursive disciplines—the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic—assumed decisive roles in shaping medieval encyclopedias, and we shall see how encyclopedists deployed narrative and metaphor as organizational paradigms.20 However, the power of such paradigms to unify the text, to make it coherent with itself, was severely limited by the very citations on which encyclopedic writing relied. The texts cited derived from diverse historical and institutional situations, and those situations shaped the discourses that they represent. I here employ the term discourse as Michel Foucault has used it, most explicitly in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), to denote a paradigm authorized by institutional power that allows the construction of both the subjects and the objects of knowing.21 The Britannica is one kind of discourse, in which subjects and objects are constructed in a particular way; Wikipedia has created quite a different one. In the Middle Ages, although compilation itself may be thought of as a specific discourse,22 its dependence on direct citation engages and incorporates diverse other discourses in a manner unequaled by the sparse notes and references of the today’s encyclopedias. That scholastic encyclopedism is thus discursively heterogeneous is the second part of my argument. These encyclopedias, like libraries, become “heterotopias” of knowledge—that is, spaces where many possible ways

8

 Introduction

of knowing are juxtaposed. And they inspire the following questions: If the subjects and objects of knowing shi from one discourse to the next, how can the encyclopedic text provide a coherent space for them to inhabit? How can it provide a stable position for the reader’s subjectivity? The responses to these questions have implications beyond the encyclopedic genre because encyclopedism as I understand it is but one manifestation of a dominant textual practice of the scholastic period. Historians began some time ago to challenge the old view of scholasticism as a period defined by Thomism, and they have drawn aention to other voices and views in the period (Grosseteste, Albert the Great, Bonaventure, Ockham, etc.). But that work is still largely based on genres (commentaries, quaestiones, summas) that advance a discernible argument and reduce competing voices, by either synthesizing or rejecting them. If, however, we understand the encyclopedic compilation to be as important a component of the scholastic movement as the summa, then our view of scholasticism must change even more radically. It must take beer account than it has hitherto done of the heterogeneity of encyclopedism. Such a revised understanding of scholastic textual practice can, in turn, illuminate some of the most challenging poetic and fictional texts of the late Middle Ages.

Generic Considerations No study of premodern encyclopedism can begin without acknowledging one intractable problem. The word encyclopedia is not classical or medieval; it is a coinage of the Renaissance.23 It may have originated from a felicitous error in a humanist edition of Quintilian in 1470. There has been some debate about the first intentional use of the word, but it is clear that the Latin form was already circulating among humanists in the last decades of the fieenth century, and it was adapted to the vernaculars in the early sixteenth. True to the spirit of that time, it is constructed from two Greek roots, enkyklios [in the circle] and paideia [education]. The two terms had appeared together occasionally in antiquity, most notably in Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia (completed ca. 78 ce). Although most everyone agrees that this text (a compilation of sources on the natural world and medicine, with diverse digressions) is encyclopedic, classicists are still debating the meaning of Pliny’s cryptic reference in the prologue to “what the Greeks call enkyklios paideia.”24 In other ancient texts, this pair of terms refers, not to a book, but rather to a broad, preliminary program of study, the foundation for more advanced and specialized studies. In early Renaissance usage, encyclopedia similarly desig-

Introduction

 9

nates such a program or, as extensions of that sense, either the connections between the disciplines or a knowledge encompassing them all: “le vray puys et abisme de Encyclopedie” [the true well and abyss of the Encyclopedia], as François Rabelais sardonically put it.25 Unambiguous references to the encyclopedia as a book or series of books do not appear until later periods, when the word will also be applied, retrospectively, to the largest of the scholastic florilegia.26 Ancient and medieval writers nevertheless produced a number of texts that look encyclopedic to us because they were clearly inspired by the three goals I cited earlier: to provide a comprehensive overview of knowledge, to organize it, and to propagate it. In the ancient world, such texts were generally given titles to reflect their subject maer: Natural History, The Antiquities of Things Human and Divine, The Disciplines. In the scholastic period, this kind of title was still possible (On the Properties of Things), but compilers favored figurative formulations, such as The Greater Mirror, The Image of the World, or The Treasury. No term in classical or medieval Latin united all these texts, and only them, into a discrete genre. The word that comes closest to describing most of these books, florilegium, is also a modern coinage,27 and it refers to other compilations as well, narrower in scope or less well organized, that we do not recognize as encyclopedias at all. Hence the necessity of qualifying the term florilegium as encyclopedic when speaking of the scholastic texts cited above. The lexicological lacuna raises philosophical and methodological questions. Can we speak of encyclopedias wrien before the word, or any equivalent, ever existed? If ancient and medieval writers had perceived the encyclopedia as a genre, would they not have given it a name? Is the notion that all these texts fit into a single generic category only a mirage created by our own (post)modernity? The historian Jacques Le Goff takes the skeptical view: “If medieval clerks did not light upon the word ‘encyclopedia,’ that is because they did not light on the thing, either.” Yet even Le Goff is unable to escape the word in his aempt to designate these texts, which he calls “pre-encyclopedias, encyclopedic desires, encyclopedic sketches.”28 It would seem that, though what classical and medieval writers lighted on was not the modern encyclopedia, we have no word other than encyclopedia with which to designate it. The problem likely derives, not from a want of medieval books that look to us as if they should be called encyclopedias, but from the incommensurability of medieval and modern ways of thinking about texts. Judson Boyce Allen has shown how alien to us is the medieval version of Aristotle’s Poetics

10 

Introduction

(which circulated with Hermann the German’s 1256 Latin translation of Averroes’s twelh-century Arabic commentary) because, where we expect to find Aristotelian definitions of tragedy and comedy, we find instead that tragedy is an art of praising, comedy an art of blaming. Such a change does not simply oblige us to redraw the generic grid into which we insert texts according to their form and content: we must come to terms with the idea that genre can be a way of speaking. This is not the literary theory of Aristotle, or, for that maer, of Northrop Frye. The Latin commentators that Allen has studied came closest to our notion of genre when discussing the forma tractandi of a text, but that gerundive is important, for it indicates that these commentators were thinking less in terms of static form than in terms of (obligatory) action and process and, hence, of speaker, audience, and object. Thus, medieval genre “is not a concept which applies to texts as verbal constructs, but to verbal events which include both reference and rhetorical effect. . . . Forma tractandi is the form of a text, it is true, but in terms of modes of thought, reference, and effects which implicate the text in a great deal that would now be thought external to it.”29 In this context, it would be strange for a friar to announce that he was about to write an encyclopedia, but it would be perfectly fiing for him to give his text the title Greater Mirror, which sets the book in relation both to the world it represents and to the reader who gazes into it.30 Yet the question remains of how we are to deal with this situation retrospectively, that is, how we are to isolate a group of texts to study. A Linnaean system of genres is still indispensable, for it provides the terminology needed for any nuanced comparison of texts, and I shall occasionally employ it for this purpose, but it is purely heuristic, without historical reality or intrinsic value. My methods will be principally descriptive and comparative, and I shall follow Hans Robert Jauss’s lead in describing a historical “family” of texts, presupposing that a certain concept of genre does influence the shape that writers give their texts, but it is created by singular, preexisting texts and is subject to revision by later writers.31 Such a view shis our focus from taxonomy (which texts fit where?) to practice (how does a particular writer replicate or revise encyclopedic practices modeled by past texts?). And in this emphasis on practice we come closer, perhaps, to the medieval notion of forma tractandi as a process that is gone through. This is why I have chosen encyclopedism rather than encyclopedias as the focus of the present book. In the end, I am less interested in encyclopedias than in the specific intellectual and textual practices that shape them. I therefore conceive of encyclopedias as the products of a practice that

Introduction



11

has metamorphosed through time. For example, Pliny and the scholastics share one characteristic that sets them apart from modern encyclopedists: they are compilers. Yet they do not all face the same degree of discord between their source texts. The scholastics, working much later than Pliny and obliged to negotiate the fissures between pagan, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian, between ancient and medieval, encounter more acute disharmony. Furthermore, they have diverse ways of handling contradictions between their sources: some indicate what they think of the value of particular sources; some are more concerned with synthesis than others, thus anticipating a more modern encyclopedism. At the same time, the difference between the titles chosen by Roman writers and those chosen by scholastics indicates that the two groups were engaged in distinct semiotic practices. Unlike Pliny, for example, the scholastic encyclopedists assumed that objects in the world carried symbolic meaning—a meaning that alone justified the writing of encyclopedias. Nevertheless, each scholastic encyclopedist negotiated the several levels of meaning differently. In the chapters that follow, I will be as much concerned with these variations as with commonalities.

Choice of Texts and Shape of the Study Such a project requires us to consider a diverse group of texts. Our touchstone throughout this book will be one monumental encyclopedic florilegium, the tripartite Speculum maius, or Greater Mirror, compiled by the Dominican Vincent of Beauvais, who seems to have worked on the project from about 1235 until shortly before his death in 1264. I shall complement the discussion of this most canonical of scholastic encyclopedias with analyses of the texts of two writers less commonly included in studies of encyclopedism, the Majorcan evangelist and mystic Ramon Llull (ca. 1232–1315) and the Parisian clerk and translator Jean de Meun (d. ca. 1305). I shall treat two of Llull’s eccentric adaptations of the encyclopedic genre, the Libre de meravelles and the Arbor scientiae, as well as another text that is not an encyclopedia even in the broadest sense of the word, the Arbre de filosofia d’amor. The Arbre and Jean de Meun’s continuation of the Roman de la Rose engage deeply with the encyclopedism of their time. Both (as well as the Libre de meravelles) exploit fiction in order to dramatize the movement’s pretensions to universality and order, its ambitions to propagate knowledge, and its struggles with the incoherencies of compilatio. Together with the Speculum maius and the Arbor scientiae, these texts were among the most ambitious, perspicacious, or controversial productions of the thirteenth-century encyclopedic movement.

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Introduction

Like Wikipedia, they provoked contemporary readers and laid bare the intellectual fault lines of their time. The book is divided into three parts. The first, “The Archive,” is intended to articulate, in general terms, the relation between scholasticism and encyclopedism while also providing a brief explanation of the similarities among and differences between scholastic encyclopedism and that of earlier periods. The archive of the part title may be construed in the traditional way, as an accumulation of codices to be categorized and described, or in the more abstract Foucauldian sense, as the culturally and historically specific rules that render it possible to make certain statements but not others, to preserve the traces of certain statements, but not others—in other words, the conditions of possibility for the constitution of a material archive. The broad-ranging contextual discussion of part 1 provides the background for the other two sections, which are devoted to specific texts. Part 2, “The Order of the Encyclopedia,” offers a chapter on each of the three writers under consideration. Each chapter treats the organization and hermeneutics of an encyclopedic text (for Llull, the Arbor scientia) and makes two points, not necessarily in the same order. On the one hand, the chapters show how writers faced with a proliferation of possible “orders of knowledge” ultimately seled on rhetorical and exegetical paradigms for the arrangement of the material they had borrowed and adapted from other texts while also presupposing that readers would use their writings to interpret the world symbolically—to read it. This creates a clear continuity between encyclopedic and literary practices. On the other hand, the chapters identify problems in the organizational paradigms or hermeneutics of these texts and trace them back to a confrontation between conflicting discourses, thus preparing the ground for part 3. This final section, “Heterotopias,” begins by returning to the Speculum maius. Its first chapter offers focused interpretations of sample passages from the natural history portion of this encyclopedia, rather than global surveys, in order to examine more closely the materials, technique, and consequences of compilation. In this way, it describes the confrontation of discourses created by this textual practice, identifying the epistemological foundation and institutional investment proper to each discourse, and showing how their juxtaposition creates a heterotopia. The final chapter sketches out the position and agency that the heterotopia accords to the authorial, or the scribal, or the readerly subject, through readings of the Speculum maius, the Roman de la Rose, the Libre de meravelles, and, finally, the Arbre de filosofia d’amor. Thus, the ultimate question of this book is what sort of space the scholastic encyclopedia makes available for the knowing subject.

Introduction



13

Disciplinary Configurations, Pre- and Postmodern The second half of this introduction must be devoted to further methodological considerations, for the suggestion that my reading will be postmodern raises as many questions as it answers. That label has been claimed by an eclectic group of scholars whose methodologies are not necessarily compatible. My own approach will be postmodern in two principal ways. The first is my renegotiation of the disciplinary boundaries, established several centuries ago, that still govern our universities. Neither the generic coordinates of this study nor its emphasis on the discursive should be taken to indicate the esoteric interests of the literary scholar, preoccupied with aesthetic questions, and isolated from the scientific and philosophical disciplines. The idea that literature is a discipline apart is a construction of modern thought; it has been challenged by the multidisciplinary work of scholars of the last four decades, who have studied the role of discourse in a wide range of cultural practices, from advertising and sloganeering to the writing of history and the elaboration of scientific and philosophical propositions. In the field of medieval studies, these scholars have found themselves working with, rather than against, their sources, for premodern thought presupposed no absolute barrier between the literary and other disciplines.32 In Roman antiquity and the Middle Ages, the various cognates of the term literature carried a meaning far closer to their etymological root, the leer. They oen designated “writing,” pure and simple, and they did not apply exclusively to poetry, artistic prose, or fiction.33 If they excluded anything, it was precisely the vernacular texts in which these genres flourished with renewed vigor in the twelh and thirteenth centuries; writing had been so long associated with the Latin language, and the oral tradition with the vernaculars, that the laer languages needed time, and champions, to earn their “leered” pedigree.34 Science, the field to which modern thinkers were accustomed to oppose literature, is no less problematic a term. Derived from the verb for “knowledge” and “discernment,” the classical Latin scientia indicated a particular kind of knowledge, derived from the study of causes, and such knowledge is aainable in many fields beyond what we consider the sciences today. During the scholastic period, the word was commonly employed to indicate any branch of knowledge, which we would now call a discipline (scientia and disciplina could be used interchangeably, although the laer placed more emphasis on instruction),35 and all these branches (except sometimes theology and the mechanical arts) were thought to constitute the parts of philosophia,

14 

Introduction

another term whose application was broader in the Middle Ages than it is today. This meant that disciplines such as philosophy (in the more restricted modern sense) and theology, which are not now considered scientific and which reflect on, among other things, the origins and importance of language, could as easily be indicated by the word scientia, as could astronomy or medicine. The “practical” branch of philosophia included ethics, to which what we now call literature was oen aached because it dealt with mores (human customs or behavior).36 Grammar, rhetoric, and poetics were also connected to—or at least taught by means of—literature. Although their status as scientiae was less assured, this was not, as today, because these disciplines were not considered sufficiently empirical but because some individuals thought that their role was exclusively propeadeutic. However, given the considerable subtleties of those who practiced the discursive disciplines in the period, such a position was hard to maintain, and what were variously called the scientiae eloquentiae or the scientiae sermocinales took their place beside the other scientiae of the day.37 Therefore, when at the height of scholasticism Vincent of Beauvais cites Daniel’s prophecy that, in the Latin of the Vulgate, “multiplex erit scientia” (which the Authorized Version of the Bible translates as “knowledge shall be increased”), he (and Jerome, the translator of the Vulgate) is referring, not to science as we understand it, but to learning in general, transmied by books.38 This is not to suggest that medieval thinkers made no distinction between astronomy or natural history, on the one hand, and poetry, on the other. As we shall see, the scholastics elaborated sophisticated distinctions between the various disciplines. But those distinctions were founded on a set of principles and disciplinary methods different from those of the modern period. The modern expectation that scientific texts have as their sole purpose to transmit “objective” or “factually accurate” information is based on the assumption that language can be made the univocal, even transparent, instrument for representing objects and processes in the world, the understanding of which is the final goal of reading. Language’s more dubious capacities—its moments of obscurity, the power of paronomasia and metaphor to make meanings overlap, the influence that rhetoric can exercise over human behavior—are resolutely set aside; this is the province of poets and orators, who preside over a separate world, through the looking glass, in which science has no part. Scholastic readers, for their part, were not incapable of measuring the objective accuracy of a claim, and some areas of inquiry—astronomy, herbology, alchemy—required them to do so.39 A few writers even seem to have made their own observations of natural phenom-

Introduction



15

ena, testing the claims of the authoritative texts against them, a practice that was never widespread but that nevertheless constituted a significant minority paradigm for knowledge making.40 Nonetheless, in the larger intellectual community, accuracy was not the only, and certainly not the first, measure of a scientific text’s worth. The principle by which the validity of a statement was measured remained the authority of the individual who had made it; at the top of the hierarchy of authorities was the Bible, just beneath it the patristic writers, and yet farther down the “philosophers” (a diverse category that included writers in Greek, Arabic, and Latin, not only metaphysicians and moralists, but also mathematicians, astronomers, and natural historians). In this way, scientific writing relied on citation, a linguistic and literary practice, for its authority. Moreover, because many of the authoritative texts had first to be translated and even then remained in places ambiguous or opaque, the scholastics were obliged to devote much of their energy to problems of meaning and interpretation. As a result, scientific work continued to be construed as a process of commentary on venerable texts, in all their linguistic specificity.41 Further reinforcing this focus on the discursive, preachers and moralists exhorted readers to seek the eternal truths that are obscurely signified by the objects in the material world. Thus the objects described in the encyclopedia—and the encyclopedia itself as an object, a book—functioned as signs, just as the words that described them did. Objects could be combined into a grammar of creation that had nothing to do with empirical science as we conceive it.42 My aempt to take account of this essential difference between the medieval encyclopedic paradigm, in which liera and scientia are superposed, and the modern one, which opposes them to each other, has important early precedents, chief among them Brian Stock and Winthrop Wetherbee’s now classic studies of early twelh-century writing.43 But these scholars focused on the first decades of scholasticism, when Platonism still exerted a powerful influence on writers and Aristotelian texts had not yet been fully absorbed. Although Wetherbee treated Jean de Meun in his final chapter, neither he nor Stock extended their arguments to fully embrace the thirteenth century, when Aristotelianism was on the ascendant. In fact, the change in the dominant philosophical paradigm necessitates a different kind of argument from the one they put forth. Such an argument must take more explicit account of the scholastic textual practice of compilatio, to which Malcolm Parkes and Alastair Minnis called aention in articles that appeared not long aer Stock and Wetherbee’s monographs.44 To date, those working on thirteenth-century encyclopedism have not

16



Introduction

considered the full implications of the work of these four scholars. A group of continental European scholars has returned to the manuscripts of encyclopedias to investigate how they were compiled and read, a marvelously fruitful approach that is transforming the way we understand these texts.45 These scholars have, however, not elaborated on the ways in which this new understanding of encyclopedias could change the way we read the period’s poetry and fiction.46 The one scholar who has wrien extensively about the interface between encyclopedic and imaginative writing, Bernard Ribémont, has tended to retreat to the binary paradigm in which the and of literature and encyclopedias (part of the title of his 2002 essay collection and the general subject of several monographs) constitutes a dividing line between the terms on either side; encyclopedias are scientific texts, and the interplay between encyclopedic and literary writing is conceived as the transfer of information from the former to the laer.47 Since literary genres are notoriously protean, Ribémont further argues that we should modify Jauss’s model of genre to accommodate the encyclopedia, whose reliance on prior, authoritative texts seems to him to limit the kind of modification that this (to his mind “nonliterary”) genre can undergo to a “process of accumulation” and a “stratification of authority.” In other words, it is the content of the encyclopedia, not its form, that changes, and developments in the genre always reflect an “evolution exterior to the text,” such as changing scientific systems.48 According to this paradigm, the encyclopedia becomes a zone in which no transformation can ever be initiated. I shall argue quite the opposite, that the internal dynamics of the scholastic encyclopedia not only reflect but also influence the intellectual developments of the period. Genre shapes both scientific writing and scientific thought, both philosophical writing and philosophical thought, because there is no viable distinction to be maintained between them. Ideas take shape in texts. Thus, the philosopher Berel Lang revamps the traditional “philosophy and literature” project by taking account of the fact that philosophy “is also, perhaps even first, a form of writing” and concludes from this that “the critical means that have been found relevant to more conventionally ‘literary’ texts can be—ought to be—also applied to philosophical writing.” The model that such a study would presuppose is, for Lang, something like the “Heisenberg Effect”: That is, in contrast to the Neutralist model in which the philosophical writer draws on an independent and supposedly “style-less” body of propositional assertions that the philosopher first discovers and then arranges or refor-

Introduction

 17

mulates, the writer in this second model, in choosing a form or structure for philosophical discourse, is, in that act, also shaping the substance or content which the form then—very loosely speaking now—will be “of.” The form in other words is an ingredient of philosophical content—as the impingement of light, in the “Heisenberg Effect,” influences the activity or location of the particles identified, and as the question of what identity the particles would have without the process of identification is then placed in the limbo of indeterminacy.49

Thus a study of encyclopedism is not simply a study of the literary characteristics of the encyclopedia. It is a study of the way form shapes, determines, creates meaning. A reflection on the formal characteristics of encyclopedias is therefore prerequisite for incorporating them into a historical understanding of scholasticism, and it must also inform any use of these texts in other sorts of projects.

Archaeology, Revisited In effacing the modern distinction between science and literature, I reproduce the move of an influential postmodern thinker, Michel Foucault. Foucault understood discursive practice to determine the way intellectuals of any age construe the objects of knowledge and the relations between them—whether they acknowledge its role (as the scholastics did) or not (as the moderns generally refused to do)—and he devoted The Order of Things (1966) to elaborating this thesis, effecting a rapprochement between the scientific, the historical, and the poetic.50 Gilles Deleuze thus characterizes Foucault’s description of the thought of an era as an “archaeology-poem,” made up of multiple registers, but equally of the particular inscription of an articulation linked in turn to events, institutions and all sorts of other practices. The essential point is not that we have gone beyond the duality of science and poetry that dogged the work of Bachelard, or that we have found a way of treating literary texts scientifically. Above all, what we have done is to discover and survey that foreign land where a literary form, a scientific proposition, a common phrase, a schizophrenic piece of non-sense and so on are also statements, but lack a common denominator and cannot be reduced or made equivalent in any discursive way. This is what had never before been aained by logicians, formalists or interpreters. Science and poetry are equal forms of knowledge.51

18 

Introduction

As we have seen, the valorization of poetry as an equal form of knowledge is not really new, but Deleuze is right to understand it as a break from the modern paradigm, and it is one of those innovations that allow us to reread scholasticism. Therefore, as my occasional allusions have already indicated, my conception of a postmodern historiography has largely been shaped by Foucault’s early archaeological studies, which describe the ways in which knowledge is constituted in different periods.52 A triad of terms (discourse, the archive, the heterotopia), whose sense the French philosopher redirected, will prove indispensable, for they will allow us to assume a new position in relation to the material we are interpreting or to discern phenomena that could heretofore be discerned only indistinctly or not at all. Nonetheless, Foucauldian methods must be used with caution. Foucault’s own descriptions of premodern periods are famously distorted; they tend to idealize, mythologize, or even fictionalize.53 The challenge before us, then, is to refuse to follow him into his premodern, utopian otherworld and to eschew the misreadings that have tarnished his reputation among historians while nevertheless adapting the methodological tools that he developed in his archaeological studies to medieval sources. I prefer the term adapt to apply because the confrontation of medieval sources with the methodologies in question will necessitate revision of the laer.54 The criticism of Foucault’s arguments that I shall occasionally voice over the course of this book, the revisions that I shall propose, should be understood as the response to a methodological imperative of postmodernism itself, which, according to Linda Hutcheon, “installs and then subverts . . . the very concepts it challenges.” In historiography, the aim of the postmodern is to “confront and contest any modernist discarding or recuperating of the past in the name of the future. [Postmodernism] suggests no search for transcendent timeless meaning, but rather a re-evaluation of and a dialogue with the past in light of the present.” It is, of course, not only modernists but also occasionally postmodernists who discard or recuperate the past, so I shall have to contest Foucault’s occasional dismissals or instrumentalizations of the premodern in order to set the stage for a productive dialogue, or what Hutcheon elsewhere calls a “critical confrontation,” between past and present.55 This revisionist work is rendered easier by the fact that, in the past couple of decades, Foucault’s historical methodologies have become the subject of explicit debate, from the anthology Foucault and the Writing of History (1994), edited by Jan Goldstein, to Thomas R. Flynn’s more recent A Poststructuralist

Introduction

 19

Mapping of History (2004).56 During the same period, medievalists have also begun to try to understand aspects of medieval culture “with” Foucault, to borrow Philipp W. Rosemann’s prudent formulation for the title of his 1999 Understanding Scholastic Thought with Foucault.57 As I do here, Rosemann explicitly locates himself as a postmodern scholar, arguing that the refusal to acknowledge our own historical and intellectual situation when carrying out scholarship on the Middle Ages can never really guarantee us the privileged role of reporting uncontestable facts derived from empirical evidence. Rather, such refusal only obscures each individual scholar’s (necessary) investment in some current school of thought.58 Rosemann has eloquently demonstrated that the postmodern approach to the Middle Ages need not neglect the “evidence” of material sources, that working “with” Foucault on sources that the French scholar himself never considered allows us to derive from those very sources a rich and nuanced understanding of scholastic thought. The question of material sources brings us back to one method that I have already introduced in my discussion of genre and that Foucault employed masterfully. This is a methodological individualism, which led him to reject such universal categories as man, aspiring instead to tease out the relations discernible between individual objects and the historically specific practices that subtended those relations (and objects). As Roger Chartier puts it, Foucault refused to use “universal categories” “whose historical variations (be they madness, medicine, state, or sexuality) the historian simply notes. Behind the lazy convenience of vocabulary, what we need to recognize are singular demarcations, specific distributions, and particular ‘positivities’ produced by differentiated practices that construct figures (of knowledge or of power) irreducible to one another.”59 Thus, according to Paul Veyne, “things are only objectivizations of determined practices.”60 Foucault’s nominalism privileges the variations among individuals, variations rendered visible through categorical groupings, but these groups are more like “lines of variation,” in the characterization of Deleuze: “General terms are the co-ordinates which have no meaning other than to make possible the estimation of a continuous variation.”61 The necessity of taking such a course when studying medieval encyclopedism has, I hope, already become clear; it reduces the natural tendency to anachronize or perpetuate old assumptions about medieval textuality because it forces us to study actual texts and relations. Its consequence, in the larger scheme of things, is to throw into relief the discontinuities of history, a consequence evident in the difference between a reading of the encyclo-

20

 Introduction

pedic genre as a historical constant (which would mean that the failures of the medieval encyclopedia to conform to the expectations of the modern genre would be characterized merely as an incomplete development) and the one I have proposed, which posits that genres can only ever be understood through discrete texts, thus emphasizing the irreducible differences between the texts of the thirteenth century and, say, those of the eighteenth.62 Discontinuity can be understood to have a lateral as well as a vertical dimension, although one of the weaknesses of The Order of Things was Foucault’s failure to take that possibility into account. In other words, there can be discontinuities between practices dispersed along what was previously taken to be historical succession, but there can also be discontinuities between practices contemporary to each other, or else texts created by distinct historical practices can be juxtaposed. This observation leads us to another method that Foucault introduced: the exploitation of a most eclectic group of source texts, a model for anyone aempting to take full account of (rather than reduce) the eclecticism of medieval encyclopedias. Taken together, both these methods reveal the diacritical paern of thought and the openness to the diversity of a given subject maer that has come to characterize postmodern historiography. But material sources also pose several problems for the medievalist adapting Foucauldian methodologies. Language can assume two material forms: one acoustic, the other visual. Foucault particularly neglected to discuss the first of these, the sound paerns that organize language, although he occasionally exploited them with titles such as “La prose du monde” (which is memorable because of its approximate assonance—paradoxically, a phenomenon deriving from medieval verse). The Latin encyclopedic writing of the Middle Ages occasionally made room for verse, and the first vernacular encyclopedias were in either verse or a prose oen distinct from colloquial speech. Adrian Armstrong and Sarah Kay have recently argued that such poetic practices structure the understanding of reality in late medieval texts, an observation applicable to all three writers that I consider here.63 As we shall see in part 2, both Ramon Llull and Jean de Meun exploit the sound paerns of language to perform (for Llull) or call into question (for Jean) the ostensible claims of their texts, and neither writer can be adequately understood without aention to this acoustic material. Vincent of Beauvais, for his part, cites from both prose and poetic texts, creating an acoustic and discursive bricolage that late medieval readers seemed to appreciate, for they reflected it visually when laying the text out on the page, a phenomenon that I shall study in part 3.

Introduction

 21

This practice leads us to the visual materiality of the text, which also deserved more aention than Foucault accorded it in his analysis of discourses in The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge. We shall see in parts 1 and 3 that the visual aspect of the manuscript page, the shape and distribution of its leers and their decoration, determined the way in which medieval readers approached and understood the text. The diversity of layouts indicated and reinforced discursive heterogeneity in the scholastic period. Foucault, on the other hand, insisted that the verbal and the visual were incompatible.64 He took this perceived incompatibility as a point of departure for analysis, most notably in his essay on Magrie’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe, which he treats as a drawing “created from the fragments of an unraveled calligram.” The calligram as genre, and another way in which it may be unraveled, will be treated in chapter 5, but I cite here Foucault’s surprising treatment of the leers in Magrie’s drawing, which, because they are wrien out with flourishes of calligraphy, he characterizes as something “drawn—images of words”: “From the calligraphic past, which I am quite obliged to extend to them, the words have conserved their logical relationship to the drawing, and their state as something drawn. Consequently I must read them superimposed on themselves. At the surface of the image, they form the reflection of a sentence saying that this is not a pipe. The image of a text.”65 Foucault here seems to erase the material medium through which—according to his own explanation elsewhere—statements must necessarily be articulated and in which they maintain a residual existence.66 He does not aribute to these leers even the status of traces. We should, perhaps, understand this insistence on an absolute disjunction between the discursive and the visual as deriving from the technologies of Foucault’s time. Print and the typewriter had rendered calligraphy an archaic, artificial art form, while film, as Deleuze points out, had introduced a disjunction between the visible and the acoustic.67 Nevertheless, Foucault did recognize that, in earlier periods, the visible and the discursive could be fused; he refers in his discussion of the Renaissance in The Order of Things to “that uniform layer, in which the seen and the read, the visible and the expressible, were endlessly interwoven,” formed because there is “no difference between the visible marks that God has stamped upon the surface of the earth, so that we may know its inner secrets, and the legible words that the Scriptures, or the sages of Antiquity, [illumined by a divine light,] have set down in the books preserved for us by tradition.”68 And, inspired by the discovery of Erwin Panofsky’s essays on medieval art, Foucault did all too briefly consider the “complex and tangled relations” between discourse and

22



Introduction

image in the scholastic period, but, beyond one very short essay, he never pursued the question.69 His interest in the problems of the present gave him lile cause to elaborate on this other, older way of construing the two realms as one or to describe the visibility of a statement. In the present study, I shall be obliged to do so.70 The difficulty of relating the discursive to the visual when working with Foucauldian methodologies indicates a more fundamental problem: in his early work, Foucault never successfully articulated the relation between the discursive and the nondiscursive. He was interested in the conditions of possibility for the creation of knowledge, especially the rules that determine how serious statements of truth can be made. At least some of these conditions would appear to be external to discourse, as he occasionally acknowledged.71 But in The Order of Things he treated discourse as entirely autonomous, without any relation to the nondiscursive. And in The Archaeology of Knowledge he continued to cite this autonomy and provided no clear explanation of how to link the two realms.72 It is therefore unclear whence derive the rules that define how knowledge is constituted. Foucault repeatedly stated that the rules governing discourse are not derived from a collective consciousness, yet he made no positive statement about their source and was inconsistent even about the level at which they are to be located. Do these laws lie behind, or operate within, discursive phenomena? Foucault vacillated.73 The vagueness of the link between the discursive and the nondiscursive probably derives from the fact that power plays a most indistinct role in these two books. Its role would be elaborated in Foucault’s later work. In a 1977 interview, Foucault would state that power was the deep preoccupation of his early work, although he had not been aware of it at the time. He would thus describe The Order of Things as one of a series of analyses of power, “the pinpointing of mechanisms of power within scientific discourses themselves: what rule is one obliged to obey, in a certain period, when one wants to create a scientific discourse on life, on natural history, on political economy? What must one obey, to what constraint is one subjected, how, from one discourse to another, from one model to another, are the effects of power produced?”74 All the passive constructions in this explanation paper over an essential obscurity, the same one that had plagued The Order of Things: Foucault is still not answering the question of whence the rules and constraints derive. Nevertheless, his new work on sexuality does make clear that he has chosen his source texts because they were produced in the fields of exercise of power.75 As Deleuze explains: “The words, phrases and propo-

Introduction

 23

sitions examined by the text must be those which revolve round different focal points of power (and resistance) set in play by a particular problem.”76 And, with this topography of power, the archive, that larger field that embraces all the discourses in a given age, begins to acquire a discernible shape. What, then, are the focal points of power and resistance that can be used to map the scholastic archive? The answer derives from identifying the central problem, which is theological, philosophical, and textual in nature: an intellectual culture long accustomed to one way of knowing was challenged to absorb a body of texts set down in earlier historical moments when people had other ways of knowing. The focal points of power and resistance can then be understood as the various institutions (religious orders, universities) where stands were taken on the problems that this (potential) assimilation created. But the boundaries of organized institutions alone do not adequately circumscribe these foci, for the orders and universities were riven by controversy. A more accurate map may be created by delimiting what Brian Stock has called “textual communities,” that is, groups in which a particular use of a specific text both structured the interactions of the members among themselves and unified them as a group against other individuals or communities.77 Not all members of a textual community needed to have access to the text in question; a single interpreter or a small group of interpreters could use their knowledge of a text to shape a larger community of individuals who know the text less well or not at all. In this way, illiterate or semiliterate individuals could well belong to textual communities dominated by a few charismatic preachers, teachers, or—I would add, although Stock does not extend his analysis this far—troubadours or romanciers. Textual communities are sometimes isomorphic with institutions, but, because they crystallize around texts rather than being delimited by institutional boundaries, they also have the ability to embrace multiple institutions, to delimit factions within a single institution, or to link individuals who led lives outside any formal institutional structure. The textual community thus constitutes a particularly useful paradigm for describing a period during which factions, which sometimes crossed institutional boundaries, formed around the way particular texts should be used. By the mid-thirteenth century, the Dominicans, many secular masters at the University of Paris, and a few Franciscans were moving toward an Aristotelianism of sorts, although they took slightly different approaches to the Aristotelian texts and some were more skeptical, or more heavily influenced by Neoplatonism or Averroism, than others. They were led by a group of powerful interpreters: Albert the Great, Aquinas, Siger of

24

 Introduction

Brabant, Roger Bacon. They were opposed by what some scholars have identified as an Augustinian faction, composed of many (but not all) Franciscans and also independent individuals such as Ramon Llull. The Augustinians, whose most powerful voice was that of Bonaventure, knew Aristotle and did not reject all his works categorically, but they approached them with even greater caution, privileging instead the largely Platonic ideas of Augustine.78 Yet another, more radical textual community formed around the millenarian writings of the twelh-century exegete Joachim of Fiore, a Cistercian who was to acquire in the thirteenth century a following (“Joachimites”) that included many of what came to be known as “Spiritual” Franciscans. The Joachimites shared the same biblical text, the same object of commentary, with the Aristotelians and the Augustinians, but their exegetical practice was different, shaped by the visions and writings of Joachim. Similarly, but on a larger scale, Christians, Muslims, and Jews shared some of the same essential texts, but the dialogues that were initiated between them during the period came to naught because their hermeneutics were at variance; they had constituted mutually exclusive textual communities around similar texts. This brief sketch of the textual communities of the thirteenth century suggests that we can move beyond the definition given by Stock, to think of such communities as forming, not around a single text, but around a small constellation of key texts. For example, the Bible was still at the center of the Aristotelian community, even though Aristotle’s writings were also; those thinkers whose view of Aristotle was shaped by Averroes belonged to a community distinct from those whose view was not so shaped; etc. The texts chosen for closer analysis in parts 2 and 3 of this study were produced by writers who participated in very different institutions and textual communities. The three major Latin encyclopedists of the first half of the thirteenth century, Thomas of Cantimpé, Bartholomeus Anglicus, and Vincent of Beauvais, were all mendicants and came out of a milieu in which, it seems, inchoate Aristotelian inclinations were still tempered by traditional Neoplatonism.79 I have decided against basing the present study on this triad of encyclopedists because I fear that a discussion of such a group would never escape the boundaries of a single textual community and that it would thus constantly circle round to the same observations. The more diverse group that I have assembled—mendicant and secular, clerical and lay, Aristotelian and Augustinian, with connections to the Joachimites, Jews, Muslims, and several courtly milieux—provides a fuller sample of thirteenth-century thought. Such a sample is necessary when studying a textual practice whose goal was to promulgate knowledge beyond the university or clerical commu-

Introduction



25

nity. In part 2, before engaging in a focused analysis of their texts, I shall give brief accounts of these writers’ involvement in various institutions and textual communities. Although the limitations of space will not allow me to fully explore the relations between the texts in question and the structures of power in those groups, I hope that such accounts will go some way toward filling this lacuna in the early Foucauldian archaeological method. I am aware that my choice of texts is expressed through the kinds of “unities” (the oeuvre, the author) that Foucault rejected. What he had in mind, as Hayden White has observed, was “a history of the human sciences without names,” and, if he was forced to employ names, they were never intended to be any more than “shorthand devices for designating the texts.”80 In part 1, devoted to general questions, I shall take more or less this approach, but the close readings required in parts 2 and 3 will necessarily throw into relief the writers’ participation in the various conflicting institutions of the thirteenth century and the “author function” (the understanding of authorship proper to a particular culture, period, or genre) in relation to which these texts have been, and continue to be, understood. Therefore, this study provides the occasion to consider the peculiarities of the author function in the scholastic period. In fact, I have chosen these texts partly because many of them provide case studies for the way the traditional unities of the oeuvre and the author—and (to go Foucault a few beer) the book and the reader—break down.81 This will be foreshadowed in the conclusions to the chapters of part 2 and become clearer in part 3. The Speculum maius was composed of multiple “books” (textual divisions), but it could not be contained within a single “book” (codex). Neither was it transmied in complete and identical collections of books; multiple versions circulated in fragmentary form, extracts were made to suit the tastes of specific readers, and apocryphal portions were added, a situation that complicates any aempt to take it as a unified work or as a stable component of Vincent’s oeuvre. As for the author, this was a term that medieval writers did not use lightly, and many insisted that compilers were not authors at all. On the other hand, the Roman de la Rose is a first-person narration that was begun by one writer and completed by another, a reader of the earlier portion. This structure is reproduced within the fiction of the Libre de meravelles. Such intersections of reading and writing invite us to recall John Dagenais’s assertion that “in the Middle Ages the primary ‘literary’ activity was not writing, and certainly not ‘authoring’ or ‘creating,’ but reading.”82 Thus, the traditional unities turn out to be not so unified aer all, and I shall be obliged, in the final chapter, to abandon both the author and the (homogeneous) textual community in pursuit of a less

26



Introduction

determinate, more protean knowing “subject” that is opened up by encyclopedic texts, neither a traditional author nor a passive reader, but actively engaged in the constitution of the text, the arbiter of its conflicting meanings and interpreter of its ethical imperatives.

On the Problem of Reading Everything One last methodological issue deserves comment. As Vincent of Beauvais was willing to acknowledge but Foucault was not, it is not possible to read everything, much less to take account of it in a single book.83 Hence, I offer three qualifications concerning the scope and purpose of the chapters that follow. First, despite my intense and at times minute focus on the texts in question, these chapters are not intended to provide a comprehensive study of the writings of Vincent of Beauvais, Ramon Llull, or Jean de Meun. All three were exceedingly prolific, given to writing lengthy texts whose complexities modern scholarship, though it is vast and deep, has not exhausted. A comparative discussion of their writings does, however, make it possible to discern broader dynamics that remain indistinct, if not wholly invisible, when one of the writers is studied individually. The fact that all three participate in these dynamics suggests larger conclusions about the period in which they were working than it would it be possible to draw from a single-author study. It may seem contradictory, then, that time should occasionally be devoted to texts by earlier writers. As it happens, when encyclopedias are constructed from citations of other texts, studying them means studying what happens to those other texts when they are absorbed into encyclopedias, which necessitates a preliminary understanding of the function of those texts in their original form. I want to distinguish this approach from the Quellenforschung, the traditional source study, which would pose such questions as from what kind of manuscript Vincent drew his citations of Pliny (i.e., from a full text of the Natural History, or from a twelh-century florilegium, or from the citations of Pliny in Isidore of Seville’s much earlier encyclopedia?). I will, on occasion (particularly in chapter 3), assume this scholarly mode and suggest sources whose relevance has been neglected. Nevertheless, my work largely short-circuits this kind of inquiry because my theoretical paradigm renders the intermediary steps in the transmission of a given text less important than the outcome—the appearance of a citation in an encyclopedia—and the epistemological and literary distance that can be measured between the encyclopedic citation and the original text.

Introduction

 27

Finally, and most important, the chapters to follow are not intended to provide a survey of scholastic encyclopedism. Such a survey would have to begin with early twelh-century texts, and it would have to devote sustained analyses to the important thirteenth-century Latin encyclopedias of Bartholomeus Anglicus and Thomas of Cantimpré as well as the vernacular adaptations of the genre by Gossuin de Metz, Bruneo Latini, and Matfre Ermengaud, before proceeding to Dante’s Commedia, vernacular translation of the Latin encyclopedias, and the development of a philosophical encyclopedism in the fourteenth century. It would thus have to take account of the specific forms that encyclopedism assumed at different points within the scholastic period. Of these points, the current study can address only the thirteenth century—and that only partially, with a focus on texts wrien in the kingdom of France or by a peripatetic Majorcan seeking a readership in France. A more complete coverage would triple the length of this book while diffusing its theoretical focus. The resulting book would be an encyclopedia of medieval encyclopedias, and that is not my goal. In fact, Reading the World is a very different kind of book from the historical survey or the encyclopedia; its purpose is to balance historical with theoretical considerations in an investigation of the way three very different writers came to terms with the paradigms of encyclopedic practice in their day.

+

PA R T I

∂

The Archive

The study of scholastic encyclopedism begins and ends with the archive, yet it is archaeological. The initial contradiction disappears when the terms archaeology and archive are understood in their Foucauldian sense. For Foucault’s archaeologist does not toil under the sun at some remote site, excavating the capital of a vanished empire, brushing the soil off fragments of stone and poery, mapping the points of their emergence, describing, classifying, reassembling. Foucauldian archaeology does not admit such intimate contact with things because it posits that things are only ever known through and in the cultural practices—different from one era to the next—that give them shape and order them. The archaeological method is therefore highly abstract, and, in Foucault’s early work, it takes as its object primarily the discursive realm. It is carried out in the library, rather than at an excavation site. In this preoccupation with textual knowledge, Foucault’s archaeologist can be likened to the scholastic scholar. But the analogy can be taken no further, for the archaeologist approaches linguistic artifacts, the library’s tomes, in a way quite unlike that of the scholastic or of the traditionalist historian or literary critic today. Words, like things, must be treated as traces of the practice that created them, not as signs whose lost meaning is to be illuminated. Discursive practice, rather than meaning, is what preoccupies the archaeologist at work in the archive. The archive, too, must be abstracted from what is given. It is not the material archive represented by the library or the compendium because it may 29

30 

Part One

not be reduced to its material residue, although the terms in which Foucault describes it do suggest a certain formal analogy: “We are now dealing with a complex volume, in which heterogeneous regions are differentiated [and where practices that cannot be superposed are deployed in accordance with specific rules].”1 But Foucault’s notion of the various discursive units, from the smallest (the statement, or l’énoncé) to the largest (the archive), is at once more elusive and more dynamic. The statement may be defined neither logically (as a proposition) nor grammatically (as a sentence). It is instead a verbal event that helps constitute the knowledge of a given time.2 The relations between statements, rather than mere “context,” define what Foucault dubs the enunciative field.3 If we wanted a material metaphor for the description of the enunciative field, we could take a cue from the term itself and conceive of that description as a topography or cartography of the area populated by statements, with their concentrations in certain kinds of places and the roads that connect them.4 The archive, finally, is that which defines the relations—the conjunctions and disjunctions—between enunciative fields. Thus, the archive is not that which collects the dust of statements that have become inert once more, and which may make possible the miracle of their resurrection; it is that which defines the mode of occurrence of the statement-thing; it is the system of its functioning. Far from being that which unifies everything that has been said in the great confused murmur of [a single] discourse, far from being only that which ensures that we exist in the midst of [the] preserved discourse, it is that which differentiates discourses in their multiple existence and specifies them in their own duration.5

Neither the scholastic library nor the scholastic encyclopedia, library in miniature, is an archive in the Foucauldian sense, but the traces they contain allow us to discern the archive that subtends them. Nonetheless, the very reading of those traces involves contact with the material archive and training in the traditional philological disciplines of historical linguistics, paleography, codicology, textual criticism, and literary history. This means, as Martin Irvine has observed, that the scholar of medieval textuality must be “an archivist on two levels simultaneously—in the material archive of history and in the larger system of texts and discourse that formed the archive of possible statements, genres, and bodies of knowledge, the discursive conditions that made textual culture possible.”6 In what follows, I shall examine both these archives, employing philology and archaeology, allowing these meth-

e Archive 

31

ods to inform and modify each other. I pose the following questions: How and within what system do statements function? What discourses does the archive differentiate, and how? In what ways does the encyclopedic practice of the time reflect more general scholastic intellectual and textual practices? These are, of course, large questions that I shall pursue throughout the entire study, but part 1 surveys the scholastic archive most broadly in order to provide provisional answers that will guide the more focused readings in parts 2 and 3.

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1

∂

The Book of the World Encyclopedism and Scholastic Ways of Knowing

Toward the middle of Ramon Llull’s Libre de meravelles (Paris, ca. 1288–89), an odd text that weds the encyclopedic genre with the quest romance, there is a parable about another, more conventional encyclopedia, the Libre de plasent visió. According to the story, a wise king one day receives, from the hands of a visiting squire, a book compiled by an unnamed hermit, “on eren depintes moltes figures e estòries” [where many figures and histories were depicted]. The book is described in a rich passage that must be quoted at length: Lo donzell dix al rei que lo libre és de plaser corporal e espirital: “De plaser corporal és, per ço car hi ha moltes e diverses figures, qui són molt noblament feites, e són de totes aitantes maneres com hom pot pensar de criatures e de obres de criatures. . . . E així, per orde, en cascuna cosa distinta de altra, ha sa figura, e la manera segons que los hòmens, e les bísties, e aucells, e peixs viuen e fan en aquest món obres per tal que viuen. En aquest libre ha estòries de batalles, de ciutats e naus e galees, reis; e de totes altres coses antigues que són passades, fa aquest libre memòria per figures. Aquest libre, sényer rei,” dix lo donzell, “féu aquest sant ermità, qui fo filòsof; e de tots los libres que poc atrobar, ell trasc totes les històries que poc trer; e de tot ço que veia fer als hòmens e a les bísties e aucells, arbres e peixs, ell ho posava en figures. “Sènyer rei,” dix lo donzell, “con lo filòsof hac fet aquest libre, ell se’n venc estar en una esgleia ermitana, e en aquest libre ell guardava tot jorn, per ço 33

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que n’hagués plaer corporalment e espirital: plaser corporal ne havia, per ço car lo libre és bell, e ben pintat e afigurat, e car de moltes figures és ajustat; plaser espirital ne havia, per ço car, per ço que veia ab ulls corporals, se girava a veser ab ulls esperitals, ab los quals veia Déu e les obres que havia en les criatures; e havia plaser de ço que considerava en les coses passades, e en les obres que fan les criatures.” (8.57)1 [The squire told the king that the book was about physical and spiritual pleasure: “It concerns physical pleasure because it contains many and diverse figures, which are very nobly fashioned, and they are of all manners that one can imagine creatures and the works of creatures. . . . And thus, in order, for each thing distinct from any other, there may be found its figure and the manner in which men and beasts and birds and fish live and carry out in this world the works by which they live. In this book there are stories (estòries) of bales, of cities and ships and galleys, kings, and all the other ancient things that came to pass this book commemorates through figures. This book, Lord King,” said the young man, “was made by the holy hermit, who was a philosopher; and from all the books that he could find, he drew all the histories (històries) that he could, and everything that he saw done by men and beasts and birds and trees and fish, he placed here in figures. “Lord King,” said the young man, “when the philosopher had finished his work, he departed to live in a hermitage, where he spent his days looking at the book, in order to have pleasure both physical and spiritual: physical pleasure, because the volume is beautiful, and well painted and endowed with many figures, spiritual pleasure, because, on account of what he saw with his physical eyes, he was converted to a spiritual vision, by which he saw God and his works in creatures. And the philosopher took pleasure from thinking about past things and the works that the creatures perform.”]

This description, so compelling that an early reader has drawn a bracket around it in one of the surviving manuscripts,2 was long taken by scholars to represent a real encyclopedia, lost to one of the vagaries to which books are subject—neglect, vandalism, or the.3 Thus, the Libre de plasent visió insinuated itself into the Lullian bibliography as a work apart. Yet it was never more than a title indicating a book no one claimed to have seen. The legend was overdue for critical examination when, in 1980, Anthony Bonner published a series of short iconoclastic pieces modestly titled “Notes de bibliografia i cronologia lul·lianes.” Bonner observed how curious it was that a book of such “spectacular beauty” would be mentioned only once in the

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Middle Ages (by the purported author himself), and only three times in the early modern period, and never in any of the exhaustive catalogs of Llull’s writings compiled during the centuries of his greatest fame. To Bonner, the description of the Libre de plasent visió smacked of novelistic invention.4 Bonner has convincingly argued that the Libre de plasent visió should be eliminated from the list of Llull’s texts. My purpose in returning to the subject at the beginning of this first chapter is, not to repeat his argument, but rather to suggest an alternative way to read the description of this encyclopedia. Representations of books, however unreal the particular object in question, reveal the paradigms and ideologies that underpin the making and use of specific kinds of texts in a given context.5 Llull’s depiction of the Libre de plasent visió sets out all the objectives of scholastic encyclopedism: exhaustive coverage, the ordered presentation of material, the dissemination of knowledge beyond traditionally learned circles, and the conversion of souls. It constitutes one of the most elaborate surviving descriptions of the way encyclopedias were compiled and used in the Middle Ages. If we conceive of the scholastic archive as the system in which statements function, rather than as a collection of baered manuscripts, then the elusive Libre de plasent visió offers us the means to understand that archive. Thus, the early scholars who read the passage with such naive earnestness were right to take it seriously, to believe that it had relevance to a real medieval phenomenon; they erred only in assuming that the book’s importance lay in its historical existence and singularity. The real importance of the description, to my mind, is Llull’s paradigm of encyclopedism, in its epistemological foundation, its rhetorical practice, and its hermeneutics. But medieval literary practice favored idealized, hyperbolic descriptions, and the depiction of this encyclopedia conforms to the expectations readers would have had at the time, not only for what the encyclopedia should be, but also for how ekphrasis should be wrien. The laer exigencies impinge on the former. The Libre de plasent visió is, in all its shadowy existence as an idealized form, a book about everything, filled with perfectly organized extracts of all the material that the hermit found in all the books he read—in short, it represents an aspiration that could never be fully realized. Some decades before Llull began to write, Vincent of Beauvais’s Dominican superiors set for him a similar task. His inability to fulfill it, and the criticisms that early versions of the Speculum maius aracted, probably contributed some part of the bierness that occasionally stains the prologue to the Speculum maius, draed aer nearly ten years of work on the project. This text is more than a preface; titled the “Libellus totius operis apologeticus,” it is indeed a

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full-fledged apologia, the only full articulation of the aspirations and travails of the encyclopedist to have been penned by a medieval writer.6 Finding himself caught between that Scylla and Charybdis of criticisms, that his text has grown too long but does not say enough about certain subjects, Vincent poses a rhetorical question: “Quis enim omnia, que de singulis rebus in tam infinita voluminum numerositate per orbem usque quaque dispersa reperiuntur, in brevi possit colligere, cunctaque perstringendo simul in unum volumen manuale redigere?” [Who could possibly assemble all the writings about individual things, dispersed throughout the world in such an infinite multitude of volumes, and touch briefly upon all of them in a single volume, as in a manual?] (LA ch. 11). Aer recounting his futile efforts, undertaken as a penance, to reduce the text to the length of the Bible (ch. 16), he concludes bleakly: Tanto igitur, tamque laborioso opere per Dei gratiam ad finem usque perducto, ego quoque navem meam per spaciosissima scripturarum maria jam ex longo tempore fluctuantem ipsaque distractione semetipsam quodammodo lacerantem ad portum stabilitatis sue reducere cupio. Quod utique dum per imbecillitatem conatus mei vix facio, serenato quodammodo liberoque rationis oculo hoc ipsum opus intuens, et in statera discretionis appendens in parte quidem negligenter egisse, in parte vero modum excessisse me reperio. . . . Hec sunt ergo, in quibus sicut nec ipse mihi complaceo, sic etiam Deo et hominibus displicere formido. (LA ch. 18) [Aer completing, by the grace of God, such a laborious work, I now desire to bring my bark, long tossed in the wide sea of writings and baered by its own perplexities, back to the port of stability. The work that I, in the frailty of my efforts up to now, have barely been able to accomplish, I consider with an eye of reason, as it were, calmed and liberated. Weighing this work upon the scales of my discernment, I see that in part I acted negligently, and in part I clearly exceeded the reasonable measure. . . . Here therefore is the work, with which I fear, just as I displease myself, so I may also displease God and men.]

The disillusionment of these lines may seem to undercut the idealism of Llull’s description, just as the unrestrainable proliferation and fragmentation of the encyclopedia that Vincent’s apologia serves to preface may seem to break open the unity and coherence of the Libre de plasent visió. These books represent two extremes, and the other encyclopedias of the period fall

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somewhere between them. Nonetheless, Llull’s parable and Vincent’s apologia articulate a shared aspiration, and the confrontation of the two texts opens a space for a discussion of scholastic textual and intellectual practices in their general outlines and of the specific forms of encyclopedism they determined. Although these two texts will remain the touchstones throughout the present chapter, the discussion will range widely, for I wish to provide a general overview of the practices and materials of scholasticism, the ways in which statements were made, the enunciative fields that accommodated them, and the archive that determined the relation of those fields to each other. This presentation must move more quickly than the discussion in the remaining chapters, and it must trace a number of intersecting, even interwoven threads. Since such material does not lend itself to a chronological treatment, it has been organized around four practices or means of creating and organizing knowledge: figura, glossa, compilatio, and ordo. Each opens a window on scholasticism and is essential for understanding encyclopedism. The first topic, figura, draws our aention to semiotics, to the way medieval thinkers, influenced by a few phrases from the Pauline Epistles and the more extensive reflections of Augustine, understood signs to function—be they pictures, objects in the world, or words arranged into stories, traced onto the page, and bound into books. It also requires us to consider the competing epistemology of the philosopher who was to pose the most serious challenge to the hegemony of Augustinian discourse in the Middle Ages: Aristotle. With the second practice, glossa, I shall continue the discussion of semiotics from a different angle, by considering the exegetical work that explicates such signs: in nature, understood as a second, created revelation, and in the primary revelation, Scripture. Once I have considered both sides of this diptych, I shall turn to the practice of compilatio, which brings competing discourses into contact in texts that have been woven from citations of other texts and are thus both old and new. The discussion of compilatio will allow me to distinguish the encyclopedic florilegium from two other important scholastic genres, the summa and the prosimetrum. It will also make it possible to consider how the scholastics produced order out of the chaos of citations—and books—that they had inherited. The ordering of everything from disciplines to libraries (and hence the archive in both senses) will therefore be the final practice described in this chapter. The ordo that so preoccupied scholastic thinkers gives form to the largest of the florilegia, creating the books that we recognize as encyclopedias. The quartet of figura, glossa, compilatio, and ordo has not been chosen at random. Not only does it provide

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the terms with which to describe scholastic and encyclopedic practice;7 it also rewrites the quartet of figures of resemblance with which Foucault describes the preclassical episteme, with very different results. I shall therefore conclude by measuring the distance between the scholastic archive and the preclassical archive as Foucault describes it in The Order of Things.

Figura The description of the Libre de plasent visió is oddly enigmatic. It exhibits one of Llull’s characteristic literary techniques, the repetition of a single word for emphasis: in this case, figure. Yet that repetition has the paradoxical effect of making the sense of this polysemic term more elusive than it would be in a passage where the word was occasionally replaced by a partial synonym or paraphrase, for such replacements would help narrow the lexical field through a sequence of fine distinctions or differences (which is, since Saussure, the way language has been understood to function).8 In this passage, however, the few words that would appear to restrict the sense of figure are similarly multivalent, as we shall soon see. Let us begin our investigation of the figure with the acceptation that, from the sixteenth century to the present day, readers of the Libre de meravelles have universally understood: graphic illustrations or miniatures.9 Interpreted in this way, Llull’s exemplum would appear to depict an illustrated book similar to the Liber floridus (ca. 1125) compiled by one Lambert of SaintOmer, canon and encyclopedist. Lambert compensated for his dubious skills as a Latinist with his remarkable artistic talents; he generally proceeded by arranging fragments of text relevant to a particular object of knowledge around a central, graphic depiction of that object. I have reproduced the justly famous lion page as my frontispiece, despite the fact that this Romanesque book is earlier than the texts to which the present study is devoted, because it provides a visual translation of many of the practices proper to scholastic encyclopedism—which may explain why the Liber floridus maintained a modest popularity throughout the scholastic period (copies were not numerous, but they were made, a complicated undertaking that must have incurred considerable costs).10 If we wanted to identify, among texts more widely read during the thirteenth century, those in which graphic figures play an important role, we would have to look to other (though not unrelated) genres. For example, bestiaries and similar texts (lapidaries etc.) elaborate Christian allegories out of ancient lore about the creatures. These texts belong to an old genre;

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most bestiaries were based on an anonymous Greek text of late antiquity, the Physiologus, which had been translated into Latin ca. 700. They remained popular, the subject of various translations and adaptations, throughout the scholastic period; Lambert mined the Physiologus for material, and later encyclopedists put it to more limited use. In manuscripts, the bestiaries were frequently—and beautifully—illustrated (pl. 1). The didactic function of these images is explained by Richard de Fournival (1201–60) in the prologue to the Bestiaire d’amour, an adaptation of genre to the courtly milieu that would have been standard reading in Paris during Llull’s sojourns in the city. The book will combine both painture [painting] and parole [speech], for the first lends itself to hearing, the second to sight, and these senses are the portals of the memory. Through them, what is recounted in the text can be made present to the reader: Et comment on puist repairier a le maison Memoire par painture et par parole, si est aparant par chou que Memoire, qui est la garde des tresors que sens d’omme conquiert par bonté d’engien, fait che qui est trespassé ausi comme present. Et a che meisme vient on par painture et par parole, car quant on voit painte une estoire ou de Troies ou d’autre, on voit les fais des preudommes qui cha en arriere furent aussi con s’il fussent present. Et tout aussi est il de parole, car quant on ot .j. roumans lire, on entent les fais des preudommes aussi con s’il fussent present.11 [And the way that one can return to the house of memory through painting and speech is evident because memory, which is the storehouse of the treasure that human sense conquers through its ingenuity, renders as if present that which has passed. And one arrives at this through painting and speech. For when one sees a story painted, be it of Troy or some other maer, one sees the deeds of the valiant men who lived in that past time just as if they were present. . . . And it is the same with speech. For when one hears a romance read, one understands the deeds of the valiant men as if they were present.]

The page that can penetrate both portals at once will produce a more distinct and lasting impression on the mind. The graphic image plays a more central role in the stunning Bibles moralisées, made in Paris in the first half of the thirteenth century, where biblical events and the events they prefigure are depicted in roundels in the middle of the page, the biblical texts themselves copied in two outer columns (fig. 1).

Figure 1. Creation, from a Bible moralisée (Paris, ca. 1220–30). The first four days of creation are interpreted as prefiguring the establishment of the church. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS 2554, fol. 1r. Photograph reproduced by permission of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek / Vienna.

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Unlike the bestiaries, but like the Liber floridus, the Bibles moralisées make the graphic representation an essential locus of meaning; the images sometimes contribute information absent from the text, and, without interpreting them, it is sometimes impossible fully to grasp the relation of the various fragments of text to each other. This is the significance of the placement of the graphic image at the center of the page, with the text squeezed into the open spaces on the periphery. I shall return to the organizational power of the image later; for the moment, I would point out that all three examples require the reader to cope with not only verbal but also nonverbal signs.12 Such reading harks back to the oldest sense of the Latin figura, as a physical form. But the “figures” in Llull’s description of the Libre de plasent visió do not necessarily have to be understood as paintings. The Latin word also refers to the shape of the leer, the grapheme, as opposed to the potestas, the phoneme that it evokes, or its nomen [name]. The distinction had been articulated by Priscian, in the Institutiones grammaticae (early sixth century).13 These shapes, whether rounded or angular, stout or slender, carried their own meaning in the Middle Ages. Today, the extravagance of font choices in Microso Word, or, perhaps more powerfully, the close association between particular fonts and the corporations that employ them, is beginning to resensitize readers to the shapes of leers. Nevertheless, the variations among the typefaces of printed books are oen too subtle to be detected by any but confirmed bibliophiles. In earlier periods, the situation was different. Medieval readers remained closer to and hence more aware of book production than are readers in a print economy. All books were handmade, and the labor involved was a source of spiritual discipline for the monk and of income for the impecunious urban student. Noble and bourgeois readers wealthy enough to purchase new books would have commissioned them from a bookmaker and might well specify, in addition to what sort of ornamentation or illustration they desired, the dimensions of the volume and the size of the script. Although Gothic script had become the standard for new codices in France, England, and the Low Countries by the late twelh century and elsewhere by the end of the thirteenth, the older libraries (mainly those aached to monasteries and cathedrals) would have been stocked with books made in past centuries, copied in recognizably different scripts, and certain of these scripts were closely associated with particular kinds of texts, ways of reading, or textual communities. Some older books even employed a hierarchy of scripts meant to throw certain passages into relief.14 Thus, the figures of the book comprehend its leers, and those figures illustrate the

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discursive differences that separate the various texts from which the encyclopedist drew his excerpts. As an extension of figura’s sense as leer, the term could also be applied to the visual aspect of the manuscript page as a whole, which was carefully arranged (with variously configured columns of text, decorated initials, paraphs, and rubrics) in order to create boundaries, distinguish between kinds of texts, arrange them into hierarchies. Medieval bookmaking was guided by well-developed aesthetic principles, but the disposition of the text on the page served more than these ends alone. Hugh of Saint-Victor (ca. 1078–1141), an influential early scholastic cited frequently and with admiration by Vincent of Beauvais, instructed students to fix the visual aspect of the page in their minds: Multum ergo valet ad memoriam confirmandam ut, cum libros legimus, non solum numerum et ordinem versuum vel sententiarum, sed etiam ipsum colorem et formam simul et situm positionemque lierarum per imaginationem memoria imprimere studeamus, ubi illud et ubi illud scriptum vidimus, qua parte, quo loco (suppremo, medio, vel imo) constitutum aspeximus, quo colore tractum lierae vel faciem membranae ornatem intuiti sumus.15 [It is very helpful for strengthening the memory that, when we read books, we take pains to impress upon the memory, through the imagination, not only the number and order of verses or ideas, but simultaneously also the color and form and site and position of the leers, where we have seen this or that wrien, on which side, in which location (the highest, the middle, or the lowest) we have observed it to be placed, in what color we have observed the drawing of the leer or the decorated surface of the parchment.]

Mary Carruthers has drawn aention to the way medieval reading practices thus exploited the visual aspect of the page to imprint the text on the readers’ memory (and memory, as Carruthers construes it, belongs to the creative realm of rhetoric). Malcolm Parkes and Paul Saenger have demonstrated how the visual disposition of words in the line, including the use of punctuation and word separation, facilitates certain kinds of reading while disabling others, and a number of codicologists have studied the relation between the disposition of text on the page and literary genre, a topic to which I shall return in chapter 5.16 Most recently, Martha Rust has shown how to understand “the semantics of the text itself as an image—as a picture

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of writing—and examine the ways in which the meanings of a text-as-image may interact with or impinge upon (as opposed to merely subtending) the meanings of text–as–linguistic artifact.”17 All this scholarship points to the significance of the visual aspect of the manuscript page. The spatial form in which medieval readers saw the text shaped their perception and memory of it. To use the French terms, the mise en page and mise en texte of the text were primary factors determining its discursive function and cannot be overlooked in the study of medieval textuality. This methodological imperative, more than the desire to show how medieval books were illustrated, governs my decision to punctuate this book with numerous reproductions of manuscript pages. Is the “figured” encyclopedia that Llull describes, then, an illustrated encyclopedia or merely a text copied on the page in ways susceptible of particular kinds of reading? Figura and its cognates are, thus, multivalent, embracing both the nonverbal and the verbal, both the graphic and the textual. The other terms that Llull offers are similarly ambiguous. The word istòria or stòries belongs to a family of words that may indicate either a verbal or a visual narrative (historia).18 The references to painting in the description would seem to refer solely to graphic images, but just as in medieval usage figura may refer to either a graphic image or the shape of the leer, so painting could refer to either illustration or calligraphy. The semantic slippage is evident in the prologue to the Bestiaire d’amour. My earlier citation from the French text was not as straightforward as it would at first appear, for Richard goes on to explain how exactly the book will combine “painture” and “parole”: Et je vous mousterrai comment chis escris est et painture et parole. Car il est bien apert qu’il ait parole, pour che que toute escriture est faite pour parole moustrer, et pour che c’on le lise; et quant on le list, si revient ele a nature de parole. Et d’autre part qu’il i ait painture, si est en apert pour che que lere n’est mie s’on ne le paint.19 [And I shall show you how this text has both painting and speech. It obviously has speech, since all writing is made to show speech and is meant to be read, and when one reads it, it returns to the nature of speech. On the other hand, the fact that it has painting is evident in this: there is no leer if one does not paint it.]

A book cannot really contain “speech”—this is the key to understanding Richard’s formulation. Books do not make sounds, but, in order to under-

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stand vernacular texts in the thirteenth century, readers needed to hear them. Silent, entirely visual reading depends on reliable word separation, which is made possible by the grammatical analysis of a language. Although Latin had been thus analyzed and word separation standardized by the twelh century, the vernaculars lagged behind because they were not acquired through grammatical study and had begun to be wrien only recently. Words are separated in vernacular manuscripts of the thirteenth century, but without the kind of consistency necessary for silent reading.20 As a consequence, the reader must transform the leers on the page, which Richard understands as merely representing speech, back into a form that can pass through the ears, that is, in Quintilian’s terminology, from figura to potestas or pronuntiatio. The leers themselves are part of the “painted” aspect of the book, for “there is no leer if one does not paint it.” Therefore, despite Richard’s initial move to balance painting and speech as equal and equivalent modes of communication and to associate both with the book, his description in fact locates speech at one remove from the book as physical object and the leers it contains. In this sense, the painting in the Libre de plasent visió could well consist of its leers. Here, we see another discursive distinction that scholastic readers would have made as a maer of course: between the text that can be read silently and interpreted privately and the one that must be read aloud and, thus, invites a communal experience, discussion and the negotiation of meaning. Perhaps this is why the frame for Llull’s parable emphasizes speech rather than writing. The Libre de plasent visió is described in the portion of the Libre de meravelles devoted to the senses, but not in the chapter treating the pleasures of sight, as one might expect. Rather, the parable appears in the chapter on hearing. The book’s visual aspect is verbally described by a character within the frame of a parable (a verbal figure) recounted by one character to another. Hence, paradoxically, the visual aspect (painted / wrien) of the book recedes as if in a medieval version of the telephone game. The graphic figure that in the Liber floridus and the Bibles moralisées became the nexus of signification is displaced through the rhetorical deployment of narrative (argumentum), which assumes its role. And it is the ambiguities of language that render the book ultimately intangible, obscure its visual specificity. We are le with the paradox that, despite the description’s emphasis on vision and the considerable temptation for the modern bibliographer to identify the Libre de plasent visió with this or that medieval book, it is accessible to us only by word of mouth. Therefore, unlike other scholars, I do not believe that the term figura in

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Llull’s description of the Libre de plasent visió refers univocally to illustration or to the other visual phenomena that I have described, however important they may be.21 Erich Auerbach long ago demonstrated the extreme polysemia of the Latin figura,22 and Llull’s applications of the word in Catalan are similarly broad. It refers to all the multiple means—graphic and verbal—by which the invisible may be made perceptible to the senses.23 Llull’s figures include his tree diagrams as well as the various graphic devices that distinguish the texts intended to promulgate his Art of Finding Truth,24 but we may likewise place under this rubric the forms of verbal figuration that permeate many of his texts: metaphors, even narrative itself. Aer all, figura is also a rhetorical device, an indirection of meaning. In Quintilian’s formulation, “figura . . . [est] conformatio quaedam orationis remota a communi et primum se offerte ratione” [ figura is a figure of speech removed from the common and initially apparent sense].25 Such figuration acquired force at a time when thinkers sought hidden meanings virtually everywhere—in beasts whose habits were thought to correspond to the actions of Christ, in the history of the Jewish people, thought to prefigure the Gospel narrative and the establishment of the church, even in the myths of Virgil and Ovid. Figuration shaped thought and made possible writing. Figura permeated things as well as words because early Christian writers had identified in the visible world the signs of the invisible, turning things into signs and, thus, integrating them into a semiotic system. The tradition is—must be—rooted in a scriptural text, Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: “Invisibilia enim ipsius, a creatura mundi, per ea quae facta sunt, intellecta, conspiciuntur: sempiterna quoque ejus virtus, et divinitas” [The invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead] (Rom. 1:20). Augustine, among others, had aempted to systematize this hermeneutics and had cited the Pauline passage in the De doctrina christiana [On Christian teaching] (397) in order to argue that the proper use of the things of this world involves understanding them as signs of the divine truth: “Utendum est hoc mundo, non fruendum; ut invisibilia Dei, per ea quae facta sunt, intellecta conspiciantur, hoc est, ut de corporalibus temporalibusque rebus aeterna et spiritualia capiamus” [This world is to be used, not enjoyed, so that the invisible things of God may be clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, in other words, so that we may grasp eternal and spiritual things by means of temporal and corporeal ones] (1.4.4).26 Some eight hundred years later, Hugh of Saint-Victor would describe the creatures as “figures” in a book, “quaedam sunt non humano placito inventae, sed divino

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arbitrio institutae ad manifestandam invisibilium Dei sapientiam” [which are not made by human principles, but instituted by the divine will in order to show forth the wisdom of God] (DS 7.4). Thus, Augustinian hermeneutics subtend the medieval encyclopedia as speculum or “mirror,” a title derived, in part, from another leer of Paul: “Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate” [Now we see through a glass, darkly] (1 Cor. 13:12). Like the creatures in the world, the images in the mirror-book, distorted and imperfect though they be, are the material, visible signs of the immaterial, the invisible, the perfect. It would not have occurred to an encyclopedist of antiquity to call his text a “mirror,” as Vincent does, or to speak of his book’s potential to procure “spiritual pleasure,” as Llull does.27 Although the information it conveys is frequently eclectic and surprising, the classical encyclopedia was much more like the modern one in its description of the physical properties and possible uses of things. The thirty-seven books of Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia (ca. 77 ce) give an encyclopedic treatment of all the natural world: astronomy, meteorology, geography, zoology, botany, etc. Entirely separate texts, many encyclopedic in scope, treated philological, pedagogical, cultural, and religious questions: Varro’s Antiquitates rerum humanarum et divinarum (47 bce) and De lingua latina (ca. 45 bce)28 and Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria (ca. 95 ce). These texts place an emphasis on the various forms of communication and representation. But none of them treats at any length the connection between words and things. However, when Augustine elaborates on the Pauline passages in the De doctrina, he aributes to objects in the world, whose signification would ordinarily be limited to the small number of natural processes that can be inferred from them (as fire may be from smoke), another level of meaning that has nothing to do with the natural world. Furthermore, his comments on the signification of things are merely the preface to an innovative discussion of the interpretation of Scripture. He will therefore give short shri to things; his real preoccupation is with words, and he wants to elaborate a theory of signification that is primarily linguistic. This means that, when he does deal with things in this treatise, it is only insofar as they are objects named in the Bible. In a passage that is generally considered to have inspired medieval encyclopedism, Augustine calls for an exegetical tool to help those charged with preaching and teaching, serving, like the texts of Origen, Jerome, and Eusebius, to explain the sense of words and names drawn from languages unknown to a Latin-reading public:

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Quod ergo hi fecerunt de his rebus, ut non sit necesse christiano in multis propter pauca laborare, sic video posse fieri, si quem eorum qui possunt benignam sane operam fraternae utilitati delectet impendere, ut quoscumque terrarum locos quaeve animalia vel herbas atque arbores sive lapides vel metalla incognita speciesque quaslibet Scriptura commemorat, ea generatim digerens, sola exposita lieris mandet. (DC 2.39.59) [It seems to me, therefore, that what these writers have done in such matters, so that it not be necessary for the Christian to labor over details at many points in Scripture, could also be done by a capable person who would take pleasure in a work very beneficial to the brothers, by identifying whatever geographic locations or animals or plants and trees or stones or unknown metals or whatever species of things Scripture records, sorting them by classes and writing them down in a treatise published separately.]

Thus, Augustine inaugurates a new encyclopedism that superimposes on the encyclopedic model of Pliny the linguistic analysis of Quintilian and the religious inquiry of Varro. The creatures, as creatures rather than specimens, become the constituents of a vast semiotic system laid out as another kind of revelation to man. The role of the encyclopedia is to interpret that revelation. It was Isidore of Seville (ca. 570–636) who would write the definitive encyclopedia of this new semiotic system, the Etymologiae sive origines rerum, which would continue to be copied, read, and variously illustrated, revised, and cited throughout the Middle Ages.29 The Etymologiae constitute an inquiry into things through the words that name them. While Isidore remained close to the kind of etymological practice modeled by late antique grammarians (which I shall discuss in chapter 5) and refrained from much overt allegorization, his medieval readers would seek to aach more clearly spiritual meaning to things through a freer use of metaphor and allegory. The early medieval encyclopedia would therefore represent objects as indicators of further levels of truth, as invitations to a higher knowledge. As the Carolingian Hrabanus Maurus (ca. 780–856) put it in the prologue to the De universo or De rerum naturis, a spiritual reworking of the Etymologiae: Quod idcirco ita ordinandum aestimavi, ut lector prudens continuatim positam inveniret historicam et mysticam singularum rerum explanationem: et sic satisfacere quodammodo posset suo desiderio, in quo et historiae et allegoriae inveniret manifestationem.30

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[Therefore it seemed to me that the work should be arranged in such a way that the wise reader would find set out continuously the literal and mystical explanations of individual things: and thus in a certain way he could satisfy his desire by finding a manifestation of both literal meaning and allegory.]

The reader of the De universo is to consider not only the literal, here identified via medieval exegetical terminology as the historia, but also the symbolic or “mystical” meanings of things, which Hrabanus terms allegoria. Among all the things, the res, that make up the world is the liber, or “book,” itself. But it occupies a privileged position. It is more than just one thing-sign among many; as the container for any number of signs or figures, it becomes a symbol of the universe as a whole.31 The trope derives from prophetic passages in both testaments: “complicabuntur sicut liber caeli” [the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll (liber)] (Isa. 34:4); “Caelum recessit sicut liber involutus” [Heaven departed as a scroll (liber) when it is rolled together] (Rev. 6:14). Augustine would several times reverse the metaphor by referring to Scripture as a “firmament,” again privileging words over things by suggesting that the sacred text be made a primary object of human experience and the essential key to interpreting all other objects.32 The trope would be adapted by twelh-century writers of different stripes. We have already seen that Hugh of Saint-Victor describes the world as a book, wrien by the hand of God: “Universus enim mundus iste sensibilis quasi quidam liber est scriptus digito Dei, hoc est virtute divina creatus, et singulae creaturae quasi figurae” [This whole sensible world is as a certain book wrien with the finger of God, that is, created by divine power, and the individual creatures are as figures in it] (DS 7.4, PL 176). The encyclopedia, filled with figures of all the figures in the world, could be taken as the “book of the world” par excellence. Thus, the ultimate understanding of the Libre de plasent visió as “figured encyclopedia” could be the “encyclopedia as figure,” the book as metaphor for the world.

New Paradigms Augustinian semiotics were, however, not the only way for scholastics to understand nature. Neglected books from antiquity had come back into vogue, and others, long lost to Western Europeans, had become available again (it would seem that the only way such a textual paradigm of knowledge could be challenged or revised was through the appearance of more books). These texts modeled different paradigms, some more compatible with Augustinian semiotics than others.33

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In the first half of the twelh century, two late antique texts that had always been available to medieval readers, Calcidius’s partial translation, with commentary, of Plato’s Timaeus (ca. 321 ce) and the commentary on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis by Macrobius (late fourth or early fih century), received increasing aention. Calcidius’s version of the Timaeus was itself the object of commentaries by such prominent thinkers as William of Conches, and the two texts inspired a generalized preoccupation with Platonic paradigms, which could be made to (more or less) complement those of Augustine because the bishop of Hippo, too, had felt the influence of Platonism. The effect of this renewed Platonism most relevant to our inquiry is the expansion of the semantic field of figura to embrace pagan myth, which was taken as an indirect explication of Natura, herself not immediately visible in the objects of the natural world but rather veiled behind them. This understanding of myth the early scholastics found elegantly explained in the commentary on the Somnium Scipionis. Macrobius had claimed that poets and philosophers use fable to explicate Nature, quia sciunt inimicam esse naturae apertam nudamque expositionem sui, quae sicut vulgaribus hominum sensibus intellectum sui vario rerum tegmine operimentoque subtraxit, ita a prudentibus aracana sua voluit per fabulosa tractari. Sic ipsa mysteria figurarum cuniculis operiuntur ne vel haec adeptis nudam rerum talium natura se praebeat, sed summatibus tantum viris sapientia interprete veri arcani consciis, contenti sint reliqui ad venerationem figuris defendentibus a vilitate secretum.34 [because they know that Nature dislikes an open, bare exposition of herself. Just as she has withheld, behind a variegated garment of things, an understanding of herself from the rude senses of men, she has also wished that her secrets be handled by prudent individuals through fabulous narratives. Thus those mysteries are concealed by secret figurative devices so that she not be obliged to present herself naked even to adepts. In this way, only eminent men may know her hidden truths through the work of their wisdom, but the rest must strive to venerate her through the figurae that protect her secrets from cheapness.]

Thus, a writer of the first half of the twelh century, perhaps Bernard Silvester, defines figura as a kind of instruction (“Genus figura doctrine est”), then subdivides it into allegoria, the figurative mode of historical narrative, primarily Scripture, and integumentum, the fictional mode of the narratives

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of the pagan poets and philosophers.35 In the early years of scholasticism, therefore, figura as serious inquiry into truth was extended to commentaries on and rewritings of classical mythology and Platonic philosophy. Myth was interwoven with the discussion of the natural world, perhaps most spectacularly in Bernard Silvester’s Cosmographia (ca. 1247). A more considerable challenge was posed by the paradigms of Aristotle, whose writings were so pervasive in later scholasticism that he was oen identified simply as “the Philosopher.” Many of his texts were made available to the Latin West for the first time in the twelh century, through the energetic activity of translators working at the linguistic crossroads of Europe (especially Sicily and the Iberian Peninsula),36 but it was not until the thirteenth century that these thinkers really began to master them (in their medieval versions, distinct from the classical ones). Among the Aristotelian texts most relevant to the understanding of the natural world were the Physics (translated into Latin no fewer than three times in the twelh century and twice in the thirteenth), the De caelo (translated once in the twelh century and three times in the thirteenth), and what is generally known as the De animalibus (an anthology comprising the Historia animalium, the De progressu, the De motu, the De partibus, and the De generatione, translated twice in the thirteenth century).37 Another text that had never been lost, Pliny’s Naturalis historia, also transmits a great deal from the natural history of Aristotle and his pupil, Theophrastus. Isidore had made some use of Pliny’s compilation, but scholastic encyclopedists returned to fuller versions of the text. Finally, several Aristotelian texts that we would today classify as philosophical articulated the theoretical bases of Aristotelian physical theory and were indispensable for understanding the texts cited above. Chief among them was the difficult Posterior Analytics (translated three times in the twelh century and once in the thirteenth; Averroes’s great commentary on this text was also translated ca. 1220), but the Metaphysics, the De anima, and the De interpretatione also shaped the new Aristotelianism of the scholastics. Aristotle is admired today chiefly for being an empiricist, and his small triumphs of observation (including such counterintuitive phenomena as the womb of the dogfish) are cited as evidence that he was among the earliest “biologists.” From this perspective it is difficult to see the relevance of his philosophical writing (in the restricted, modern acceptation of the term) to his natural history. But, while it would be a mistake to aribute perfect coherence to his oeuvre (he did revise his ideas, and he was sometimes opaque or contradictory, providing ample scope for later commentators), empirical observation was for him virtually required by the system of causality that

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he set out in the Metaphysics, which distinguished four causes: material, formal, efficient, and final.38 It was in order to discern the formal causes of animals, which he extrapolated from their anatomical structure, and to identify their final causes, that is, their ultimate purpose, that he practiced observation and dissection, writing down all he could about their parts and functions (their proprietates, in the medieval parlance).39 Moreover, his philosophical view that all the universe could be understood as continuous with itself was further elaborated in the scala naturae, commonly known today as the great chain of being, a continuous scale along which all the creatures can be placed, from the least complex or perfect (plants) to the most (human beings), through a comparison of the parts and characteristics they shared in common and those they did not.40 This idea led him to compare and classify creatures in a way that may seem to anticipate modern systems of classification but that has an entirely different raison d’être. And, if Aristotle claimed, while considering the reproductive habits of bees, that “credit must be given rather to observation than to theories, and to theories only if what they affirm agrees with the observed facts,”41 this is also consonant with his philosophy of the mind, according to which sense perceptions were always accurate but reasoning was not necessarily so.42 Therefore, however accurate some of his observations and theories have proved, Aristotle was a philosopher, in the old, expansive sense of the word. His philosophical approach to the world was, however, markedly different from the Platonic approach. Late Hellenistic and late antique thinkers would find various ingenious ways to harmonize them, but problems remained. Partly because of the Neoplatonic influences on Augustine, and partly for theological reasons, there were also serious incompatibilities between Aristotelian and Augustinian thought. Aristotle’s natural history made no space for allegorical or symbolic figura, and his insistence that knowledge is gained through sense perceptions alone (i.e., figura as visible form) was directly at odds with the Augustinian view that God illumines the human mind.43 The tensions produced by the differences between Platonism (in its various iterations), Augustinian thought, and Aristotelianism (also in diverse iterations) will be visible throughout the scholastic period; we shall see later in this chapter how these tensions were expressed in the thirteenth-century disagreement between Oxford and Paris theologians concerning the relation between the disciplines. With a few exceptions, Aristotle’s writings were not transmied directly to Western Europe via early translations into Latin. Instead, they were first translated by Persian and Arab scholars, and in this context they ac-

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cumulated a number of important commentaries. Perhaps most significant were those of Ibn Rushd, or Averroes (1126–98), who became known to the scholastics as “the Commentator.” The treatises of Ibn Sīnā, or Avicenna (ca. 980–1037), would also profoundly influence the scholastic reception of Aristotle’s work. As a rule, the Muslims of the Middle Ages were more given to empirical observation in their study of the natural world than were contemporary Christians, and, while they, too, held the authoritative texts to be important objects of study, they also set up observatories and what we would now call “research” hospitals. When, however, the Arabic versions of Aristotelian natural history were translated into Latin and the first direct translations of Aristotle’s works from Greek to Latin also began to appear, they did not instantly touch off an empirical revolution in the West. A few scholars (preeminent among them the English Franciscan Roger Bacon [ca. 1214–94]) began to study subjects such as optics and alchemy that required experimentation and observation, but the impact of their work was muted by the censure that was leveled at it. In the larger intellectual milieu, textual knowledge was still the only kind deemed truly acceptable (with the exception of illumination, but that was reserved for only a few individuals). The paradoxical result was that Aristotle’s De animalibus, its commentaries, Pliny’s compendium—all these highly empirical texts became immensely popular as texts without immediately altering the paradigm for studying natural history. The scholastic paradigm still dictated that intellectual work of any kind must proceed by locating textual sources and ascertaining their relative authority.44 And, with all the new Aristotelian source material, new encyclopedias became necessary. Historians traditionally assumed that, as Aristotelian natural history became a subject of discussion in the thirteenth century, encyclopedists abandoned the semiotic tradition represented by the Etymologiae or the De universo and the metaphoric tradition of early twelh-century writers.45 Bruno Roy sees in the absence of explicit symbolism from natural history encyclopedias of the thirteenth century a “banalization” or even a “secularization,” which he suggests may derive from the desire to reach a larger audience.46 Monique Paulmier-Foucart provides a more nuanced interpretation of the phenomenon, aributing it to the Victorine insistence that knowledge be grounded in an understanding of the literal meaning before proceeding to other kinds of interpretation.47 It is true that the highly poetic and rhetorical writing of allegorical Nature, based on the Platonic paradigm and exemplified by the Cosmographia, was no longer widely practiced in the thirteenth century, a situation that is interpreted (also allegorically) by an

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anonymous poet as the stripping of Lady Nature, exposing her naked to the eyes of all.48 Rhetoric, which embraced the study of poetry and defined the tropes, was gradually pushed out of the official curriculum at the new universities, while grammar was reconfigured as a speculative science.49 Nevertheless, there are reasons to question the assumption that all forms of figurative thinking were beating a disordered retreat before the victorious Aristotelians. It was still through the modes of linguistic analysis taught by grammar and rhetoric that children learned to read Latin, and the disciplines would thus have retained a considerable influence in shaping the way medieval readers processed text. Moreover, works on these subjects could have continued to play at least a minor role in university education. They certainly continued to be copied. More fundamentally—and this, I think, is where PaulmierFoucart’s insight is most helpful—natural historians were still operating, still thinking, textually. Knowledge was still fundamentally exegetical. And these compilers were expanding their texts to absorb the Aristotelian ones without entirely abandoning the Augustinian—a juxtaposition made possible by the textual practice of compilatio that we shall consider at the end of this chapter. The affinities between the prologue of the De universo and Llull’s much later parable indicate that symbolic encyclopedism in the Christian mode had not disappeared by the end of the thirteenth century. Some scholars may respond to this assertion by arguing that Llull cannot be taken as indicative of thirteenth-century trends (on the debatable grounds that he is too reactionary or too eccentric). Nevertheless, his contemporaries are also still citing the symbolism of creation, including the book of the world trope. For example, the Franciscan theologian Bonaventure (1221–74) reformulates it: “Creatura mundi est quasi quidam liber in quo relucet, repraesentatur et legitur Trinitas fabricatrix” [The creature of this world is as a certain book in which the creative Trinity glimmers, in which it is represented and read].50 Again, one could respond that Bonaventure was an Augustinian and represents a minority, reactionary group opposed to the Aristotelianism that had come to dominate the schools. What, then, of the mainstream encyclopedias? Several scholars now working on the De proprietatibus rerum have challenged the traditional understanding of these texts as nonsymbolic, drawing particular aention to Bartholomeus’s prologue and to the uniform cycle of symbolic glosses that accompany the text in early manuscripts, which frames the literal exposition at the center of the page with allegorical or tropological exegesis in the margins.51 Recent scholars’ findings are consonant with the results of my own work on the Speculum maius. Vincent of Beauvais cites a number of Isidore’s ety-

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mologies, and, however much they may be dwarfed by the other citations, they are given positions of prominence at the beginning of various entries. Furthermore, Hugh of Saint-Victor’s formulation, that the world is a book of figures, wrien with the hand of God, is one of a number of similar passages that Vincent cites at the beginning of the Speculum naturale (1.10), in one of two discussions of the methods of spiritual interpretation that frame the long exposition of natural history,52 and Vincent also employs the trope in the prologue, in order to justify the length that the Speculum naturale has aained.53 Therefore, I shall argue here that it would be more accurate to say that the symbolic tradition survives and coexists—in ways that bear investigation—with the Aristotelian description of the properties of things. It may even be made to justify them. In an aempt to excuse the expansion of the Speculum naturale beyond simply a treatment of the creatures mentioned in the Bible, Vincent has recourse to the symbolic tradition, the integumenta figurarum intended to guide the conduct of individuals: “quod licet multis etiam e fratribus placeat, eo quod totum per quasdam rerum similitudines et integumenta figurarum ad edificationem morum referri valeat” [may it please many of the brothers that all of this, by means of certain similitudes of things and cloaks (integumenta) of figures, should assist moral edification] (LA ch. 18). If the new science draws aention back to figura as the visible form of an object, it does so through the figurae of leers and pages and without overwriting figura as the relation between a physical object and an eternal truth. Only such an understanding of scholastic encyclopedism can adequately explain, among other overlooked passages, Vincent’s description of the contemplative mind in the prologue, a passage that seems to anticipate Llull’s parable: Ego quidem—ut taceam de mundis corde, quorum est proprium Deum videre et in ipso delectari—ego inquam—ut fateor—licet peccator indignus, cujus nimirum mens adhuc in fecibus carnis sue jacet ejusdem sordibus obvoluta quadam tamen spirituali suavitate in mundi creatorem ac rectorem afficior, ipsumque majori veneratione ac reverentia prosequor: cum ipsius creature magnitudinem simul et pulchritudinem ejusque permanentiam intueor. Ipsa namque mens plerumque paululum a prefatis cogitationum et affectionum fecibus se erigens, et in specula rationis—ut potest—assurgens, quasi de quodam eminenti loco totius mundi magnitudinem uno ictu considerat, infinita loca diversis creature generibus repleta intra se conti-

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nentem. Evum quoque totius mundi videlicet a principio usque nunc uno quodam aspectu nichilominus conspicit, ibique tempora omnia per diversas generationum successiones rerum mutationes continentia quasi sub quadam linea comprehendit, et inde saltem intuitu fidei ad cogitandum utcumque creatoris ipsius magnitudinem, pulchritudinem atque perpetuitatem ascendit. (LA ch. 6) [I indeed (without mentioning those pure in heart who have the privilege of seeing God in himself and delighting in him), I, as I say, who acknowledge myself to be an unworthy sinner, whose mind doubtless lies yet in the impurities of its flesh and is wrapped round with its filth, am nevertheless moved by a certain spiritual sweetness towards the Creator and Guider of the world, and I honor Him with greater veneration and reverence when I gaze upon the greatness of his creatures, together with their beauty and permanence. For truly the mind itself, rising a degree out of the aforementioned impurities of thought and sentiment, and mounting as it may into the watchtower of reason, as if into a prominent place, considers the greatness of all the world in one stroke, with its infinite regions filled with diverse kinds of creatures. The mind also perceives with a single glance the age of all the world, that is, from the beginning to the present, and thereupon it grasps all the ages through the different successions of generations and the mutations of things, as if upon a single line. Thence (at least, in a certain way) it ascends through the perception of faith into a reflection, to be achieved by whatever means possible, upon the greatness, beauty, and perpetuity of the Creator Himself.]

The moment of luminous contemplation is to be contrasted to Vincent’s reference to the “impurities” or “filth” of the flesh, that is, the fleshy, physical properties of things, and also to the “sea of writings” on which he claimed to have been “tossed about” (LA ch. 18). When he or his readers become distracted by either of these, the world of material phenomena or the multiple allurements of the library’s tomes, they fall prey to the vice of curiositas.54 Thus, in Vincent’s representation the knowing subject is subject to considerably greater tension than the ideal reader of the Libre de plasent visió. There is the very present danger that the mind could be drawn into insatiable curiosity about the creatures ( figura as a physical form or surface) or about books ( figura as the disposition of words on the page), that it could fail to transcend them in that crucial moment of mystical abstraction ( figura as metaphor that points to an intransient order and away from the other figurae, which

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are destined for annihilation: “praeterit . . . figura hujus mundi” [the fashion of this world passes away] [1 Cor. 7:31]). This tension between divergent ways of knowing, divergent uses of figura, fissures scholastic encyclopedism.

Glossa With the transition from graphic to verbal figuration, my discussion began to slip back and forth between semiotics and hermeneutics, a slippage that continued as I considered the way Plato and Aristotle, and the encyclopedia itself, were read, that is, the relation of the observer to the figura. Since semiotics and hermeneutics in the Middle Ages are mutually dependent, it is difficult to describe one without making reference to the other. The semiotic system that is the world may be understood as such only through the hermeneutics propounded by Augustine, but hermeneutics depends on the assumption that there is a semiotic system to begin with. This assumption lies behind the concept of a book of the world. Yet there are also other ways in which medieval encyclopedism is shaped by hermeneutics. Only by analogy to the Bible does the world become a semiotic system, the equivalent of a book, a second revelation to humankind. Hugh’s reference to the book “wrien by the hand [lit. ‘finger’] of God” is a calque of the description of the tablets of the law in Exod. 31:18: “duas tabulas testimonii lapideas, scriptas digito Dei” [two tables of testimony, tables of stone, wrien with the finger of God]. While Christian writers considered it salutary to meditate on the power of the Creator as manifested in the creature, they also deemed it acceptable to study things in the world in order to beer understand the meaning of Scripture. We have already seen that this justification lay behind Augustine’s call for a description of the creatures in the De doctrina christiana. Things may well have been signs, but the principal signs were words. Furthermore, even those late antique scholars whose work would transmit to the early Middle Ages what lile they could know of pagan mathematics, physical science, and natural history—Calcidius, Boethius, Macrobius— were heavily engaged in commenting on authoritative texts. The commentaries of Calcidius and Macrobius, encyclopedic in their sweep of topics, if not in their form, would serve as the essential handbooks of science through the mid-twelh century. By implication, even pagan natural philosophy could be conceived as a discussion of the meaning of words and of books. The gloss or commentary would therefore become a dominant genre, and it would remain so until the threshold of the modern period—and beyond.55 The glosses on Scripture far exceeded the literal sense that Augustine indi-

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cated in the passage from the De doctrina cited above, for Scripture was, according to the patristic writers, marvelously fecund in meaning, simple but capable of opening up a multiplicity of interpretations. As Henri de Lubac writes, medieval exegetes treated it “as a vast poem, intended to instruct, whose inexhaustible meaning leads us back to the height and purity of the first contemplation.” “Without losing the primordial unity that it possesses in the Word,” he notes later, “Scripture nevertheless holds for us a spectrum of senses as numerous as the colors of the peacock’s tail.” Scripture was like the seven loaves that Christ broke and distributed to the multitude, like the bread that Christ broke before the disciples at the Last Supper at Emmaus, when he opened their eyes.56 The breaking open of Scripture produced multiple fragments that would serve the diverse multitude of the faithful. And the command “crescite et multiplicamini” [grow and be multiplied] applied, as Augustine argued in the Confessions (by means of a decidedly spiritual interpretation), not only to the reproduction of the species but also to the human act of communication: “in hac enim benedictione concessam nobis a te facultatem ac potestatem accipio et multis modis enuntiare, quod uno modo intellectum tenuerimus, et multis modis intellegere, quod obscure uno modo enuntiatum legerimus” [by this benediction I understand that you have conceded to us the capacity and the power to announce in multiple ways what we have comprehended in a single way, and to understand in multiple ways what we have read expressed obscurely in a single way].57 By the late eleventh century, so numerous were the commentaries on the Bible that it had become difficult for a single scholar to master all of them, as teachers had been wont to do in the monastic context. Moreover, with the renewal of the cathedral schools came a transformation of the modes of study. Teaching had always taken the form of the oral exposition of an authoritative text, and such exposition would continue throughout the scholastic period. But scholars began to write more new academic texts as well, and, for such work to be efficient, beer research tools were required. Among the first of these to be developed, over the course of the twelh century, was the Glossa ordinaria, a vast compilation of extracts from patristic, Carolingian, and eleventh-century commentaries, arranged on the page as columns of gloss framing the scriptural text at the center (fig. 2).58 A single page gave the reader access to both a biblical passage and a selection of what the compilers had deemed the most important commentaries on it; readers who became interested in a particular commentator could then seek out the full text of the commentary, if they had access to a large enough library, and if the extract had been sufficiently well identified (as it turns out, the first

Figure 2. Pentateuch with Glossa Ordinaria (Paris, ca. 1164–70). The larger script distinguishes the scriptural text. The page has been designed to accommodate both interlinear glosses and marginal glosses in two columns. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Auct. E. inf. 7, fol. 128r. Photograph reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Libraries.

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compilers of the Glossa ordinaria were not particularly careful about aribution, although the situation improved with later revisions). The similarity between the mise en page of the Glossa ordinaria and that of the lion page from the Liber floridus is not wholly fortuitous. Both arrange relevant fragments of text around a central node (textual or graphic) on which they comment. And both make possible a figural relation of some kind. One of the modes of biblical exegesis represented in the Glossa—and its compilers proved more solicitous in labeling these diverse modes than in aributing the extracts to their authors59 —was allegory, in the restricted, exegetical sense of the interpretation of Old Testament narratives as prefigurations of Gospel narratives (now called typology). Figura was the term commonly employed for such a relation.60 The way in which this form of exegesis superimposes one narrative on another is illustrated visually in the Bibles moralisées of the early thirteenth century, where a register of roundels illustrating biblical episodes is placed above a register illustrating the events that those narratives prefigure (see fig. 1 above). When studying a period so marked by the practice of commentary, we cannot neglect the genealogical affiliation between the encyclopedia and the gloss—or the problems that it creates. Despite the rich possibilities of scriptural exegesis, Augustine’s call that the encyclopedia be dependant on this authoritative text would appear to subordinate it, squeezing it out into the margins, causing it to lose its own internal coherence and capacity to reflect the diversity of the world or of human knowledge. In a remarkable meditation on the late antique transformation of the encyclopedia, Carmen Codoñer therefore characterizes Augustine’s call as a “rupture” in the encyclopedic tradition. The bishop of Hippo’s insistence in the De doctrina that things must be thought of as signs, and that this symbolism is principally useful for biblical exegesis, has the result that the subjects treated in the encyclopedia will be reduced in number to those mentioned in the Bible alone and that their coherence, the relation obtaining among the subjects, will be based, not on the relations obtaining between them in the physical world, or on a logical structure into which they fit, but on their oen arbitrary arrangement in Scripture: “The sacred text is proposed as the only object for analysis and comprehension, in whose margins reality appears nonexistent, since the text is the exclusive means to approach it.”61 If Augustine points the way to a properly Christian, symbolic encyclopedia, then, he also creates obstacles to its realization. I would add to Codoñer’s account that such obstacles are not exclusively Christian; parallels can be found in pagan writing. Macrobius clearly conceived of the commentary on the Somnium Scipionis

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as a way to transmit the essentials of antique scientific knowledge and Neoplatonic thought, and, judging from his text’s reception, the project was a smashing success. On the other hand, because the text is a commentary (on a text whose primary purpose was not to transmit either science or Neoplatonism), there is no logical form to the presentation of material. This lack, along with the digressions that link the topics that interest Macrobius to the lines of Cicero, lend the commentary its rambling character and make it nearly impossible to locate information without reading through the entire commentary.62 At the same time, the multiple layers of text that the encyclopedist and his readers must negotiate interpose themselves between readers and the physical world—though not, perhaps, as absolutely as with the Christian encyclopedia. According to Codoñer’s perceptive analysis, Isidore of Seville overcomes the difficulties created by subordinating the encyclopedia to a prior text by emphasizing the complexity of the human being—present in Scripture as in the world. A full understanding of this most unusual of the creatures requires a consideration of the liberal arts by which the human intellect (in its fallen state) is shaped (bks. 1–3), of the human body (bk. 11, De homine et partibus ejus), including all its lacks and malfunctions (bk. 4, De medicina), and of the structures of human society (bk. 5, De legibus vel instrumentis judicum ac de temporibus; bk. 8, De ecclesia et synagoga; bk. 15, De civitatibus). The Etymologiae therefore produce what Codoñer characterizes as a “double phenomenon.” On the one hand, all the disciplines involved in basic education (the liberal arts etc.) receive an additional value as instruments of the analysis of the scriptural text. On the other, Isidore’s representation of reality combines social analysis with empirical observation since all topics are relevant only insofar as they have some relation to the human being, but Pliny’s compilation of ancient scientific texts in the Naturalis historia remains the model for the description of animals and plants. In this way, Isidore is able to consider simultaneously the “City of God” and the “City of the Here Below.”63 As a consequence, the internal dynamics of the encyclopedia are not exhausted in the relation between the encyclopedic text and the objects discussed. They are profoundly intertextual—in two different ways. First, the text as a whole is situated in relation to a shadow text that it may cite rarely (if at all). It comments on this text by commenting on the world. That is, the material objects that it treats are not, in fact, the fundamental objects of its commentary—the fundamental object is a specific text. The encyclopedia’s internal organization reflects in some way on the organization of the shadow text—whether by imitating it or by revising it—but in the laer case

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the revision must be understood in relation to the text revised. This creates a tripartite layering of texts: (in the case of the Christian encyclopedia) scriptural revelation, created revelation, encyclopedia. It is this practice of juxtaposing or superimposing multiple organizational structures and epistemologies—drawn from Scripture or ancient philosophy, ancient natural history, the liberal arts, patristic writings, etc.—that we find in the later encyclopedic tradition and that renders these medieval texts so complex and oen (at some level) incoherent. For example, the second of the three steps of literal exegesis, the contextual analysis or sensus, and the third, the philosophical or theological, the sententia, make room for all the “profane” sciences—physics (including botany, zoology, etc.), ethics, metaphysics.64 The book of Genesis is frequently considered closely related to the science of physics, and, thus, monastic writers permit themselves to dabble in natural history when composing their commentaries. This creates a hybrid text, on the one hand exegetical, tied to and subordinated to Scripture, intended to elucidate meaning, and on the other empirical, aentive to the world. In the new universities of the thirteenth century, a gap opens between scriptural exegesis and theology, as Peter Lombard’s Sententiae replace the Bible as the textbook of choice and the quaestio, a debate on a given problem, absorbs more and more instructional time, reducing that devoted to the verbal commentary.65 Nevertheless, encyclopedias of the period maintain the earlier hybridity, the dependence on scriptural—or, at the very least, patristic—texts. The final organization that Vincent of Beauvais lights on for his Speculum maius is “juxta ordinem Sacre Scripture” [according to the order of sacred Scripture] (LA ch. 2). Hence, the creatures are arranged according to their order of appearance in Genesis, creation is described before the Fall, and natural history precedes human history, which itself concludes with a consideration of the last things prophesied in the book of Revelation.66 One of Vincent’s stated purposes is, aer all, to aid in “divinarum Scripturarum mysticam expositionem, vel ad ipsius veritatis manifestam aut symbolicam declarationem” [the spiritual interpretation of holy Scripture, or the literal or symbolic exposition of their truth] (LA ch. 1). Therefore, Gilbert Dahan argues forcefully that the thirteenth-century encyclopedia must be counted among the tools for biblical exegesis.67 His argument would seem to be confirmed by the 1307 catalog of the library of the Dominican house at Dijon, which lists the Speculum maius among works “concerning the Bible,” along with concordances, commentaries, theological works, and so on, and by the 1304 Paris taxatio list, which places the De proprietatibus rerum in a similar group of texts.68 us, despite the inheritance from Pliny, the growing

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interest in Aristotle’s scientific method (which stressed observation and induction), and the results of Arab investigations in such areas as mathematics, astronomy, and medicine, thirteenth-century encyclopedists remained aached to an Augustinian model in which the writing of encyclopedias was connected to the study of Scripture. This was not merely a historical, genealogical relation, a tradition deriving from Augustine by way of Isidore, whom everyone read and cited, and thus a tradition to be acknowledged but then ignored. Closely related to the function of the encyclopedia as a tool for preparing sermons, the exegetical function continued to exert an influence on new texts. Nevertheless, the subordination of gloss to original text is too simple a formulation. To comment on a text is to assign it a fixed meaning, and, when texts are read with commentary, their capacity to assume other, varied meanings is reduced while the commentary filters and progressively displaces the text commented on. As Christopher Burdon puts it: “In practice . . . the inevitable effect of commentary when a reader approaches it with such desire for understanding or authoritative guidance is to wrest the authority to itself and away from the canon. So the text becomes pretext for the exercise of power by the official interpreter, scholar or magisterium—perhaps too by the reader if she is sufficiently identified with the interpreting authority.”69 The apparent privilege of the scriptural text on a page of the Glossa ordinaria, copied as it is in a larger script, is belied by the weight of the authoritative gloss. Similarly, the sheer volume of the passages devoted to natural and political history in the Speculum maius seems to overwhelm, or at least seriously to strain, the scriptural framework. Thus, the gloss displaces its object. And, contrary to common assumptions about the derivative nature of commentary, medieval glosses became spaces for invention—scientific, philosophical, rhetorical, or artistic. The commentators on Aristotle were able to elaborate new understandings of both physics and metaphysics, a practice of transformation masked by the fact that these commentators oen present their ideas merely as correct interpretations of the Aristotelian text. Thus, a number of individuals who have occasionally been singled out by historians of science as innovators (Albert the Great, William of Ockham, John Buridan) expressed their new ideas in commentaries on older texts.70 As for the reading of classical Latin texts, Rita Copeland has shown that, in the space created by exegesis, medieval writers engaged in rhetorical creation.71 The Bibles moralisées provide a beautiful visual illustration of this creative displacement. There is no doubt that, however devout the painters’ aitude, the genre provided them an opportunity to develop and display

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their artistic skills. On the opening page of one of the Old French manuscripts, God is depicted as an artisan, using a compass (the artist’s own tool) to trace the circumference of the universe, a circle analogous to those that will be filled with illustrations in the Bible (pl. 2). This visualization of God’s creative act dignifies the work of the illuminator himself.

Compilatio In the previous sections, I have argued for continuity between earlier medieval practices and encyclopedism and those of the thirteenth century. My motivation for beginning in this way is that this continuity has not been widely enough acknowledged, so great has been the impetus to distinguish thirteenth-century thought from what had gone before. But such continuity does not exclude the possibility of change, and I am not advocating the understanding of symbolism or exegesis as transhistorical constants. It should be evident by now that the discourse of Augustinian semiotics is difficult to synthesize with that of Aristotelian natural history, and the introduction of the laer does indeed create a rupture in the medieval episteme (even as other aspects of Augustine’s thought lend themselves to the development of a new empiricism—the complexity of the situation cannot be exaggerated). I am suggesting, however, that both discourses remain powerful for a certain period of time and that they are juxtaposed and interwoven, like the threads of different colors in a tapestry, in the unique space created by thirteenthcentury encyclopedic writing. In other words, rather than choosing between continuity and rupture (as two models for writing history), I am drawing aention to the borderlands of the history of thought, those moments and spaces where different ways of reading and knowing, different discourses and epistemes, are brought into contact with each other. I cite both moments and spaces because historical moment alone is not sufficient to create the possibility of overlap or contact; forms of writing and specific practices play a determinate role as well. Some permit unresolved discursive dissonance; others do not. I am investigating encyclopedism because I believe that, in its scholastic realizations as compilatio, it accommodates dissonance to a degree that some of the other dominant practices of the period (the disputatio, the composition of quaestiones and summae), however polyvocal they may appear, do not.72 Llull’s parable may provide a utopian view of the practice of compilatio, of taking extracts from the most diverse of sources and arranging them into a coherent mosaic, but Vincent’s prologue describes the very real difficulties that compilatio posed for ency-

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clopedists and readers. In fact, these mosaics did not fit together neatly; there are gaps, dissymmetries, and disjunctions, which become visible on the lion page of the Liber floridus, with its extracts fied in every which way, in blocks that are sometimes rectangular and sometimes not, on axes that sometimes diverge and sometimes converge.73 Aitudes toward compilation changed in the scholastic period, as the invaluable articles by Parkes, Minnis, Richard Rouse, Bernard Guenée, and Neil Hathaway have shown.74 While the practice itself was not new (Pliny’s Naturalis historia and Isidore’s Etymologiae also constitute compilations of a sort), the verb compilo and its cognates, which had previously had a negative valence because of their link to the idea of “pillaging” or “the,” began in the tenth century to acquire more neutral connotations, and this new understanding of compilatio gained force in the early scholastic period. Writers also began to engage in a new kind of source criticism that expanded the field of texts from which to cite, for compilers of the thirteenth century did not content themselves with authoritative texts; even apocryphal texts could be cited if a particular passage was judged useful. At the same time, writers became increasingly aware that compilation was a way to bring old material back to the aention of readers and to make something new of it, to re-create it.75 Vincent of Beauvais is the scholastic writer to discuss his textual practice most explicitly. He claims that one of his initial reasons for making a compilation of his own was his dissatisfaction with existing florilegia, the “falsitas vel ambiguitas quaternorum” [the falseness or ambiguity of the quires] in which citations are misaributed or not aributed at all or the sense of the citations has been corrupted by careless copying (LA ch. 1), a criticism very much in harmony with scholastic humanism, the desire to correct and restore texts while ensuring that, even in compilations, the authors are properly identified. But he also wants to encourage his brothers to read a broad range of texts. His prologue begins by citing the proliferation of new books, too great a number for readers to acquaint themselves with all, as they had once been able to do: Quoniam multitudo librorum, et temporis brevitas, memorie quoque labilitas non patiuntur cuncta, que scripta sunt, pariter animo comprehendi, michi omnium fratrum minimo plurimorum libros assidue ex longo tempore revolventi ac studiose legenti visum est tandem, accedente etiam majorum meorum consilio, quosdam flores pro modulo ingenii mei electos

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ex omnibus fere, quos legere potui . . . in unum corpus voluminis quodam compendio et ordine summatim redigere. (LA ch. 1)76 [The multitude of books, the brevity of time, and the unreliability of the memory do not permit all things that have been wrien to be comprehended by the mind at one time. Therefore, as I, least of many brothers, long and assiduously read and reflected, I had the idea of bringing together into one whole, by means of a kind of abbreviation and superficial ordering, certain flowers that I had carefully chosen from among nearly all the books which I was able to read. And in this work I was also responding to the request of my superiors.]

Vincent goes on to lament that, with the multiplication of learning, many texts are neglected, especially ecclesiastical histories, with all their edifying and pleasant examples of saintly life (LA ch. 2). He has therefore created a text that is at once new and old: “antiquum certe materia et auctoritate, novum vero compilatione et partium aggregatione” [old, certainly, in its maer and authority, but new in its compilation and the joining of its parts] (LA ch. 4). This explanation of the Speculum maius goes to the heart of what makes the thirteenth-century encyclopedia a borderland text, neither an example of pure continuity with the old nor a clear rupture from it. It allows us to take account of the complex, easily misunderstood temporality of the compilations of Vincent of Beauvais, Bartholomeus Anglicus, and Thomas of Cantimpré, compilations that depend on the content and structure of older sources but that were produced in rapid succession, in the first half of the thirteenth century, by mendicant scholars. The concentration of these encyclopedic compilations in the early thirteenth century suggests that such a project is very much the product of a specific historical and cultural moment and, thus, that, although the “new” is a rather old trope, Vincent’s claim to newness must also be taken literally.77 We must not be misled, by Vincent’s heavy use of Augustine and Hugh of Saint-Victor and by the emphasis that scholarship on the thirteenth century has traditionally placed on the genres of the quaestio and the summa, into thinking of the encyclopedist as simply old-fashioned or reactionary (he does, aer all, rely heavily on Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas as well). Vincent was a writer of his time, and, if common notions of early thirteenth-century intellectual and literary practices do not accommodate his work and that of others like him, then those notions must be questioned.

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Vincent’s discussion of the old and the new aspects of the Speculum maius does, however, give encyclopedic florilegia a different status from other texts of the period, a distinction most clearly articulated in the discussion of authorship and authority. Scholastic writers distinguished between a compilator and an auctor. Bonaventure, for example, divides the “making of books” into four different activities: Aliquis enim scribit aliena, nihil addendo vel mutando; et iste mere dicitur scriptor. Aliquis scribit aliena, addendo, sed non de suo; et iste compilator dicitur. Aliquis scribit et aliena et sua, sed aliena tamquam principalia, et sua tamquam annexa ad evidentiam; et iste dicitur commentator, non auctor. Aliquis scribit et sua et aliena, sed sua tanquam principalia, aliena tamquam annexa ad confirmationem; et talis debet dici auctor.78 [A certain man writes the words of others, without adding or changing anything, and he is simply called a copyist. Another writes the words of others while adding to them, but not with words of his own; and he is called a compiler. Another writes the words of others as well as his own, but others’ words serve as the principal ones, and his own serve as supplements, to make the meaning more clear; and he is called a commentator, not an author. Another writes both his own words and those of others, but his words serve as the principal ones, and those of others serve as supplements, to confirm his words, and he must be called an author.]

Vincent is similarly careful to identify himself as an excerptator rather than a tractator (LA ch. 7). The auctores themselves he scrupulously identifies, with rubrics placed before each new quotation within the column of text rather than in the margins, a traditional practice that increased the risk that a copyist would overlook an aribution or connect it with the wrong extract (LA chs. 1, 3). Vincent so insists on aribution because authority derives from authorship, a role that he declines in favor of the writers from whom he takes his extracts. And he recognizes that different writers possess different levels of authority: the writers of the Bible occupy the top of the hierarchy, followed by the patristic writers, and so on, until one reaches the boom, where one finds the pagan poets and philosophers (LA chs. 11–12). Therefore, the authority of the compilation is not a global phenomenon. It is radically local and must be determined anew for each citation. Furthermore, because it is on the level of the auctor, of the individual who writes words of his own, that conceptual coherence is to be sought (as in one of Jerome’s famous crite-

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ria for aributing texts to a given author), the compilation as a whole cannot be expected to present the kind of coherence one finds in an authored text. Writes Vincent in the prologue: Et ego quidem non ignoro philosophos inter se multa dixisse contraria, maximeque de rerum natura. . . . Sed quoniam in istis . . . pars utralibet contradictionis absque periculo fidei nostre potest credi vel discredi, lectorem admoneo, ne forsan abhorreat, si quas hujusmodi contrarietates sub diversorum actorum nominibus in plerisque locis hujus operis insertas inveniat, presertim cum ego jam professus sim, in hoc opere me non tractatoris, sed excerptoris morem gerere, ideoque non magno opere laborasse, dicta philosophorum ad concordiam redigere, sed tamen quid de unaquaque re quilibet eorum senserit aut scripserit, recitare, lectoris arbitrio relinquendo, cujus sententie potius debeat adherere. (LA ch. 8) [I am not unaware that the philosophers made among themselves many contradictory statements, especially concerning the nature of things. . . . But since in these maers either side may be believed or not without danger for our faith, I advise the reader especially—lest he be deterred, coming upon contradictions of this kind under the names of diverse authors inserted in multiple places in this work—that I do not claim to have proceeded as a treatise-writer (tractator), but rather as an excerptor (excerptor). Therefore I have not undertaken the huge task of bringing the statements of the philosophers into concord with each other, but rather I repeat whatever any one of them thought or wrote concerning any given thing, leaving it to the judgment of the reader which opinion he should accept.]

Therefore, the compilatio can be expected to contradict itself. Nevertheless, the distinction between the author and the compiler, the authored text and the compilation, is not as clear as Bonaventure or Vincent would like. The very fact that two individuals would feel compelled to make it explicit suggests that confusion surrounded the status of the writer of particular kinds of texts: not only encyclopedias, but also collections of “sentences” (quotations or sententiae from Scripture and the patristic writers, arranged systematically). By far the most influential in the laer genre were the four books of sentences put together by Peter Lombard in the mid-twelh century and commented on, in later centuries, by any theologian who aspired to make a name for himself.79 Bonaventure sets out the four kinds of writers in the first pages of his own commentary on the Sen-

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tences—and then concludes that Peter was an auctor, rather than a compilator, because he compiled the citations in order to support his own arguments.80 Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) seems, for his part, to hold the opposing view. In his commentary, he glosses the reference to the “tower of David” in Peter’s prologue by identifying an allusion to the Song of Sol. 4:4, which describes a fortified tower. The fortifications can be understood as the citations from authoritative texts, Aquinas writes, and Peter compiled them because he could not invent his own arguments. Thereby, he guaranteed his text against error.81 The Lombard’s status is thus an open question, and the debate is directly linked to the problem of the relation between citation and original thought. Much as he protests that he has not “authored” the Speculum maius, Vincent himself will be implicitly treated as an author by many medieval rubricators: the majority of manuscripts begin with the rubric “Here begins the Speculum naturale / doctrinale / historiale of Brother Vincent.” That is, the text circulated most frequently with a name (and an institutional affiliation) attached, and this set it apart from many anonymous florilegia of the period. There are several possible explanations for this consistent aribution. One cannot discount the importance of the first-person discourse in the prologue, and the organization of the compilation required serious independent thought, which Vincent there recounts in surprising detail. But, in complicating the distinction between author and compiler, my point is to show that the encyclopedia is also located on another kind of border, an indistinct and contested line between two categories that scholastic thinkers were accustomed to use (that of the authored text and that of the compilation), and neither the elite intellectuals nor the larger group of manual laborers they employed could agree on which category it should occupy. Yet the ambiguous, shiing authority of these particular compilations (the encyclopedia, the sentence collection) did not have the effect of marginalizing the genre. It flourished in its borderlands. Compilatio may occupy a liminal zone, but it does provide the means to make several necessary, though artificial, generic distinctions. This study is not taxonomic, but the close analyses of texts in part 2 require that generic distinctions be expressed in a set of precise terms whose meaning does not shi around. In these analyses, two other scholastic genres, the summa and the prosimetrum, will play an important role. Like the didascalicon that we shall encounter in the next section, these genres are no longer practiced, so there is no English term for them. But, because all are related in some way to the encyclopedia, scholars occasionally employ that term. If one is operat-

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ing with a loose definition of encyclopedia, these other genres fit, but it then becomes necessary to make generic distinctions within the category encyclopedias because everyone can agree that the encyclopedic florilegium, the summa, the prosimetrum, and the didascalicon are different kinds of texts. My strategy in this study is instead to refer only to the encyclopedic florilegium as an encyclopedia, retaining the Latin names for the other genres and, thus, distinguishing texts produced by compilatio from others. In the scholastic period, the encyclopedia and the summa fulfill a similar purpose, constituting handbooks or manuals of necessary knowledge for the use of those unlikely or unready to pursue advanced studies themselves. The genres are similarly broad in their sweep, and they depend to some degree on methods of schematic organization, thus distinguishing themselves from the traditional commentary. For these reasons, the encyclopedia and the summa have sometimes been conflated. In her otherwise excellent essay for the exhibition catalog accompanying Encyclopedism from Pliny to Borges at the University of Chicago Library, Anna Sigrídur Arnar groups the Speculum maius with diverse other texts under the heading Summa, which she defines as a form of encyclopedia particularly clearly shaped by a philosophical system: “The very meaning of the word summa describes the goal of most encyclopedias: it is a summation of knowledge presenting a particular view of the world both comprehensively and systematically. It is simultaneously an index of accumulated knowledge and a model that proposes a method for the organization of this knowledge.”82 Although Arnar’s description does apply equally well to summae and to encyclopedic florilegia, it omits the critical distinction between the two in the Middle Ages. A comparison of the chapters in, say, that most eminent of summae, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologica (ca. 1265–74), with those in the Speculum maius brings this distinction to light. Aquinas borrows the form of the quaestio, developed in the schools in order to debate and resolve the apparent contradictions in the Bible, to structure his approach to various vexed theological problems. He shares with the other theologians of his day the belief that the Bible and its commentaries form a coherent whole, and the quaestio allows him to take apparently contradictory authoritative citations and show how, when interpreted in specific ways, they concord with each other.83 The considerable intellectual labor involved in this operation aracted the subtlest minds of the day, and it earned them the status of authorities in their own right: the summa is almost always an authored text. While apparently taking account of divergent views, it also tends toward a synthesis and a degree of ideological unity that does not, ultimately, tolerate plurality of views.

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Arnar herself acknowledges that “the absolute systemization of knowledge demands a certain uniformity of thought and language which, in turn, requires a homogeneous audience,”84 and, indeed, the great summae were written for a more restricted audience than were contemporary encyclopedias (Vincent’s intended audience was broader than Arnar suggests and included lay readers). The summae’s ultimate consequence—several centuries later— was to shut down debate and produce the homogeneous doctrine that was so long used by historians to characterize the scholastic movement as a whole.85 This is quite different from what is achieved in the Speculum maius, where discordant voices are quoted at length, contradiction is oen le unresolved, and any synthesizing is le up to the reader—with the expectation that different readers may arrive at different conclusions. Hence, the reverberations of the thirteenth-century encyclopedia-as-compilation were quite different from those of the summa; Parkes and Minnis have argued that they made possible such multivoiced, self-contradictory, centrifugal, and oen frustrating texts as the Roman de la Rose, the Decameron, and the Canterbury Tales.86 The second possible generic confusion lies beyond the realm of university discourse. The textual practice of encyclopedists, who take old material and configure it in new ways, resembles developments in medieval poetics, which similarly privileged the reworking of old material. This poetics has its clearest articulation in Geoffrey of Vinsauf ’s Poetria nova (ca. 1208–13), the most widely copied ars poetriae of the late Middle Ages,87 but it can be discerned as early as the first troubadours, with their varied reformulations of conventional material and their simultaneous insistence on the newness of their compositions, a trope prominent in the song “Farai chansoneta nueva,” aributed to Guilhem IX of Aquitaine (1071–1126). Thus, compilatio was consonant with practices beyond the domain of encyclopedism.88 Among the various genres of poetic texts, closest to the encyclopedia in its writing of the world is the Latin prosimetrum, a Menippian genre that alternated prose and verse. Known to scholastic readers through Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (late fih century) and Boethius’s De consolatione Philosophiae (524), the genre came back into vogue in the twelh century, and two of the new prosimetra were to achieve lasting popularity: Bernard Silvester’s Cosmographia (already mentioned) and Alan of Lille’s De planctu Naturae [The plaint of Nature] (ca. 1160–65).89 Both texts cultivate polyphony in a many-faceted representation of the natural world, and, in this, they resemble the encyclopedia. Yet there are important differences. The twelhcentury prosimetra are not compilations. They are decidedly authored texts, in which sources are thoroughly reworked; thus, the difference between

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them and encyclopedias is analogous to the difference between Lucretius’s De rerum natura and Pliny’s Naturalis historia. A more essential distinction concerns levels of representation. The Speculum maius consists of a collection of extracts from scientific, historical, and literary texts intended to provide a view of creation, in all its abundant minutiae; it constitutes a textual mirror of the world. The Cosmographia and the De planctu, on the other hand, offer a selection of details, enough to create the impression of the abundant minutiae proper to the encyclopedia, but filtered through the text’s own philosophical and aesthetic principles.90 More important, communicating such minutiae is not their primary purpose. They introduce an additional level of representation between creation and the reader, the representation of and reflection on the function of poetic myth, on the relation of such discursive practice to knowledge of the physical world. This metadiscourse intervenes, rendering the world of realia even fuzzier than it is in encyclopedic representations.91 This is not to say that the prosimetra have no serious meaning—which would be to fall back into the trap of assuming that literature could somehow be separated out from other forms of textuality in the Middle Ages. The prosimetra are philosophical exercises inspired by a figurative practice that we have already considered, integumentum, the allegorical elaboration of a veiled truth, elaborated by Platonic thinkers and transmied to the Middle Ages through the writings of Macrobius and others. These texts are serious exercises in cosmology and psychology. But one of their central concerns is the function of poetry, its capacity to transmit truth. The titles provide clues: the De proprietatibus rerum and the De naturis rerum are encyclopedias and are about things; the De planctu Naturae is about discourse about things. In the De planctu, rather than simply deploying a learned language to represent objects in the world, Alan elaborates “images” (to use Bakhtin’s formulation) of learned languages that intersect and qualify each other. In the encyclopedia as compilatio, the dialogic relation of words about a given object is spatially represented in the juxtaposition of direct citations, but it is not, as in Bakhtin’s image, “refracted” through the “fresh intention” of a new author.92 Therefore, both the Cosmographia and the De planctu provide something rather different from the encyclopedia: an aesthetic experience that encyclopedias either do not initiate, or provide in a considerably less intense form, and a mature philosophical reflection on the very being of language and its relation to the universe and the human mind, a reflection that must remain inchoate in an encyclopedic compilation, where linguistic issues can be treated only through the citation of other texts, if at all.93

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The question, then, is why the Latin prosimetrum ceased to be a viable genre for new texts (however popular the existing ones remained) shortly before the encyclopedic florilegium began to flourish as it never had before.94 And I would like to emphasize this chronology. Whereas the summa and the encyclopedia were contemporary with each other, the small boom in the production of new Latin prosimetra preceded the encyclopedic boom by more than fiy years. In a recent book on the prosimetrum, Bridget K. Balint has speculated that its decline can be aributed to increasing pessimism about “the relationship of language to truth” and about “the suitability of texts to the task of making both mythical and moral sense of the self and the cosmos.” According to Balint, the De planctu, in particular, reflects an increasing disorder that would undermine the genre. Moreover, the ascendancy of Aristotelian science spelled the end of poetic integument as a vehicle for serious inquiry into the nature of the soul and the cosmos.95 These explanations are compelling, and they suggest that the encyclopedic florilegium—with its diverse and dissonant uses of language, its plurality of authors and subjects, its imperfect, ungainly organization—this sprawling and apparently less coherent and polished genre, was uniquely suited to the heterogeneity of thirteenth-century thought.

Ordo Having distinguished these various genres, I now conclude this presentation of scholastic practices with a habit of mind—even an impulsion—shared by virtually all scholastic writers: ordering. Heavily determined by Aristotelian logic and physics, scholastic order was expressed through hierarchical division. Thus, in an early thirteenth-century summa (more precisely, in the second point of the fourth chapter of the first article of the first quaestio of the introduction), a Franciscan, probably Alexander of Hales, wrote: “modus definitivus debet esse, divisivus, collectivus, et talis modus debet esse in humanis scientiis, quia apprehensio veritatis secundum humanam rationem explicatur per divisiones, definitiones, et ratiocinationes” [the method must be one of definition, division, and argumentation. Such a method is appropriate in the fields of human knowledge, since human reason reaches an understanding of truth by divisions, definitions, and reasonings].96 Hierarchical division structured every stratum of thought and textuality; it even shaped readers’ experience of texts inherited from earlier ages. Books had to be categorized according to various systems: for example,

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Bonaventure’s quadripartite division between (in descending order of authority) Scripture, the writings of the saints, the sententiae of the masters, and “worldly or philosophical doctrines,”97 or between authored texts, commentaries, compilations, and simple copies. Such divisions also operated within the semiotic / hermeneutic field ( figura / glossa) by distinguishing between the different kinds of interpretation that can be applied to objects or texts. The venerable four senses of Scripture,98 the literal, the allegorical, the tropological (or moral), and the anagogical, were used in manuscripts of the Glossa ordinaria to categorize the various glosses.99 Imbued with an Aristotelianism that described things—all things—by identifying their causes, readers approached a given text as they would a curious amphibian, ready to describe its formal cause, which they assimilated to its structure or what came to be known as its ordinatio.100 This structure they analyzed, dividing the text into units and units within units: books, chapters. They then invented running headings and indices to make it possible to locate a given passage without skimming the entire book.101 The page that we recognize and expect today, with its divisions and subdivisions, its paratextual material, was new in the scholastic age. Scholastic division made possible a new way of reading, less dependent on slow meditation and memorization. The scholastics could read— or at least consult—more books than their predecessors could ever have hoped to do. And they needed to. Vincent’s reference to the multiplication of knowledge was perhaps alarmist in its eschatological overtones, but it was not hyperbolic. Ancient areas of inquiry were again expanding, coalescing into recognizable disciplines that did not fit within the common classification of the early Middle Ages, the seven liberal arts, which medieval writers knew from the De nuptiis of Martianus Capella, the Institutiones saecularium litterarum of Cassiodorus (ca. 543–55), and the Etymologiae. These seven arts had constituted the program of basic education that was considered suitable for free men in Latin antiquity; it began with the trivium and then proceeded to the quadrivium, which embraced the disciplines of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. In the ancient world, the liberal arts had been intended to prepare men for the study of more advanced subjects (physical science, ethics, metaphysics), but the texts relevant to those subjects were largely unknown to early medieval readers. Therefore, following the lead of Augustine in the second book of the De doctrina and Boethius in the De Trinitate, early medieval thinkers had largely viewed these arts as preliminaries to theology, the study of the sacra pagina. Together, these eight disciplines had

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constituted the education expected of members of the only universally educated group, the clergy (although, at low points in these turbulent centuries, even the education of some clergy was in doubt). As more and more texts treating other disciplines became available in the scholastic period, the pressure that they placed on the early medieval paradigm manifested itself in diverse ways. When, for example, the polymath Richard de Fournival decided to make a portion of his extensive personal library available to the students of Amiens, he was obliged to catalog a collection that ranged far wider than the liberal arts.102 In the prefatory material to the catalog, or Biblionomia, Richard lovingly describes his library as a “garden” in which readers may discover “fruits of many kinds.” He announces that his collection is divided into three principal sections (or “beds”), the first of which contains books of philosophia, a term that, in the Middle Ages, embraced all disciplines that could be studied without recourse to revelation and was also sometimes used to refer to the ancient literary heritage.103 Richard states that he has ordered the books of philosophy in the “natural” way, beginning with the trivium, then the quadrivium, then additional categories: the physical sciences, metaphysics, and ethics. Even this expansion of the traditional schema is not enough, however. He remarks that not all books of philosophy fit neatly into this paradigm, notably texts dealing with more than one branch of philosophy as well as the “works of the poets”; these he has therefore grouped together at the end of the series. What is remarkable about this schema is that all these categories of books are included in only the first division of the library. A second division contains books relevant to what Richard designates baldly the scientiae lucrativae: medicine and law.104 To theology is devoted the entirety of the third division. Richard further states that the books belonging to each division are identified by letters inscribed on their covers. Because there are more books than leers in the alphabet, different scripts ( figurae) are employed successively. Another distinguishing mark is provided by ink: the leers designating volumes of philosophy are traced in colored ink, those designating volumes pertaining to the lucrative disciplines in silver, and those designating theology in gold. Thus, the relative weight of the disciplines shis: medicine and law are not inserted as equals into the traditional schema of the liberal arts (as Richard has done with the natural sciences and ethics). Instead, these newly important disciplines assume a prominent place apart, and a hierarchy is established, with theology (the only revealed knowledge) at the top, medicine and law just below it, and theoretical disciplines below them. Richard gives no indication of having based his arrangement on theo-

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retical discussions of the order of the disciplines and the relations obtaining between them, but such discussions had sprung up in the major centers of learning. For the habit of hierarchical division also found expression in a general reflection on philosophia. What, the scholastics asked themselves, were its constituent parts, and how could the definitions and articulations of those parts be established? As usual, they sought the answers to these questions in the library. What came most immediately to hand were two texts of Boethius, the first commentary on Porphyry (ca. 509) and the De Trinitate (ca. 520).105 Here, Boethius had sketched out an understanding of the disciplines that had been elaborated in antiquity. It owed its genesis to a siing mélange of Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic ideas, although in the Middle Ages it would oen be aributed to Aristotle alone. Unlike the seven liberal arts, this paradigm accommodated the subjects of advanced study, and it was based on a set of ontological distinctions between different kinds of inquiry. While influential in the late antique period, it had fallen out of favor in the early Middle Ages, when readers knew neither the advanced disciplines nor the philosophical texts that formed the basis for the distinctions between them. The scholastics, who would eventually gain an acquaintance with both, would revive it, and it would go on to become a commonplace among writers, such as encyclopedists and translators, who worked to make learning more widely accessible in the late medieval period. They thus divided learning into three branches (fig. 3). The first is speculative or theoretical; the scholastics usually included here physical science, mathematics, and metaphysics (sometimes conflated with theology, sometimes not). The second division is practical, but by this word they did not mean the same thing as our concept of the “applied” sciences. Instead, they meant the philosophical practices that guide human behavior, so they subdivided this category into ethics, economics (by which they meant the management of the affairs of the household), and political philosophy. The third branch is devoted to rational philosophy, or logic. Although this schema recuperates the quadrivium as the four subdivisions of mathematics (medieval thinkers had a broad view of mathematics as the study of quantities, and they placed under this rubric both music and astronomy), the place of the trivium was more tenuous.106 Along with dialectics, grammar and rhetoric were sometimes aached to the logical branch, but some thought that this branch should not be considered a part of philosophy at all, only its instrument.107 Hugh of Saint-Victor took a larger view when, in the second book of the Didascalicon (late 1120s), he set out one of the most complete schemata of the disciplines in early scholasticism (table 1). Hugh preserved the three branches of the Aristotelian

Figure 3. Allegory and diagram showing the “Aristotelian” classification of disciplines. In this instance, theology is aributed to theoretical philosophy. Unfortunately, it is not possible to know what disciplines are represented in the bipartite division of logical philosophy because the boom of the page was cut off when the leaves were trimmed for rebinding. Manuscript of Fulgentius’s Mythologiae (late fih / early sixth century), copied in Italy in the second half of the twelh century. Paris, BNF MS lat. 18275, fol. 20r. Photograph reproduced by permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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Table 1. Divisions of philosophy according to Hugh of Saint-Victor (Didascalicon, book 2) Theology

Theoretical (Speculative)

Mathematics

Arithmetic Music Geometry Astronomy

Physics (Study of Nature)

Practical (Active)

Individual (Ethics) Private (Economics of the Home) Public (Politics)

Philosophy

Mechanical (Adulterate)

Fabric Making Armament (Masonry, Carpentry, Smithery) Navigation Agriculture Hunting Medicine Theatrics Grammar Demonstration

Logical (Linguistic) eory of Argument

Probable Argument

Dialectic Rhetoric

Sophistic

schema, but he specified that logic is divided into three parts, grammar, the art of reasoning, and the sophistic, and that reasoning includes both dialectic and rhetoric.108 More innovative was his creation of a fourth branch of philosophia to accommodate the mechanical arts, seven in number like the liberal arts. Hugh believed that the principles that guide all human activity—even the humble work of spinning wool or plowing fields—belong to philosophy, although not all branches of philosophy contribute to the same degree to the ultimate, salvific purpose of learning. His schema thus ac-

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commodates the technological work that earlier medieval schemas had excluded.109 Hugh’s Didascalicon is only the most well-known of a series of scholastic didascalica, another genre that is closely related to the encyclopedia. These slender texts were not intended to transmit vast quantities of learning, but they did serve as introductions to philosophy in all its breadth. They generally began with an explanation of the relation between the philosophical disciplines, and it is this emphasis on ordo, as well as their pretentions to universality, that they share with encyclopedic florilegia. We could, perhaps, think of them as prolegomena to encyclopedism.110 The paradigms that the didascalica proposed for the order of the disciplines grew more sophisticated as scholastics came into contact with the Platonic and Aristotelian texts that Boethius had read and as they discovered relevant Arabic treatises. In Toledo, toward the middle of the twelh century, Dominicus Gundissalinus produced a translation-adaptation of al-Fārābī’s tenth-century De scientiis and probably also of a De ortu scientiarum that the Latins sometimes aributed to the same thinker. Gundissalinus also added a new treatise of his own, the De divisione scientiarum, in which he exploited the logical thought of Avicenna.111 All three of these texts would circulate beyond the Iberian Peninsula; while the De ortu appears to have been known only to a few (among them, Vincent of Beauvais), the De scientiis was considered important enough to be translated again some thirty years later by Gerard of Cremona.112 Such new reading led the scholastics to engage with the philosophical bases of the Aristotelian schema—and to revise it. About 1250, the Oxford Dominican Robert Kilwardby would publish his own De ortu scientiarum, learned, comprehensive, and influential, a didascalicon for the thirteenth century. Kilwardby’s schema created a place apart for the study of Scripture (“Divine Science,” as opposed to the “Human Science,” to which all other disciplines, including metaphysics, belonged) and divided human science into philosophy (which he divided in a way similar to, but not perfectly calqued on, the schema of Hugh) and magic (which he viewed unfavorably but nevertheless felt compelled to include in his universal schema).113 With the De ortu scientiarum, Kilwardby was not only satisfying a request from his superiors and inserting himself into the tradition of didascalica. In his explanation of the relations between the disciplines, he was also joining in the discussion that his contemporaries Robert Grosseteste, Albert the Great, Roger Bacon, and Thomas Aquinas were carrying out in their commentaries on Boethius’s De Trinitate and Aristotle’s newly available Posterior Analytics and Metaphysics.114 James Weisheipl has identified in these

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thirteenth-century texts two schools of thought, a pronounced Platonism at Oxford and a “new Aristotelianism” at Paris.115 Grosseteste, Kilwardby, and Bacon (as well as can be discerned, though Bacon’s commentary on the Metaphysics has been lost) saw number and proportionality as the explanation of physical phenomena and, hence, the key to understanding natural science. Moreover, because metaphysics treated the One, they believed that it, too, must be approached through number. Nevertheless, they classed disciplines according to the progressive grades of abstraction they employ, producing a hierarchy that conforms to the Platonic hierarchy of the forms the disciplines study, with metaphysics at the top, the mathematical disciplines in the middle, and natural science at the boom. Albert and Aquinas, on the other hand, argued for the autonomy of the natural sciences and of metaphysics, rejecting the contention that number is the basis of all three disciplines. Mathematical explanations, they maintained, were inadequate for identifying causes or fully describing motion. At the same time, the order of disciplines that these thinkers established was pedagogical, independent of any hierarchy of abstraction or forms: it began with logic and then progressed to mathematics, natural science, moral philosophy, and metaphysics. Yet, despite these differences, all these writers were students of Augustine as well as Plato and Aristotle, so they were inspired to some degree by the desire to demonstrate how the “new” learning could be fit into a system that subordinated it to theology. Hence the prominent position that metaphysics assumes in all these schemas and the even more prominent position of scriptural study in the schema of Kilwardby. As George Ovi Jr. has put it: “The classifications of the sciences were intended to systematize what was known in order to ensure the primacy of what was believed.”116 And the most devoted readers of Augustine proved the least willing to accept any possible autonomy of the philosophical disciplines, as the title of Bonaventure’s treatise, the De reductione artium ad theologiam [On retracing the arts to theology] (1250s), indicates. These treatises and commentaries represent philosophical reflection unfeered by practical constraints or applications. Nevertheless, scholastic discussions of the relations between fields of knowledge did bear on the organization of new texts, chief among them encyclopedias, which were expected to reflect, in the ordinatio of their many books and chapters, the ordo of the world or that of philosophia. The encyclopedists tried diverse solutions to the problems of organizing a universal compendium.117 Predictably, those who aempted the most comprehensive treatment of human knowledge experienced the greatest difficulty. Bruneo Latini took the Aristotelian disciplin-

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ary scheme as the global structure for his Tresor.118 Nevertheless, he devoted considerable time to history (in the book relating theoretical knowledge, aer giving a rather cavalier overview of theology), even though no explicit place is made for history in the schema (it was, in fact, oen considered a part of theology, but in this case it vastly overwhelms the theological discussion). By the time he moved on to the practical and the logical, he had more or less le the schema behind. Thus, the text’s most recent editors characterize his execution of the tripartite plan as “both deviant and partial.”119 More successful was Vincent of Beauvais, who identified a number of possible divisions of knowledge—including two that were not widely known—and exploited several in organizing portions of his text. The schemata of Aristotle and Michael Scot (1175–ca. 1232, one of Aristotle’s most prolific translators) are cited at the beginning of the Speculum doctrinale, and the order of knowledge proposed by al-Fārābī has a significant influence on the portions of text devoted to the different arts (specifically, law).120 The prologue offers an extensive explanation of the hierarchy of texts (something like Bonaventure’s four categories of writing) as a tool to help the reader judge the authority proper to any given citation (chs. 11–12). But for the global organization of his encyclopedia Vincent hewed to the Victorine model in following the order of Scripture, although this creates problems that I shall consider in chapter 2. Given the difficulty of making everything fit, it is easy to understand why other encyclopedists restricted their field: neither Thomas of Cantimpré nor Bartholomeus Anglicus dealt with the liberal arts at all, and they had precious lile to say about theology. In the case of Thomas’s De naturis rerum, these restrictions may lend the text some coherence as a compendium of natural history, but they also occlude any philosophical basis for its order. Thomas gave virtually no explanation for the sequence he had chosen, which progresses from anthropology to zoology and, finally, cosmology in a trajectory that seems to derive from Isidore, though his reliance on alphabetical order within many of the books distinguishes his work from that of the bishop of Seville.121 The individual books vary widely in length, from the mere three pages of Helmut Boese’s edition devoted to book 15 (the seven metals) to the seventy pages devoted to book 4 (the quadrupeds). The book on the soul (bk. 2) is a modest thirteen pages in length, while that on human anatomy (bk. 1) receives sixty-nine. It is categories that include items susceptible to being listed that dominate the work, and one has the impression that the human being fits only insofar as the body and the life cycle can be fragmented, broken down into a succession of items like the succession

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of creatures in the world. Neglected, then, is a discussion of the soul and omied entirely any discussion of God, history, or the arts and sciences. The failure to discuss or justify this order anywhere further contributes to the impression that the author was unaware of or uninterested in the possibility of providing context (historical, philosophical, psychological / perceptual) or any unifying, overarching idea for his compilation. The only larger context that Thomas provided are his moralizations, meant to facilitate the reader’s contemplation and the preparation of sermons by giving the spiritual significance of a particular object.122 Yet his comments in the prologue show that he was concerned that these moralizations might dominate the work and, thus, limited them (paradoxically, perhaps contributing to the structural and contextual deficiencies).123 Unlike Thomas, Bartholomeus Anglicus explained the order that he had chosen in a brief prologue heavily influenced by the symbolism of Paul, Augustine, and Pseudo-Dionysus. It is the hierarchical thinking of this last writer that provides the global paradigm for the encyclopedia; the nineteen books of the De proprietatibus rerum descend from God, to the angels, to the rational soul, and only then to the material world—first the human body, then the various material objects of the universe, arranged more or less according to their appurtenance to each of the four elements, fire (the celestial bodies), air (meteorology, birds), water (fish), and earth (geography, stones and metals, plants, and animals).124 As in the De natura, the books of the De proprietatibus vary greatly in length, from the brief books devoted to God (bk. 1) and maer and form (bk. 10), to the vast expositions of the plants (bk. 17), the animals (bk. 18), and the accidents (color, smell, taste, etc.; bk. 19)—all made up of lengthy lists. And as in the De naturis rerum, the discussion of the human body, its ages, and its maladies (bks. 4–7) far exceeds that of the human soul (bk. 3) in length. Nevertheless, the symbolic frame imposes conceptual unity on the work, and the various fragments and lists all take their places in a lovely spatial array. Another organizational possibility, and a rather old one, returns us to the discussion of figura, for the graphic figure, too, could organize a text, and scholastic thought was imbued with the diagrammatic, with methods of logic and exegesis that Michael Evans has called the “geometry of the mind.”125 The lion page from the Liber floridus provides a visual translation of the centrality and organizational power of the graphic figure. Here, the animal forms, the lion and the porcupine, and the border create unusual spaces for the text. Unsuited to the linearity of language, these spaces only approximate the form of a rectangle; their sides are curved to accommodate the

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line of the lion’s back, or else the lines of text are subtly tipped to follow the angle of its front leg. Yet the graphic figure also justifies the juxtaposition of the various textual extracts on the page. Although all the quotations here would fit perfectly well under the rubric of leo in any medieval bestiary or encyclopedia, elsewhere in the Liber floridus the visual figures bring together texts that would otherwise seem unrelated to each other, and their role could not be thus usurped by a simple rubric (a lovely example of the role of the graphic figure to unify diverse texts is the “lily among thorns” on fol. 230v).126 The textual extracts therefore intersect in diverse ways with each other and with the visual figure that structures and unifies them. The figure serves as the nexus, the central space in which meanings may intersect. Here, the difficulty is how to connect the different nexuses, how to make a coherent series of them. Whether or not Lambert succeeded or even attempted to create series is maer for debate; we shall see in chapter 3 the way in which, more than one hundred years later, Ramon Llull would aempt to resolve the problem in the Arbor scientiae, a new encyclopedia organized around a series of figures. Each of these orders represents only a partial solution. Some purport to take account of everything, yet some fields must be wedged in, destroying the symmetry of the whole. Others create an ordered field of knowledge only by banishing elements that do not fit into the structure. A few fail to make clear any organizational principle. In most, the material is not evenly distributed across the conceptual structure. Probably the most rigorous applications of a coherent global organization can be found in the Speculum maius and the Arbor scientiae, which will be discussed in part 2. However, though very popular, the Speculum maius was only rarely transmied in complete form during the Middle Ages, and the Arbor scientiae was hardly read at all. Meanwhile, texts that I have just identified as less rigorous (the Tresor, the De natura rerum, and especially the De proprietatibus rerum) were frequently transmied in complete form. And the Roman de la Rose, which dramatizes disorder, was greeted with even more appreciation, transmied complete in even more manuscripts. The situation is not without parallels in other domains. The Summa theologica, like the Speculum maius, represents the rigorous application of a systematic order. And, like the Speculum maius, it also survives in a great number of manuscripts, testifying to its importance in the intellectual life of the later Middle Ages, but it was rarely transmied complete.127 So we are le to conclude that the obsession with encyclopedic knowledge and with order was resisted by some other force or forces. Was it simply

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the fact that handmade books were so expensive, rendering the most concise compilations, despite their imbalances and lacunae, the only ones within reach for many readers? Thus, the capacities of medieval institutions and their technology of the word would have proved inadequate to the paradigm of encyclopedic order. Or was the paradigm itself fissured by the growing awareness of the impossibility, new in this period, that any single individual or text could fully survey the vast expanse of knowledge? Perhaps rigorous order itself was, to all scholastics but the select few, tolerable only as an aspiration, as a schema sketched on a leaf of parchment, but not as a rule governing the articulation of the parts of a book. Nevertheless, as an ideal, ordo had to be cultivated to stave off the cacophony of the scholastic library. It constituted the condition of possibility of compilatio, and it worked in tandem with figura-glossa to make knowledge possible. Although all scholastic texts are informed to some degree by these practices, as libraries in miniature the encyclopedic texts of the period are founded on all four.

La prose du monde The archaeological description of the scholastic archive that I have just completed puts us in the position to reassess the work of the philosopher who devised this method. A comparison between the scholastic archive and what Foucault dubs the prose of the world, the preclassical archive as he describes it in an early chapter of The Order of Things, reveals contradictions and disjunctions—not all of which are due to the differences between scholasticism and Renaissance humanism. In fact, most derive from Foucault’s own presuppositions and choices. I should like to conclude this discussion of the archive by sketching them out, and this for two reasons. First, “The Prose of the World” has had more influence than is to be desired on the way modernists understand preclassical—including medieval—intellectual practices. Foucault’s claims overlap just enough with those I have made in the present chapter to invite the misprision that scholastic intellectual practices and those of the Renaissance are identical. On the contrary, a clear distinction must be made between the scholastic episteme and the one Foucault describes. The laer, for its part, corresponds only partially to the Renaissance episteme, as is shown by a fuller reading of Foucault’s source texts and a beer explanation of their place in Renaissance thought (although a new description of the Renaissance episteme is beyond the scope of this book). Second, Foucault’s chapter raises a theoretical quandary that is, to my mind, not easily resolved, and I would like to offer it to theoretically minded readers for their own re-

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flection. Medievalists with no investment in such theoretical questions may wish to skip this section and continue on to part 2. In The Order of Things, Foucault undertakes to describe the archive of Western thought, from the sixteenth century to the twentieth. He divides this vast temporal expanse by identifying what he calls, rather grandiosely, “two great discontinuities in the episteme of Western culture,” the first occurring toward the middle of the seventeenth century, ushering in the classical age, the second at the beginning of the nineteenth, dividing the classical from the modern.128 To the classical and modern ages he devotes three or four chapters each. The age that preceded the classical receives a single chapter, in which its episteme is set out remarkably neatly as background for the chapters to follow. Here, Foucault was writing specifically about the Renaissance, although readers can be forgiven for assuming that a chapter beginning “Up to the end of the sixteenth century . . .” will have a broader sweep (and that line is misleading in more ways than one, for Foucault’s “Renaissance” includes the first half of the seventeenth century).129 Unfortunately, in this book, the Renaissance oen appears to stand metonymically for the premodern episteme as well, and the confusion is exacerbated by Foucault’s choice of sources, many of which take their inspiration from medieval writing. The thesis of “The Prose of the World” is simple: the preclassical episteme is based on resemblance. This episteme would therefore appear to be based entirely on one of the senses of figura, but Foucault subdivides resemblance into four kinds, describing a sequence—which will eventually turn out to be circular—of what he calls “figures that determine the knowledge of resemblance,” distinct dynamic linkages between objects contiguous or separated in space.130 These four figures are convenientia, aemulatio, analogy, and sympathy (with its opposite number, antipathy). The first indicates adjacency in space, a nearness or contact that is never arbitrary but can always be traced to some hidden relation and that allows yet more properties of two objects to be communicated, creating a visible resemblance. By distributing objects in space, convenientia links the world “together like a chain.” Aemulatio, on the other hand, establishes resemblance, not through proximity, but across distance, between objects separated in space: “There is something in emulation of the reflection and the mirror: it is the means whereby things scaered throughout the universe can answer one another.” This distant reflection Foucault understands as a kind of combat of similar forms, and the relations established by aemulatio he understands as “concentric circles reflecting and rivaling one another.” The third form of resemblance, analogy, is more com-

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plex than the first two. It shares aspects of both without replicating either. Like convenientia, it “speaks . . . of adjacencies, of bonds and joints,” but, like aemulatio, it also “makes possible the marvelous confrontation of resemblances across space.” Yet it is concerned primarily with relations between objects, rather than objects themselves; it is these relations that may be reproduced, rendered through similitudes, elsewhere. Chief among points of possible analogy, “saturated” with such resemblances, the “fulcrum” on which they turn, is the human being: “He stands in proportion to the heavens, just as he does to animals and plants, and as he does also to the earth, to metals, to stalactites and storms.” The final form of resemblance, sympathy, proves the most difficult to circumscribe because it is, as Foucault puts it, “a principle of mobility,” whereby objects that share some similarity are drawn toward each other, as fire (hot and light) is drawn to air. Because of its power of assimilation, sympathy alone would reduce the world “to a point, to a homogeneous mass, to the [dull] form of the Same.” It must therefore be countered by antipathy, which pushes objects apart again: there is antipathy between fire (hot and dry) and water (cold and wet). The opposed powers of sympathy and antipathy make possible a dynamic, ever-changing world extended across a differentiated expanse of space and time. They thus create and support the other three similitudes.131 Foucault now moves to the question of how the subject perceives this semiotic system. As it turns out, just as the four similitudes are interwoven and support each other, so our knowledge of any one depends on our recognition, not of that one, but of another, which serves as its signature. This means that “the signature and what it denotes are of exactly the same nature,” yet “they obey a different law of distribution. . . . The form making a sign and the form being signalized are resemblances, but they do not overlap.”132 This claim Foucault illustrates with examples drawn from Oswald Croll’s Tractatus de signaturis internis rerum (1608). The aconitum genus of flowering plants—among the common species are monkshood and the notorious wolfsbane—is mortally poisonous in large doses. Nonetheless, the plant does possess certain genuine medicinal properties, and small amounts had been used medicinally since antiquity. Croll cites its use for the treatment of ocular diseases. Foucault tells us that its efficaciousness was understood to derive from an invisible sympathy between the plant and the human eye. Croll in fact fails to pronounce on this point, but he does explain that the signature revealing the efficaciousness of the aconite in the treatment of ocular afflictions is the “similitude” between the plant and the eye, visible in the spherical, dark seeds of the aconite, which resemble the pu-

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pil.133 The signature, an aemulatio in the Foucauldian schema, is not the same figure of resemblance as the one it reveals, sympathia. Everywhere imbued with such signatures, the world is “like a vast open book; it bristles with wrien signs; every page is seen to be filled with strange figures that intertwine and in some places repeat themselves.”134 As humans, we, too, are caught up between the leaves of this book. We cannot escape this system of similitude; not only what we know, but also the way in which we know it, is inextricably entangled in this world of sign-things. To think is to identify likeness: The sixteenth century superimposed semiology and hermeneutics in the form of similitude. To search for a meaning is to bring to light a resemblance. To search for the law governing signs is to discover the things that are alike. The grammar of beings is an exegesis of these things. And what the language they speak has to tell us is quite simply what the syntax is that binds them together. The nature of things, their coexistence, the way in which they are linked together and communicate is nothing other than their resemblance. And that resemblance is visible only in the network of signs that crosses the world from one end to the other.

At the same time, because resemblances bear, not their own signatures, but those of other resemblances, this thinking, this knowledge, takes place in a realm of half-revealed forms, of obscurity. In that narrow, dark chink between the resemblance and its signature lies nature: “Nature” is trapped in the thin layer that holds semiology and hermeneutics one above the other; it [is only mysterious or veiled], it [only] offers itself to our cognition, which it sometimes leads astray, in so far as this superimposition necessarily includes a slight degree of non-coincidence between the resemblances. . . . [B]ecause the similitudes that form the graphics of the world are one “cog” out of alignment with those that form its discourse, knowledge and the infinite labor it involves find here the space that is proper to them: it is their task to weave their way across this distance, pursuing an endless zigzag course from resemblance to what resembles it.135

Since the objects in the world play the role of “signatures,” things and signs, the world and language, collapse into each other. Foucault therefore shows how, in an episteme in which no distinction is made between “what is seen and what is read, between observation and relation,” the world becomes a

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book: “The great metaphor of the book that opens, that one pores over and reads in order to know nature, is merely the reverse and visible side of another transference, and a much deeper one, which forces language to reside in the world, among the plants, the herbs, the stones, and the animals.”136 Thus, in order to know, one interprets. So far, everything that I have cited from Foucault’s treatment of the Renaissance episteme is consonant with some aspect of scholastic intellectual practice that we have already considered. But, if we pursue the discussion further, differences begin to appear. We may be inclined to suspect that they derive from the texts that Foucault cites, which must be different from those we have been considering up to this point because they were wrien three centuries later. But, as George Huppert has already observed, Foucault limited his sources to a small group of texts, many rooted in the ancient hermetic tradition.137 This is why he makes no mention of the scholasticism and Aristotelianism that still held sway in some circles, even though the writers he cites represent an equally old-fashioned school, or of the mathematical analyses of physical phenomena by such innovators as Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei. I would add that Foucault’s interpretation of even his principal sources is unreliable. When read fully, some of these texts—more, indeed, than other Renaissance sources—give a picture similar to the twelhand thirteenth-century texts that we have already considered. Foucault’s more selective readings seem to me to result in two fundamental distortions: a myopic explanation of the texts’ exegetical nature and the refusal to entertain the possibility of discursive heterogeneity. In the first of these areas vulnerable to critique, Rosemann has preceded me. Foucault characterizes sixteenth-century knowledge as “plethoric yet absolutely poverty-stricken.” According to the French philosopher: “By positing resemblance as the link between signs and what they indicate . . . sixteenth-century knowledge condemned itself to never knowing anything but the same thing, and to knowing that thing only at the unaainable end of an endless journey.”138 The tone betrays a modern judgment. (Surely the principle by which the value of knowledge is measured is not universal or self-evident. Foucault’s archaeological project is based on this very premise.) But the sentence itself is obscure, for what that “same thing” is to which knowledge always returns Foucault does not now say.139 He has just stated that nature is the object of knowledge, but nature is plethoric and diverse, and it cannot be characterized as “the same thing.” He now implies that the object of knowledge is the very fact of resemblance, sameness, an implication that would seem to be confirmed at other points in the chapter: resemblance

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is both the way of knowing and the content of that knowledge.140 Yet his exposition becomes most opaque at moments like this one when he brushes up against the question of why one thinks during this period or what is the ultimate object of knowledge posited by this way of knowing. During the scholastic period, that “Same” is, quite simply, God. Rosemann asks: “Has Foucault failed to appreciate that the ‘one thing’ which preclassical culture pursued in its endless quest for knowledge was so precious that it regarded all its travails as being more than warranted? Did he not realize that the Text which scholars were trying to decipher was God’s Wisdom itself?”141 A text such as the Speculum maius does not permit such a partial reading because, in the prologue and the two expositions of resemblance that frame the part of the encyclopedia devoted to natural history, God is posited as the final term in all figures of resemblance, the final end of every aempt to know through similitude and the guarantee that knowledge thus aained will be true. And there are certain epistemic continuities between scholastic texts and the texts from which Foucault cites, continuities that are obscured by the highly selective manner in which he reads his sources. The prologue to Croll’s Tractatus de signaturis contains language similar to what we find in the explanations of hermeneutics in the Speculum naturale. I cite one example: Et sane nil magis Pietatem auget, nil inquam ad cultum Dei ejusque amorem nos ardentius promovet, quam vera ejus Cognitio, quam indefinens immensorum Dei operum et mirabilium Contemplatio, quam Naturalis illa Magia (semper Internum nobis nucleum seu signatum per Externum corticem seu signum declarans et unnuens) Coeli proles et filia artium et arcanorum Inventrix, qua compellimur canere, Pleni sunt Coeli, Plena est omnis Terra Majestatis gloriae Tuae Creator omnipotens!142 [And indeed nothing more increases piety, nothing, I say, more strongly inspires us to the veneration and love of God, than the true knowledge of Him, than the endless contemplation of the immense and marvelous works of God, than that natural magic (always declaring and signifying our inner parts whether marked by our external covering or a sign), offspring of the heavens, child of arts and discoverer of mysteries, by which we are impelled to sing: The heavens and earth are full of your glory, Omnipotent Creator!]

We therefore need to pose a methodological and theoretical question. Many of the Renaissance writers that Foucault cites—even the natural historians—

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were exegetes. They were absorbed by the task of elaborating the meaning of signs. That is the central point made in “The Prose of the World.” On the other hand, Foucault insists repeatedly that his archaeological method is not hermeneutic, that discursive practice, rather than the meaning of texts, is the object of his description. He is aer, not hidden meaning, but visible practice. Can Foucault’s blindness at this point in The Order of Things be aributed to some essential incompatibility between archaeological description and exegetical source (between postmodern reading and premodern text)?143 Foucault claims, in a particularly dense passage of the Archaeology of Knowledge, that the statement must be taken as a literal assertion of truth: The analysis of statements . . . is a historical analysis, but one that avoids all interpretation: it does not question things said as to what they are hiding, what they were “really” saying, in spite of themselves, the unspoken element that they contain, the proliferation of thoughts, images, or fantasies that inhabit them; but, on the contrary, it questions them as to their mode of existence, what it means to them to have come into existence, to have le traces, and perhaps to remain there, awaiting the moment when they might be of use once more; what it means to them to have appeared when and where they did— they and no others. From this point of view, there is no such thing as a latent statement: for what one is concerned with is the fact of language (langage).144

Rigorously applied, such an approach would eliminate—to take one example—the parables of the Gospels, which make no literal truth claims whatsoever, from among the “statements” studied by the historian of thought. Yet parables served as powerful assertions of truth in the preclassical period; they communicated tropologically, allowing preachers, writers, readers, and listeners to draw parallels between the actions of the nameless, archetypal characters of the story and their own contemporary experiences. The function of the parable in textual and intellectual practice cannot be understood unless the implicit, the unspoken, is taken into account. More generally, the specific form that figura takes in the episteme can be fully understood only if both the terms that it brings into relation are also studied, if the fields they open or the limitations they impose are also articulated. Foucault does, in the paragraph that immediately follows the one from which I have just quoted, acknowledge the problem that polysemia poses for the analysis of statements, but his discussion is at this point most difficult to follow: the statement is “not concerned with” the duplication or suppression of meaning; rather, “the way in which these hidden elements function, and

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in which they can be restored, depends on the enunciative modality itself.”145 We have, I think, stumbled on an issue that Foucault le unresolved because he never did extensive work on sources that would have forced him to hone his methods. To my mind, however, archaeology is not essentially incompatible with exegetical sources; it needs only to be practiced with more sensitivity to the epistemologies it encounters that may resist or partially elude it. Such negotiation of difference is also a component of postmodern thought. In the chapters that follow in part 2, I shall expand the range of archaeological description in order to beer discern, and to distinguish among, the various practices of encyclopedic polysemia. I would like to emphasize that these practices are plural and that the differences among them are as significant as the qualities they share. This brings us to the second problem that undermines Foucault’s description of the preclassical episteme in “The Prose of the World.” Differentiation and heterogeneity play determinate roles in the description of the archive in The Archaeology of Knowledge: “Archaeological comparison does not have a unifying, but a diversifying, effect.”146 However, aside from the clear recognition that different time periods will have their own specific forms of statements, discourses, and epistemes, The Order of Things offers very lile in the way of differentiation.147 It is in order to uncover this heterogeneity that I chose in this chapter to elaborate four practices or forms of knowledge that do not—like Foucault’s four figures—chase each other round an endless circle of replication but rather intersect and diverge in various ways. And the most significant of these four for a critique of Foucault’s chapter is compilatio, the practice that absorbs all the others. Compilation did not cease with the advent of the Renaissance; it continued as one mode for writing about nature (though not the only one) throughout the preclassical period that Foucault describes, and he recognizes its importance. But he does not appear to appreciate the powerful heterogeneity of these texts. One can even discern, in the way he cites sources, a tendency to eliminate anything that might hint at epistemic dissonance. Thus, in order to explicate the rupture between the Renaissance and classical epistemes, Foucault has recourse to Buffon’s critique, in the Histoire naturelle, générale et particulaire (1749), of earlier writers of natural history. Buffon had declared that the style of description should be “simple, clear, and measured,” and he had taken the naturalists of the Renaissance to task for “faening” their books with “useless erudition” “in such a way that the subject that they treat is drowned in a great many unrelated subjects which they discuss with such complacency and elaborate with so lile consideration for

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their readers that they seem to have forgoen what they had to say to you in order to recount what others have said.” For Buffon, Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605), “the most laborious and learned of all naturalists,” represented this citational excess: I imagine a man like Aldrovandi, having once conceived the idea of making a complete corpus of natural history; I see him in his library reading successively the ancients, the moderns, the philosophers, the theologians, the jurisconsults, the historians, the travelers, the poets, and reading without any other aim than to seize upon all the words, all the sentences that have some relation, close or distant, with the object of his study. I see him copying or having copied all these remarks and arranging them in alphabetical order, and aer having filled a number of portfolios with notes of this kind, taken oen without study or discernment, beginning to work on a particular subject, and not wanting to lose anything of what he has gathered, so that when he writes the natural history of the cock or of the cow, he recounts to you everything that has ever been said of them, everything that the ancients thought, everything that people had imagined concerning their powers, and their character, and their courage, and all the things for which people tried to use them, all the stories that good women have made of them, all the miracles that certain religions had them perform, all the subjects of superstition that they furnished, all the comparisons that the poets have drawn from them, all the aributes that certain peoples accorded them, all the representations that people made of them in hieroglyphs, in armorials—in a word, all the stories and all the fables that anyone ever thought of on the subject of cocks and cows. A person may judge, aer that, what portion of natural history can be found in this hotchpotch [ fatras] of writings.148

It is remarkable to what degree Buffon’s representation of the Renaissance naturalist resembles Llull’s description of the hermit encyclopedist. Only the rhetorical valence has changed, from praise to blame. Foucault quotes Buffon’s critique imprecisely, adding an additional line that does not appear in the original text: “there is no description here, only legend.”149 He then comments that, if the texts of Aldrovandi and his contemporaries were legenda, literally, “things to be read” (it is curious how useful this misquotation proves to be), this was not that they [the Renaissance naturalists] preferred the authority of men to the precision of the unprejudiced eye, but that nature, in itself, is an

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unbroken tissue of words and signs, of accounts and characters, of discourse and forms. . . . To know an animal or a plant, or any terrestrial thing whatever, is to gather together the whole dense layer of signs with which it may have been covered; it is to rediscover also all the constellations of forms from which they derive their value as heraldic signs. . . . Knowledge therefore consisted in relating [language to language]; in restoring the great, unbroken plain of words and things; in making everything speak.150

I have argued above that, indeed, natural history writing involves bringing language into contact with language. But there is one important difference between my argument and Foucault’s, and it is revealed by the way Foucault elides Buffon’s fatras or “hotchpotch,” which, aside from its negative connotations, does accurately describe preclassical compendia. The “unbroken tissue” that Foucault evokes is misleading; it occludes the complexity of these compilations. In a text filled with citations from two millennia of writing, the “tissue of words and signs,” the “plain of words and things,” is never “unbroken.” There are, between all those citations, interfaces, disjunctions, overlaps, and interstices. As we shall see in part 3, these disjunctions are due to the kind of shis in discourse and episteme that Foucault taught us to recognize but failed in this instance to see since they took place long before the Renaissance. Ramon Llull’s parable of the Libre de plasent visió expresses the aspiration of his contemporaries to create a coherent encyclopedia out of an excess of different kinds of signs, an aspiration that Vincent of Beauvais discovered could never be fully realized. In the end, it is the lion page from the Liber floridus, with its blocks of text oddly and diversely angled, that best represents the imperfect juxtaposition of citations that these encyclopedists produced. Nevertheless, all the encyclopedic experiments of the twelh and thirteenth centuries constitute traces of the scholastic archive, and I have drawn on these and other texts to sketch the outlines of that archive. We have discovered that it is quite as variegated as Foucault’s description of the archive in The Archaeology of Knowledge would lead us to expect and considerably more variegated than the one that the French philosopher aributes to the preclassical age in The Order of Things. But Foucault’s lacunary readings are a cautionary tale: archaeology becomes historical fiction when the archaeologist fails to read complete texts aentively. We must now begin this reading.

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The Order of the Encyclopedia

In chapter 1, we saw that the scholastics responded to the proliferation of books by privileging paradigms of order, which they elaborated in glossae on ancient texts and exploited when planning libraries or encyclopedias. Such schemas worked beer in theory than in practice. In the end, it was quixotic, this aempt to establish an order for all knowledge that carried more meaning than, say, the received order of language (the alphabet) and could also (unlike some of the subtler philosophical musings) structure a material archive. Nonetheless, their struggles allowed the encyclopedists to experience what Foucault would have called order in its primary state—that is, it showed them that order can be an abstraction or an aspiration, beyond any individual realization of it, and that those diverse realizations are oen arbitrary, inadequate, or flawed.1 The purpose of the three chapters that follow is to analyze the solutions to or dramatizations of the problem of encyclopedic order in three texts: Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum maius, Ramon Llull’s Arbor scientiae, and Jean de Meun’s continuation of the Roman de la Rose. These chapters will consider, not only in what order the objects of knowledge are treated (why that order was chosen, what difficulties it presents, and whether the encyclopedist overcomes them), but also, more fundamentally, the structure of the hermeneutic system in which their claim to knowledge is grounded, with its possible distortions and incoherencies. They show that encyclopedic order depended on rhetorical practices (narrative, metaphor)

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but that the paradigms thus created were only partially adequate to structure the eclectic knowledge of the scholastics. Because these three texts have never before been juxtaposed in a study such as this, I owe the reader some preliminary explanation of their relation to each other. From the perspective of genre, only the Speculum maius constitutes an encyclopedic florilegium. It, along with several other texts of the period, established the horizon of expectations that thirteenth-century readers would have had for the genre. The Arbor scientiae and the Roman de la Rose both challenge this horizon by wedding the encyclopedia to other genres. Ramon Llull eliminates much of the disorder endemic to the florilegium by eschewing direct citation and imposing an ideological coherence on his material that equals— perhaps even exceeds—that of the summa. At the same time, the indirections and obscurity of his description of the world replicate the difficult verbal figures of troubadour song, giving his prose text certain lyric overtones. Jean de Meun, on the other hand, ironically parodies encyclopedic disorder and cacophony in a verse romance that owes its form and modes of expression to early old French romance, to the prosimetrum, and—again—to courtly lyric. Alternatively, we can configure these three texts according to their dominant hermeneutics. The Speculum maius represents what I shall call a horizontal encyclopedia, privileging literal meaning, the surfaces of the things of this world, in all their variety and plethoric extension. The objects it treats are organized into a narrative succession, a nonhierarchical form that links objects without relating them to each other symbolically. The text is justified by the certainty that those objects also signify at other levels (allegorically, tropologically), but the encyclopedia does not elaborate those meanings. The Arbor scientiae inverts that model, creating a vertical encyclopedia that privileges symbolic function over surface description, the unity of the signified over the diversity of signifiers, the next world over this one. While the Speculum maius is profoundly centrifugal, its organizational paradigm barely adequate to link all its diverse objects, the Arbor scientiae maintains an almost impossibly perfect, hierarchical structure, but only at the cost of evacuating much of the diversity of the things of the world. For its part, the Roman de la Rose follows neither the horizontal nor the vertical axis. Jean’s peculiar combination of genres shows how the disordering properties of poetry and of desire work against the very order and symbolism on which the encyclopedic genre as book of the world—and knowledge itself—is predicated. In this sense, the text treated in the third in this sequence of chapters could be understood to deconstruct the epistemological premises of both horizontal and vertical encyclopedias. It could be considered diagonal.

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Narrative and Natural History Vincent of Beauvais’s Ordo juxta Scripturam

Overview Vincent of Beauvais compiled the Speculum maius over several decades, working in the various libraries of the Île-de-France, and perhaps traveling farther.1 He was a friend of the Cistercians, with whom he spent much of his time, but he worked at the behest of his Dominican superiors, who wanted to have at their disposal an up-to-date compendium of knowledge in all disciplines, in order to remedy the perceived failings of the small libraries in their new provincial houses.2 The Dominicans cautiously supported the use of Aristotelian philosophy, and their most eminent members (chief among them Thomas Aquinas) were engaged in the project of reconciling Aristotelian thought with Christian theology—and pointing out places in which a reconciliation was impossible. Vincent incorporated such material into his encyclopedia as it came available. But his institutional and intellectual alliances were not exclusively religious. Early on, his project gained the support of King Louis IX of France, who became interested in the historical portion of the text.3 Therefore, one could hardly imagine a more officially sanctioned encyclopedia than this one, representing as it does the interests of both the mendicant and the monastic orders as well as those of the secular powers. And the long years of labor resulted in an erudite, useful, and infinitely fascinating anthology that earned instant and enduring success among medieval readers. But Vincent was never able to complete 95

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it. His growing ambitions, his interest in the latest writings of the university doctors, his discovery of new historical, scientific, and poetic sources buried in various libraries: all led to the continual expansion of an apparently limitless encyclopedia. At his death, the text had reached a staggering 3.25 million words,4 far more than could be copied into a single codex. In its manuscript realizations, a full set of the Speculum maius required as many as ten weighty tomes.5 The text’s length and state of incompletion may explain why scholars today sometimes neglect it in favor of the more contained florilegium of Bartholomeus Anglicus. Without explaining exactly what he finds unappealing about the Speculum maius, Le Goff seems to speak for a number of scholars when he writes: “We are all persuaded that it is, in a certain way, the great encyclopedia of the thirteenth century; even if it is not the most intellectually appealing, it is the principal one.”6 There seems to be consensus that the De proprietatibus rerum had a greater impact, especially on poets, than the Speculum maius, and a comparison of numbers of surviving manuscripts does indicate that the former was copied even more frequently than the laer.7 Yet, despite its great interest and appeal, the De proprietatibus rerum offers a much briefer prologue, in which Bartholomeus has lile to say about how he has gone about his work and why. And the text of the Franciscan’s encyclopedia is devoted almost entirely to natural history.8 The Speculum maius is the only Latin encyclopedia of the century to include, in addition to natural history, extended treatments of psychology, the liberal and mechanical arts, and political, ecclesiastical, and literary history. Vincent’s compilation is, indeed, the principal encyclopedia its time, so we must ask whether the text’s problems are not also the problems of medieval intellectual endeavor in general, which do not come to light in the briefer, less ambitious encyclopedias precisely because their authors set limits that Vincent did not. This approach allows us to appreciate the Speculum maius, flaws and all, as fully part of the encyclopedic movement anterior and contemporary to it, rather than as some sort of enormous anomaly, a monster lowering over scholastic encyclopedism. To see this text as one that expressed the intellectual tendencies of its time is also to understand why it was admired by many medieval readers and why it continued to be read, copied, and cited throughout the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. In my view, Vincent’s is the most challenging but for the same reasons the most revealing of the thirteenthcentury Latin encyclopedias. Moreover, its discussion of the trivium makes it the only one to offer a language and a framework for its own critique as text

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at the same time that it provides an encyclopedic foundation for later poetic texts that engage encyclopedism as a textual practice. Most important, Vincent’s decades of work afforded him ample time to meditate on and experiment with encyclopedic organization, trying and rejecting the models provided by other writers until, in an enigmatic gesture of both conservatism and innovation, he finally seled on a paradigm borrowed, not from another encyclopedia at all, but from scriptural narrative. In his practice, compilatio, glossa, and ordo are fused. The Speculum maius unfolds according to the progression from creation, to fall, redemption, and re-creation. Because I appreciate Vincent’s innovations in this domain differently from the other scholars who have studied this text, I wish to devote the present chapter to the topic of his final organizational model. Although it has been characterized as chronological or historical (in the exegetical or theological sense), I shall argue that these terms do not fully describe the nature of the paradigm that binds the various specula into one and that a clearer understanding reveals a closer connection than has been realized between Vincent’s work and vernacular encyclopedias that assume a narrative organization or frame and that engage in rhetorical invention. The continuity between the Speculum maius and texts such as the Roman de la Rose or the Libre de meravelles becomes more evident if we understand Vincent’s terms historia and narratio (or enarratio) as referring at one and the same time to exegetical practice and rhetorical invention, in the kind of conflation that Copeland has described.9 Since one of the roles of the encyclopedia was to aid in the preparation of sermons, it should come as no surprise that the sermon’s combination of exegesis and invention, which takes Augustine’s De doctrina christiana as its theoretical basis, can also be identified in the preachers’ source text, similarly inspired by the De doctrina. In sum, a reconsideration of the global organizational model of the Speculum maius and of the terms that Vincent uses to describe it allows us to locate the encyclopedia at the intersection between the genres of biblical commentary, historiography, and sermon, where interpretation and re-creation play equal roles.

From the Alphabet to Scripture Vincent’s multiple revisions have been the subject of fruitful studies by scholars such as Serge Lusignan, Monique Paulmier-Foucart, Hans Voorbij, Marie-Christine Duchenne, and, most recently, Eva Albrecht.10 By comparing the text of the various surviving manuscripts, these scholars have

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been able to demonstrate the successive stages that the Speculum maius went through. The encyclopedia appears to have begun as a sequence of articles on the virtues and vices, history, and natural history, and Albrecht has identified this version in a manuscript now at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.11 Vincent then expanded the text into a bipartite encyclopedia, with an eclectic Speculum naturale, which covers natural history, sin and the vices, and the arts and sciences and is followed by the first version of the Speculum historiale. The Naturale portion of the bipartite encyclopedia survives in only two manuscripts, both at the Bibliothèque royale in Brussels; these were the object of Paulmier-Foucart’s early work.12 The large majority of manuscripts represent a later, tripartite encyclopedia. A revised Speculum naturale covers almost exclusively natural history; Albrecht has shown that this stage of the Naturale is represented by two, slightly different recensions, of which the earlier was most widely diffused.13 A new Speculum doctrinale, intervening between the Naturale and the Historiale, was intended to contain a treatment of all the arts, although Vincent never finished it. The Historiale still covers the same material as in the original encyclopedia, but this final speculum was in fact constantly expanding, and a number of further versions survive, of which the final one was the most widely diffused.14 Toward the end of his life, Vincent appears to have initiated the project of a quadripartite work that would include, between the Doctrinale and the Historiale, a Speculum morale taking account of sin, the vices, and similar subjects omied from the tripartite work. However, we do not know how much work he might have done on this new speculum, and the Morale that we have today, which had very lile diffusion in the Middle Ages, is mainly the work of anonymous Dominicans ca. 1300.15 It is easy to understand why Vincent would never have found the time to make much progress with the Morale or even complete the Doctrinale: he could not stop tinkering with the Naturale and (especially) the Historiale, reshaping or expanding them to accommodate new sources that he had discovered, whether in the darkening leaves of an ancient book or on the fair new parchment of a Parisian bookseller. How, then, are these successive iterations of the Speculum maius to be connected to Vincent’s evolving reflections on encyclopedic order? For the answer to this question, we must return to the prologue, where he recounts his experiments. He here implies that he began with a global paradigm based on alphabetical order, which was becoming more and more popular in scholarly milieux because it facilitated the rapid location of a given subject. But he eventually finds this organization unsatisfactory because it obscures the “totam . . . rerum naturam” and the “ordinem historie totius non parum

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utilitatis vel pulchritudinis habentem” [the whole nature of things and the order of all history, which possesses no small utility and beauty] (LA ch. 3). Thus, despite the tendency of the Speculum maius in its manuscript tradition to fragment, to be broken down into smaller pieces, at its moment of origin we find its author expressing his appreciation for the natural form and order of the whole and rejecting any organization that would impose artificial or arbitrary divisions. Nevertheless, recognizing the utility of an ordering principle that can be applied uniformly to any group of entries, Vincent plans for a table summarizing the contents to be placed at the beginning of each book and for analytic tables, probably alphabetical, to be appended to the entire work. He wants to maintain at once the myriad, complex logical relations between the entries in the text itself and the facility of locating any one entry within the whole, “ne forte casso labore singulas revolvendo paginas in incertum vagari incipiat” [lest perchance, with pointless labor turning the pages one by one, the reader should begin to wander uncertainly].16 These are not entirely Vincent’s own words. He has borrowed them from Hugh of Saint-Victor, who had said more or less exactly the same thing of the importance of mastering the seven liberal arts by commiing much material to memory.17 Vincent’s reuse of the image of a reader thumbing desperately through a manuscript—in order to justify his inclusion of paratextual material that will make it unnecessary for readers to memorize much of anything—is eloquent testimony to the degree to which readerly practices had changed from the twelh century to the thirteenth.18 Vincent himself seems to have completed a summary alphabetical table for the Historiale but not for the other specula, and it was also this final speculum that was the object of Jean Hautfuney’s more comprehensive early fourteenth-century alphabetical table, which was something of a hit in the later Middle Ages. This laer remains useful, not only because it serves as a reference tool, but also because it projects some shadow of what the Speculum maius would have become if Vincent had relied exclusively on alphabetical order. The proximity of the most disparate of items in Jean’s table is dizzying. In the section on the Ls, for example, the list moves from “Lancea Christi in Antiochia invenitur” [The spear of Christ is found in Antioch] to a sequence of names (Lanfranci, Landegravus . . .) to “Languor est a corpore percidendus” [Languor is to be eliminated from the body] and then “Lanificium invenitur” [The weaving of wool is developed]. Hence, Paulmier-Foucart concludes that, though Jean’s table testifies to the value of alphabetical order, “it is equally evident that this method for approaching the material is reductive and that it cannot take account of all the dialectical

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relations which compose the richness and the unity of the Speculum maius.”19 Clearly, this encyclopedia was not conceived simply as a reference work. It was also—even primarily, if we consider the distinctly secondary position of the various indices and tables, divided up within or appended to the larger text—conceived as a work to be read sequentially, whose organization is to be thought through, contemplated as significant in and of itself. Nevertheless, the organizations implicit in the encyclopedias of Thomas of Cantimpré or Bartholomeus Anglicus do not suit Vincent’s purposes either because of his ambition to expand the encyclopedia from a list of virtues and vices (his original idea) or of objects in the world (the model used by his contemporaries) to a full treatment of subjects that do not break down easily into small constituent units or fit into a hierarchical frame: theology, human psychology, and—the subject that both Thomas and Bartholomeus omit—the arts and sciences. Such an expansion covers more thoroughly the breadth of thirteenth-century learning, but it also creates new problems for the encyclopedist. The human reason, for instance, is not made up of discrete parts that can be treated in succession. Hence the appearance of what Paulmier-Foucart calls “scholastic” chapter titles (beginning with words such as qualiter, quid, and utrum [in what manner, what, whether]), particularly in the sections relating to theology and psychology, which may be contrasted to the “denominative” chapter titles traditional in the encyclopedia and dependent on substantives that can be organized into lists (De buffone, De gameleone, De rana [Concerning the toad, Concerning the chameleon, Concerning the frog]).20 This new method of assigning chapter titles liberates the encyclopedia from the denominative list, creating the possibility of more complex sequences, and we should not underestimate the significance of this modification of the genre. Vincent’s encyclopedia can be thought of as a “threshold” work, like that of Isidore, who also found it necessary to adapt the preexisting encyclopedic genre (à la Pliny), rendered impracticable in its prior form by new developments in Christian thought (Augustinian hermeneutics). Like Isidore, Vincent opens up the encyclopedia to a broader discussion of human beings in their relation to God, to creation, and to the human community.21 In fact, Vincent cites Isidore in chapter 7 of the prologue as one of the sources of his encyclopedic model, and passages borrowed from the Etymologiae proliferate, particularly in the Speculum naturale.22 Yet, despite the reference to Isidore, Vincent does not follow his global order for the material.23 Isidore does seem to be behind some more localized arrangements: his division of the animal world into a number of different categories may

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have inspired Vincent’s divisions, much more numerous than those we find in other thirteenth-century encyclopedias.24 But Isidore seems to have been significant to Vincent in a more general way: the reference in the prologue makes it clear that Vincent has imitated Isidore’s practice of treating each branch of learning briefly: Isidore “in libro Ethimologiarum inter cetera, de quibus agit, et de unaquaque scientia pauca breviter tangit” [in the book of Etymologies, among all the other things that he treats, Isidore touches briefly on each of the sciences individually] (LA ch. 7). Vincent’s desire to treat all the disciplines also owes a great deal to the two most prominent Victorines, whom he likewise cites here. As we have already seen, Hugh set out a schema of the disciplines in the Didascalicon; Richard of Saint-Victor established a similar one in the Liber exceptionum (ca. 1153–62).25 In his prologue, Vincent cites Hugh in particular because he “scientiam universaliter dividit ac subdividit, singularumque materiam breviter describit” [performs a universal division and subdivision of knowledge and briefly describes the maer of each discipline] (LA ch. 7). Vincent will use the Victorine division of the arts and sciences in his Speculum doctrinale.26 However, neither Isidore nor the Victorines provide the kind of universal paradigm that Vincent seeks. Crucially, Isidore failed to make a clear place for history as a branch of learning or to articulate its connection to the other branches, yet history was one of the privileged subjects of the Speculum maius. The Victorines, for their part, were among the vanguard of historical thinkers during the early scholastic period. Nevertheless, they understood history as an exegetical practice and therefore as a component of theological study; it did not receive a place apart in the schema set out by Hugh in the Didascalicon, and it is treated, not in book 2, where that schema is explained, but in books 5 and 6, devoted to the manner of reading Scripture.27 This interweaving of theology and history made an extensive survey of the laer topic difficult to fit into an encyclopedic paradigm. Moreover, the Victorines payed scant aention to natural history, though Hugh did make a place for it in the category of physics. Vincent therefore has recourse to yet another paradigm, that of the five modes by which the creation of the world may be described, as Honorius Augustodunensis (ca. 1080–ca. 1157) set them out in his Speculum vel imago mundi. Vincent identifies this text as a precursor for his title, though not the source of his work’s structure (LA ch. 3). He states the role of the Imago mundi more clearly in the first chapter of his first version of the Speculum naturale, where he cites at greater length Honorius’s description of the five modes, subtly altering the text in order beer to accommodate history. This chapter has been identified as the first complete plan of

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the Speculum maius, originally placed at the beginning of the bipartite work, and remaining in the same place in the tripartite work, where an additional explanation follows it.28 Honorius’s original text reads: Creatio mundi .v. modis scribitur, [Primo] quo ante tempora saecularia universitas mundi in mente divina concipitur. Que conceptio archetipus mundus dicitur. Unde scribitur: “Quod est factum in ipso vita erat” [Ioh. 1:3–4]. Secundo cum ad exemplar archetipi hic sensibilis mundus in materia creatur, sicut legitur: “Qui manet in eternum creavit omnia insimul” [Eccli. 18:1]. Tercio cum per species et formas sex diebus hic mundus formatur, sicut scribitur: “Sex diebus fecit Deus opera sua bona valde” [Ex. 20:9, Gen. 1:31]. Quarto cum unum ab alio, ut puta homo ab homine, pecus a pecude, arbore unumquodque de semine sui generis nascitur, sicut dicitur: “Pater meus usque modo operatur” [Ioh. 5:17]. Quinto cum adhuc mundus innovabitur, sicut scribitur: “Ecce nova facio omnia” [Apoc. 21:5].29 [The creation of the world is described according to five modes, First, how the whole of the world is conceived in the divine mind before the beginning of worldly time. This conception is called the archetypal world, about which it is wrien: “What was made had its life in him” (John 1:3–4). Second, how this sensible world is created in maer to conform to the exemplar of the archetype, as one reads: “He who abides in eternity created all things at once” (Ecclus. 18:1). Third, how the world is formed in its species and forms in six days, as it is wrien: “In six days God made his very good works” (conflation of Exod. 20:9 and Gen. 1:31). Fourth, how one thing is born from another, as for example man from man, beast from beast, [tree] from tree, every one individually from the seed of its kind, as it is said: “My father worketh hitherto” (John 5:17). Fih, how the world will furthermore be renewed, as it is wrien: “Behold, I make all things new” (Rev. 21:5).]

Vincent reworks this:

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Mundi factura quinque modis describitur. Dicitur enim primo modo mundus archetypus, id est principalis et omnium exemplaris, secundum quod ante tempora saecularia universitas creature in mente divina fuisse legitur. Secundo modo dicitur mundus primitus exemplatus, scilicet cum ad exemplum archetypi angelus, et hujus sensibilis mundi materia creata est ab initio. Tertio modo, cum per species et formas varias mundus iste visibilis formatus describitur. Quarto modo, secundum quod, pulchritudine temporali cursum suum continue peragente, unumquodque ex sui generisa semine nascitur. Quinto modo, secundum quod mundus iste visibilis, in fine temporum ab hac specie corruptibili in incorruptibilem transmutatus innovabitur. Mundus archetypus ipse est filius Dei, cum Patre et Spiritu Sancto unus Deus, hic est Dei sapientia, et ratio, et verbum coaeternum,b de quo scriptum est: “Quod factum est, in ipso vita erat” [Ioh. 1:3–4], id est vivebat, sicut arca vel domus praeconcepta vivit in mente artificis, antequam fiat. De secundo scriptum est: “Qui vivit in aeternum creavit omnia simul” [Eccli. 18:1]. De tertio scriptum est: “Qui fecit mundum de materia informi sive invisa, id est invisibili” [Sap. 11:18]. De quarto scriptum est: “Praeterit figura hujus mundi” [I Cor. 7:31]. De quinto scriptum est: “Novos caelos et novam terram expectamus, in quibus justitia habitat” [II Petr. 3:13]. (SN 1.1)30 [The making of the world is described according to five modes. Namely, by the first mode, the archetypal world, that is, the original and the paern of all things, concerning which we read that, before worldly time, the whole creaturely world is read in the divine mind. By the second mode we speak of the world first modeled, that is, when the angel according to the model of the archetype and the material of this sensible world were created from the beginning. By the third mode, this visible world, now formed, is described in its myriad species and forms. By the fourth mode, we speak of how each individual thing is born out of the seed of its kind in the beauty of time continually following its course. By the fih, we speak of how this visible world will be renewed at the end of time, transformed from this corruptible species into an incorruptible. The world archetype is the Son of God, one God with the Father and the Holy Ghost, that is the Wisdom of God, and the Reason, and the Coeternal Word, concerning whom it is wrien: “What was made had its life in him” (John 1:3–4), that is, it lived, just as the chest or the house lives preconceived in the mind of the crasman, before it comes to be. Of the second it is wrien: “He who abides in eternity created all things at once” (Ecclus. 18:1). Of the third: “He who made the world of unformed or

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unseen—that is, invisible—maer” (paraphrase of Wisd. of Sol. 11:18). Of the fourth: “The fashion of this world passeth away” (1 Cor. 7:31). Of the fih: “We look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness” (2 Pet. 3:13).]

Paulmier-Foucart draws particular aention to Vincent’s alteration of the description of the fourth mode and his replacement of the scriptural passage that accompanies it. By emphasizing historical succession, Vincent shows his Victorine inclinations, displacing the original description of biological regeneration, which Honorius had balanced against the description of eschatological regeneration in the fih mode. To this historical succession Vincent aaches an aesthetic value, however fleeting—“pulchritudo,” which motivates the new biblical reference, to the “figura hujus mundi.” Or, perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that the fleeting quality of time constitutes its beauty. The valorization of history creates an opening for the Speculum historiale, which Vincent will make explicit when revising this chapter, as we shall see below.31 To Paulmier-Foucart’s insightful commentary I would add that the new scriptural basis for the fih mode complements this alteration by replacing the direct words of God at the moment of the renewal of heaven and earth, when the tears of the redeemed will be dried and death and grief will be no more (Rev. 21:4), with the words of still-fallen humanity, that is, by repositioning the reader within this passing, beautiful but oen sad human history, rather than aer it. The re-creation of heaven and earth will play a more minor role in the Speculum maius than that, perhaps, imagined by Honorius when he set out his five modes. This elision of the fih mode and the emphasis on the limitation of human knowledge to the present world, defined by the passage of time, become more evident when Vincent revises the chapter, adding the following explanation:32 Juxta hunc ordinem Deo auxiliante intendimus procedere, maximeque in praesenti volumine [Speculo naturale] mundi descriptionia juxta tertium modum, hoc est de variis rerumb speciebus, quas mundus iste sensibilis continet, describendis, diligenter insistere. . . . Temporalem . . . mundi pulchritudinem ab initio usque ad finem in opere illo plene digessimus, quod Speculum historiale vocari decrevimus. Quapropter in hujus voluminis capite, Deo juvante, de ipso archetypo, et etiam de mundo secundario, videlicet angelis, et prima materia primitus exemplata pauca breviter perstringemus. Et postea mundanarum specierum diligenter varietate descripta, tandem de

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temporalibus mundi curriculis, et ejus sine similiter nonnulla succincte percurremus. (SN 1.1)33 [With God’s help I intend to proceed according to this order, and in the present volume (the Speculum naturale) I intend carefully to describe the world according to the third mode, that is, according to the varied species of things to be described, which this sensible world contains. . . . I have compiled an ample treatment of the temporal beauty of this world from its beginning to its end in that work which I have decided to call the Speculum historiale. Therefore, at the beginning of the present volume, I shall, God willing, first set out a few words about the archetype and also the secondary world, namely the angels, and the primal maer. Next, aer having carefully described the variety of the world’s species, I shall end by running through the temporal courses of the world with no lile concision.]

Yet even the bipartite Speculum maius is uerly out of proportion with the paradigm of the five modes. The rigid categorization of material that Honorius’s model requires creates an uneven distribution: brief treatments of the first, second, and fih modes but extended discussion of the third and fourth. Such a lack of balance between the categories recalls the imbalances of the De naturis rerum and De proprietatibus rerum, once again illustrating the difficulty of parceling out knowledge into a set of fixed categories, as any schematic paradigm requires. Moreover, as scholars have noted, the inclusion of a discussion of the arts and sciences, and of sin and the vices, in the original version of the Naturale poses an additional problem, one that Vincent’s creation of a Speculum doctrinale will exacerbate: the five modes provide no place for these subjects.34 The weakness of this schema, compared to those of Isidore and the Victorines, is its failure to take account of the human arts and sciences—one might even say, its failure to account for the human at all, for Honorius’s emphasis rests on the various deployments of creation largely without regard to the human response to them or to human agency. Yet a subject such as psychology, which Vincent was the first encyclopedist to treat at length, is specifically human.35 Here, again, Vincent’s replacement of the biblical citation accompanying the fih mode is significant, for it indicates his desire to infuse the modes with a more human element. The modification of the descriptions of the third and fih modes complements the new citation by implicitly locating a human being who sees and interprets the world, a change whose significance will become more evident in chapter 6.

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Such revisions do not, however, sufficiently remodel Honorius’s categories to suit Vincent’s purposes. Therefore, Vincent has recourse to another model, one that complements that of Honorius while creating a more balanced distribution of the material over the three parts.36 Vincent explains his final choice in the prologue: Consideratis omnibus competentiorem procedendi modum nullatenus repperi quam istum, quem pre cunctis elegi, videlicet ut juxta ordinem Sacre Scripture, primo de creatore, postea de creaturis, postea quoque de lapsu et reparatione hominis, deinde vero de rebus gestis juxta seriem temporum suorum ordinate dissererem. (LA ch. 3) [All things considered, I have come upon no beer way of proceeding than that which I have chosen before all others, that is, that I should treat sequentially, according to the order of holy Scripture, first the Creator, then the creatures, then also the fall and renewing of man, and certainly, in the end, the deeds accomplished according to their temporal succession.]

The creation of the world will justify the Naturale and lend it an overall organization, the six days of creation (see table 2). The necessity that human beings accommodate themselves to the exigencies of their fallen state will justify the Doctrinale, which will deal with all the liberal and mechanical arts. The succession of human history from Adam and Eve to the final judgment, the maer of the Historiale, will make the link between Genesis and Revelation by supplementing the historical books of the Bible with everything that has taken place since (the fall of the Roman Empire, the rule of the Merovingian, Carolingian, and Capetian kings, the lives of numerous saints, etc.). Vincent has finally found a model broad enough to organize all the maer in his Speculum maius. Moreover, this use of Scripture solves the problem of the human absence from Honorius’s five modes. For Scripture, as revelation, is the preeminent text mediating between God and the human being. It is a model of communication, and it offers accounts of human action and subjective experience. Vincent’s final model shows the influence of the increasingly ambitious historiographic writing of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries, particularly Helinand of Froidmont’s universal chronicle (early thirteenth century). Curiously, by reemphasizing the link between the encyclopedia and Scripture, this new organization also brings us back to a period even before Isidore, to the very origins of the Christian encyclopedia in Augus-

Table 2. Hexameral organization of the Speculum naturale (Douai version) Book 1

On the first creation of the world, first God, then prime maer, then angels

Gen. 1:2

Book 2

On the sensible world and then the work of the first day of creation, light

Gen. 1:3–5

Book 3

On the work of the second day of creation, the firmament and the heavens

Gen. 1:6–8

Book 4

On the other parts of the world, fire and air

Book 5

On the work of the third day, bodies and kinds of water

Book 6

On earth

Book 7

On minerals and metals

Book 8

On stones

Book 9

On the germination of the earth, plants in general, then common plants

Book 10

On domestic plants

Book 11

On seeds, grains, and juices

Book 12

On trees, first generally, then trees that grow in the wild

Gen. 1:9–10

Gen. 1:11–13

Book 13

On domestic trees, especially fruit trees

Book 14

On the fruits of trees and their juices

Book 15

On the work of the fourth day, the lights and signs of the heavens, and time

Gen. 1:14–19 Gen. 1:20–23

Book 16

On the work of the fih day, the flying creatures

Book 17

On the fish and marine monsters

Book 18

On the work of the sixth day, the land animals, first large domestic animals

Book 19

On beasts

Book 20

On other animals, that is, serpents, reptiles, and worms

Book 21

On the nature of animals, their parts and members

Book 22

On nutrition, motion, reproduction, and bodily fluids

Book 23

On the creation of human beings, and first on the human soul

Book 24

On the powers of the vegetative soul

Book 25

On the powers of the sensitive soul

Book 26

On the impression of sense data upon the soul

Gen. 1:24–25

Gen. 1:26–30

Book 27

On the noncorporeal powers of the soul

Book 28

On the formation and nature of the human body

Book 29

On all the things that God created in six days, and from which he rested on the seventh

Gen. 1:31–2.3

Book 30

On the first state of human beings, Paradise, the first sin, and its punishment

Gen. 2:8–3:24

Book 31

On human reproduction in the state of sin, other things about the human body, and monstrous races

Book 32

On the places inhabited by humans and the ages through which the generations run, to the end

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tine’s writings on Scripture: the programmatic De doctrina christiana (which Vincent indeed cites in the prologue) and also, more indirectly but more fundamentally, the symphonic final book of the Confessions, where Augustine likens Scripture to the firmament and interprets the order of creation as a prefiguration of God’s salvific intervention in human history.37 This does not necessarily mean that the scriptural paradigm is somehow vestigial, the vague memory of the earlier encyclopedic tradition. In fact, what Vincent is doing here is something new. Despite the exegetical position of the encyclopedia as Augustine had set it out, the major medieval encyclopedists had not aligned their texts with Scripture to the extent that Vincent does by imitating its narrative order. And I should like to underline the fact that the scriptural model appears, not at the beginning, but at the end of his process of experimentation. That is, all possibilities considered, Vincent finds this sort of order superior to and more refined than any other paradigm. It is supple, as schematic categories like those of Honorius are not, and it can accommodate clusters of information that would imbalance another kind of structure. It can also accommodate multiple genres of text (psalms, proverbs) by framing and creating relations between them. Thus, by aligning his encyclopedia more closely with Scripture than his predecessors had done, Vincent provides the most authoritative of justifications for the meaningful juxtaposition of diverse kinds of texts. It is not possible to say of the Speculum maius that it is just a compilation because it takes as its model a text whose integrity and meaningful order had been argued by religious scholars for centuries. At the same time, Vincent sets out to demonstrate that all human knowledge, as represented by the medieval library, can be contained within a single book, the Bible.38 As evidence, we have only to cite the fact that the encyclopedia and Scripture share the same point of commencement and the same point of ending. Genesis and Revelation provide the bookends of the library. These bookends have great significance for Vincent: they give him a way to contain his text, but, more crucially, they also derive from the ideology behind it. Vincent states in the prologue that his work has been inspired, not only by the practical problem posed by the proliferation of books, but also by an eschatological one: Videbam preterea, juxta Danielis prophetiam, temporibus nostris non tantummodo secularium lierarum, verum etiam divinarum scripturarum ubique multiplicatam esse scientiam, omnesque precipue fratres nostros

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assidue sacrorum librorum historicis ac mysticis expositionibus insuper et obscurioribus questionibus enodandis insistere. (LA ch. 2) [Furthermore, I saw, as in the prophecy of Daniel, that in our times the knowledge, not only of worldly leers, but also of the holy Scriptures, was everywhere increased, and all our brothers, especially, applied themselves indefatigably to literal and spiritual expositions of the holy books and to the untangling of very obscure questions.]

The reference is to the prophecy of the end of time in the twelh chapter of Daniel: Et in tempore illo salvabitur populus tuus omnis qui inventus fuerit scriptus in libro. Et multi de his qui dormiunt in terrae pulvere evigilabunt, alii in vitam aeternam, et alii in opprobrium ut videant semper. Qui autem docti fuerint, fulgebunt quasi splendor firmamenti; et qui ad justitiam erudiunt multos, quasi stellae in perpetuas aeternitates. Tu autem, Daniel, claude sermones, et signa librum usque ad tempus statutum; plurimi pertransibunt, et multiplex erit scientia. (Dan. 12:1–4) [And at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found wrien in the book. And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that instruct many in righteousness, as the stars forever and ever. But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time foreordained; many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.]

The prophecy dissociates the “multiplex . . . scientia,” one of the signs of the end of the world that Vincent identifies in Historiale 31.107,39 from the knowledge that makes a person doctus and hence, in this apocalyptic vision, resplendent. The opposition is tied up with a thematics of the book that anticipates the various books in Revelation: the one that Daniel must seal here in an act to which Vincent seems to be comparing his action of closing up human knowledge into a single volume40 and that anticipates the book of the seven seals in Revelation, which only the Lamb of God is worthy to open (Rev. 5:1–8:1), and the Book of Life (Rev. 20:12, 15). This book, too, could be compared to Vincent’s—at least, to the Speculum historiale, which similarly

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recounts the deeds of the dead. Thus, the implicit ties between the Speculum maius and the Bible multiply when we trace Vincent’s elliptical gestures toward Scripture. It may appear contradictory that Vincent should base his entire work on biblical order yet at the same time practice the utmost restraint in citing Scripture directly within the text of the encyclopedia. We find far more citations of such writers as Augustine and Isidore than of the Bible. This is not an oversight on Vincent’s part; it is quite the opposite, as he explains in the prologue. Aer stating that the citations in his text will be drawn from books of different levels of authority, he continues: Et in hiis omnibus excipio Sacram Paginam, olim a sanctis Prophetis et Apostolis Divino Spiritu indubitanter afflatis editam et conscriptam, de qua in hoc opere nichil penitus [volui]41 propter ipsius usum communem, sed nec ausus fui propter ipsorum Sacrorum Librorum reverentiam excerpere, nisi forte breviter percurrendo fundamentum historie. Sicut enim Scriptura Sacra precedit alias tempore, sic etiam dignitate. (LA ch. 11) [And I except from among all these the sacred page, once proclaimed and wrien down by the holy prophets and apostles surely breathed upon by the Holy Ghost. In this work, I wanted uerly nothing from Scripture to be excerpted, on account of its common use. Nor did I dare to excerpt from it on account of my reverence for their sacred books, except, on occasion, in briefly running through the foundations of history. Indeed, just as sacred Scripture precedes the other writings in time, so it also precedes them in dignity.]

It is, I suspect, because of the infrequency of scriptural citations, because of a certain tendency to skim over Vincent’s explanation in the prologue for the phenomenon, and because of the traditional concentration on the Historiale rather than the Naturale that scholars have neglected to discuss the implications of the fundamental relation between the Speculum maius and Scripture and the sometimes mediating, sometimes disruptive role that Augustine’s commentaries in particular play in bringing the two together. It is true that the order resulting from Vincent’s final disposition of material reflects a series of before-and-aer relations that seem to invite the characterization chronological or historical, especially when one considers his evident obsession with history and his contact with a royal court very much interested in the subject. Paulmier-Foucart describes Vincent’s final order as

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chronological, though she expands the concept to include what existed before and what will exist aer the running of the course of time. Moreover, she implies that temporal progression governs the Naturale, as it does the Historiale, though in a different form, for, as she writes, the passage between the Speculum naturale and the Speculum historiale is one “from an astral to a human time.”42 In this analysis Vincent’s final order may be represented as temporal succession. Lusignan, on the other hand, makes no clear distinction between the time that measures creation and that which followed it: “The time of the Historiale finds its origin in the six days of Genesis and the myth of the terrestrial paradise. The great moments of the drama of the loss of the primitive innocence launch the narrative of human time.”43 These descriptions imply that the scriptural model is in fact but an emblem, a metaphor for time, chronology, or history. The value of Paulmier-Foucart’s and Lusignan’s work has been to trace in the apparent chaos of the multiple manuscript versions the steps by which Vincent arrived at a conception of human history that was to earn him his lasting place in European intellectual culture. The reevaluation that I shall propose here builds on this work while paying close aention to passages (particularly in the Naturale) that these scholars have neglected. PaulmierFoucart’s and Lusignan’s implication that a chronological tie continues to bind the Naturale to the Historiale even aer the constitution of human history as an “autonomous object of exposition” implies the ultimate reconcilability of concepts of time expressed in the Naturale and in the Historiale. Yet my work on the Naturale has led me to identify a certain number of inconsistencies in Vincent’s explanations of his chosen order, inconsistencies that bear directly on the nature of time and history. These incline me away from a chronological description of his organization and inspire me to return to the scriptural paradigm as something other than an emblem for chronology. It is therefore necessary to consider more closely the exegetical position of the encyclopedia. (It is, aer all, the intersection between literal exegesis and the theological concept of history that has deflected scholarly aention from biblical narrative.) Thus, in the next section, I shall analyze the complex relation between the scriptural “leer,” theological “history,” and the Speculum maius.

Hexameron The encyclopedia and history (in the theological sense) are both outgrowths of patristic and medieval exegetical practice, and thus the tie between them

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seems evident. The Christian encyclopedia for which Vincent finds his justification in Augustine’s De doctrina christiana serves the purpose of elucidating the literal meanings of scriptural terms, providing the foundation necessary for spiritual interpretations. For most medieval writers, the terms liera and historia were “practically interchangeable,” as de Lubac demonstrates in his study of the four senses of Scripture.44 Hugh of Saint-Victor thus uses the word historia when speaking of literal exegesis: Hoc nimirum in doctrina fieri oportet ut videlicet prius historiam discas, et rerum gestarum veritatem a principio repetens, usque ad finem, quid gestum sit, a quibus gestum sit, et ubi gestum sit, diligenter memoriae commendes. Haec enim quatuor praecipue et in historia requirenda sit, persona, negotium, tempus et locus. Neque ego te perfecte subtilem posse fieri puto in allegoria nisi prius fundatus fueris in historia. (DS 6.3) [To be sure, in instruction you should first learn history, recalling the truth of the deeds accomplished from the beginning all the way to the end, diligently commiing to memory what was done, by whom, and where. And in history, these four things are especially to be found out: the person, the event, the time, and the place. Nor do I believe that you can become fully adept in allegorical exposition if you have not first been well prepared in history (literal exposition).]

Even more strikingly, Peter Comestor, whose Historia scholastica (ca. 1170) Vincent makes the primary link between the Speculum naturale text and that of Genesis 1 by frequently citing it at the beginning of his treatment of a new day of creation, uses historia for literal exegesis in his very title. Such a conflation comes about in part because of the association of the literal sense with the exterior, the surface of things, the visible, as opposed to a meaning that can be obtained only through intellection.45 This meant that the term’s semantic field intersected with that of history. “Historia ad apertam rerum gestarum narrationem pertinet et in superficie lierae continetur, sicque intelligitur, sicut legitur” [History pertains to the open narration of deeds, and it is contained in the surface of the leer. It is understood in just the way that it is read], Adam Scotus writes.46 The word historia itself was believed to be etymologically related to the verb of vision, according to (among others) Isidore, whom Vincent cites in his treatment of history as poetic genre in the Doctrinale: “Dicta autem Historia a potu historin, id est a videre vel cognoscere: apud veteres enim nemo conscribebat Historiam, nisi is qui interfuis-

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set, et ea que conscribenda essent vidisset” [History is said to derive from “historin,” that is, from the act of seeing or knowing. Among the ancients, indeed, no one wrote history unless he had been present at the event and had seen what he was to write] (SD 3.127).47 Hence, the famous formula for the four senses of Scripture can commence “liera gesta docet” [the leer teaches deeds],48 as if the leer related events exclusively; and Latin writers frequently used the formula historia fundamenta to refer to the initial comprehension of the literal sense of the biblical text. Certain biblical texts lacking a narrative form (proverbs, e.g.) were consequently thought to lack a literal sense. The term liera, de Lubac concludes, “is not in the least atemporal. . . . Divine revelation not only took place in time, over the course of history: revelation itself possesses an historical form.”49 If the encyclopedia is a genre based on the quest for the literal sense, then a historical form appears perfectly appropriate. In the Speculum naturale, however, such a link proves fragile, despite the focus on the creatures’ physical, visible properties in the entries devoted to them. For one thing, the sheer mass of material that must be organized alphabetically (the lists of creatures belonging to a particular category created on a given day) overwhelms the overall structure of the six days of creation as an original text of some six hundred words is virtually obliterated under the weight of a gloss of 1.25 million. The “historical” skeleton of the Naturale is further obscured because Vincent almost never cites the text of Genesis firsthand. The transitional moments between the works of one day and the next are narrated obliquely, in the opening few lines of individual books, by means of an incomplete and reworked citation of the Genesis text already integrated into a commentary, usually the Historia scholastica. The whole is introduced by a rubric indicating the name of the commentator, rather than the biblical source.50 And not all transitional moments are marked in this way; some are not marked by any biblical citation at all, except for a chapter title, “De opere n. diei” [Concerning the work of the x. day], and sometimes not even that, as for the fourth day, the subject of book 15. In this case, only the prose summary of the book that was generally included in the tables of chapter titles identifies the change of days. In the frequent instances where all these tables are placed at the beginning of the manuscript, a reader perusing the text itself would have only his or her personal memory of the biblical paradigm to indicate the historical progression. As the gloss takes on its own shape, the text that it expounds disappears. The original visual disposition of text and gloss, with the text at the center of the page, in large script, and the gloss arrayed about it in smaller script (as in fig. 2 above), is inverted, the

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text that is the object of commentary broken up and scaered through the gloss (which now occupies the center of the page), or relegated to a rubric, or absent entirely.51 The Genesis text, the historia or liera that the encyclopedia purports to follow and expound, like the Cheshire cat, fades away. It may seem that, as the leer recedes, only the chronological progression remains, a vestige of the scriptural model just sufficient to bind the parts of the Speculum maius together: this is precisely the implicit conclusion of other scholars. I have reservations about such a conclusion for two reasons. First, despite the near disappearance of the biblical text in this encyclopedia, we have already seen that Vincent specifically characterizes his global order, not as chronological or historical, but as “juxta ordinem Sacre Scripture,” and he explains his reticence in citing Scripture at the same time that he places it first in his hierarchy of authorities. This suggests that, however elusive, the liera retains all its privilege in the Speculum maius and cannot be reduced to chronological progression alone. Second, the degree to which the order of the Speculum maius can be considered chronological (i.e., based on temporal progression) is called into question early in the Naturale, for the participation of the six “days” of creation in time as we know it is not self-evident. It is, in my view, the controversy over the literal, “historical” sense of Genesis 1 that most seriously undermines the possibility of a historical connection between the Speculum naturale and the remainder of the Speculum maius. The discussion about the way the creation narrative should be understood is a venerable one and can be traced back to early Jewish commentators, such as Philo of Alexandria and Aristobulus of Paneas, and to such important patristic writers as Basil, Anselm, and Augustine (who wrote no fewer than four commentaries on the first chapter of Genesis).52 Vincent must address the problem in his ambitious second book, when discussing the exact nature of the first days. Paradoxically, these days preceded the creation of the celestial bodies, the moving lights by which we measure a day or any other unit of time (SN 2.15). Furthermore, one may wonder with Augustine how any form of time (in essence tied to the creature, who moves and changes) can measure the actions of an eternal being.53 The Bible provides no explanation. Moreover, as Augustine points out, though Genesis begins with the words in principio and proceeds to enumerate a creation spaced out over the course of six days, a verse from Ecclesiasticus, “Qui vivit in aeternum creavit omnia simul” [He who abides in eternity created all things at once] (18:1),54 seems to contradict this description. But Vincent must find an explanation for the day of creation because it is precisely the progression of days that structures

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the Speculum naturale. And he has rendered the six days even more problematic by beginning the Naturale with a discussion of Honorius’s modes. In this discussion, following his predecessor, he cites the Ecclesiasticus passage as justification for the second mode while eliminating Honorius’s reference to the six days as justification for the third. In the De Genesi ad lieram, Augustine proposes a solution to these problems that Vincent excerpts and summarizes in chapters 15–22 of his second book.55 The light that God separated from the darkness on the first day, before creating the sun or the other celestial bodies, was, not physical light, but the light of the spiritual, angelic intelligence, which recognized in one moment its own illumination and the universe of the creatures (SN 2.15, 19). Material creation took place at the same instant, following this spiritual creation, not temporally, but logically: Deus operatus est simul omnia, unde inciperent omnia tempora, praestans eis etiam ordinem non intervallis temporum, sed connexione causarum, ut ea, quae simul facta sunt, senario quoque illius diei numero praesentato perficerentur. Non itaque temporali, sed causali ordine prius facta est informis formabilisque materies, et spiritualis et corporalis, de quaa fieret, quod faciendum esset. (SN 2.29)56 [God accomplished all things at once, from which all the ages sprang. He gave them an order not according to the intervals of time but according to the linking of causes, so that those things which were done at one time might also be perfected by the six appearances of that day. It was thus according to a causal order, not a temporal one, that unformed and formable maer was first created, both spiritual and corporeal, from which might be fashioned what was to be fashioned.]

Thus creation took place “non in tempore, vel per tempora, sed in radice temporum” [not in time, or through time, but at the root of time] (SN 2.15). Augustine was not the first hexameral writer to propose the solution of simultaneous creation, which had been much baed about by the writers of the Alexandrian school, Clement of Alexandria and Origen, following the lead of the allegorical interpretation practiced by Philo and Aristobulus.57 As a consequence of this position, a clear distinction must be made between the succession of the six days and the temporal unfolding of the remainder of biblical narrative. Augustine elaborates this distinction in the pivotal fih

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book of the De Genesi ad lieram. Such a rupture in a literal commentary between Genesis 1 and what follows it breaks open the “historical” organization of the Speculum maius. The problem comes to the surface in Vincent’s aempt to respond to Augustine’s interpretation. Probably aware that his inclusion of the De Genesi ad lieram at this point complicates the structural principle of his his own text, the scholastic encyclopedist intervenes, aempting to adjudicate the contradictions of his sources. First, he juxtaposes Augustine’s interpretation to that of Jerome, Gregory, Bede, and “many others,” who accept the six days as days of twenty-four hours (chs. 23–24; Hugh of Saint-Victor, who also opposed Augustine’s position, may be included in this group).58 The brief summary of their positions that Vincent provides gives only an outline of possible responses to the problems that Augustine had raised, but Vincent nevertheless seems to consider these writers’ authority sufficiently weighty and, thus, announces his intention to follow this more “common” interpretation (SN 2.24). It is natural that an encyclopedist and writer for a general readership should prefer a commonly held interpretation to Augustine’s subtle and intricate explanation.59 However, Vincent also makes explicit another reason for preferring creation in time over creation “at the root” of time: despite its lesser intellectual rigor, the former allows the link between the six days of creation that shape the Naturale and the narrative of history that will shape the Historiale: “Hae duae expositiones Augustini, quia lierales sunt, fundamentum historiae non auferunt. Sed aliia, ut supra dictum est, communiter tradunt et asserunt quod opera illa Dei primaria per intervalla sex dierum facta sunt” [These two expositions of Augustine, because they are literal, do not offer the foundation of history. But other writers, as it is said above, interpret in the common way and claim that those first works of God were carried out in intervals of six days] (SN 2.23).60 The fact that Vincent offers no extensive responses to the various problems that Augustine had raised nevertheless allows the laer’s argument to remain compelling, and the series of chapters that set it out thus remains discordant, particularly since the relative amount of text devoted to the two positions (eight chapters for Augustine’s view vs. a mere two for the one that Vincent prefers) indicates a significant imbalance in favor of Augustine. Moreover, the apparent simplicity with which Vincent rejects Augustine masks a fundamental incoherence. “Hae duae expositiones Augustini, quia lierales sunt, fundamentum historiae non auferunt” [Because Augustine’s interpretations are literal, they do not provide the basis for historia], Vincent writes. The fact that historia was generally taken to belong to the literal sense

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of Scripture renders this statement bizarre. It is true that the interpretation that Augustine proclaims to be literal is rather unusual and does indeed fail to serve as the basis of history. But Vincent could have rejected it for this reason. Yet, rather than stating that, although it is literal, it does not serve as the basis for history, Vincent uses the word quia [because], as if there were some profound incompatibility between literal interpretation in the broader sense and history as he understands it. And, in fact, this seems to be the case. For one thing, the history recounted in the Speculum historiale seems not so much to unfold from Scripture as to subsume it. Though the account begins with Adam and Eve, aer recording the events of the Old Testament Vincent uses, not the shape of events of the New Testament, but rather the history of the Roman Empire to organize his narrative. One of the more surprising results, as Mireille Schmidt-Chazan has remarked, is that it is, not the birth, life, and passion of Christ that serve as the guiding organizational principles for the account of that historical period, but rather the succession of Roman emperors in power at the time. The narration of Christ’s life is thus divided up between book 6, which recounts the reigns of Julius and Augustus Caesar, and book 7, which is devoted to the reigns of Tiberius and Caligula.61 Vincent furthermore rearranges material to preserve intact the narration of the lives of various figures.62 This sort of free rearrangement has led Marinus Woesthuis to argue that Vincent’s concept of history is not really theological (unfolded out of the literal sense of Scripture). Were this the case, he would have followed the example of one of his most important sources for the Historiale, the Chronicon of Helinand of Froidmont, by adhering to a strictly chronological ordering of events: “[For Helinand] chronology was significantly more than other possible ordering tools like a thematic or an alphabetical order, because it was an essential constituent of the validity of the historical narrative. . . . [T]his corresponds to a theological conception of history as the visible expression of God’s providence. As the chronological order of historic events was created by God, the truth expressed in historia depended upon the historian’s ability to establish a correct representation of this order.” Vincent, on the other hand, rearranges events in order to create coherent narratives of the lives of various figures or to accommodate lengthy florilegia of Latin writers. Chronology serves as an overall structure for the Historiale, but, in Woesthuis’s analysis, Vincent uses it as a “framework” that permits access to his text and provides its overall structure, without being significant in itself: “In comparison with Helinand, Vincent is not so much interested in what may be called the sensus historiae as in the sententia historiae.”63

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This may seem to suggest that time and history themselves become artificial organizational tools, born not so much out of a reflection on the meaning of human history with relation to scriptural revelation as out of the necessity to find an order for the material that Vincent has collected. On the other hand, such a conclusion would contradict his explicit appreciation for the “ordinem historie totius non parum utilitatis vel pulchritudinis habentem” [the whole order of history, possessing no lile utility or beauty] in the prologue. This contradiction brings to light others. When Vincent reorganizes the Naturale for the tripartite version, he places a brief summary of history in the final book (bk. 32), where he integrates it with a discussion of the geography of the inhabited world. This summary is intended to stand in for the Speculum historiale in the case of libraries that possessed the Naturale but not the other specula (a similar summary of the Naturale and the Doctrinale is included in the first book of the Historiale, for the same reason). The placement of a summary of human history within the Naturale makes necessary some explicit link between the two specula. Therefore, he introduces it as follows: Quoniam, ut ait Augustinus, Deus incommutabili aeternitate vivens creavit omnia simul, ex quibus currerent tempora et implerentur loca ipsorumque temporalibus et localibus motibus voluerentur saecula. Hujus operis naturalis in quo nimirum de natura rerum in universali et in particulari, ac de illis operibus Dei primariis quibus in sex diebus omnes naturas creavit earumque cursum instituit, principaliter agere disposuimus librum hunc ultimum de locis et temporibus breviter transcurrendo, juvante Deo, complebimus. (SN 32.1) [As Augustine says, God living in unchangeable eternity created all things at once, from which time flowed and places were filled and the ages were made to revolve in their temporal and spatial motions. It is, therefore, principally to this natural work that I devote this final book, treating the nature of things in general and particular, as well as those first works of God by which he created all natures in six days and instituted their courses, and concluding, with God’s help, by briefly running through the geographical places and the ages of the world.]

Here in rapid succession Vincent refers to simultaneous creation and creation in six days, making no apparent aempt to reconcile the two.

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Most important, although he frequently insists that the Speculum naturale provides the “foundation” of history, Vincent never really explains what this means. In the prologue, where he specifically cites the six days of creation as the organizational principle of the Naturale, he nevertheless seems to make a distinction between these days and historical succession. Thus the Naturale is organized “juxta seriem operum .vi. dierum, de natura et proprietatibus singularum per ordinem rerum” [according to the series of works of six days, concerning the nature and properties of individual things in their order], while the Historiale is organized simply “juxta seriem temporum” [according to temporal succession] (LA ch. 15). Later, Vincent writes of the Naturale that its foundation is sacred historia, “ab ipso principio creationis rerum usque ad requiem Sabbati, cui etiam diffusius interseruntur ea, que pertinent ad naturam celi et mundi” [from that beginning all the way to the Sabbath rest, into which are extensively inserted those things which pertain to the nature of the heavens and the world] (LA ch. 17). This does, indeed, create a historical link between the Naturale and the Historiale, but it does so at the expense of misrepresenting the Naturale, the majority of which is devoted precisely to what Vincent characterizes here as “inserts,” and the very title of which reflects that fact. It appears that, even for Vincent, the degree to which his encyclopedia as a whole could be thought of as a history was a maer of confusion.

Rhetorical Historia and (E)narratio There are multiple possible responses to the problems that I have raised. One is to see in the “order of history” that Vincent so appreciates a series of historical relations more complex than a simple chronological succession and, thus, in Vincent’s concept of history one that breaks free of the Victorine tradition—perhaps, ultimately freeing itself from exegesis. But the consequence of this response is to deflect analysis from the conflicted relation between the Speculum maius and Scripture. As we have seen, it is the scriptural text, finally, that provides the only global organization broad enough to account for all the material Vincent wishes to include in this encyclopedia. It alone provides the most tenuous of ties among the Naturale as a description of the world created in Genesis, the Doctrinale as a discussion of the results of the Fall, and the Historiale as a recital of the events intervening between the Fall and the re-creation of the world. Indeed, it is perhaps the encyclopedia’s fluidity, its failure to fix a single relation with regard to scriptural or

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material revelation, that allows Vincent to incorporate such a quantity and diversity of writings. But that fact does not justify the failure to aempt to describe these multiple or shiing relationships. Scriptural exegesis itself provides the initial model for this fluidity (though Vincent takes things far beyond the exegetes), for patristic and medieval writers had experimented with multiple and not always reconcilable exegetical methods. We should, then, search for a medieval sense of historia that, while not limited to the theological or exegetical acceptation, nevertheless maintains some connection to it. I would suggest that the rhetorical sense of the term provides what we need while simultaneously expanding our spectrum of possible terms by making historia part of the larger category of narratio, one of the components of rhetorical speech. We find these rhetorical terms explicated in the third book of the Speculum doctrinale, where Vincent draws on the rhetorical theory of the Pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero’s De inventione and De oratore, and Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, which had all been absorbed into the encyclopedic treatment of the arts in Isidore’s Etymologiae. Vincent defines narratio as “rerum gestarum aut ut gestarum expositio” [the exposition of deeds done or as if done], according to a citation drawn from Cicero’s De inventione (SD 3.101).64 It constitutes one of the four parts of rhetoric, according to a citation from Isidore, who identifies the other three as exordium, argumentatio, and conclusio, and it “res gestas explicat” [unfolds deeds done] (SD 3.101).65 Vincent’s treatment of rhetorical narratio, however, like that of Isidore, ends here, without subdividing narratio as rhetoricians like Cicero and Quintilian had done. That subdivision, into historia, argumentum, and fabula, is deferred, oddly, to his discussion of the seven types of poetry. Here, historia reappears as one of the types, and a paraphrase of the originally rhetorical distinction between historia, argumentum, and fabula, which Isidore had displaced into his book on Grammatica, concludes Vincent’s chapter on history as poetic genre: “Item inter Historiam et Argumentum et Fabulam hoc interest: nam Historiae sunt res verae, quae facte sunt; Argumenta sunt, quae etsi facta non sunt, fieri tamen possunt; Fabulae vero sunt, que nec factae sunt, nec possunt, quia contra naturam” [There is this difference between historia, argumentum, and fabula: historiae are true things, which have taken place; argumenta are those things which, even if they have not taken place, could nevertheless occur; but fabulae are those things which neither have taken place, nor can do so, because they are contrary to nature] (SD 3.127).66 That is, Vincent’s concept of narrative, informed by classical rhetorical theory, is broad enough to embrace any “expo-

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sition” or “unfolding” of events in a sequence. The term narratio accommodates the full spectrum of possibilities of truth, verisimilitude (a word that appears in Quintilian), and pure fiction (Cicero writes that, in certain kinds of arguments, examples may be drawn from “fictae narrationes” [invented narratives]).67 By placing historia in his discussion of poetry in the Doctrinale, Vincent emphasizes the role of rhetorical, narrative invention. This does not so much contradict the exegetical notion of history as work in tandem with it, given that medieval commentators tend to engage in a rhetorical re-creation of the authoritative texts. We can see the conflation of exegesis and rhetoric not only in the fact that both domains share a common term, historia, but also in the slippage between narratio and enarratio. While, in its weaker forms, the laer term was more or less interchangeable with narratio,68 it also served in ancient exegetical practice to designate the grammatical exposition of a text. Augustine used it in his Christocentric expositions of the Psalms to indicate interpretation more generally, and this collection of commentaries would (much) later come to be called the Enarrationes in Psalmos. By the eighth century, according to Copeland, grammatical enarratio had taken on “the double function of historical recuperation and rhetorical interpretation of texts,” and eventually “enarratio comes to represent a dynamic, re-creative, engagement with the language of tradition.”69 At the same time, despite its forays into rhetorical territory, enarratio was essentially a grammatical exercise and, thus, maintained its link to the liera of the text. Rhetorical re-creation infused and reinvigorated literal exegesis. The term (e)narratio, in fact, appears several times in Vincent’s discussion of the six days of creation because it had played a crucial role in Augustine’s interpretation in the De Genesi ad lieram. It is precisely the word that Augustine uses to describe Genesis 1 when aempting to explain the difference between the creation event itself and its expression in Scripture. This discussion intervenes at the moment when Augustine is considering the relation of maer and form. (Did maer preexist form? Not temporally, according to Augustine, but causally.) Significantly, the illustration he offers to help the reader understand the difference between causal and temporal priority is the act of human speech. Unformed maer need no more temporally preexist the creation of formed things than the unformed voice the pronunciation of words, Augustine writes, but, when we aempt to explain the act of creation or the act of speech in human language, we must divide the event into a succession of units, and, hence, we speak of material first, then form. This parceling out of information constitutes “narration”:

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. . . cum dicimus materiam et formam, utrumque simul esse intellegimus nec utrumque simul possumus enuntiare. Sicut autem in brevitate temporis contingit, cum duo ista verba proferimus, ut alterum ante alterum proferamus, ita in prolixitate narrationis alterum prius quam alterum narrandum fuit, quamvis utrumque, ut dictum est, simul fecerit Deus, ut, quod sola origine prius est in faciendo, etiam tempore prius sit in narrando, quia duae res, quarum etiam altera nullo modo prior est, nominari simul non possunt, quanto minus simul narrari! (GL 1.15.29) [. . . when we speak of maer and form, we understand that both exist simultaneously, and yet we cannot pronounce the words at the same time. Just as a brief interval of time intervenes, when we uer these two words, so that we pronounce one before the other, so also in the extension of narration one thing must be narrated before another, although, as it is said, God performed both at once. Thus, what in the act had precedence only in what concerns the origin, assumes in the narration temporal precedence as well, since two things, neither of which had any precedence over the other, cannot be named at the same time, much less narrated at the same time!]

Here, narratio represents an aempt to express or approximate a truth by means of the distorting medium of human language, dependant on a temporal succession that may not govern the truth itself. Vincent implicitly accepts Augustine’s terminology when he uses the word enarratio to introduce Augustine’s position, specifically distinguishing the term from a truly temporal sequence: “Omnia, quae a principio Geneseos enarrantura . . . ait Augustinus facta fuisse non in tempore, vel per tempore, sed in radice temporum” [All things which are e-narrated from the beginning in Genesis . . . were, according to Augustine, done not in time, or through time, but at the root of time] (SN 2.15).70 I would therefore suggest that, while continuing to appreciate the importance of historia in the Speculum maius, we modify our approach in two ways. First, we should accept the term historia in the rhetorical and poetic as well as the theological sense, an enrichment that allows us to understand Vincent’s multiple deviations from the strict chronology required by theological history. This is justified by the fact that Vincent chooses to discuss historia in his treatment of poetry in the Doctrinale. In the coordination between historia as literal exegetical practice and historia as rhetorical model or poetic genre, we see the constitution of the encyclopedia as a text that is at once gloss and literary creation; we understand how it is that the encyclopedia

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can be born from the gloss yet constitute a more developed, independent form. Yet, at the same time, we should also recognize that the Scriptura to which Vincent refers when presenting his organizational model is above all a narrative text, in both the rhetorical and the Augustinian senses of the word. Consequently, the “ordo juxta ordinem Sacre Scripture” must be understood principally as the calque of a preexisting narrative. In the end, I prefer the word narrative to history because it draws more immediate aention to the fact that this organization is a construction in human language. The second meaning of the word history, as the events themselves independent of their narration, obscures the constructedness of wrien history. The constructedness of any and all narrative is, in my view, also the ultimate significance of Vincent’s struggles with the De Genesi ad lieram. He takes the title of this commentary seriously, replicating the term liera in his own chapter titles, and introducing Augustine’s argument by stating: “Quam sententiam multis rationibus et conjecturis lierae probare nititur” [Which opinion he endeavors to prove by many reasonings and inferences from the leer] (SN 2.15). But Vincent does not know quite how to integrate Augustine’s commentary, literal though it be, into his encyclopedia, and he also betrays confusion about how—in Augustine’s view—the text of Genesis 1 functions. It cannot be figurative (or else the commentary would not be literal), yet it does rely on some form of signification uncommon enough to require extensive explanation. Augustine refers to the six days of Genesis 1 vaguely as a “quandam significationis umbram” [certain shadow of signification],71 and he carefully distinguishes this from the figurative or allegorical, terms that could be applied to his very different interpretation of Genesis at the end of the Confessions.72 Thus in the De Genesi: Nemo ergo putet quod de luce et die scilicet spirituali diximus non proprie sed allegorice convenire. Licet enim alia sit lux spiritualis in angelis, alia lux corporalis in sole, non tamen hic dicitur proprie lux et ibi figurate; ubi enim est certior lux, ibi verior dies. Cur ergo non verior vespera et verius mane? (SN 2.21)73 [Let no one think that what I have said concerning light and the spiritual day belongs not to the proper but to the allegorical sense. Although the spiritual light in the angels and physical light in the sun are two different things, nevertheless the one is not called light properly and the other figuratively. Where there is a more certain light, there is also a truer day. Why therefore not a truer evening and a truer morning?]

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Augustine’s rejection of the terms figura, allegorica, and parabola in the De Genesi ad lieram is consistent with the distinction that he makes between figurative and literal speech in his other exegetical writings. The figure and parable always involve a substitution of one term for another, justified by similarity between the two things signified, and comprehensible by means of comparison, as Augustine explains in his exposition of Psalm 77: “notum est quod in parabolis, quae dicuntur rerum similitudines rebus de quibus agitur comparantur” [it is noted that, in parables, those similitudes of things which are announced are compared to the things about which one is really speaking].74 This produces a proposition that is not true but gives a “similitude” of truth, according to the explanation of the figures of Scripture that Augustine offers when expounding the parable of the sower (Ma. 13:24– 30, 36–43) in Sermon 73: “quando similitudines dantur, vel proprietas non exprimitur, per eas non veritas, sed similitudo veritatis exprimitur” [when similitudes are given and the proper term is not expressed, the similitudes express not the truth, but a similitude of the truth].75 Augustine’s literal interpretation similarly creates two levels of signification but differs from the exposition of the figure or parable by according a truth value to both levels. The leer of Genesis 1 is, for Augustine, not figurative, but rather an expression in human language of a truth beyond it. Therefore, the commentator’s goal should be to purge from our understanding of the text the anthropomorphic elements of human language.76 Vincent, however, muddies the terminological waters by inserting a paraphrase of Augustine’s position that freely employs the words figura and parabola for the “superficies lierae”: Sicut ergo Joannes in Apocalypsi aperte vidit ea quae nobis sub figuris tradidit, et Dominus in Evangelio ea que aperte intelligebat populo sub parabolis proponebat, quia populus rudis aliter capere non poterat, sic et Moyses Spiritu Sancto revelante scivit quidem omnia simul creata fuisse in esse completo, tamen, quia rudi populo Judaico loquebatur qui non potuit intelligere vel capere qualiter Deus subito operatur, ideo sub distinctione sex dierum opera explicavit, loquens de eo quasi de homine qui per moras et successiones temporuma operatur et post laborem operis requiescit, ut homines scilicet carnales ac rudes aliquanto modob possent mundi creationem mente capere et sic in eis salubriter aedificaretur fides, qua crederent Deum omnia fecisse. Sic enim Scriptura more suo in superficie literae parvulis condescendit, ut cum dicit Deum zelotem, iratum, poenitentem, et hujusmodi. (SN 2.20)77

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[Therefore, just as John in the Apocalypse saw openly those things that he related to us in figures, and the Lord in the Gospel set before the people in parables those things that he understood openly (because an ignorant people could not otherwise grasp them), thus also Moses by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost understood that all things were created at once in their complete being. Nevertheless, because he was speaking to the ignorant Jewish people who could not understand or grasp how God could act suddenly, he set out God’s works divided into six days, speaking of God as if of a man who works by intervals of time and rests aer the labor of the act. This allowed men, carnal and uncultivated, to comprehend in some way the creation of the world. Here faith could be established in them for their benefit, by which they could believe that God made all things. Thus indeed Scripture has a way of condescending to the lile ones with the surface of the leer, as when it says that God is zealous, angry, regretful, and so on.]

Vincent’s summary shows how easily Augustine’s version of literal exegesis may be misunderstood. It may also indicate that Vincent senses an exegetical instability created by the juxtaposition within his encyclopedia of Augustine’s peculiar form of literal interpretation with the common interpretation of Genesis 1. But what comes to light in that juxtaposition is precisely the degree to which the liera itself is a heuristic construct, a mediation between the ineffable and human understanding. In this we see the affinity between Vincent’s “ordo juxta ordinem Sacre Scripture” and the schematic encyclopedic organizations discussed at the end of chapter 1. We are obliged to acknowledge that the entire layout of the Speculum maius is a fragile heuristic construct rather than the transparent reproduction of temporal succession. Yet, contrary to what one might initially assume, this renders the Speculum maius more, rather than less, capable of fulfilling Vincent’s encyclopedic aims because narrative offers an unusually flexible structure for linking disparate elements, as Paul Ricoeur suggests when he characterizes it as the “synthesis of the heterogeneous.”78 What the reliance on narrative does not do—and here Ricoeur’s argument is absolutely crucial, as is the inclusion of historia as a subgroup of narratio in rhetorical manuals—is render the encyclopedia somehow less serious an undertaking. By serious here, I have in mind referentiality—not the denominative referentiality that first springs to mind when this term arises, but something more akin to the indirect referentiality of metaphor that comes to light in Ricoeur’s analysis in La métaphore vive or to the fabula of the prosimetra. I am not arguing that our understanding of the encyclopedia be transformed

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into an appreciation of the play of language for the sake of language. Rather, I am arguing that the use of re-creative narrative in the encyclopedia is the response—whose implications Vincent himself may not have grasped—to a need not met by medieval historiography or any other form of writing to represent the full extension of the human experience of time. Ricoeur considered the constructed plot line “the privileged means by which we reconfigure our confused, formless, even mute temporal experience,”79 and, if we thus understand it, the use of narrative does not deflect the encyclopedia from its referential purpose but rather serves it. This raises the possibility that other narrative constructs may serve as the organizational principles of later encyclopedic texts. Vincent’s chosen narrative is sacred, authoritative—but this does not render it impossible for later writers to draw narrative paradigms from other, less authoritative or even apparently frivolous traditions, such as the plots of the quest romance (the Libre de meravelles) or of the romance of seduction (the Roman de la Rose). Aer all, the fictional narrative, the wholly invented narrative, possesses greater suppleness than preestablished biblical or historiographic ones.

Shards of the Mirror But Ricoeur’s approach to narrative is a singularly idealizing, transhistorical one, and, while it offers an elegant interpretation of the paradigm that Vincent had in mind, it cannot account for the fact that Vincent was never able fully to realize his plans. The great advantage of the narrative framework, its ability to distend at any point, may also have proved its great disadvantage. When there are no longer any set proportions, any limits, how does one know when to stop writing? Other encyclopedic schemas may have excluded material, but such exclusion made it possible for the encyclopedist to finish his project. The second weakness of Ricoeur’s theory of narrative when considered in light of the Speculum maius is the horizon of perceptibility. If it were a shared, human temporal experience that Vincent had managed to reproduce, then one would expect his contemporaries to have recognized the value of his text and reproduced it in its (imperfect) entirety. Ideally, the Speculum maius would appear in the library in its full extension, from Genesis to Revelation, ten or so hey manuscript tomes stacked one against the other. But almost nowhere was such a collection to be found. Scholars have frequently cited the impressive number of surviving manuscripts; the 250–300 copies (depending on how one counts) equal the number of Roman de la Rose manuscripts, and this for Latin text with no liturgical

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use or explicit role in the university curriculum. Moreover, the text did not appeal only to French tastes; it was read, cited, and copied all over Europe. This rapid and broad diffusion owes much to Paris’s eminence as a university city: talented friars of many countries would have been sent there to complete their studies. The exchanges between monastic scriptoria (particularly those of the Cistercian order, whose literary treasures Vincent had mined so assiduously) also played a role. Thus broadly summarized, the text’s reception history would seem to indicate that the Speculum maius was an unqualified success. However, any reception history that treated the Speculum maius as a monolithic whole would be inaccurate. The text’s transmission involved a number of irregularities, creating curious fissures. The corpus of surviving manuscripts indicates that the three (or four) parts were oen distributed and read separately. Of these it was the Speculum historiale that took Europe by storm; copies of the Naturale and the Doctrinale are much less numerous.80 Moreover, diffusion of the Naturale and the Doctrinale was limited mainly to France and the Low Countries, and the surviving copies are most oen early ones.81 Complete sets of the Speculum maius planned, copied, and decorated together were very rare, and they seem to have been owned almost exclusively by libraries located in this region. To my knowledge, only two such sets of the tripartite text survive. One was made for the Cistercian monastery at Cambron ca. 1280.82 The other was made in Paris in the fourteenth century; its early provenance is unknown, but it is now owned by the Sorbonne.83 There is much to be said about the statistical likelihood of multivolume texts surviving seven centuries in complete sets, but, even so, if the complete set had had any popularity, one would expect to find in a field of hundreds of manuscript copies more evidence of the phenomenon. What we find instead are a number of libraries that owned the Historiale as well as sundry natural history texts and treatises on the liberal arts or the virtues and vices.84 This haphazard collection of texts paralleling the missing parts of the Speculum maius indicates that such libraries could well have afforded a complete set of Speculum manuscripts. Why did they not procure one? Perhaps one reason for the dispersion of the Speculum maius, its almost entirely fragmentary transmission, is that readers did not perceive the organizational paradigm that unified it—or simply did not find it compelling enough to want to see its full realization. And their perceptions maered because theirs was the power to decide how much of a text to have copied. Thus, the unity that is Vincent’s work, never fully realized in the first place, further breaks down under the pressure of scholastic practices of book transmission and collecting. Paradoxically, then, the imposing tomes of the Spe-

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culum maius testify to the limitations of rhetorical paradigms. The aractive narrative form of the twelh-century prosimetra, short texts that offer only a selection of details about the natural world, lost its appeal when applied on a larger scale, or else the literary practice of compilatio, with its engagement of discordant voices, obscured the very framework whose purpose was to hold all of that diverse material together. Thus, the transmission history of the Speculum maius reveals the fragility of scholastic encyclopedism (when pursued, as Vincent did, nearly to the limit) within the very intellectual, institutional, and material context that had borne it. If, today, the text of the Speculum maius is available in complete form in libraries across the world, that is only because the world of books changed in the fieenth century. A new technology, movable type, made it possible to reproduce texts in multiple copies at reduced cost, and a new form of humanism, encyclopedic in a rather different way, pursued the chimera of the ideal text.85 And a chimera the Douai edition is, with its insertion of the apocryphal Morale and its expansions and “corrections” of Vincent’s citations. But that is the subject of another book.

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The Obscure Figures of the Encyclopedia Tree Paradigms in the Arbor scientiae

Overview While Vincent of Beauvais appears to have had a conventional education and career for his day (aside from spending more than twenty years writing one encyclopedia), the same cannot be said for Ramon Llull. Llull began his life as a Majorcan burgher, with the refined cultural tastes of ambitious thirteenth-century urban elites, and, aer his conversion from worldly pursuits, he became something of an autodidact and very much the vagabond.1 He seems to have been willing to enter into dialogue with virtually everyone he met, regardless of station, tongue, or creed, and his participation in a wide variety of textual communities made him familiar with what stands out, even among the polymath scholastics, as an eclectic assortment of textual practices. Catalan poets of the period composed in Occitan (sometimes Catalanized) and identified themselves with the troubadour lyric tradition.2 Llull had dabbled in such lyric during a youth that legend has characterized (probably with some exaggeration) as debauched.3 At the age of about thirty (ca. 1263), he experienced visions of the crucified Christ and abandoned his worldly pursuits, but he did not forget the literature to which he had been exposed. Among the hundreds of texts that he would later write are a few popularizing ones that evoke troubadour lyric as well as Arthurian romance, for he was commied to reviving devotion among the noble and burgher classes 129

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whose literary tastes had been shaped by those genres.4 Thus, the closest surviving literary antecedent of the Libre de meravelles is the Old French Queste del Saint Graal (ca. 1225–30); like the knights of the Round Table, the protagonist of the Libre de meravelles, Fèlix, sets out on a quest (in his case, to discover the world) and witnesses a succession of marvels that are then interpreted for him by the nameless hermits he encounters, many of whom employ another narrative form, the exemplum or parable, to explain difficult ideas.5 This looping structure, linking physical objects or events to complex spiritual interpretations, allows Llull to comment—obliquely—on almost all the topics treated in contemporary encyclopedias, while the appealing and familiar narrative form disguises the schema that really governs the order of the topics. Aer his conversion, Llull also took up the study of Latin texts. He may already have possessed some rudiments of the language, but he would have seen no need to become a serious student until he conceived his PanMediterranean project of educating missionaries in Arabic (which he began to study also), Hebrew, and Syriac and then sending them out to convert Jewish and Muslim communities through persuasion. (His interest in those who practiced other creeds was understandable given that his birthplace, Palma, had long been ruled by Muslims, many of whom remained either in servitude or as free inhabitants, and was also home to a wealthy Jewish community.)6 Llull recognized that his undertaking would require the support of European rulers, university faculties, the religious orders, and the papacy and that in these circles he would be neither credible nor comprehensible if he remained ignorant of the Latin language and scholastic writings. His documentable interactions with members of the various religious orders (the Dominicans, the Franciscans, the Carthusians) and the considerable time that he must have spent as their guest during his travels would have given him exposure to the books that religious were reading in houses all over Western Europe.7 Thus, the numerous texts that Llull wrote over the course of his career engage with Latin and vernacular literature of all kinds, although his use of other texts is considerably subtler than that of most scholastic writers. He tended to reshape to some degree nearly everything he borrowed. Paradigmatic are his own distinct reformulations of rhetoric and logic and, above all, his Art of Finding Truth, a system of thought that he believed to have been revealed to him in an illumination on Mount Randa.8 This system constituted a synthesis of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim ways of reasoning.9 Llull claimed that it was capable of proving the truth of the Christian un-

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derstanding of God as Trinity while also providing a way to aain certain knowledge of any given subject—a response to scholastic discussions of the philosophical bases of the various disciplines.10 It is important to recognize that Llull’s studies of Jewish and Muslim texts seem to have inspired him to a synthetic mode of thought. In one sense, it would be possible to say that synthesis was the ultimate goal of the whole scholastic movement, but in this work Llull proved himself both similar to and different from his contemporaries at the University of Paris. Llull’s open-mindedness did not extend to the Aristotelian thought that preoccupied them; he understood that, given the dominant paradigms, it was necessary to relate his theological discourse to the natural world in some way, but he chose a more old-fashioned relation, one based on Neoplatonic cosmology.11 On the other hand, he took a fuller account than his academic contemporaries did of the way members of other religious creeds reasoned. This may partially explain why the academic authorities were loath to give his Art their official imprimatur, although his insistence that the Christian understanding of God can be proved through reason would also have made them uncomfortable. Despite the differences between Llull and his contemporaries, Mark D. Johnston has argued that he participated fully in the “popular scholasticism” of the time.12 Following the lead of Johnston and other recent scholars who have worked on Llull’s relation to various textual communities,13 I posit here that it is only when we place Lullian texts in their larger, Pan-Mediterranean and Pan-European context that we can begin to understand them. My focus will, however, be somewhat different from that of these scholars, for I am particularly interested in the encyclopedic and textual practices of the area that we today call France. The fact that Llull is most widely read today in Catalan (the language that he contributed so much to shape) should not cause us to forget his voluminous output in Latin or to overlook his explicit references to French versions of certain of his texts (such as the Arbre de filosofia d’amor) and the precociously early French translations of others, including the Libre de meravelles, which may have been made at his request.14 It is clear that Llull made an effort to ensure that his writings encounter no linguistic barriers against gaining a broad readership and that he particularly targeted the French kingdom. He paid numerous, lengthy visits to Paris, where he repeatedly sought approval from the university for his Ars generalis and planned to establish a library of his writings at the Chartreuse de Vauvert.15 He also evidently considered himself to be writing for the French royal court when in 1298 he presented his Arbre de filosofia d’amor to Philippe IV le Bel and Jeanne de Navarre, although there is no indication that the text

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had been requested or that it was received with much enthusiasm. Llull did have friends and ardent disciples in France, however; they collected and preserved his Latin texts and, again, tried to gain wider acceptance for them by presenting copies to members of the royal family.16 Llull’s desire to educate a broad public and the universal claims that he made for the Art rendered encyclopedism especially congenial to him, and he made assays at the genre at regular intervals over the course of his long career: with the Libre de contemplació, wrien in Majorca in 1274, the Libre de meravelles, wrien in Paris in 1288–89, and the Arbor scientiae or Arbre de ciència (the text circulated in both Latin and Catalan versions), wrien in Rome in 1295–96. Yet none of these texts reproduce the kind of encyclopedia exemplified by the Speculum maius. Lullian scholars differ about whether they may properly be called encyclopedias, on the grounds that they are so different from contemporary texts in the genre17 and that they never aained a very large readership in the Middle Ages.18 Perhaps because it was the printing press that gave Lullian encyclopedism its first real diffusion, these texts are more frequently situated in the context of Renaissance humanism or early modern thought, more broadly conceived.19 Nevertheless, the discussion of the Libre de plasent visió in chapter 1 revealed that Llull was perfectly aware of encyclopedic conventions, which he must have reworked to suit his own ends. His texts can therefore be viewed as encyclopedic mirrors created within an intellectual and literary context that recognized mirrors’ capacity to reshape images in diverse ways.20 To view Llull’s encyclopedic texts from this perspective is perhaps another way to see encyclopedism pushed to its unspoken limits and, thus, to glimpse both the paradigms and the problems of medieval encyclopedic practice. Therefore, I juxtapose Vincent’s and Llull’s texts in chapters 2 and 3, reproducing, on a larger scale, the juxtaposition of chapter 1. This time, however, my aim is to differentiate their encyclopedic practices,21 and the Lullian text with which I am concerned is the Arbor scientiae.22 I begin with a very simple distinction: whereas Vincent privileged compilatio, Llull privileged figura. The laer was willing to describe compilatio but not to engage in it. In fact, he rarely practiced any kind of direct citation. In the apologetic texts that he intended for a Jewish and Muslim readership, Llull would have avoided the citation of authorities because, unlike most of his contemporaries, he recognized that Christians, Jews, and Muslims held “incommensurate hermeneutical assumptions” that made it impossible for the discussion to move beyond the preliminary question of how a given text should be read, even if all could agree that it was authoritative.23 But, when he is writing for

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a Christian audience, his refusal to cite directly like his contemporaries is more difficult to explain.24 Perhaps his extensive apologetic writing influenced his approach to other genres as well, or perhaps his early apprenticeship in courtly lyric, where convention dictated that citations be indirect, allusive, and revisionary, had already shaped his style of expression in ways that scholars have not yet fully appreciated.25 But the lack of direct citation should not be taken to indicate that Llull did not use sources—he did. The difference is that he reworked them to such a degree that they subsist in his texts less as citations than as palimpsests, faint traces whose presence cannot always be proved conclusively. Llull’s refusal to cite his sources directly has consequences for the form and style of his encyclopedias, to which I must here devote a brief excursus. The form of a given passage in the Speculum maius is predetermined by the source from which Vincent has drawn it; whether it is in quantitative verse, rhythmic verse, or prose, the compiler reproduces that form more or less mechanically, just as he reproduces the argument of the passage (the formal diversity of those sources does, however, create a new bricolage effect whose significance I must consider in chapter 5).26 But, when a writer translates his sources into the vernacular, and especially when he reworks them to the degree that Llull does, his text can assume any form he chooses to give it. Llull’s Latin encyclopedic writing is in prose, thus approximating the form of such illustrious predecessors as Isidore of Seville. Moreover, because his Latin phraseology is simple and idiosyncratic, one has the impression that he would not have been equal to verse composition in the language. But his vernacular writing is a different maer. He had begun life as a poet, and verse was, as yet, the only form for original literary expression in Catalonia. Indeed, in all the Romance vernaculars, the first literary expression, from the twelh century or earlier, had been in verse. Thus, certain basic verse forms—most prominently the octosyllabic couplet of Old French—served as unmarked modes of vernacular expression, common vehicles for didactic or narrative writing, without any of the high art associations of verse today. This situation continued into the thirteenth century. The first encyclopedias in the vernaculars, Gossuin de Metz’s Image du monde (French, 1246) and Peire de Corbian’s Thezaur (Occitan, ca. 1250), were both composed in verse, though they adapted material from Latin prose sources. In the thirteenth century, however, literary prose also began to appear. The first significant texts were in French: the vast romance cycles of Lancelot and Tristan, the numerous “unrhymed” versions of earlier verse texts, and a burgeoning tradition of prose historiography.27 Prose appeared in

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Occitan as well, with translations of Arthurian romance and with the everexpanding troubadour biographies.28 But the rupture that prose introduced to literary practice in the Romance languages was not universal, immediate, or unequivocal. Excepting Llull’s writing and a few translations and sermons, Catalan literature seems to have remained relatively untouched in the thirteenth century: only one other writer, the alchemist and physician Arnau de Vilanova (ca. 1235–ca. 1312), is known to have practiced Catalan prose, and not extensively.29 In France, although Gossuin’s encyclopedia was quickly adapted to prose, the original verse version continued to circulate widely and was eventually expanded. A similar ambivalence characterized new encyclopedic writing in the region. Bruneo Latini chose to draw up his Tresor (ca. 1265) in French prose, famously employing the word for the first time in the language and distinguishing the two forms as follows: “la voie de prose est large & pleniere, si come est hore la comune parleure des jens, mais le sentier de rime plus estrois & plus fors, si come cellui qui est close & fermé de murs & de palis” [the highway of prose is wide and vast, as is the common speech of people today, but the pathway of rhyme is more narrow and difficult, like a passage enclosed by walls and fortified with palisades].30 This description, in the portion of the text devoted to rhetoric, implies that he has chosen prose for the Tresor because of its accessibility (and not because prose was truthful while verse, which required that words be adjusted or added for the rhyme, involved fabrication, as some romanciers and historiographers of the time claimed).31 On the other hand, Matfre Ermengaud elected Occitan verse (with a few prose passages) for his Breviari d’amor (1288) and revived the classic pun on vers [verse] and vers [true] in the following assessment of a quotation from lyric poetry: “Ben es vers senes falhensa” [It is true (vers) indeed, without mistake / (or) It is indeed a poem (vers) without mistake].32 Such a paronomasia draws aention to the knowledge-making potential of the very acoustic materials of language. The divergence between these two encyclopedias shows that the second half of the thirteenth century was a period of hesitation, when neither form imposed itself as the obvious choice for vernacular encyclopedism and each could be associated with the truthful description of the world.33 Llull’s use of prose in the Catalan versions of all his encyclopedic texts surely has more significance than modern scholars, hampered by the fragmentary state of surviving literature from his region, will ever be able to recover. Nevertheless, the partial context given above does suggest ways to understand Llull’s preference for prose—and the specific kind of prose he developed. I would cite again the role of Arthurian romance in shaping the

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Libre de meravelles, which unfolds with the same semantic simplicity as the Queste, a didactic text meant to please a courtly public. But even the prose of the Libre is syntactically artificial, as Jordí Rubió has shown by comparing Llull’s style to that of Arnau. Contrary to the logical order of the phrase in a language without inflection, Llull oen places the verb last, aer the noun’s direct object, or else makes it precede the subject, practices that are frequent in Old French and Occitan verse but not in prose. These syntactic peculiarities indicate that, unlike Bruneo, Llull did not adopt prose because it replicated colloquial speech paerns or because it was accessible. Instead, he cultivated a style that was recognizably different from and more difficult than ordinary speech. This departure from the colloquial is even more marked in the Catalan version of the Arbre de ciència, for acoustic paerns and echoes play through the text as Llull slips back and forth from unrhymed prose, to rhymed prose (in which the position of rhymes is not determined by a fixed meter), to formal verse (in which metrical and rhyme paerns coincide). Rubió understands this acoustic paerning as a way of emphasizing certain components of the phrase; it can, thus, be compared to the semantic repetition that we have already seen in the description of the Libre de plasent visió.34 To my mind, the echoes in the Arbre de ciència also complement the distinctive way in which Llull exploits figuration. Just as his figures circle back constantly to the Divine One, so the sounds of his text swirl back on themselves. Unfortunately, these literary qualities will not always be evident in the quotations that I offer. Scholars still have not reached consensus about which version of the Arbor, the Latin or the Catalan, Llull wrote first.35 I shall cite principally from the Latin version because it is the only one available in a critical edition and the only one that had any broad diffusion in Europe. It is also sometimes more precise than the Catalan version. Nonetheless, on account of the consonance that I see between Llull’s vernacular linguistic practices and his use of figuration, I shall at the end give a few examples of the Catalan as well. This consonance indicates that the consequences of Llull’s refusal to practice traditional compilatio extend well beyond the language and style of his texts—to their organization and hermeneutics. Here, we rejoin the topic of the present chapter. Freed from the compiler’s constraints, Llull could experiment with any number of possible orders, and he could apply any he chose with the utmost rigor. In this way, he could realize in his encyclopedic texts the relational structure of spiritual figura, deploying it in such a way that the material and the immaterial, the worldly and the spiritual, maintain an equilibrium that Vincent could never have achieved. Thus, each book

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of this encyclopedia is organized according to the tree figure described in its prologue; the arboreal form shapes and contains the encyclopedic miscellany. Our previous consideration of the senses of the word figura in the description of the Libre de plasent visió has provided the initial context to understand these trees, and many of the possible senses of figura will be evoked in the discussion to follow. The most (apparently) obvious of the relevant senses is the graphic figure: the tree was a well-known physical object frequently exploited in medieval art and books; I shall consider a number of possible trees from the twelh- and thirteenth-century books that could glimmer as palimpsests among the leaves of the Arbor scientiae, including the double trees that mirror each other across the openings, or facing pages, of Lambert of Saint-Omer’s Liber floridus and Joachim of Fiore’s Figurae.36 This exploitation of the physical composition of the book engages additional senses of figura, as a physical form and as the visual aspect of the page. But my survey of possible precedents for the trees of the Arbor scientiae will above all demonstrate that the tree was used initially to facilitate the exegesis of Scripture, glossa; it is a popular form for what has been called visual exegesis, and I shall therefore call it an exegetical figure. Its power as an agent of ordo, the structural figure for a new text, is in these twelh-century examples only secondary and weak. With the growing importance of ordo to scholastic thought it will eventually fully assume that role for encyclopedic texts—without relinquishing its exegetical role. This occurs in the last quarter of the thirteenth century, with Matfre’s Breviari d’amor, wrien not long aer Llull had begun experimenting with tree figures in other kinds of texts, the Libre del gentil e dels tres savis and the Començaments de medicina (both wrien ca. 1274–83). The Arbor scientiae constitutes Llull’s own aempt to unite figura, glossa, and ordo in the arboreal form. And herein lies the crux. Exegetical figures accommodate considerable imprecision, even thrive on it, for it generates more commentary. In this way, they show themselves to be the instruments of rhetorical inventio and could be thought of as shared territory in the medieval alliance between rhetoric and hermeneutics. Structural figures, on the other hand, must usually lend themselves to a precise graphic representation. When writers such as Llull aempt to make the exegetical tree correspond structurally to the deployment of a lengthy encyclopedic text, they are obliged to push the tree figure to the very limits of recognizability, creating, in Llull’s case, figures that resist visualization. In fact, the trees of the Arbor scientiae are not designed to be graphic figures, as repeated aempts to draw them have proved. They can no more be visualized than can the figures of the Libre de plasent visió.

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Therefore, the descriptions of the Libre de plasent visió and the Arbor scientiae offer parallel instances of an encyclopedia founded on a practice of figuration that derives its power from its very ambiguity and elusiveness. This last point will bring us to role of obscurity in the encyclopedia. Although obscurity has long been banished from the encyclopedia—Diderot, for example, strictly forbad the encyclopedist to employ an obscure style because this kind of text is “made for everyone”37 —I shall argue that the obscurity that Llull’s early apprenticeship in troubadour lyric probably taught him to appreciate, and that became so essential to his hermeneutics, also defines his encyclopedism. An investigation of figuration in Lullian encyclopedic texts thus allows us to address the question of how, in an episteme in which the figure plays more than a purely ornamental or illustrative role, the various categories of figures coexist with, or complement, or obscure, each other within the space of the book.

Exegetical Figures It is characteristic of the picture, which is not limited as text is to a linear sequence, to be able to establish, within a single image, multiple diverse relations between different texts. The graphic figures of the Liber floridus bring the extracts copied onto any given page into relation with each other. In the Bibles moralisées, such figures provide a particularly concentrated, dense kind of scriptural exegesis that makes it possible to eliminate text almost entirely. The term visual exegesis has become current for this kind of illustration.38 Most exegetical forms were more visually complex than the juxtaposed medallions of the Bibles moralisées; superimposed rotae proved particularly useful for indicating the participation of multiple levels of a hierarchy in each other, while the tree figure provided a scaffolding to show how chains of individual elements relate to each other. Already, the twelh century had seen the development of the tree of Jesse and trees of virtues and vices—both were exegetical in origin, but their forms remained relatively simple. A few thinkers had elaborated considerably more complex exegetical trees. Lambert’s encyclopedia, which Llull may well have known,39 contains several, including the arbor bona (Ecclesia fidelium) and arbor mala (Synagoga), reinterpreted trees of virtues and vices, juxtaposed across a single opening (figs. 4–5).40 The Arbor bona rises from a lower trunk bearing a medallion with a personification of charity. From the trunk sprout twelve branches holding medallions with personifications of twelve other virtues, but several of these

Figures 4 and 5. Lambert of Saint-Omer, Liber Floridus, arbor bona, arbor mala. Manuscript made at Saint-Omer (Artois), ca. 1125. Ghent, Rijksuniversiteit, MS 92, fols. 231v–232r. Photograph reproduced by permission of University Library Ghent.

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stems are intertwined, and the upper trunk divides into three branches only above the medallion representing hope. This creates a more complex visual figure than Lambert’s earlier tree of virtues, the “Palm of the Church,” where, true to the morphology of this species, each frond (labeled with a virtue) springs from a central bulb.41 The species of the Arbor bona is considerably more problematic because, although all virtues spring from the same root in charity, each is associated with a different plant graed onto the tree. Hope, for example, is represented by the lily, continence by the rose, joy by the cypress, and so on. Like the personifications, each plant is labeled, but Lambert has also made a certain effort to distinguish the plants visually in a way that renders them more readily recognizable than the generally similar female figures in the medallions. Opposite the arbor bona, the arbor mala mirrors its visual disposition, but with important differences of detail. It springs from cupidity, is withered, and has two axes laid to its base. All the medallions contain text alone, and the entire tree belongs to a single species, the fig, as each of the eleven leaves is redundantly labeled. As elsewhere, both trees are surrounded by relevant biblical citations, but the trees’ relation to exegetical practice is here also established more subtly. Penelope Mayo has observed that their root in charity and cupidity distinguishes them from other twelh-century trees of virtues and vices, which, influenced by the Prudentian system, spring from humility and pride.42 Though it makes perfect sense to depict the virtues as springing from charity—greater than the other theological virtues of faith and hope, according to Paul (1 Cor. 13:13)—charity is opposed, not to cupidity, but to lust in other schemas. In Lambert’s representation, lust at the apex of the tree of vices is opposed to chastity at the apex of the tree of virtues. The opposition of charity and cupidity at the base of the trees, on the other hand, recalls the hermeneutics that Augustine sets out in the De doctrina christiana, one based ultimately on either charity or a carnal cupidity. If the De doctrina is in fact the subterranean source for Lambert’s two trees, it resonates particularly well with the image and texts on the verso of the Arbor mala folio, a depiction of the second dream of Nebuchadnezzar from the book of Daniel.43 The story of Nebuchadnezzar’s two dreams revolves around the question of interpretation; while the various astrologers and sorcerers that the king summons can neither interpret nor even recall the first dream (ch. 2), Daniel can, so the king calls on him to explain his next vision (ch. 4), of a magnificent tree that a heavenly watcher condemns to be cut down. Daniel offers a grim but accurate symbolic interpretation, in which the tree represents the king, destined to be driven from his throne.

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Since Daniel then counsels Nebuchadnezzar (without success, apparently) to repent of his sins, the condemnation seems to follow on the king’s vicious life and, thus, may, as Mayo argues, be related to the preceding trees.44 But it is in fact the practice of interpreting obscure revelations, rather than the content of those interpretations, that most strongly links the recto and verso of this folio. A cupidinous interpretation takes the object for nothing more than an object, but its desire for the object is thwarted, according to Lambert’s symbolism, in its confrontation with the dead tree, no longer capable of growth, foliage, or fruitfulness. It fails to conceive of the res as signum, and for thus remaining blind to the spiritual sense of revelation it is condemned to be cut down. A charitable interpretation, on the other hand, which takes the res as the sign of another, spiritual truth, is met by the flowering and surprising transformation of the object, from a single tree into multiple species of plants and bushes. Thus, the allusion to the De doctrina links the arbor bona and the arbor mala, which are not accompanied by any extensive text in Lambert’s book, to the reading and interpretation of the biblical text as a whole—and, beyond it, to all created revelation and the encyclopedia that represents it.

Tree Matrices Ramon Llull clearly shared in the scholastic fascination with the way diagrams and graphic structures can be imposed on or generate texts. Even early in his career, before his extensive travels, he experimented with tree figures as exegetical and didactic tools. The result, in this case, was to radically reconfigure exegesis while maintaining the Augustinian imperative to take things as signs. The first of his trees appears at the beginning of the Libre del gentil e dels tres savis, which recounts a debate that the three sages, a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim, hold for the benefit of the “Gentile” (here, an unbeliever) as all sit beneath five trees.45 The trees provide the conceptual seed and, to a certain extent, the structure for the first book of text. Llull clearly intended for them to be represented graphically, for he writes in the prologue that the trees he describes are “signifficats per los .v. arbres qui son al comensament d’aquest libre” [represented by the five trees which are at the beginning of this book] (LGTS, 9). Characteristically, in the elaboration of these trees Llull takes what is by his time an old chestnut of devotional literature, the tree of virtues, and reinvents it according to his own paradigm. Present are the seven traditional virtues (here designated as “created”), but so are “virtues” of an entirely different order, the “uncreated virtues” or

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aributes of God (goodness, greatness, eternity, power, and so on). These principles are probably based on the divine names used in Muslim devotional discourse, and they constituted the foundation of the Lullian system of thought as it was already being set out in the earliest version of the Art.46 Each of the five trees represents a different combination of the created virtues, the uncreated virtues, and the vices. Sometimes the members of one of these groups are paired with other members of the same group (as in the first tree, representing the uncreated virtues); sometimes they are paired with members of another group (as in the second, representing the pairing of uncreated and created virtues). The sets of couples or permutations would be more properly set out on a mathematical matrix, which was, in fact, one of the forms that Llull employed for the figures of the Art. Instead, he here imposes them on the tree form by explaining that each pair is written on a flower of the tree. Bonner has pointed out that this use of the tree is distinct from the mathematical tree, in which the terms are arranged in such a way as to create paths that link multiple terms but “there is no path one can take that starts and ends at the same vertex [or term] without backtracking.”47 The trees of the Libre del gentil create no paths at all, but they do reflect a tendency evident elsewhere in scholastic manuscripts to conflate several distinct diagrammatic forms.48 Because the five trees bear so many flowers, even the text cannot follow these initial figures without risk of becoming overly long and intolerably repetitive. Therefore, the discussion in the first book touches on only a selection of blooms. Moreover, there are too many flowers for all to be drawn on a single page or even a two-page opening. Medieval painters tried various solutions: in an early fourteenth-century illustration of the text, the flowers are reduced to a few representative blooms, and the five trees march horizontally across an opening, three on the le, two on the right.49 Each tree bears only six or seven flowers, showing only a small number of all the possible combinations. The economy of this solution seems to have made it aractive to later editors: Francis Wolff more or less reproduces the scene in the engraving for his 1722 edition of the Latin text. However, the artist of a manuscript of the French translation, which may have been made under Llull’s direction, takes a more exhaustive approach.50 He represents each tree in full, with all its flowers realized as golden medallions hanging from the branches, the combination of virtues and vices within it also wrien in gold (pl. 3). This solution, however, requires each tree to fill a whole page, with the result that the five trees must be displayed across two separate openings and part of a third. Thus, the relation between the trees, each of which

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shares something with the others, is lost entirely. Moreover, these pages show clearly the inappropriateness of the tree structure for each matrix of combinations; the tree itself is reduced to a slender green trunk with even slenderer branches, more like the dividing lines of a matrix than the living wood of a tree. It is not immediately evident that these trees are exegetical in nature. Like Lambert’s trees, Llull’s represent the proper and improper dispositions of the soul for creating a discourse about God; unlike the earlier trees, however, they do not enter into a direct relation with the biblical text. Llull would seem to be creating an entirely new structure of understanding, rather than commenting on an old one. The reason for this approach becomes evident in the prologue. One of the sages proposes the terms of the debate: “pariaus bo . . . que esputasem ço que creem, segons so que les flors . . . d’aquests arbres signiffiquen. E pus per aucturitats no·ns podem avenir, que asajasem si·ns puriem avenir per rahons demonstratives e necesaries?” [why don’t we debate what we believe, following what the flowers of this tree signify, and, since we cannot agree through the citation of authorities, try to reach agreement through demonstrative and necessary reasonings?] (LGTS, 12). Llull thus announces that there will be no explication of authoritative texts in this debate and proceeds to elaborate a new system for reasoning, one based on principles that members of all three religions can agree on, a system that Bonner has characterized as “endo-referential.”51 Nevertheless, the absence of external authorities from the Libre del gentil should not be taken to indicate that the text does not engage in exegesis, for the entire first book, providing, as it does, an explanation of the “signification” of the trees, could be taken as a lengthy exegesis of the graphic figures. The newly valorized figure replaces the citation. The Libre del gentil could be thought of as almost entirely “endo-exegetical,” turning glossa back on itself, rendering the practice perfectly circular. Nevertheless, the tree figure, drawn as it is from the created world, roots Llull’s exegetical system in Pauline and Augustinian semiotics. It is worth noting that Llull nowhere mentions the mnemonic utility of the trees in the Libre del gentil. The figures here are explicitly exegetical and rhetorical in nature, and their function is principally to generate text. This distinction is important because Frances Yates’s early and invaluable work on the figures of Llull’s Art emphasized their mnemonic utility,52 with the result that scholars have tended to assume that his tree figures could also be explained in these terms. An investigation of the Lullian texts that contain trees, however, turns up no references to a mnemonic function. As a further

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example, Llull introduces his other early tree figure, the tree of the principles of medicine, in the Començaments de medicina,53 as a visual aid to help readers understand the truth that is set forth in the text, because “Natura es d’enteniment que entena mils per demonstració feta per vista et per oiment, que per oir tan solament” [It is of the nature of understanding that it grasps ideas beer when they are demonstrated both visually and orally, than when they are demonstrated only orally] (1.1). The figure’s didactic function is made explicit, but there is no reference to any memory practice.54 Llull most likely created the tree of the principles of medicine aer the trees of virtues and vices, and it is structurally far more complex. According to his description, the “root” of the tree consists of a wheel that shows the four humors, their components (heat, dryness, moisture, and cold), and their operations and fevers. Out of this shared root rise two “branches,” the first representing the principles of medicine as they have been transmied by the ancients, the second Llull’s own system for comprehending the principles. The first branch is divided—and here the description loses its specificity to the form—into three “parts” representing things natural, unnatural, and contrary to nature. Each of these parts is further divided into a certain number of “flowers,” which represent its various subdivisions. The second branch, which Llull notes “es novelament atrobada a espondre la primera artificialment et mataforicalment” [is newly invented for the purpose of explaining the first artificially and metaphorically] is similarly divided into parts, two in this case. The first of these is divided into four more parts, each devoted to a leer representing the components of the humors, and each of these is further divided into four, representing degrees of heat, dryness, etc., and indicated by its own leer. “Cascuna de les letres cové esser flor en l’arbre” [Each leer should be a flower on the tree], Llull explains. Finally, the second part of the second branch “es departida en” [is divided into (the Latin text gives the verb continet)] three triangles, half matrices representing the principles of the Lullian Art, and a square of predestination from the Art (Començaments de medicina, 1.1). It is possible in this description to see Llull groping his way toward a more complete use of the tree form; he has accorded to the root—odd as it is in this representation—the role of signifying the fundamentals of the human organism, as it was understood at the time. But he has neglected to mention a trunk, so the two main branches appear in manuscript illustrations like two separate trunks, connected to each other only by the wheel at their base (fig. 6). With no root structure in sight, one has the impression, visually, of two entirely separate trees springing from the wheel—a problem that brings

Figure 6. Ramon Llull, Arbor medicinae (ca. 1274), Tree of the Principles of Medicine. Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 247, fol. 58v. Photograph reproduced by permission of the President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

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to the fore the difficulty of visually representing, on the same plane, two objects of which one is supposed to be a metaphor for the other. Aer all, the presence of metaphor would seem to be conditioned on the absence of the original object. Moreover, the text does not make clear how to divide the branches into distinct parts. Manuscript illustrations place medallions along what gives the appearance of being the trunk, creating a false impression that the categories of natural and unnatural things, for example, are somehow continuous with each other. Finally, illustrators were clearly embarrassed by the difficulty of showing how the second part of the second branch is divided into three triangles and a square; this is the point where illustrations become nearly incoherent; the geometric shapes are alternatively poised on the tips of or superimposed on the branches or even woven of twigs, as in the odd basket-weave square in one of the surviving manuscripts at Oxford (fig. 6), a solution for which the illustrator deserves credit for creativity, if not for aesthetics.

Dark Foliage Thus, in his early aempts at using the tree figure Llull encounters a number of problems: how to best exploit the symbolism of the tree’s organic, continuous, branching form; how to relate multiple trees to each other; how to harmonize the tree form with other, apparently alien forms (if that should even be aempted); and how to make figure and text correspond with each other. All these problems confronted other thinkers whose works were wellknown by groups with which Llull would have contact during the 1280s and 1290s.55 In the late twelh century, for example, the Calabrian exegete Joachim of Fiore had elaborated a series of tree figures in an aempt to illustrate his Trinitarian system for understanding history.56 Joachim is best known for the collection of figurae that he created at the end of his life, but the tree figure first appears in the Liber concordie, wrien before the elaboration of the figurae proper, where he explains his exegetical system. All events from the creation on (and in this sense Joachim’s vision could be called encyclopedic, although he wrote no encyclopedia) belong to one of three status or orders: the ordo conjugatorum, which belongs to the Father, begins in Adam, and ends in Christ; the ordo clericorum, which belongs to the Son and springs from the first order, beginning in Ozias but not bearing branches until Christ, and culminating in Joachim’s own time; and the ordo monachorum, which belongs to the Holy Spirit and begins in Moses (proceeding from both the Father and the Son) but does not become visible until Saint Benedict

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and will continue until the end of history. Joachim then speaks of a vision in which he saw three trees that represent this historical paradigm, but because of the way they overlap he is unable fully to explain the connections between them since the paradigm “intellectu animi aliquatenus capi potest, figuris autem competentibus aut vix aut nullatenus dari potest” [can somewhat be grasped by the mind but hardly or not at all represented through correlating figures].57 He nevertheless seems to have tried to represent the vision graphically, and later copies of this text include various aempts as well. Marjorie Reeves has called particular aention to the drawing in an early to mid-thirteenth-century manuscript from southern Italy, now in the Vatican Library (lat. 4861, fol. 211v). The artist has represented a single tree, rooted in Adam, with a trunk that remains bare except for three clusters of branches, corresponding to Jacob, Christ, and Benedict. The graphic translation is imperfect, however, because it fails to distinguish the three trees and their respective times of barrenness and fruitfulness. Reeves suggests that Joachim may have abandoned the aempt to make text and visual figure correspond aer the Liber concordie, for the figurae that began to circulate at the end of the Calabrian exegete’s life did so unaccompanied by any extensive textual commentary.58 Yet, in this predominantly graphic representation, Joachim solves the problem of showing how three trees can spring from each other and continue for a time parallel while also remaining distinct. The two trees of the three status that mirror each other across an opening in the well-known Oxford manuscript (made in southern Italy at the beginning of the thirteenth century)59 resemble leafy ladders and are set side by side, connected at joints or nodes (figs. 7–8). This makes it clear that each new tree springs, not out of the apex of its predecessor, but rather from the middle of the earlier trunk, allowing the earlier tree to continue to grow parallel to the new one.60 A yet more surprising arboreal form on the verso of the second tree-ladder weds the tree to the circle.61 Here a single plant is rooted in Noah, with three stems representing his sons. The stem of Ham ends abruptly in a dead stump, but the stems of Shem and Japhet rise, circle round, and cross over each other three times, representing the status of history. It is thus through different sorts of gras, where trunks are momentarily made to grow together, that these trees aain a complexity that at once pushes them to the very limits of the arboreal form and adapts them to the sophisticated exegesis of late medieval commentators. In the thought of Joachim of Fiore, the graphic figure exceeds exegetical figura as allegorical interpretation because the New Testament becomes, rather than the fulfill-

Figures 7 and 8. Figures of the three status, displayed across an opening from one of the oldest manuscripts of Joachim of Fiore’s Figurae, made in southern Italy, early thirteenth century. Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 255A, fols. 11v–12r. Photograph reproduced by permission of the President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

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ment of a prefiguration, a second leer like the Old. The simple fact of correspondence is more fundamental to the system than any of the abundant symbolism that overlays it.62 Nevertheless, the graphic figure enables the kinds of connections across the biblical text on which exegetical figura depends. Moreover, the hybridity of these trees, which in each case represent both a tree and something quite different (ladders, circles, eagles), confronts the viewer with the necessity of arriving at a nonliteral interpretation that can reconcile the two disparate forms, articulate their symbolic intersection. At the same time, we find in Joachim’s figurae a full exploitation of the form of the codex—or, at least, of the quire—the symmetrical opening that juxtaposes the verso of one folio with the recto of the next. Lambert had already exploited this structure to make visible at once the similarities and dissimilarities between the arbor bona and arbor mala. In the Oxford manuscript of the figurae, the trees of the three status constitute the third of a series of such openings. Each pair of figures exhibits a mirrored structure but also significant differences, showing how history can be conceived in different ways. For example, in the first pair, the tree of the Spiritus Sanctus and the tree of the two advents, the former realizes what Reeves and Beatrice Hirsch-Reich characterize as a “mystical intention,” the laer a “historical” one.63 Unlike Lambert’s trees, then, both members of the pair represent the same subject, but they represent it through a different interpretive lens. The potential redundancy of the figures is eschewed though diverse modes of exegesis, in a way that will be repeated by the trees in the Arbor scientiae. Joachim’s figurae seem to have circulated in Northern Europe in the thirteenth century, and Llull could have encountered them either there or in Italy, through his contacts with the Spiritual Franciscans.64 Franciscan friends could also have introduced him to a more recent use of the exegetical tree in Bonaventure’s slender treatise the Lignum vitae (1260). This figure is far simpler than those of Joachim, but it is significant in this context for being the only precedent I know for the use of a visual tree figure as the organizational paradigm for an entire text. Bonaventure’s tree is inspired by the tree of life in the Garden of Eden (Gen. 2:9), which he conflates (as medieval writers and artists so liked to do) with the wood of the cross. He tells us that he has developed it “quoniam imaginatio juvat intelligentiam” [because the imagination assists the understanding].65 It allows him a way of linking and organizing the forty-eight individual meditations that compose the treatise, although these connections are loose and associative. Moreover, their correspondence to the form of the tree is minimal. Although Bonaventure describes all the tree, from the roots to the branches, leaves, flowers, and fruits,

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he assigns individual names corresponding to sections of the treatise only to the branches (in three groups of four) and fruits (one of which is supposed to hang from each branch). This restraint and the fact that the treatise is brief and relatively simple, its subject maer limited to a meditation on Christ, make possible a perfect, if delicate, correspondence between the spatial deployment of the image and the verbal deployment of the text. Yet closer in time to the Arbor scientiae, the sometime troubadour Matfre Ermengaud, of the town of Béziers in Languedoc, had described a “tree of love” in the opening passages of his odd Breviari d’amor (pl. 4). An Occitan text that aempts to wed Latin learning to the discourse of troubadour lyric, the Breviari d’amor stands at the end of the troubadour tradition, preserving the lyric in the form of citations without musical notation. It is unusual and difficult to classify, yet it was undoubtedly something of a bestseller in its own time among Languedocian and Catalan readers.66 Its tone and treatment of the lyric look forward to such moralizing “reforms” of lyric practice as those carried out in the following century by the Consistori del gai saber of Toulouse. What is significant about the Breviari for any discussion of the antecedents of the Arbor scientiae is that in Matfre’s text, aer a hiatus of more than a century and a half, the exegetical tree reenters the encyclopedic tradition.67 Matfre provides descriptions of the tree in both verse and prose, and it is clear that he meant a miniature to be placed at the beginning of the text in manuscripts.68 When he refers generally to the entire drawing, he consistently indicates a single tree, but the figure is in fact composed of five vertical stems. The central stem is superimposed on the body of a lady, who represents love in its broadest sense, according to the prose description. She is crowned with the love of God and the neighbor, “la plus digna partz d’amor” [the worthiest part of love]. Over her heart (“cor”) is posed a medallion representing the love of children, “quar es la plus corals amors que sia” [for it is the most heartfelt of loves], while wrien on each foot or, in other manuscripts, squeezed into the space beneath them are the love of male and female and the love of temporal goods, both of which a person should strictly regulate.69 This fairly simple schematization, which hierarchizes the loves and indicates the human being’s proper relation to them by means not of the tree form but of the metaphor of the human body, is complicated—perhaps even rendered incoherent—by Matfre’s simultaneous aempt to represent the genealogy of the loves as originating from God.70 Since the space of the lady’s head and heart are already occupied, the medallion representing the origin of love, labeled “Deus es comensamen et fi” [God is the beginning and

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the end], is placed over her stomach. Nature is placed below, and from her branch two descending stems representing “human” and “natural” loves. The prose description implies that two stems should branch down from each of these to the two loves born of them, the human love of God and the neighbor and love of temporal goods and the natural love of male and female and love of children.71 Such an ekphrasis introduces a number of problems. The most general is redundancy; the hierarchical representation is not consistent with the genealogical one because the laer affiliates the love of God with the love of temporal goods and the love of children with the love of male and female. Each of the four loves must therefore be twice represented in the composite figure. More specifically, the vertical and diagonal axes are usually traced with stems connecting all the medallions, whether or not one is born from the next or even belongs to the same paradigm. This practice makes God seem to descend from the medallion for the love of children on the lady’s heart. Similarly, the love of temporal goods is connected by a stem to the love of God. Nevertheless, the two paradigms are coherent at least insofar as they share a movement of descent. This tenuous coherence will, however, be problematized by the tree metaphor, whose natural movement is upward.72 At the boom of the illustration, Matfre has placed the “roots” of love, which are the qualities that make a person worthy of love. They are to be represented with personifications—specifically, heads.73 A number of the miniatures of the tree of love eliminate the heads in the roots of the tree, a choice that could be aributable to space constraints but also clears up a conceptual problem, the upending of the human form (whose hierarchy is so significant above) implicit in burying heads in the roots of the tree.74 Some manuscripts, such as that in plate 4, depict the roots radiating out in a circle about a medallion depicting Christ—a structure that recalls the wheel at the root of Llull’s tree of the principles of medicine. Indeed, Montpellier was a center for medical study in the period; Llull spent considerable time there, and Matfre may have as well; there, or in neighboring libraries, the laer writer (or the illustrators of manuscripts of his texts) may have encountered Llull’s Comançaments de medicina. The tree of love’s upward movement is further developed in the four lateral trees, but two of these are of negligible size and importance, and the dominance of the two larger trees, which are oen taller even than the lady of love, may similarly evoke the two trunk-like branches of the tree of the principles of medicine. In Matfre’s figure, the two taller trees, that of eternal life and that of the knowledge of good and evil, spring from the love of God

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medallion on the le and the love of male and female medallion on the right. The conceptual paradigm that produces the lateral trees is entirely independent of that associated with the lady. Each lateral tree bears a fruit at its apex (eternal life from the tree of life and children from the tree of knowledge), and from its trunk spring leaves and flowers representing the associated virtues (for the tree of life the theological and cardinal virtues and the gis of the Holy Ghost, for the tree of knowledge a host of courtly virtues such as largesse and courtesy). The prose description implies a moral or even spiritual ascent by means of these virtues to the fruit at the top of the tree.75 The variations between the way this encyclopedic figure is described verbally and the way it is realized graphically in manuscripts indicates its visual complexity and conceptual flaws.76 Matfre himself seems unaware of these problems, but he does refer to the tree (singular) as “enpeutatz . . . mout sotilmen” [very subtly graed].77 Here, in the context of Occitan poetic practice, the idea of the gra takes on a new significance beyond the biological and visual linkage we have seen thus far. By explicitly identifying the gra in his description, Matfre implies a connection between the visual figure and poetic form. For the term enpeutat can also apply to the initial hemistich of a verse line when it rimes with the end of the preceding line or the end of the same line or the first hemistich of the line following.78 The gra thus encompasses the linguistic connections that can bring disparate concepts into mutual relation and dependence (as we have already seen in the verbal / visual play that located “the most heartfelt of loves” over the lady’s heart) and creates the most complete fusion of the verbal and the visual that we have seen so far. It is therefore all the more significant that, unlike that of Bonaventure, Matfre’s text does not follow the disposition of its opening figure.79 In effect, a graphic figure of this complexity would be impossible to follow in a linear text. When we speak of a figure that is encyclopedic in this sense, that pretends to draw all the parts of the vast encyclopedia together into one graphic image, we are confronted with the radical differences between textual and graphic representation. Lambert, too, confronted these differences and responded, at the end of the Liber floridus, where we find the arbor bona and arbor mala, by abandoning any continuous text. Similarly, Joachim, who was not an encyclopedist but sought a global representation of history, broke apart his complex figurae from verbal exposition, adding only labels and brief explanatory notes to his collection of drawings. But Matfre instead suggests the formal correspondence between image and text, obfuscating the disjunctions by gesturing, with that adverb sotilmen, toward the practice

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of obscure poetry developed by the troubadours, whose lyric he (and Ramon Llull) knew so well. Having treated graphic and exegetical figuration, I must now turn to the last aspect of figuration necessary for understanding Llull’s tree of knowledge: obscurity.

Obscure Figures Other scholars have already described the way Christian exegetes rehabilitated the stylistic obscurity that Roman rhetoricians had considered a vice.80 The field is vast, so I shall cite here only a few moments in that transformation whose links to encyclopedism have been overlooked. Like the exegetical encyclopedia itself, the valorization of obscurity can be traced to the De doctrina christiana, where Augustine cites allegories and enigmas, examples of “figurative speech,” in his very personal description of the experience of reading Scripture. He admires them as sources of pleasure that relieve the potential tedium of a purely literal revelation.81 If we trace the sources of encyclopedism and obscurity back to the scriptural text itself, we return to the verse from 1 Corinthians, the particularly felicitous juxtaposition in the Latin New Testament of the mirror and the enigma (“videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate”). The first of these, mirror, was to become a common title for didactic texts, and Vincent adapted it spectacularly to the encyclopedia. The second, enigma, is a rhetorical trope more obscure than allegory: as Isidore puts it, “sensus . . . obscurus est, et per quasdam imagines adumbratus” [the sense is obscure and shadowed forth by certain images] (ET 1.37.26). In the vernacular lyric tradition that Matfre and Llull had practiced, obscurity was cultivated by the troubadours of what scholars know as the trobar clus.82 Speaking generally, this poetics seems to be the gradual unfolding of profound meaning. It may have been derived from the songs of the early and notoriously difficult Gascon troubadour Marcabru (fl. 1130–50), who seems to have worked in southwestern France and northern Spain, and whose lyrics remained popular in Languedoc through the early fourteenth century.83 Marcabru calls his style “paraul’escura.”84 According to Linda Paterson, his difficult imagery belongs to “the scholastic view of nature as a paern of symbols.”85 This allies it with Christian exegesis, Augustinian hermeneutics, and the symbolic encyclopedia. Matfre expresses lile interest in clus composition. His few surviving songs are not in this style, and his choice of citations in the Breviari d’amor betrays a taste for the troubadours of the leu, “easy” or “open,” style.86 Nevertheless, he explicitly aributes obscurity to the “tree of love”:

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Matfres Ermengaus de Bezerss, senhers en leis e d’amor serss . . . domentre qu’als no·s fazia, comenset lo premier dia de primavera, sus l’albor, aquest Briviari d’Amor, per declarar las figuras del albre d’amors obscuras . . . (BA lines 9–10, 17–22) [Matfre Ermengaud of Beziers, lord in law and servant of love . . . while he was doing nothing else, began, on the first day of spring, at dawn, this Breviary of Love, in order to expound the figures of the tree of obscure loves.]

It is not entirely clear whether this quality is to be ascribed to the “figures” that compose the tree or to the loves that it represents, for the adjective is placed next to the feminine plural “loves” but linked by rime to the “figures” to which it seems beer suited conceptually. In any case, the tree diagram purports to represent the subject that Matfre will expound, and multiple ekphrases, in both verse and prose, open the encyclopedia. That is, the encyclopedia’s purpose is to unfold out of an obscure drawing and an initial, “brief” and “subtle” explanation of it an exposition suited to those with lile learning or experience.87 The frequency with which Matfre returns to the phrase “per dar az entendre clar” [to make it clearly understood] implies a tension between the difficulty of the figure and the full understanding that he wishes to instill in his readers.88 Such tension gives added significance to the reference to spring and the dawn in the first lines of the poem, immediately preceding his reference to the “obscure” “figures.” For this is at once a double allusion to the troubadour lyric that he will cite amply in the final part of the encyclopedia (to its traditional spring exordium and to the genre of the alba, the dawn song, in which the troubadour laments the separation to come aer a night of love with his lady)89 and a double image of increasing light and clarity (the lengthening days and the rising sun). The “albor”-“amor” rime falls in the couplet that immediately precedes that of the “figuras . . . d’amors obscuras,” introducing the tension between light and shadow, between full understanding and mystification, that will permeate the encyclopedia. Furthermore, the tree as figura derives, as Matfre tells us much later, from Scripture—an initial verbal figure that demands a “clear” explanation

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and is thus, by implication, obscure. The treatise on the love of men and women serves per mostrar e per dar az entendre clar sso que la Sanct’Escriptura nos a pauzat en figura, quar l’Escriptura Sancta dis quez en terrenal paradis on fo mes le premiers formatz, havia mans albres plantatz, delechables et odorans, e mout precios frugz portans, entre·ls quals l’albres de vida era daus l’una partida . . . et hac n’autre daus l’autra part que fo nomnatz de nom aital albres de saber ben e mal. (BA lines 27675–86, 27690–92) [to show and make clearly understood that which Holy Scripture has given us in a figure, for Scripture says that in earthly paradise where the first creations were placed, there were many trees planted, delectable and wonderfully scented, and bearing very precious fruit, among which the tree of life stood on one side . . . and there was on the other side another tree that was called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.]

The book must contain treatises on both the love of God and the neighbor (symbolized by the tree of life) and the love of male and female (symbolized by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil) in order fully to expound the figure of the Garden of Eden (BA lines 27699–708). The treatise on the love of men and women also has a second exegetical role, for it expounds the meaning of the condensed, allusive lyric of the troubadours, which Matfre takes as his authoritative source in this part of the text: li dig dels trobadors no son ges trufas ni folors del tot, ans y pot hom triar bonas doctrinas, qui o sab far,

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e bonas razos e bos sens, bos aibs e bells captenemens, los quals cauziran li senat, menesprezen la vanetat. (BA lines 27783–90) [the poems of the troubadours are not at all frivolities or foolishness, but rather sources from which good teachings may be drawn—by one who knows how—and good explanations and good sense, good qualities and beautiful manners, all of which the wise can discern, despising vanity.]

Despite his taste for relatively easy lyric, Matfre tells us here that this poetry requires a gloss. Thus, we could think of the Breviari d’amor as an extended exegesis of both the graphic and the textual image. The obscure figure is the pretext for the encyclopedic text. Unlike Matfre, Ramon Llull is widely credited with an obscure style,90 but he does not practice it exclusively. He seems to have taken the opportunity, during his early apprenticeship in troubadour poetry, to consider the advantages of both trobar clus and trobar leu. In the prologue to the Libre del gentil, he acknowledges the utility of the laer, declaring himself in search of “novella manera e novelles rahons” [a new way and new arguments] by which to guide the errant to eternal glory (LGTS, 6). He thus situates himself stylistically in the medieval tradition of “new” poetry. This approach to novelty is not a quest of new subject maer, not a rupture with poetic tradition, but rather a reinvention or, as Alexandre Leupin puts it, a “rejuvenation.”91 His evangelical task is analogous, requiring new arguments to support a venerable faith, so it is fiing that Llull should express that task in terms borrowed from medieval poetics. When in the following paragraph he turns to the question of clarity and obscurity in vocabulary, it is difficult for the terms plans [plain] and escurs [obscure] not to continue to evoke the poetics already suggested by the “novella manera,” for, just as the troubadours associated the term escur with the trobar clus style, so they associated plan with the trobar leu.92 Llull seems to intend a related sense: Cada sciencia a mester los vocables per los quals mills sia manifestada. E cor a·questa sciencia demonstrativa sien mester vocables escurs e que los homens lecs no an en hus; e cor nos ffassam aquest libre als homens lecs, per açó breument e ab plans vocables parlarem d’esta sciencia. Et conffiats en la gracia d’aquell qui es compliment de tots bens, avem esperanssa que per

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esta manera matexa alonguem lo libre ab pus apropriats vocables als homens letrats, amadors de la sciencia especulativa; cor injuria sseria ffeta a aquesta sciencia e a aquesta art, si no era demostrada ab los vocables qui li covenen, e no era significada ab les sutils rahons per les quals mills es demostrada. (LGTS, 6) [Each branch of learning (sciencia) requires words by which it may be best expressed. And since this demonstrative knowledge requires obscure terms, beyond the usage of laymen, and since we are writing this book for such people, we shall speak of this knowledge briefly and with plain words. And entrusting ourselves to the grace of him who is the fulfillment of all good, we hope that in this same way we can continue the book with terms more suitable for leered men, lovers of speculative knowledge; for it would be damaging to this knowledge and art, if it were not demonstrated with terms appropriate to it, or represented with the subtle reasonings by which it is best demonstrated.]

Llull justifies his choice of words as Matfre does, with reference to the “lay” people in his audience, those whose relative lack of education renders it difficult for them to understand particularly dense or uncommon kinds of representation;93 but, whereas Matfre quickly slips from this into a justification of his choice of the vernacular over Latin, Llull is not similarly distracted. He envisioned his texts circulating in multiple languages. Therefore, the essential question in this passage is not choice of language but the kinds of words employed in different kinds of discourse within one and the same language and the difficulty that those words present for a reader uninitiated in a particular discourse. In the Libre del gentil, Llull does not tell us what exactly constitutes his solution in the quest for words that are both “plans” and “apropriats” to the leered and that will adequately “manifest” his knowledge to the lay reader. This text is roughly contemporary with the Libre de contemplació, in which he takes an alternative approach to obscurity that will be prominent in his later vernacular writing.94 In the Libre de contemplació he argues that language is never fully capable of expressing thought: Enaixí, Sènyer, com paraula defall a expondre tot ço que enteniment entén, enaixí enteniment entén en los significats més coses e altres coses que paraula no pot nomenar ni parlar. (LC 28.155.15)

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[Lord, just as speech falls short of expressing everything that the understanding grasps, so the understanding grasps more or different meanings than what speech can name or express.]

Llull therefore tends to use difficult metaphors and parables in order to grope toward more profound truths, for, the more difficult the symbol, the higher the understanding that it permits the reader to achieve.95 Scholars have frequently cited the explanation of the obscurity of the prophets in the Libre de meravelles as a justification for Llull’s own obscurity: on plus fortment los profetes parlaven escurament de l’aveniment de Jesucrist, pus ocasionat és lo humanal enteniment a exalçar si mateix en subtilitat, e en cercar les obres que Déus ha en si mateix e fora si mateix. (LM 1.11) [there where the prophets spoke more obscurely of the advent of Jesus Christ, the human understanding has more occasion to exalt in subtleness, and in seeking the works that God possesses in himself and outside himself.]

Llull’s use of obscure symbols in the Libre de meravelles sets the text apart, both from his earlier long narrative the Blanquerna (mid-1280s) and from the Queste del Saint Graal, which I have suggested as one of the likely models for the Libre de meravelles. In the Queste, the symbolism of the knights’ adventures is easy for the alert reader to explicate, even before the intervention of a hermit (ignorance of prior history of the Grail presents the only obstacle to understanding). The text reads somewhat like a modern mystery novel in which the reader has a good chance of solving the case before the detective does. The Libre de meravelles, on the other hand, presents a series of truly puzzling events, rendered even more puzzling by the indirect explanations that the hermits offer. Llull’s valorization of obscurity in the passages that I have just cited from the Libre de contemplació and the Libre de meravelles justifies his use of this literary technique, as well as artificial, difficult phraseology, in encyclopedic texts. The pedagogical aims of the genre are served by forcing the reader to “exercise” his or her intelligence. In what we could take as a further explanation of the pedagogical usefulness of obscurity in the encyclopedia, Llull links the “strangeness” of words to their novelty and argues that these two qualities of language render it beautiful and capable of momentarily sating the desires of the soul:

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car per ço car l’ànima racional no·s pot sadollar en est món e desija son compliment, per açò s’adelita més home com ou paraules novelles e estranyes, car ha entenció que per aquelles pusca mills venir a açò que desija, que per les paraules que ha acostumades d’oir en les quals ni per les quals no pot atrobar compliment a sa ànima. On, per lo plaer que l’ànima ha com hom ou novelles raons e demonstracions, per açò són les paraules embellides en aquell qui les diu. (LC 40.359.26) [for, since the rational soul cannot be satisfied in this world and desires its fulfillment, for this reason man delights more when he hears new or strange words, for he has the impression that by means of such words he can beer arrive at that which he desires than by the words that he is accustomed to hear, in which and through which he cannot find fulfillment for his soul. Therefore, on account of the pleasure that the soul experiences when one hears new reasonings and demonstrations, the words are beautified in the mind of the one who pronounces them.]

The repositioning of “used” words as less effective than unaccustomed ones would seem to contradict the preference for “plain” words that Llull expresses in the Libre del gentil, yet the two positions are consonant insofar as unaccustomed words provide a “new manner” to express truth. Together, newness and strangeness are the qualities that Llull aributes to the marvel.96 Through the marvel, the encyclopedia, until now the most conservative of texts because of its purpose of transmiing already existing knowledge, comes in Llull’s work to accommodate the sort of rhetorical modernity vaunted by the poets and poeticians of the time. With its figures, it fulfills its evangelical purpose of transforming the vision of its reader and reforming his or her understanding.

New Trees In the Arbor scientiae, the tree figure becomes the privileged vehicle for this mission. Llull’s understanding of the symbolic potential of the tree had deepened considerably by 1295, in comparison with his uses of the tree nearly two decades earlier in the Libre del gentil and the Començaments de medicina. For one thing, Llull seems to have learned that the form was most appropriate for expressing participation and subdivision, not permutations and combinations, for which the graphs, half matrices, and vovelles of the Art were beer suited. Yet his use of the tree form in the Arbor scientiae far

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exceeds this basic lesson. Did he reach this sophisticated understanding of the form through encounters with the trees of Lambert, Joachim, Bonaventure, or Matfre, as he thumbed through codices in the libraries of the religious houses that hosted him during his travels? In each case, the hypothesis is compelling on both conceptual and historical grounds, but there is no way to prove that Llull knew these other texts. At the very least, our survey of the other trees has made it clear that Llull’s tree of knowledge, to which I now turn, is not novel, but it is new in the poetic sense of the word. It faces the same representational problem as its precedents: the uneasy coordination of the verbal and the visual when dealing with complex paradigms. But Llull actively practices the poetics of obscurity toward which Matfre made only indistinct gestures. He cultivates the enigma in his descriptions of the tree.97 Nevertheless, probably in order to draw readers gradually into the difficulties of the Arbor scientiae, Llull begins with a deceptively simple prologue. As with many of his texts, he evokes a “Ramon,” a fictionalized projection of himself in the third person. In this case, a nameless monk happens on Ramon in tears beneath a beautiful tree, lamenting his lack of success in his visit to Rome. When the monk hears Ramon’s name, he tells him that he has long sought him and asks him to write unum librum . . . ad omnes scientias generalem, qui leviter intelligi posset, et per quem Ars sua generalis, quam composuerat, facilius intelligi posset, quia nimis subtilis videtur ad intelligendum, et etiam quia ceterae scientiae, quas antiqui sapientes invenerunt, ita sunt difficiles et ita longum tempus requirunt, quod difficiliter aliquis potest ad finem debitum pervenire, et etiam plura dubia sunt, quae quidam sapientium contra alios habent sapientes. Quare rogavit ipsum, quod unum librum faceret generalem, qui ad alias scientias intelligendum juvaret, quoniam intellectus confusus periculum magnum et magnae devotionis privationem ad honorandum Deum, cognoscendum, amandum, serviendum et proximo suo salutem procurandum apportat. (AS prooemium) [a book . . . treating all the branches of learning, a book that can be easily understood, and through which his Ars generalis, which he had wrien, would be more easily grasped, because it seems very difficult, and also because the other branches of learning, developed by ancient sages, are so difficult and require so much time to master that one can do so only with difficulty, and there remain many questions, since the sages are not in agreement. For this reason [the monk] asked [Ramon] to write a general book that would help

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people understand the other branches of learning, for a confused intellect presents a great danger and an impediment to great devotion, in honoring, knowing, loving, and serving God and working for the salvation of one’s neighbor.]

The book that the monk seeks is similar to yet different from an encyclopedia such as the Speculum maius; it, too, will fuse both old and new material, but contradictions will be resolved so that doubts do not imperil the soul. Everything there is to know will be set out in a way that will make it accessible to everyone. An impossible task, it would seem, but the monk has chosen perhaps the one person who would take it on—Ramon’s confidence in the explanatory powers of the Art is unwavering. Aer some initial prevarication (he feels rejected by the Christian community; he thinks it would be beer for him to go and preach to Muslims), he begins to consider how to make the Art more approachable. The tree catches his eye, and, when the monk asks what he is thinking, he responds: Domine, cogito in hoc, quod per hanc arborem significatur, quoniam omne, quod est, significatur in ipsa. Propter quod habeo voluntatem illum librum faciendi, de quo me rogatis, recipiendo significata, quae haec arbor mihi in septem rebus significat, videlicet per radices, per truncum arboris, brancas, ramos, folia, flores et fructus; per ista septem hujus libri processum tenere propono. (AS prooemium) [Lord, I am thinking about what is signified by this tree, since all that is, is signified in it. On account of this I wish to write the book that you entreated of me, by receiving the meanings which this tree signifies to me in seven things, that is, through its roots, trunk, branches, boughs, leaves, flowers, and fruits. With these seven things I propose to undertake this book.]

Llull assigns meaning to more parts of the tree than Matfre, who considered only four: the roots, leaves, flowers, and fruits. To these Llull adds the trunk, which had been so oddly missing from the tree of the principles of medicine and not exploited symbolically in the tree of love, and two different kinds of branches, the brancae (branques in the Catalan) and the rami (rams). Llull’s use of the two terms for two distinct parts of the plant in his tree allegories may be somewhat his own invention, but it allows him to capitalize on the organic nature of the tree as a whole by assigning meaning to all the con-

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Table 3. Structure of the Arbor scientiae Book

Contents

1.

Elemental tree

2.

Vegetal tree

3.

Sensual tree

4.

Imaginative tree

5.

Human tree

6.

Moral tree

7.

Imperial tree (treats the hierarchy of lay human society)

8.

Apostolic tree (treats the hierarchy the church)

9.

Celestial tree

10.

Angelic tree

11.

Eviternal tree (treats eternal blessedness and damnation)

12.

Maternal tree (treats the Virgin Mary)

13.

Christological tree

14.

Divine tree

15.

Tree of exempla (proverbs and exempla illustrating everything treated in the preceding trees)

16.

Tree of questions (questions and answers related to the preceding trees)

necting parts through which nutrition is passed from the roots to the leaves, flowers, and fruits.98 Llull’s tree of knowledge in the Arbor scientiae is, like Matfre’s tree of love, at once one and many—sixteen, to be exact. Unlike the tree of love, however, it does provide the structure for the text of the encyclopedia, which is divided into sixteen books, one for each tree (table 3). The difference between this division into books and that which we see in other encyclopedias, including Llull’s Libre de meravelles, is that the natural world is divided, not into classes of creatures, but rather into categories in which multiple classes participate, and any one class may participate in any number of these categories. The vegetal category, for example, expresses a quality common to plants, animals, and humans. Conversely, human beings participate in all the first eight categories. Like the succession of trees in Joachim’s figurae, then, the trees in Llull’s text treat the same subject maer from different perspectives. Thus, the books of the encyclopedia participate in each other through a network of relations.99 The multiple connections between books create an extremely complex

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organizational structure. Each of the sixteen books will be divided into seven sections, according to the seven parts of the tree. Of these, the roots for all but the tree of questions will be the “semblances” of the principles that constitute the building blocks of Llull’s Art. Llull’s principles consist of the “uncreated virtues” or “divine dignities” that we have already seen: nine attributes of God, present in the created world through exemplarity, although Llull’s notion of exemplarity is to be distinguished from the analogy that permeates the thought of Franciscan thinkers such as Bonaventure. The dignities’ presence on the lower levels of creation is active insofar as they provide the instruments of God’s participation in creation. Hence, Johnston describes their presence as that of a “dynamic proportionality” while recognizing that Llull admits of no real proportion between the Creator and the creature.100 Nine additional principles complement the dignities by providing the concepts necessary to articulate the relation between God’s full possession of these aributes and their lesser or imperfect appearance in creation: difference, concordance, contrariety, and so on.101 The action of these eighteen principles on all levels of creation serves ultimately as a unifying force.102 They tie all creation together while rendering valid a single method of thought—Llull’s Art—for the understanding of all levels of the ladder of creation. It is thus appropriate that, just as the principles are present on every level of being in Llull’s system of thought, so they provide the shared root of the sixteen trees of his final encyclopedia. Above the roots each tree is arranged slightly differently, according to the inherent structure of the subject in question. Generally speaking, the branches express the powers of a particular level of being; the boughs its operations, the leaves its accidents, the flowers its instruments, and the fruits its effects. Hence, the vegetal tree has four branches, representing the four powers of the vegetal soul (appetite, retention, digestion, and expulsion), but each is double in the sense that it participates at once in the preceding tree (the elemental) as well as the vegetal tree (AS 2.3 prologue). The boughs are similarly double; those belonging particularly to the vegetal tree are generation, corruption, privation, and renewal. The trunk from which the branches spring resists any easy labeling: Truncus iste duplex est, quoniam est de natura et essentia elementali et vegetali, et est truncus generalis ad truncos, qui sub illo sunt vegetati, sicut truncus pomerii, leonis et hominis, gruis et piscis, et est visibilis in suis particularibus, sicut truncus pomerii, qui visibilis est et palpabilis, et sua visibilitas et palpabilitas per essentiam elementalem consistit, quae in se continet

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grossam materiam, sed essentia, quam habet pomerium per vegetationem, videri non potest neque tangi, quia sua materia est subtilis, in tantum quod videri non potest neque tangi; sua tamen figura in liquore apparet, qui est in trunco, quemadmodum truncus vegetalis in trunco ficus in similitudine lactis, et in trunco leonis in figura sanguinis. Est tamen truncus vegetalis de natura corporali, quia est de partibus substantialibus corporalibus, secundum quod est significatum in radicibus. (AS 2.2) [This trunk is twofold, since it is of both the elemental and the vegetal nature and essence. It is general to the trunks that are quickened according to it, such as the trunk of the fruit tree, the lion and the man, the crane and the fish. It is visible in its particulars, just like the trunk of the fruit tree, which is visible and palpable. Its visibility and palpability consist in its elemental essence, which contains gross material. However, its essence, which the fruit tree possesses through its quickening, may be neither seen nor touched, because its material is so subtle that it may be neither seen nor touched. Nevertheless, its figure appears in the liquid within the trunk, for example the vegetal trunk appears in the trunk of a fig tree in the similitude of milky juice, and in the trunk of a lion in the figure of blood. The vegetal trunk is nonetheless of a physical nature, since it is among the substantial parts of the body, according to what is signified in the roots.]

The figure, too, is doubled. Llull tells us that the “vegetal essence” is neither visible nor tangible but appears to us already “figured” as the liquor that carries nourishment and sustains life: the sap of the fig tree or the blood of the lion. This essence is, however, figured in the encyclopedia by the trunk of the tree schema, which sustains its branches and connects them to the roots. In his subsequent treatment of the leaves, flowers, and fruits of the vegetal tree, Llull similarly declines to provide labels that can easily be applied to a schema, a list to be classified under rubrics. Instead, he further discusses the relation between the vegetal and the elemental and continues to develop the extended tree metaphor. When treating the leaves, he makes reference to those of the elemental tree, which were the nine accidents (quantity, quality, relation, and so on), then goes on to discuss the symbolism of autumn and the budding of leaves: Haec folia, quae ad vegetationem pertinent, ipsam ornant et conservant, sicut substantia vegetativa, cum facit folia elementalia et visibilia, quae sunt tunicae vegetativorum ex substantia pomerii existentium; et cum illa cadunt

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a pomerio est significatum, quod folia vegetativa suum cursum fecerunt et complementum in ornatione et conservatione substantiae vegetativae, quae ex tunc dormiet usque ad tempus, in quo fit renovatio foliorum in primo vere. (AS 2.5.15–22) [These leaves, which pertain to the vegetal substance, adorn and maintain it, as do elemental and visible leaves, which are vegetative garments out of the substance of the existing fruit tree; and when they fall from the tree, this signifies that the vegetative leaves have completed their cycle in the adorning and maintaining of the vegetal substance, which will sleep from that time till the moment of the renewal of the leaves in early spring.]

The reference to the renovatio of spring in this development of the tree allegory somewhat confuses the encyclopedic figure by making the new foliage a sign of renewal, which in the figure is supposed to be represented by one of the smaller branches. Thus the metaphoric possibilities of the tree exceed and complicate the schematic figure. I have quoted the treatments of the trunk and leaves of the vegetal tree extensively, and these citations suffice to show the strangeness of an encyclopedia inspired by the views on knowledge, language, and pedagogy that we have already considered. For one thing, the content does not resemble in any way the treatment of the plants in other natural history encyclopedias. This is a gesture of generalization rather than specificity and detail; Llull refers to species only occasionally and usually only to serve as an example of some shared quality, as in the fig and apple trees. His brief subsequent treatment of trees that do not bear flowers and fruits—a failure that he explains in terms of the humors of the plant (AS 2.6–7)—provides an example of the sort of content one would expect of an encyclopedia, but such examples are remarkable for their rarity. Moreover, whereas Matfre’s tree provided the backdrop for a series of distinct lists (the virtues and vices, the courtly qualities) that his encyclopedia would develop, the relation between Llull’s trees and the encyclopedic list is less evident. On the one hand, the trees all repeat the same list: the principles of the Art. A number of trees also repeat the lists of the nine accidents or diverse powers of diverse “souls” (vegetal, sensitive, and so on). But these lists are all of abstractions rather than realizations, generalities rather than species.103 The deployment of the lists renders the figure of the tree difficult to visualize. The roots and branches are fairly simple to sketch, but it is not clear where or how to aach the boughs (a smaller branch aached to each

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larger one?), a problem that multiplies exponentially when one comes to the leaves, flowers, and fruits. To the organic proliferation of such a figure may be added the further challenges of Llull’s play on the visible and the invisible and the diverse relations that each tree maintains with the ones that precede and follow it. In fact, a glance through the manuscripts and editions of the Arbor scientiae provides proof of the degree to which the trees of this text resist visual realization. Unlike Matfre, and unlike his own past practice in the Libre del gentil and the Començaments de medicina, Llull makes no reference in the Arbor scientiae to eventual illustrations of his tree figures, so the absence of such miniatures in many manuscripts is not surprising. A few manuscripts include drawings or paintings of trees, but these have been considerably simplified. In a manuscript of the mid-fourteenth century now in Munich, column illustrations mark the beginning of each new book.104 They generally show Llull standing beside a crudely drawn tree to which no labels or schema have been aached. An early fieenth-century manuscript now at the Vatican includes stylized trees at the beginning of each book, and a few representative figures sprout from the branches. For example, the vegetal tree shows personifications of the four powers of the vegetal soul perched atop the branches.105 No aempt is made to realize the complex schema that Llull describes. Early modern printers usually tried to include a more schematized representation at the beginning of each new book, with uneven success. The woodcut of the vegetal tree in the 1515 Lyon edition accurately enumerates the eighteen roots and four branches (fig. 9). The banderoles aached to the trunk and leaves have been filled in with references to the visible and the invisible, a clear connection to Llull’s text, but somewhat incoherent with the project of creating a visual figure. Moreover, the woodcut is too small to accommodate all the parts that Llull gives for this (or any other) tree. Of the boughs (here represented as higher branches) only renova is labeled (twice). Though banderoles are aached to the flowers and fruits, no label has been filled in (probably because Llull himself gives no subdivisions). The lack of labels is symptomatic of the woodcuts in the Lyon edition. The editors have made use of a small number of tree templates (four or five), which vary in number and arrangement of the component parts and are twined through with the banderoles meant to be filled in to correspond to the book in question. They are, however, le empty more oen than not. One admires the editors’ persistence in including the woodcuts at all. Are they meant to serve as visual memory aids, as challenges to the reader to aempt the task that the editors decline of correctly labeling the parts

Figure 9. Ramon Llull, Arbor scientiae (1295–96), Tree of Vegetal Life. Woodcut from edition of Lyon, 1515, fol. 19v. Photograph reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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of the trees, or as pure enigmas? Historically, the woodcuts fall somewhere between the scholastic diagram and the Renaissance emblem, a unique marriage of image and text that seems to have been inspired by the late fieenthcentury passion for numismatics and reached its maturity in the early sixteenth century.106 The emblem is a creation of the Renaissance, explicitly artificial, invented in the modern rather than the medieval sense. According to Antoine Compagnon’s analysis, it is a “sign without history” conceived to “remedy” the failure of the medieval allegory.107 I therefore take this opportunity to pose the question (which I must leave for early modernists to answer) of whether and to what degree the trees of the Arbor scientiae, by virtue of their extreme artificiality and obscurity, can be understood to anticipate the emblem and, thus, to mediate between medieval allegory and a more modern conception of the symbol. Such a mediation may help explain why the text was more popular in the fieenth and sixteenth centuries than it had been earlier and why it continues to be more frequently placed in the tradition of the humanist encyclopedia. Nevertheless, it is clear from the reference to the tree in the prologue as a thing that “signifies” in and of itself, before its interpretation by him or anyone else, that Llull rooted his encyclopedic trees firmly in medieval symbolism. Twentieth-century editors of the Arbor scientiae proved either more reticent or more conceptually rigorous in their representations of the trees. The text was published twice in the second half of the century, once in Catalan (the Obres essencials) and once in Latin (the Opera latina). Both are extraordinarily beautiful books. The Catalan edition, a leather-bound, gold-embossed set with plentiful plates reproducing manuscript illustrations and early modern woodcuts, offers very lile to illustrate the Arbre de ciència, despite the fact that the plates are placed at regular intervals of eighty to one hundred pages and that this text occupies about five hundred pages of the first volume. The editors chose to reproduce a single woodcut from the Barcelona edition of 1505 and to fill the other plates in this part of the volume with a series of manuscript illustrations not associated with the encyclopedia. The Latin edition, on the other hand, is filled with tree illustrations: reproductions of manuscript miniatures and woodcuts, colorful modern artistic renderings (without labels), and a series of entirely new schemas. These last have the considerable advantage of making clear the progression from the principles to the powers, operations, and so on by representing it as an ascent from the roots to the top of the tree. Each tree has ten branches; the five on the le are labeled with the parts of the tree (excluding the roots and trunk) in ascending order, while those on the right are labeled in the same

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order “potentiae,” “operationes,” “accidentia,” “instrumenta,” and “elementata.”108 Along the length of each horizontal pair of branches are placed the relevant qualities. For the vegetal tree, the powers of the vegetal soul appear on the lowest set of branches, its operations the next level up, and so on. This highly effective schema suffers somewhat from the idiosyncrasies of Llull’s treatment of various levels; at the apex of the vegetal tree we find listed as fruits four of the species that Llull mentions by way of example in his treatment of the fruits; it is incongruent with the other lists for being incomplete and allusive. The problem, however, is minor. More significant is the fact that what renders the schema immediately visually comprehensible is its renunciation of correspondence to the way Llull himself describes the tree figure. By assigning every category from the branches to the fruits as a label for a branch, the graphic representation undoes the organic tree metaphor, with its interconnectedness and proliferation, that lends Llull’s text its richness. The figure is instead purely schematic. The artists’ renderings that alternate with these schemas in the edition balance—perhaps palliate—the laer’s extreme conceptual rigor, but a turn of the page always separates the bright and gracious vision of the tree from the gray conceptual architecture of the schema.

Tree of Knowledge The problems of visualization are yet more acute for the great tree referred to in the title, the (singular) “tree of knowledge” that unites all sixteen. An earlier generation of scholars eluded the difficulty of explicating it by referring to the “forest” of this text, as if the sixteen trees stood side by side.109 However, several recent scholars have pointed out the perplexing fact that the title of the text is decidedly singular110—just as, perhaps not coincidentally, Matfre referred to his as the (singular) “tree of love” even though it is composed of five stems. A close reading of Llull’s text shows that most of the trees spring somehow from the one preceding in a vertical rather than a lateral deployment. The arbor vegetalis is “graed” onto the elemental (inserta in the Latin text; empeltat, cognate of Matfre’s enpeutatz, in the Catalan), and the sensual tree is similarly graed onto the other two (AS 2 prooemium, 3 prooemium). If we borrow the terms of rhetorical analysis, we could call the relation between these trees synecdochical, a participatory relation between the part and the whole. This kind of linkage recalls the graing of Lambert’s, Joachim’s, and Matfre’s trees, while the vertical multiplication of the trees strongly suggests a link to Joachim’s trees of the three status. Here,

Plate 1.  Leaf from a bestiary (England, ca. 1200). The panther is depicted between the wild beasts drawn to the wonderful scent of its breath and the dragon, its mortal enemy, which flees its scent in the bowels of the earth. Aberdeen, Aberdeen University Library MS 24, fol. 9r. Photograph reproduced by permission of the University of Aberdeen.

Plate 2.  Opening leaf of a Bible moralisée (Paris, ca. 1220–30). God is depicted as a geometer or artist circumscribing chaos. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS 2554, fol. 1v. Photograph reproduced by permission of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.

Plate 3.  Tree of vices and virtues with the Gentile and the three sages seated below it, one of the five trees illustrating the Old French translation of Ramon Llull’s Libre del gentil. Manuscript made in northern France, late thirteenth/early fourteenth century. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 22933, fol. 64r. Photograph reproduced by permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Plate 4.  Tree of Love, illustrating the Catalan translation of Matfre Ermengaud’s Breviari d’amor. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS esp. 353, fol. 5v. Photograph reproduced by permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Plate 5.  Depiction of the Great Tree of Knowledge, illustrating a fifteenth-century manuscript of the Arbre de ciència, Catalan text of Ramon Llull’s Arbor scientiae. Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MS D. 535, inf. fol. 37v. Photograph reproduced by permission of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana.

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the tree figure breaks free of the linear progression of language, implicitly collapsing the various books of text into each other. It thus solves the problem exemplified by the trees of the Libre del gentil, that the relation between trees is not expressed in the figure. Like Joachim, Llull has increasing difficulty describing the relation of the trees as he ascends his conceptual structure. He soon finds the idea of graing inadequate to express the participation of one tree in the last and abandons it at the moment when he ceases to deal with material being. The imaginative tree is wholly invisible and intangible; its roots are the “similitudes” of the “real” roots of the previous trees. Such a relation recalls the relation between the two branches of the tree of the principles of medicine, where the second branch was supposed to represent the first metaphorically. But this time Llull avoids the trap of trying to represent both trees on the same plane; instead of calling for a graphic figure to be drawn, he borrows two similes (sicut) to illustrate the relation between the trees, the wax seal and the reflection in the mirror: Radices Arboris imaginalis sunt similitudines radicum realium, de quibus in Arbore elementali, vegetali et sensuali dictum est, sicut similitudo bonitatis, magnitudinis, durationis, potestatis et ceterarum radicum. . . . Et . . . est imaginatio arbor ex similitudinibus et impressionibus, et quae accipit similitudines radicum. Sicut cera, quae accipit similitudinem lierarum sigilli, et speculum, quod accipit figuras, quae sunt ante ipsum. (AS 4.1) [The roots of the tree of imagination are the similitudes of the real roots that were discussed in the tree of elements, the tree of vegetal life, and the tree of sensation, just as the similitude of goodness, greatness, duration, power, and the other roots. . . . And the imagination is a tree derived . . . through similitudes and impressions, a tree that receives the similitudes of the roots, like wax, which receives the similitude of the leers of a seal, and the mirror, which receives the figures that are before it.]

It is suggestive that the idea of two trees mirroring each other should so beautifully express the relation of Lambert’s arbor bona and arbor mala and Joachim’s pairs of trees, all depicted on the opening of a quire, in such a way that, while a rigorous separation of the two trees is maintained, their general outlines mirror each other, inviting the reader to draw mental connections or distinctions between the corresponding parts of the figures. The fact that Llull here emphasizes the similarity of the two trees while distinguishing

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their mode of being (the real vs. the imaginary) particularly recalls Joachim’s play on similarity in the figurae. In Llull’s verbal description, the reflection’s coordination with the seal reveals a certain semiotic imprecision, significant because earlier medieval writers had stressed the difference between the reproductive modalities of the imprint and the reflection and, hence, between the kinds of images each could create. The image reflected in the mirror is always insubstantial and somehow deformed (hence the “enigma” glimpsed in Paul’s mirror). Most problematically, the mirror reflection also implies the displacement of the archetype, which is never the object of vision. For these reasons, writers generally preferred the idea of the imprint, which posits substantiality and some (always anterior) contact between the origin or model and the reproduction.111 Llull’s vacillation here indicates that he cannot decide whether the image in the imagination enters into a metaphoric relation with the real object (as in the reflection, where a visual object unconnected to the original replaces the laer) or a metonymic one (as in the seal, where an object derived from the original through some formative contact with it is taken in place of that original). The incompatibility of these two similes makes it impossible to capture visually the tree of imagination’s relation to the preceding ones— unless it is by thinking again about the trees of Lambert and Joachim. For, when the book is closed, the trees that mirror each other across the opening do enter into contact with each other, corresponding parts lying against each other. This contact, like that between the wax and the seal, would nevertheless be anterior to the reading of the document, for the two surfaces part when the book is opened. Such an explanation may appear far-fetched, but, if we reject it, we are le with this perplexing vacillation between different modalities of reproduction, different kinds of tropes, that creates multiple verbal connections within the encyclopedic figure while at the same time thwarting graphic connection (verbal redundancy creates visual lack). The connections between the later trees in the Arbor scientiae will become yet more problematic. The apostolic tree appears to be entirely detached from the preceding ones. It shares their structure, and the opening description recalls the wax seal, but that simile is redirected and here figures contact between this and later trees rather than earlier ones. The model for the impression, the seal, comes this time from above (the tree of Christ) rather than below: Arbor apostolicalis . . . est arbor generalis ad res et ordines spirituales, in qua sunt impressiones vicariae sancti Petri, subjectum cujus est alba petra,

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pura, munda et scripta sanctitate, in qua sunt impressiones lierarum sigilli domini nostri Jesu Christi. Quae siquidem lierae sunt suae operationes et sua bona exempla, quae dedit gentibus in amando et honorando Deum et suum proximum. Et, quia lierae illae sunt impressae in petra, fortiores sunt quam si essent impressae in cera; et, quia petra est alba, sunt magis apparentes quam si essent impressae in arena; et, etiam lierae pulchrae sunt et mundae, quoniam petra est alba. (AS 8 proemium) [The apostolic tree . . . is the tree general to spiritual things and orders, in which are the impressions of the priesthood of Saint Peter, the subject of which is a white stone, pure, clean, and inscribed with sanctity, in which are the impressions of the leers of the seal of our Lord Jesus Christ. And these leers are his works and good examples, which he gave to the peoples for loving and honoring God and one’s neighbor. And, since those leers are imprinted into stone, they are firmer than if they had been impressed on wax; and, since the stone is white, they are more clearly visible than if they had been wrien in sand; and indeed those leers are beautiful and clean, since the stone is white.]

This is the last time the seal will appear as a figure for the relation between trees. Like the gra, it will be inadequate to express the relations of the trees in the later part of the text, which will be either loose or inexistent. All, however, now look toward the divine tree as their culmination. But it is ultimately the tree of exempla and the tree of questions that unite all the trees, bringing together each of their sets of parts with the corresponding sets of the others.112 Llull offers no full description of the great tree of knowledge, leaving it to the reader to construct in the mind’s eye (to the extent possible) on the basis of these vague explanations scaered through the text. The rare aempts to depict the great tree graphically have been singularly unsuccessful. A frontispiece to the Lyon edition shows a tree whose roots are the principles and whose sixteen branches represent the sixteen trees of the text (fig. 10). This illustration is similar to the depiction of the great tree in a fieenth-century manuscript now in Milan (pl. 5). The Milan manuscript, however, is more satisfying in that it represents the text’s hierarchy and movement of ascent by arranging the branches so that those representing the earliest trees are found at the boom and those representing the final trees at the top. Yet neither illustration can accommodate all the branches, boughs, and so on. In the woodcut, the leaves, flowers, and fruits are shown without any labels;

Figure 10. Ramon Llull, Arbor scientiae (1295–96), Tree of Knowledge. Woodcut from edition of Lyon, 1515, fol. 2r. Photograph reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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in the manuscript illustration, the leaves sprouting from the branches are labeled as other parts of the tree, “branches,” “boughs,” and “leaves,” while each branch sprouts one flower, so labeled, and one fruit. The combination of incoherence and redundancy highlights the inadequacy of the whole schema, which is the same as the inadequacy of the individual tree schemas in the recent Latin edition: the tree visually depicted radically departs from the one Llull describes. The illustration history of this text does not resolve, but instead confirms, the enigma that is the tree of knowledge.

Encyclopedism Reconfigured The disjunction between the textual and the graphic figure here is partly attributable to differences in media. I observed earlier that text is linear and sequential, whereas the graphic figure is not. But we have seen that the laer, too, has its limitations. The two-dimensional surface of the manuscript page does not allow a satisfactory representation of superimposed layers. Other problems arise when the participation of one level in another must be represented. Yet I think that the technological explanation masks another, more subtle issue. It is striking that Llull’s encyclopedic figures always seem to recede from the visual realm. Here, I would like to return to the comparison that I suggested in chapter 1 between Llull’s description of the Libre de plasent visió and Richard de Fournival’s explanation of the Bestiaire d’amour. In a cultural context much preoccupied with the medium through which ideas were transmied, Richard clearly declares his intention to exploit the sensuality of signs, whose painted flourishes greet the eye just as its sounds, once voiced, greet the ear. The book will seduce the lady just as she has seduced its author.113 Llull, on the other hand, acknowledges the visual pleasure of the book within a series of textual frames that distance this particular, beautiful object from the reader’s eye, just as an object is displaced by its reflection in the mirror. In the Arbor scientiae, despite all the foregoing speculation about codices as models for Llull’s linking of the trees, the book is a conspicuous absence among the various similes for representation. Even the seal remains at one remove: the impression is into wax, not parchment. An epistle is not a book. The book and its figures pass away just as we are told, in another passage from 1 Corinthians, that the figure—the visible form—of this world must perish: “praeterit enim figura hujus mundi” (7:31). The elusiveness of the book as physical object and of the figure as object of physical vision are comprehensible in the context of Llull’s exegetical practice. Despite his idiosyncrasies and unconventional education, he shows

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himself perfectly aware of the four modes of exegesis.114 Nevertheless, he rarely has much to say about the first. He distinguishes the literal from the modes of spiritual exegesis via his distinction between the “sensual” and “intellectual” referents of the word: Com paraula defalla, Sènyer, a significar totes coses, e com enteniment no bast a entendre totes coses, per açò esdevé que paraula ha dos significats: los uns són significats literals, los altres són significats esperituals. Los significats e les exposicions literals són sensuals, així com dir tot home és animal; e los significats e les exposicions espirituals són intellectuals, així com vós, Sènyer, qui dixés: “Façam home a image e a semblança nostra.” On, en l’exposició espiritual se contrasten pus fort paraula e enteniment, que en la literal, per ço car paraula no basta a significar tan bé les coses intel·lectualse [sic] com fa les sensuals. (LC 28.155.20–21) [Since speech fails, Lord, to signify all things, and since understanding is not sufficient to grasp all things, for this reason speech has two meanings: the one literal, the other spiritual. The literal meanings and commentaries are sensual, as in the formula “every man is an animal”; and the spiritual meanings and commentaries are intellectual, as when you, Lord, said: “Let us make man in our image and semblance.” Therefore, in spiritual exegesis speech and understanding are more in opposition than in literal exegesis, since speech is not able to signify intellectual things as well as it does sensual things.]

Johnston notes that the example of literal reference here, “every man is an animal,” was a formula frequently cited in the teaching of Aristotelian logic in the schools while the exhortation to make man in God’s image was “the prooext of exemplarist theology.”115 Thus, the passage presages the critique of Aristotelian thought that Llull would carry out for the decades to come— and with Aristotelian logic, perhaps Aristotelian natural history as well, which other encyclopedists had recovered as literal exegesis, the necessary preliminary step before passing on to the spiritual meaning of revelation. Perhaps one of the reasons that the Arbor scientiae was more or less a flop in the late medieval period while other Latin encyclopedias became bestsellers was this resistance to the Aristotelian focus on material phenomena, in all their details and variations. For Llull, the fact that the material world can be perceived only through the senses and that human sensuality is subject to the corruption of sin

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provides an explanation for the frequent conflicts he identifies between the sensual experience of objects and their intellectual import.116 True to Augustinian semiotics, Llull states that sensual things, like a mirror, constitute a “ladder” and a “demonstration” leading to understanding of intellectual things. But he lingers on the analogy, cautioning readers that, just as mirrors can be distorted and, thus, misrepresent objects viewed in them, so too sensual things can be distorted and, thus, mislead the mind.117 Similarly, he emphasizes the materiality of signs themselves, which also constitute objects in the world, but claims that a discord between the word and the understanding occurs “per ço car les sensualitats no són endreçades per les intel·lectuals, e les intel·lectuals són torbades per les sensuals” [because sensual things are not governed by the intellectual, and intellectual things are disturbed by the sensual] (LC 28.155.23). It is this problematic nature of the “sensual” sense of words that leads Llull to censure literal exegesis: En la sacra Escriptura és, Sènyer, tant home errat e desviat de veritat, per ço car no ha coneixença de la descordança qui és enfre enteniment e paraula; car per la ignorància que n’han, no volen seguir les exposicions intel·lectuals qui davallen d’enteniment, e segueixen les exposicions sensuals qui davallen de paraula. (LC 28.155.25) [In Holy Scripture, Lord, man has so wandered from the path of truth that he is not aware of the discord between understanding and speech; for on account of their ignorance, they do not want to follow the intellectual expositions that come from the understanding, and they follow the sensual expositions that come from speech.]

Llull’s insistence on the divorce between the intellectual or spiritual exposition and any sign that can be perceived through the senses repudiates the kind of project undertaken by the makers of the Bibles moralisées, who attempted a graphic, visual realization of the spiritual sense of Scripture. This earlier project had itself been a repudiation of the literalism that Christian exegetes aributed to the Jewish interpretation of Scripture, within a symbolic economy that equated the refusal to accept allegorical interpretation with blindness.118 The figure of Synagogue as a blindfolded woman, whose blindness is made visible to the viewer by the same object that obscures her own vision, had become standard in Christian iconography; it appears in illustrations of one of the most heavily exegetical passages in the Breviari d’amor, where Matfre argues against the Jewish interpretation of

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various biblical episodes and prophesies.119 Here, Matfre goes so far as to cite the biblical passages in all the relevant languages: Occitan, Latin, and Hebrew. Since Matfre’s text was clearly intended for a Christian readership, the Hebrew leers that appear on the page are not intended to be decoded by the reader. They constitute signs whose referent remains inaccessible, a visual demonstration of the killing leer, the sensual sign. Despite Llull’s interest in evangelism, neither of these methods for refuting the Jewish interpretation would have been acceptable to him. By rendering the spiritual sense of Scripture visible, the Bibles moralisées run the risk of allowing readers to be seduced by the material beauty of the signs employed. More radically, Matfre places before readers signs that they can never experience as anything other than a material, visual phenomenon. In contrast, as the prologue to the Libre del gentil makes clear, Llull wished to provide believers of all three Abrahamic faiths with signs that all would find acceptable and be able to interpret and debate. He sought common languages, and his considerable exposure to Islam would have taught him to avoid any visual representation of the spiritual.120 A painting of God with a compass, tracing the outlines of the universe, such as the famous one that opens one of the Bibles moralisées now in Vienna (pl. 2), is the last thing that Llull would have wanted. All the sensual pleasures of the book are thus insistently passed through and le behind in the movement toward an intellectual figure, which is to be preferred to the graphic figure, just as, Llull tells us elsewhere in the Libre de meravelles, the image that the painter imagines is to be preferred to the one he realizes on canvas because the imagination is closer to the intellect (LM 8.86).121 But this intellection is not the ultimate goal either. It is contemplation, seeing with spiritual eyes, that is the goal in the Libre de meravelles. The elusiveness of painting in the book facilitates—even necessitates— this passage. Unlike other encyclopedias, the Libre de plasent visió will not be reproduced in more and more luxurious copies during the succeeding decades, becoming an art object to be admired but not much read. The vernacular encyclopedist Gossuin de Metz fulminates against “maint riche clerc qui ont les grans mons de livres . . . richement atornez, pour ce que l’en les tiengne a sages et a bons clers” [many rich clerks, who own great heaps of richly ornamented books, so that others will think they are learned], but seek only people’s praise and do nothing with the books other than “regarder par defors, tant comme il sont nouvel, pour ce qu’il leur samblent bel” [to look at the outsides, as long as they are new, because they strike them as beautiful].122 It is this kind of surface appreciation, the danger that that moment of conversion from carnal to spiritual vision should not take place, that is

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thwarted by the book’s presence within another book only as an object of description and by the tree of knowledge’s similarly shadowy presence within the encyclopedia. The obscure figure of the tree does not allow the eye to linger on its surface, its literal referent, but rather compels the eye to move beyond, to an understanding of the general principles of all being, which reveal themselves to be the aributes of God. There is a kind of pleasing symmetry in the fact that the object that eludes physical vision should be called the tree of knowledge (the arbor scientiae), for it was in tasting of the fruit of another tree of knowledge (the “lignum scientiae boni et mali” [Gen. 2:9]) that human beings lost their spiritual vision and were limited to carnal sight.123 Thus, my investigation of the encyclopedic figure has led from the overlapping of diverse kinds of figures within the book to a single verbal figure that unifies the text and teases the mind’s eye even as it eludes vision. One can well ask what happens to the encyclopedia when it is transformed from a literal exegesis of created revelation to a uniquely spiritual exegesis. The kind of encyclopedism exemplified by Vincent of Beauvais, Thomas of Cantimpré, and Bartholomeus Anglicus found its purpose in running over the surfaces of things, detailing their properties and describing their natures ( just as the encyclopedists had run over the surfaces of thousands of folios in their hunt for textual extracts). These texts’ modernity lies, from our point of view, precisely in this focus on natural phenomena, even though medieval encyclopedists had to justify it as the necessary prerequisite to a spiritual understanding and seemed to feel some anxiety about indulging their curiositas. The anticipated step to spiritual exegesis was not seen as emptying the sign of its literal referent; allegory as figura establishes connections between real events, and allegorical exposition of an animal, as in the bestiary tradition, establishes a similitude between a real creature and a spiritual reality. It is this kind of participatory symbolism that Llull has in mind—but he distinguishes himself by limiting to an absolute minimum any contact with the surface of things, by transcending them almost immediately, with the result that his encyclopedia unfolds, in sixteen books, as a repeated demonstration of a single meaning. This leads to all its faults. It is repetitive, and it provides virtually nothing that could pass for scientific information. Whereas what I call the horizontal encyclopedia has the fault of not holding together particularly well because it is made up of extracts that are brought together only with utmost difficulty under any single unifying principle, Llull’s vertical encyclopedia holds together so perfectly that it almost becomes a vanishing point, every level absorbed into every other. This is why the early modern artists could illustrate all sixteen books with so few

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templates. When driven to this ultimate, radical realization, with citations banished and symbolism rigorously applied, the vertical encyclopedia risks becoming not an encyclopedia at all but quite its opposite, a tautology. But it would be an error to conclude that this most thorough integration of the figure into the encyclopedia is tautological and, thus, inimical to the very project of encyclopedism, because that would be to impose an episteme that assumes the multiplicity of objects of knowledge on a text whose episteme is premised on the singularity of the object to be known and the multiplicity of figures by which that knowledge can be accomplished.124 To conclude that Llull’s encyclopedia is tautological would indicate a failure to understand the significance of figuration itself, as a practice. For, while the figure links two realities (the physical and the spiritual realms), it cannot be subsumed by either. Figura in its oldest sense was a play between forms, an innovation, a surprise,125 and later Latin did not sacrifice that original sense when it re-created figura first as rhetoric, then as hermeneutics. Ultimately, figuration is less about meaning than about the process by which meaning can be discovered and rediscovered, shaped and reshaped, new each time. This correction allows us to see the significance of the uneven distribution of the text of the Arbor scientiae into the sixteen books. The last two of these, the tree of exempla and the tree of questions, occupy a full half of the total text.126 The tree of exempla is made up of parables and proverbs that demonstrate the relations between the various topics under discussion in the earlier books. In the narratives, Llull makes much use of rhetorical figures, especially personification, anthropomorphism, and prosopopoeia. In the Catalan version, he weaves these proverbs—abstract and obscure by any measure—together with rhyme and alliteration: O Déus qui és saviea e saber! Tu volria amar e car tener de ço que ma voluntat pot voler. Déus és tot son pur enteniment, e per ço tot quant és entén aitant quant és son estament. Car Déus entén granea en sa bontat, per ço entén bonificabilitat, qui és bo e gran intel·ligibilitat. (AC 15.4.7.b.1–3)

Here follows my aempt to translate the untranslatable, somewhat sacrificing the exact sense in order to replicate the Catalan word repetition in English (the rhyme, for its part, is not replicable):

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[O God who is wisdom and knowing! You I desire to love and to hold dear with all the desiring of my desire. God is all his pure understanding, and so he understands everything that exists in its very existence. For God understands greatness in his goodness, and thus he understands the potential for greater goodness, which is good and great intelligibility.]

As so oen in Llull’s writing, the rhymes are not particularly difficult to create; the first line rhymes because of the sequence of infinitives in er, the second and third because of noun endings that are common for Llull, -ment and -tat. Thus, the acoustic repetition reflects the repetition of chosen grammatical elements. At the same time, Llull creates alliteration simply by repeating the same word roots: “volria . . . voluntant . . . voler” or “bontat . . . bonificabilitat . . . bo.” (The simplicity is only apparent because the repetition of roots creates the same difficulties for comprehension that the repetition of figure did in the description of the Libre de plasent visió.) The acoustic paerning of this passage is inseparable from its syntactic paerning and its semantic paerning, which, for their part, replicate the larger text’s structure. On all levels, a few paerns are expressed in any number of variations. The tree of exempla tells us nothing new, but it tells it in a new fashion, multiplying its theme into a fugue and, thus, focusing the reader’s mind on the contemplation of the mystery.127 The massive tree of questions, on the other hand, is a more difficult read, an impossible one, in fact, for it is not a continuous text but rather the scaffolding for a practice of knowing through figuration: Qüestió: La bonea corporal et la bonea espiritual,) ¿com s’ajusten e·s componen?—Solució: Vé a les rails de l’arbre humanal. (AC 16.1.5.107) [Question: Physical and spiritual goodness, how are they brought together and associated? Solution: Go to the roots of the human tree.]

Thus, the reader climbs back down to the lower trees to recommence a reading of the encyclopedia. The tree of knowledge is new and strange, an enigma, an encyclopedic marvel that propels the reader into the evershiing world of signs and symbols. It flowers at the interface between rhetoric and hermeneutics, between encyclopedism and poetry, between discourse and the ineffable.

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4 ∂

The Order of Nature Encyclopedic Arrangement and Poetic Recombination in Jean de Meun’s Continuation of the Roman de la Rose

Overview It is clear from the writing of Jean de Meun that he was a different sort of intellectual from Vincent or Llull. Unfortunately, external evidence is wanting, so we know very lile about the nature of his participation in scholastic institutions. Although his exuberantly learned writing leaves lile doubt of the quality of his education, his precise academic credentials remain obscure. We know only that he was a clerk, a native of the village of Meun in the Loire Valley, who found his way to Paris, perhaps in the 1260s, perhaps in order to continue his studies at the university.1 The hostility of certain passages in his writings suggests that he was not a mendicant, and we do not know whether he ever took orders. There is no documentation to prove that he exercised any important function at the university or in secular administration, nor is there any grounds to believe that he ever le Paris. His primary literary activity was translation, and he produced Old French versions of a variety of important Latin texts.2 If his dedications (to such illustrious figures as Jean de Brienne, Count of Eu, and Philippe IV le Bel) bore fruit, then he may have gained wealthy patrons. Otherwise, there is no certain explanation for the material comfort to which he refers in one of his last texts, the Testament.3 However, it was not Jean’s translations but his continuation of the Roman de la Rose (ca. 1269–78) that seems most likely to have caught the fancy of the French court.4 This text, too, is heavily invested in the project of translation, 183

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incorporating translated fragments of a broad range of Latin sources, but it is held together by a narrative of seduction that constitutes a recognizable—though innovative and ultimately transgressive—calque of French romance. Jean took up the project some forty years aer one Guillaume de Lorris had le the text incomplete—or so Jean gives us to understand, for the name and activities of the earlier author are unambiguously aested only by Jean’s reference to him.5 To Guillaume’s inconclusive romance of four thousand lines in octosyllabic couplets, Jean added nearly eighteen thousand lines, creating a composite text dominated by his own contribution. Here, the hapless Lover from the earlier romance listens to a series of learned speeches, delivered by personifications or stereotypical characters. This artifice Jean has borrowed from other texts: the prosimetra of the preceding century as well as Boethius’s De consolatione Philosophiae and that curious late antique encyclopedia, Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii. Nonetheless, Jean’s speakers are dodgier than those of these earlier allegories, their expositions more confused. One aer another, they regale the Lover with oen warped interpretations of authorities from Ptolemy to Ovid to Albert the Great.6 Jean thus interweaves in the Roman de la Rose a number of the contemporary discourses. Discernible are the abstract courtly discourse of lyric and romance, the rhetorical exegesis involved in the translation of classical texts, the allegorical discourse of Neoplatonic writers, the resolutely literalizing counterdiscourse of satire, the materialist analyses of Aristotelian natural history (nuda Natura), and the sometimes vicious invective through which different factions of intellectuals engaged each other.7 The effect is a degree of discursive dissonance that far exceeds the controlled discord of the late antique or scholastic prosimetra. In fact, discernible in this very dissonance is the encyclopedic practice of the first half of the thirteenth century. I have argued elsewhere that the continuation of the Roman de la Rose offers an imaginative working out, by means of personification allegory, of various theoretical problems posed by medieval literary practice.8 An understanding of the Roman de la Rose as such a critical fiction allows us to perceive, in Jean’s rather malicious mise en scène of discordant discourses, a serious reflection on the practices of compilatio and ordinatio and on the encyclopedic movement that they supported.9 The way in which this Parisian romancier pushed some of the dominant textual practices of scholasticism over the edge of absurdity could also help explain why the poem was both a hit and a lightning rod for controversy among medieval readers.10 Jean’s talents as a versifier, on the other hand, elicited unqualified ad-

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miration from late medieval readers. In the fieenth century, the learned Pierre Col admied: “Je ne pouroye en prose aussi briefment reciter une chose come maistre Jehan de Meung la dit en rime leonine” [I could not say anything in prose as concisely as Jean de Meun says it in rich rhymes].11 Yet, like his use of personification allegory and citation, Jean’s exploitation of the octosyllabic couplet pushes the boundaries, in a way that the comparison to Ramon Llull throws into stark relief. Whereas the Majorcan performs the univocality of language—by repeating single words rather than stringing together approximate synonyms, by making syntactic, semantic, and acoustic paerns coincide, or by insisting that two signs that appear to have nothing in common in fact signify one and the same thing—the Parisian poet shows how the various elements of language can be broken apart. In a literary world where one can, for the first time, choose between French verse and French prose, the form of the octosyllabic couplet suddenly acquires a significance it did not possess before; it becomes, as Armstrong and Kay have argued, a marked form.12 Aention is, thus, drawn to the differences between verse and prose, and the most essential of these is that, in verse, syntactic and formal paerns can be decoupled from each other. The phrase can overflow the metrical unit of the line in what we call enjambment, while rhyme can bring words into an association different from their syntactic linkage.13 We shall, in this chapter, see how Jean uses rich rhyme to make the semantic fields of various words overlap in provocative ways that are at odds with the literal meaning of the phrase. This distinctive poetic practice has recently been analyzed by David Hult, who associates Jean’s valorization of the leer of the text with “the materiality of language itself and, in particular, . . . the ways in which that materiality can manipulate meaning in the space of vernacular expression,” thus creating a “counter-discourse that runs alongside, and occasionally in disruption with, the denotative project of his very expression, as well as the acknowledged authority of Latin expression.”14 This is a very different kind of poetry from Llull’s hymn to the Divine One, yet, perhaps, it is also more accessible, more familiar to us. Giorgio Agamben locates poetry “in the tension and difference (and hence also in the virtual interference) between sound and sense, between the semiotic sphere and the semantic sphere,”15 and such tensions are the very essence of Rose’s poetry. The dissonant elements of Jean’s continuation, the way in which his peculiar exploitations of personification allegory, citation, and versification frequently work against the text’s ostensible truth claims, have likely contributed to the relative lack of sustained scholarly discussion of the text’s

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encyclopedism. But the primary obstacle to this kind of discussion seems to have been the text’s perceived disorder. Although it was common for critics of the Rose in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth to mention the encyclopedic character of Jean’s continuation, the organizational challenge posed by this text seems to have deflected their aention from the implications of this generic association.16 Gaston Paris simply labeled the poem “an encyclopedia in disorder.”17 More picturesquely, Edmond Faral wrote that Jean had given “the air of an encyclopedia” to Guillaume de Lorris’s poem and had thus made of the whole “a monster” and “a deformed work.”18 C. S. Lewis willingly cited the text’s “encyclopedic character” but also decried Jean’s disorganization and described the continuation as a “mere heap of poetry.”19 Later scholars have showed even less inclination to tolerate the apparent paradox of a disordered encyclopedia. Bernard Ribémont cites the Rose’s disorder as the principal grounds for excluding it from a discussion of medieval encyclopedism, even though he is elsewhere obliged to acknowledge that neither the Middle Ages nor any other period ever produced the perfectly ordered encyclopedia: Encyclopedic writing must be preserved from any overflow, even if, in reality, this is not entirely possible. This necessity explains a profound desire for structure, for organization into chapters, into paragraphs, a desire to “grasp” knowledge “closely” which is reflected in the many “Cy commence” [here begins]. It is clear that such a preoccupation is more or less absent from most didactic poems. As for the Roman de la Rose, it offers a continuous discourse, underpinned by a narrative schema which, though certainly loose, pre-exists the act of writing. The encyclopedic data, real indeed, are merely inserted into this narrative: they do not structure it, and they are moreover oen carried by a discourse which could be detached from the narrative (discourse of Nature, of Genius).20

My consideration of the Speculum maius renders questionable any distinction between encyclopedias and the Roman de la Rose based on the use of a preexisting narrative as structural paradigm. But more central than the issue of narrative to Ribémont’s reasoning is his concern about overflow and disorder. The French scholar does not make clear precisely what degree of disorder circumscribes the encyclopedia as genre, and his omission suggests that a dividing line is not easy to draw. The concepts of order and disorder are not self-evident; the recognition of either depends on the suggestion— or threat—of its opposite.21

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It seems to me that the discussion of order and disorder in the Rose has been undermined by a failure to question the binary itself or to consider the paradox as a paradox. Scholars who have considered the organizational intricacies of Nature’s speech (lines 16699–9375) have offered intriguing and diverse responses to its appearance of disorder, but most seem to accept that the speech must be either orderly or disorderly. Alan Gunn has aempted to recuperate Nature’s harangue by developing an outline that shows the “logic” of its construction and concluding that “the mind capable of a construction as simple and as logical as this deserves to rank not far below the great systematizing intellects of the thirteenth century.”22 Gunn’s identification of an overarching structure, however tenuous, is significant, for it points to the heart of the paradox: there is an order here, just visible amid the mess.23 Yet it must be acknowledged that Gunn’s aempt to interpret Nature’s speech as if it were entirely orderly is quixotic. More recent scholars have taken the opposite approach. In important articles, Winthrop Wetherbee and Sylvia Huot suggest ways to understand the significance of Nature’s disorder. Considering the Rose’s philosophical context, Wetherbee suggests that Nature figures the interference of “human artifice and perversion” in the universe, that she somehow represents the limitations and deformations of human vision,24 while Huot sees in Nature a rebellion against the masculine imposition of form and order on maer.25 Both critics enter into dialogue with a larger concept of order, but neither elaborates on the possibility that some vestigial order lingers in Nature’s speech itself. I therefore devote this chapter to the interplay of order and disorder in the Roman de la Rose. My premise is that both are necessary for understanding Nature’s speech and that the text would not be able to give the impression of either one without simultaneously evoking the other. Such is the sense of Jean’s oen-cited reference to “contraires choses”: Ainsinc va des contreres choses, les unes sunt des autres gloses; et qui l’une an veust defenir, de l’autre li doit souvenir, ou ja, par nule antancion, n’i metra diffinicion. (RR lines 21543–48) [So it goes with contrary things: the ones are glosses of the others, and anyone who wants to define one must remember the other, or else he will

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never be able to come up with a definition, no maer how much he wants to.]

Yet a fuller account of Jean’s poem requires that we work with more than simply two terms. We have seen many times already that the order in which a writer describes the world is neither obvious nor monolithic. There are multiple possibilities, a fact recognized by both the encyclopedists and the rhetoricians. We have already considered the former; the laer frequently distinguish between two kinds of order, that of nature and that of artifice. Geoffrey of Vinsauf explains that artistic order displaces the elements of a series without wholly “perverting” it, creating a sequence that is somehow superior to that of nature: ars callida res ita vertit, ut non pervertat; transponit ut hoc tamen ipso rem melius ponat. Civilior ordine recto et longe prior est, quamvis praeposterus ordo. (PN lines 97–100) [skillful art turns things in such a way that it does not wholly subvert them; it transposes in such a way as to beer place the thing. This order is more sophisticated than natural order and greatly to be preferred, however much it may seem perverse.]

Thus artistic order can be placed as an intermediary term between natural order and disorder; it is neither the one nor the other but rather the contrary of both. To further complicate maers, artistic orders may be even more numerous and diverse than natural ones. In his depiction of nature / Nature, Jean uses multiple ways of (dis)ordering the world, juxtaposing and superposing them, to create a dizzying spectrum of possible visions. Hence, we find once again that rhetorical figura must be taken into account in a discussion of encyclopedic ordo. Considering Nature’s speech in light of both encyclopedic and rhetorical theorizations of order, I shall suggest that a philosophical reflection on the ordering principle appears in the very disorienting, disordering elements of the text. Simultaneously, Nature’s speech stages the making and unmaking of rhetorical tropes or figurae, the principal mode of signification for the love poem but also for the encyclopedia as mirror, the world as sign of God and the book as sign of the world.26 Thus,

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the Rose represents the very (im)possibilities of the encyclopedic representation of the world.

Listing the Creatures, Citing the Encyclopedia When scholars discuss the sources for Jean de Meun’s depiction of Nature, they unfailingly have recourse to two prosimetra: to a lesser extent Bernard Silvester’s Cosmographia but more important Alan of Lille’s De planctu Naturae. The literary genealogy between these texts and the Rose is clear: the use of verse; the rendering of Nature as a prosopopoeia, coordinated with a series, a poetic catalog or list of all the created orders; the reflection on the function of poetry; Alan’s concerns with sexual generation. But not all of Jean’s depiction and prosopopoeia of nature may be traced back to these predecessors. The series is a case in point. Bernard’s personification Natura appears as the introduction to a verse description of the world (Megacosmus 3). Alan rewrites this description on the personification’s own body through a prose ekphrasis (De planctu 2) of the embroidery on Natura’s clothing, which depicts all the various creatures. Jean reworks this series on no fewer than four occasions, two immediately preceding Nature’s speech, two in the speech itself. Already in the Cosmographia and the De planctu Naturae the list represents proliferation and multiplication; by multiplying it, Jean multiplies the figure itself. In so doing, he recalls the more complex literary, though not necessarily poetic, structure of the encyclopedia, itself built up of multiple lists: parallel lists, interlocking lists, lists within lists.27 This encyclopedic intertext has been occluded by the scholarly tendency to read Nature’s speech through the lens of texts wrien a century earlier. Gunn has argued that the overarching paradigm for the Nature portion of the Roman de la Rose is the descent from the heavens to the planets, to the elements, and then to the living creatures.28 But Nature’s various digressions stretch this list of created things so far beyond recognition that it is only at the end, when with uncharacteristic rapidity Nature names the living creatures, that the series resembles a series. And here it does so in highly abbreviated form, a clever inversion of the amplificatio that has heretofore shaped Nature’s speech. If we accept Gunn’s thesis that rhetorical amplificatio serves as a rhetorical demonstration of Nature’s theme, procreation, then the cursory nature of this list rhetorically undermines that theme, preparing the way for the human being, the one creature who—according to Nature—resists the commandment to reproduce (RR lines 16754–70):

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Si ne me plain mie des plantes, qui d’obeïr ne sunt pas lantes. Bien sunt a mes lais antantives, et font, tant conme ele sunt vives, leur racines et leur feulletes, trunz et rains et fruiz et floretes. Chascune chascun an aporte quan qu’el peut, tant qu’ele soit morte, com herbes, arbres et boissons. Ne des oiseaus ne des poissons, qui mout sunt bel a regarder: bien sevent mes regles garder, et sunt si tres bon escolier qu’il treent tuit a mon colier. . . . Ne ne me plain des autres bestes, cui je faz anclines les testes et regardanz toutes ver terre. Ceus ne me murent onques guerre, toutes a ma cordele tirent et font si con leur pere firent. . . . Si font mes beles verminetes: fromiz, papillons et mouchetes, vers, qui de pourreture nessent, de mes conmanz garder ne cessent; et mes sarpenz et mes couleuvres, tuit s’estudient en mes euvres. (RR lines 18951–90) [I make no complaint about the plants, which are not slow to obey. They follow my laws aentively and, as long as they live, produce their roots and leaves, stalks and branches and fruits and flowers. Every year, each of the grasses, trees, and bushes bears, to the best of its ability, as many fruits as it can, till it dies. Nor do I complain about the birds and fishes, which are very beautiful to look at. They know well how to follow my rules and are such good pupils that they all submit to my yoke. . . . I make no complaint about the other beasts, whose heads I made inclined downward, looking at the earth. They have never made war on me; all are on my leash and do as their fathers did. . . . And my beautiful lile vermin do it, too: ants, buerflies, flies, and worms, which are born from filth. They don’t cease to observe my

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commands, along with my serpents and my lile snakes; all are studious in my acts.]

The catalog is curious, to say the least. For one thing, the fact that the creatures’ individual, identificatory activities have been replaced with the one activity that all have in common tends to blur the distinctions among the species. In the twelh-century prosimetra, each animal was presented with some trait or activity that set it apart, either in its natural environment or in the use to which humans put it. Thus, in the Cosmographia, Bernard distinguishes the sable: “Carior et redolens, et burse predo, sabellus, / Guura conplectens delitiosa ducum” [Costlier still (than the beaver), that ill-smelling plunderer of purses, the sable, wraps himself about the pleasure-glued throats of princes].29 Moreover, it is odd that Jean’s glancing references to whole classes of creatures (which Bernard and Alan had broken down into individual species) should be followed with the names of individual species belonging to categories that neither Bernard nor Alan deign to mention, the “verminetes” and the “serpents.” In fact, Jean has taken this interest in vermin, not from his poetic predecessors, but from the encyclopedists. It is true that, when they mention insects at all, Bartholomeus Anglicus and Bruneo Latini group them with either the birds or the animals, depending on whether they fly or crawl. Nevertheless, Isidore of Seville, Thomas of Cantimpré, and Vincent of Beauvais create separate categories for these creatures. In the twelh book of the Etymologiae, Isidore subdivides the earthbound creatures into domestic animals, beasts, serpents, and “minute animals.” This last, eclectic category includes mammals such as mice, too small to merit the appellation beast, as well as a few insects. However, he places most crawling, many-legged things in the following category of vermes, which is best translated as vermin because it includes both worms and insects. A separate category for flying insects, which Isidore dubs vaguely minores volatiles [lesser winged things], follows the category of birds. Thomas of Cantimpré devotes separate treatments to the serpents (bk. 8) and the vermin (bk. 9). Vincent treats the serpents, the lizards (a new category), and the vermin (including insects) in book 20 of the Naturale, which we shall have occasion to consider in the next chapter. Only in encyclopedic writing do these small, difficult-to-classify creatures receive any serious aention, any aempt to create one or more separate categories for them. Nature’s fond reference to the “verminetes” is, then, a sly wink at a literary genre whose comprehensiveness and reasoned organization shed light on the most humble of creatures.

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The order in which Nature lists the categories of creatures similarly lacks poetic precedent. Though Nature has introduced the list at the very beginning of her speech with a reference to the golden chain (RR line 16756), suggesting a descent from the rational to the sensitive and, finally, to the vegetal, the final part of the list reverses that order by naming all the other living creatures before human beings. And it does so without following any spatial paradigm of the kind that governs the series of Bernard and Alan. Bernard arranges the creatures according to their place in the great chain and, within any one class, according to their geographic disposition. Alan places different classes of creatures on different articles of Natura’s clothing. He later reproduces the same order when, in a passage that directly inspires that of Jean’s Nature, Alan’s Natura explains that all the various creatures but man follow her laws by procreating (DPN 8.35–52). When the early scholar Ernest Langlois identified the sources for Nature’s speech in his notes, he privileged the De planctu, but, in his aempt to demonstrate Jean’s dependence on Alan, he was obliged to break up Jean’s brief treatment of the living creatures into small fragments, to which he aached the rearranged fragments of Alan’s series.30 As the chaotic appearance of the resulting commentary testifies, however greatly Jean may be indebted to Alan for the content of this passage, he has found its organizational scaffolding elsewhere. Nature’s reference to vermin suggests that we may seek possible models among the encyclopedists. As we have already seen, Bartholomeus arranges the De proprietatibus rerum according to the elements in which each creature lives, first the air with its birds (bk. 12), then the water with its fish (bk. 13), then the earth with its plants (bk. 17) and animals (bk. 18). Bruneo treats the fish, then the birds, and, finally, the animals but omits the plants. Thomas follows the great chain of being (as Jean’s Nature initially seems to intend to do), proceeding from the human being to the animals, then the birds and fish, then the serpents and vermin, and, finally, the plants. Alone among the medieval encyclopedists, and for reasons that I have already discussed at length, Vincent treats first the celestial bodies, then in succession the plants, the birds, the animals, the serpents and vermin, and, finally, the human being—which Jean’s Nature similarly defers until last. And, again, the vermin play a crucial role, for it is with them that Jean’s list exceeds that of Genesis 1 and, thus, strongly recalls that of Vincent; were it not for Nature’s “verminetes,” one could simply conclude that the Roman de la Rose follows the biblical order without showing any special connection to the Speculum naturale.

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Instead, the order and contents of Nature’s list constitute a subtle palimpsest of the work of the most ambitious of scholastic encyclopedists. This one reference to the Speculum naturale invites us to look for other ways in which the text could be present in the background of Nature’s speech, intervening between the twelh-century prosimetra and Jean’s poem. Alan’s Natura was already learned, capable of explaining the selfcontradictory experience of desire and the theory of poetic integument. In the De planctu, she—not the humble poet persona—had the distinction of articulating the Neoplatonic understanding of myth.31 Jean has, however, multiplied the interests of this personification, rendering her a true polymath, but by the same gesture making her transgress what she herself recognizes to be the boundaries of “her” knowledge (natural knowledge, or knowledge of physical nature and, through physical nature, knowledge of the essences of created things) to discuss such subjects as predestination (RR lines 17071–512), the interpretation of oracles, prophecies, and dreams (lines 17568–706), the Trinity and the virgin birth (lines 19083–160), and hell (lines 19233–92).32 She thus becomes a figure of proliferation, of excess, and this excess she owes to the Speculum naturale, alone among the natural history texts to also treat at length subjects as varied as the Trinitarian nature of God and his ways of knowing (bk. 1) and the nature and proper understanding of dreams (bk. 26). Furthermore, the insistence on reproduction and generation that Gunn has illuminated in Jean’s continuation as a whole is shared, not only with the De planctu, but also with the Speculum naturale, in which, inspired by Honorius’s fourth mode for the description of the world, Vincent frequently mentions the methods by which the various creatures reproduce and devotes entire books to plant seeds (bk. 11) and human reproduction (bk. 31). In fact, it is reproduction and the succession of generations that draw the description of the world into a narrative frame. Therefore, Nature’s portion of the Roman de la Rose is not simply a poetic reworking of the Cosmographia and the De planctu Naturae. It draws into the constellation of texts it cites the Speculum naturale and the encyclopedic practice that text represents, thus calling aention to natural order. Yet, at the same time, the speech problematizes that order. Destabilized by her eclectic education, Jean’s Nature has lost the poise and decorum that Alan had aributed to Natura, the coherence and elegance of her treatment of the various subjects. The many digressions of Jean’s Nature are more perplexing than those of Alan’s or even than the digressions in the Speculum naturale, which always have some connection to the maer at hand. Jean’s

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Nature is moreover obsessed with transgressing categories, a gesture she repeats again and again. For example, when describing great floods washing the earth, she makes much of the fishes’ invasion of places normally barred to them: Et quant li fleuve se desrivent, li poisson, qui leur fleuve sivent si conme il est droiz et resons, car ce sont leur propres mesons, s’an vont conme seigneur et mestre par chans, par prez, par vignes pestre, et s’escoursent contre les chenes, contre les pins, contre les frenes, et tolent au bestes sauvages leur menoirs et leur heritages, et vont ainsint par tout nagent. (RR lines 17909–19) [And when rivers overflow their banks, the fish—which follow their rivers, as is right and reasonable, for the rivers are their own houses—go about, as if they were lord and master, grazing in the fields and meadows and vines. They fling themselves against the oaks and pines and ash trees and usurp the habitations and patrimony of the wild beasts and thus go swimming about everywhere.]

Already anthropomorphized by Nature’s rhetorical play, the fish also physically transgress their proper place by bumping against trees and swimming along game paths. The image would be striking in any context, but here the allusions to encyclopedic order provide a backdrop against which such rearrangements and disarrangements stand out.

Transpositions and Tropes Nowhere is Nature’s vision more disorienting than in her second list, a brief one framed within the larger series. Unlike the procreation catalog, this one does not affirm but rather hypothesizes and, thus, pushes the series even farther from its Latin models. Moreover, the creatures that Nature lists bear lile resemblance to the real creatures whose names they share. She is talking, as in much of her speech, about knowledge—in this case, self-

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knowledge—and this leads her to speculate about what the world would be like were animals capable of self-awareness. (Jean has borrowed and adapted the hypothesis from a passage [2.18–20] in the De anima of the English Cistercian Aelred of Rievaulx [1110–67], whose De amicitia spirituali he would later translate in its entirety.)33 Nature speculates: San faille toutes bestes mues, d’antandemant vuides et nues, se mesconnoissent par nature; car s’il eüssent parleüre et reson por eus antr’antandre, qu’il s’antrepeüssent aprandre, mal fust aus homes avenu. (RR lines 17763–69) [Undoubtedly all mute beasts, naked and without understanding, do not naturally know themselves, for if they had language and reason with which to understand each other, so that they could instruct each other, it would be a misfortune for men.]

The speculation is, by implication, contre nature, but that does not stop Nature from imagining the consequences for her world and especially for humans: Ja mes li biau destrier crenu ne se lesseroient donter ne chevaliers seur eus monter; ja mes beuf sa teste cornue ne metroit a jou de charrue . . . ours, lous, lion, liespart, sangler, tuit voudroient home estrangler; li raz neïs l’estrangleroit, quant ou bercel petiz seroit; ja mes oiseaus por nul apel ne metroit an perill sa pel, ainz porroit mout home grever en dormant par les euz crever. . . . Neïs puces et orilliees, s’eles s’ierent antortilliees

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en dormant dedanz leur oreilles, les greveroient a merveilles. (RR lines 17770–814) [Never would handsome steeds with flowing manes allow themselves to be tamed or mounted by knights. Never would the ox put its horned head to the yoke of a plow . . . bears, wolves, lions, leopards, boars—all would want to throle man; even the rat would strangle him, when he was small in the cradle. Never would a bird at any command risk its skin; instead, it could do man great harm by pecking out his eyes as he slept. . . . Even fleas and earwigs, if they wriggled into men’s ears while they slept, would cause them marvelous harm.]

And on Nature goes with a horrific description of the harm that various insects could inflict. This is decidedly not a catalog poem or encyclopedic list. Such catalogs name rather than hypothesize; they make use of indicative verbs—when they use verbs at all—because they describe what really takes place in the natural world. Their description of every creature’s proper place in the hierarchy and its paradigmatic activity lends them their order. But this is also why they seem so static. Nothing transgresses its proper category. Or, at least, such is the impossible dream of the encyclopedist: the ideal order according to which each subject could be treated once and once only. When in Jean’s text the smallest and most insignificant of creatures, the insects, burrow into the ears of what is, in fact, the only creature of flesh capable of reason, as if they were entering into the mind itself, the image suggests a compromise of the human ability to know, as if it is only by keeping everything in its proper place that we can know the world. It also suggests a compromise of human access to language, for our ears allow us to understand speech. In this sense, the burrowing insects may be related to another ghastly detail, the birds pecking out people’s eyes, for sight and hearing are the two senses associated with language and perception. Hence, in an Aristotelian episteme, they are the two senses that make knowledge possible.34 The transgression of the categories of the natural order would seem to undermine the encyclopedic project as an aempt to represent and know the world through language. Paradoxically, Nature’s dystopian vision proceeds from her use of language in that one lile hypothesis: if animals possessed reason and speech. This hypothesis is unrealizable by her own admission.35 Unlike Alan’s Natura, Jean’s Nature did not and could not confer understanding on human beings:

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San faille, de l’antandemant connois je bien que vraiemant celui ne li donai je mie. La ne s’estant pas ma baillie, ne fui pas sage ne poissant de fere riens si connoissant. (RR lines 19025–30) [Of course, I know that I never really gave men understanding. That wasn’t in my power; I wasn’t wise or strong enough to make anything so intelligent.]

George Economou interprets this passage as Nature’s acknowledgment that she has no power over or interest in reason;36 I wonder, however, whether her earlier thought experiment, based on a hypothetical aribution of reason and language that is possible only through their exercise, does not rather suggest something different. For, without reason, Nature herself could not speak. Nature’s reasonings may be flawed or limited, as Economou argues, but they are nonetheless reasonings. Her speech may distort, but it is nonetheless speech. This suggests that the prolific and bizarre hypotheses in Nature’s discourse (thinking beasts, e.g.) may deserve as much aention as the more straightforward affirmations. And, indeed, the significance of this monde à l’envers extends beyond this one moment in Nature’s speech—and beyond her speech itself—because the thinking animals recall the discussion of Art with which the narrator first introduced her. If animals possessed reason, Nature speculates here, they would soon master the art of making armor; those that had hands would learn to use them, and they would also learn to write: Ne ront il singes et marmotes, qui leur feroient bones cotes de cuir, de fer, voire porpoinz? Il ne demourroit ja por poinz, car cist ouvreroient de mains, si n’an vaudroient mie mains; et porroient estre escrivain. Il ne seroient ja si vain que tretuit ne s’asoutillassent conment aus armes contretassent,

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et quelques angins referoient don mout aus homes greveroient. (RR lines 17799–810) [And won’t they (the beasts and birds) have monkeys and marmots to fabricate good coats of armor, out of leather or iron, or even doublets? Lack of fists wouldn’t stop them, for those animals would work with their hands and would not be less adept than men in these arts—they could even become writers (escrivain). They wouldn’t be so useless (vain) as not to plot together, devising ways to resist men’s weapons and constructing machines with which to do them much harm.]

The rime escrivain-vain recalls the catalog of artists from Jean’s introduction of Nature, where he declines to describe her because no writer or other artist could do so: Bien la vos vousisse descrire, mes mi sans n’i porroit soffire. Mi sans! Qu’ai je dit? C’est du mains! Non feroit voir nus sans humains ne par voiz vive ne par notes, et fust Platons ou Aristotes, Algus, Euclidés, Tholomees, qui tant ont or granz renomees d’avoir esté bon escrivain: leur angin seroient si vain, s’il osaient la chose anprendre qu’il ne la porroient entendre; ne Pigmalion entaillier. (RR lines 16135–47) [I would very much have liked to describe her for you, but my understanding is not great enough for the task. My understanding! What have I said? That’s the least I can say! In fact, no human understanding could do it, neither aloud nor in writing, even if the person were Plato or Aristotle, Algus, Euclid, or Ptolemy, who are now so greatly renowned as good writers (escrivain). Their cunning would be vain if they undertook the task, for they would not be able to figure out how to do it. Nor would Pygmalion be able to sculpt her.]

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I shall return to this passage later; for the moment, I should like to point out that, in the later passage about simian writers, the word vain is negated while the echo of the earlier passage invites readers to compare the monkey’s eloquence with that of the human writers named there. Moreover, the artisan monkeys recall Art’s aempt to copy nature in Jean’s introduction of his personification. Art si garde conment Nature euvre, car mout voudroit fere autele euvre, et la contrefet conme singes; mes tant est ses sens nus et linges qu’el ne peut fere choses vives, ja si ne sembleront naïves. (RR lines 15999–6004) [watches how Nature works, for she (Art) would very much like to make such a work, and she counterfeits Nature like a monkey, but her intelligence is so feeble and barren that she cannot make living things. Never will they seem natural.]

The animal dystopia that Nature gives us, then, reverses the meaning of this earlier figure of the monkey for the artist, which depended on the (natural) knowledge that a monkey, belonging as it does somewhat below man in the hierarchy of being, does not belong to the category of reasonable creatures and can only imitate, not produce signs vivified with meaning. The monkey (“singe”) and the sign (“signe”) produced by reasonable creatures have nothing to do with each other.37 Or so it is if everything stays in its proper place. But Nature has (temporarily) made the monkey reasonable, capable of producing meaningful signs, and, thus, she has realized the connection, which exists only in language and can be realized only through the figure of paronomasia, between the “singe” and the “signe.” By making the monkey (and all the other creatures) speak, moreover, Nature has accomplished (through verbal art, and emphatically not through her natural powers, which would be insufficient) what Jean has told us Art cannot accomplish: “ne les fera par eus aler, / vivre, mouvoir, santir, paler” [she will not be able to make them go of their own accord, live, move, feel, and speak] (RR lines 16033–34). And Nature has done it with aplomb by making all the creatures in that catalog of Art’s imitations, and not simply the humans, speak—just as, incidentally, Jean de Meun has done with nature, by making it into Nature and giving her

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a voice, through the figure of prosopopoeia. The disorderly elements of Nature’s speech are, in fact, recombinations that transgress encyclopedic order even as Jean evokes it. More precisely, they are tropes. That is, Jean’s Nature stages the encounter between the encyclopedia and rhetoric.38

Amorous Vision Medieval poeticians were aware of the trope’s inherent disorderliness, which they implicitly recognized as necessary to its artistic effect. Geoffrey describes metaphor as the mixing of contraries: “Sic se contraria miscent, / Sed pacem spondent hostesque morantur amici” [Thus contrary things mix, but they are bound together in peace and enemies abide as friends] (PN lines 834–35). His aempts to describe figurative language drive him to have recourse to a rich field of metaphors of his own, and they are usually spatial. Natural order is a broad highway, artistic order a torturous footpath: “Ordo bifurcat iter: Tum limite nititur artis, / tum sequitur stratam naturae” [The way of order is two-forked, now laboring upon the path of art, now following the highways of nature] (lines 87–88). In his discussion of metaphor as a trope, he renders concrete the rhetoricians’ term translatio, which had originally signified a “carrying across,” by representing metaphor as a disturbance of natural, spatial order. Hence, he describes the displaced element: res ubi caute sic sedet in serie quasi sit de themate nata: sumpta tamen res est aliunde, sed esse videtur inde; foris res est, nec ibi comparet; et intus apparet, sed ibi non est; sic fluctuat intus et foris, hic et ibi, procul et prope: distat et astat. (lines 250–55) [thus it cautiously occupies its place in the series as if it were born from the theme: the thing was taken from elsewhere but seems to belong to that very place; it is from without, but does not appear so; and it appears to be within, but is not there; thus it fluctuates within and without, here and there, far and near: it stands afar off and near at hand.]

Roger Dragonei rightly calls aention to the metaphor of peregrination with which Geoffrey describes tropes in general:39

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Noli semper concedere verbo in proprio residere loco: residentia talis dedecus est ipsi verbo; loca propria vitet et peregrinetur alibi sedemque placentem fundet in alterius fundo: sit ibi novus hospes. (lines 758–62) [Do not always allow a word to reside in its own place: such a residence is a disgrace to the word itself; let it avoid the usual places and go wandering elsewhere and lay the foundations of its abode upon another’s land: let it be there a new guest.]

When one has produced a successful metaphor of one’s own, Geoffrey writes (inspired by this previous image of wandering), it is like seeing one’s own sheep in someone else’s pasture (lines 798–99). That is, the reader is always on some level aware of the displacement, at the same time that he or she understands the alternative meaning that the word’s new context creates. This sort of “tensional” relation is precisely what interests Ricoeur, for whom metaphor functions, not by replacing one term with another that effaces it (such would be a dead metaphor, in Ricoeur’s view), but by simultaneously equating the two terms and negating the equation—maintaining, that is, the awareness that one term is out of place.40 The spatial nature of these aempts to explain the trope lends itself particularly well to an understanding of Nature’s spatial disorders as tropes. In this way, we can beer explain some of Nature’s more rapid changes in tone, such as her move immediately from the flood, in which the fish invade land, to an elegantly poetic description of clouds: Et quant revient a chief de piece que li biau tans le leit despiece, quant au ciex desplest et annuie tans de tampestes et de pluie, l’air ostent de tretoute s’ire et le font resbaudir et rire; et quant les nues reperçoivent que l’air si resbaudi reçoivent adonc se resjoïssent eles, et por estre avenanz et beles

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font robes, anprés leur douleurs, de toutes leur beles couleurs, et metent leur toisons sechier au biau soleill plesant e chier et les vont par l’air charpissant au tens cler et replandissant; puis filent, et quant ont filé, si font voler de leur filé granz agulliees de fil blanches ausinc con por coudre leur manches. (RR lines 17951–70) [And when aer a lile while fair weather dissipates foul, when tempest and rain displease the heavens, then they banish anger from the air and make it rejoice and laugh. And when the clouds perceive that they are receiving such joyful air, they themselves rejoice. And, in order to be aractive and prey, they make dresses, aer their griefs, with all their beautiful colors, and put out their fleeces to dry in the beautiful sunlight, pleasing and precious, and go through the air, carding them, in the clear and resplendent weather. Then they spin them, and when that is done, they send flying from their skein great lengths of white thread, as if to sew up their sleeves.]

Nature has just taken apart natural order by mixing the fish up with the animals. Now she puts things back together, but without reconstituting the original organization. Rather, she shows how the trope of personification allows us to place things out of place while yet creating a comprehensible description. Nature is also unabashedly plagiarizing the opening of Guillaume’s poem, where lors devient la terre si gobe qu’el velt avoir novele robe, si set si cointe robe feire que de colors i a .c. peire. (lines 59–62) [then the earth becomes so vain that she wants to have a new dress, and she can make such a fashionable one that it has a hundred pairs of colors.]

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The Lover wakes from a dream and begins sewing on his sleeves: lors trés une aguille d’argent d’un aguillier mignot et gent, si prins l’aguille a enfiler. (lines 91–93) [then I drew a silver needle from a prey, elegant case and started to thread it.]

Such echoes of the earlier poem bring the courtly allegory into relation with both the encyclopedic description of nature and its dystopian inverse. By juxtaposing the encyclopedic order of Vincent to the allegorical order of Guillaume, Jean brings together the encyclopedia and poetry—the integument of the prosimetrum but also and quite powerfully of love lyric. From this last genre derives the especially heavy use of figurative language that so transforms the order of nature. The affinities between the trope and the love poem are many, and Geoffrey, Alan, and Jean exploit them. Another of Geoffrey’s favorite tropes for the trope—and a particularly felicitous one—is the relationship between people. What elsewhere he characterizes as spatial distance here becomes enmity, and the new harmony created becomes love: Litibus alternis quando bellantur amantes, crescit in hoc bello linguarum pax animorum; hoc odio conditur amor. Sic est et in istis: se voces introrsus amant licet exteriores sint inimicitiae. Lis est in vocibus ipsis; sed litem totam sedat sententia vocum. (PN lines 880–85) [When lovers make war, disputing the one with the other, peace of mind grows in this war of the tongues, and love is built up from this hatred. So also it is with these tropes: their inner voices love each other even though their exteriors are inimical. The dispute is in the sounds themselves, but their meaning seles the case.]

Alan’s Natura, on the other hand, describes love in a rhetorical tour de force of paradoxes (DPN 9), which calls as much aention to the material of the

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poetry itself as to passion. This definition Jean lis, translates, and plants, provocatively, in the speech of his personification Reason: Amors, ce est pez haïneuse, Amors, c’est haïne amoureuse; c’est leautez la desleaus, c’est la desleautez leaus; c’est poor toute asseüree, esperance desesperee; c’est reson toute forsenable, c’est forcenerie resnable. (RR lines 4263–70) [Love is a peace full of hatred and a hatred full of love; it is disloyal loyalty and loyal disloyalty; it is fearless fear and hopeless hope; it is mad reason and reasonable madness.]

Here, an understanding of love does not come from defining one term by differentiating it from its opposite. Rather, it comes from maintaining both terms in the mind at once, in tension, as in the trope. Love’s reordering is stated in explicitly visual terms in the other definition of love that appears in Reason’s speech, this one lied from Andreas Capellanus’s De amore (ca. 1185). Jean sometimes translates loosely and, thus, can never quite be trusted, but his alterations are themselves oen illuminating. This is one such case. Andreas had wrien: “Amor est passio quaedam innata procedens ex visione et immoderata cogitatione formae alterius sexus, ob quam aliquis super omnia cupit alterius potiri amplexibus et omnia de utriusque voluntate in ipsius amplexu amoris praecepta compleri” [Love is a certain inborn suffering that proceeds from the sight of and immoderate meditation upon the beauty of the other sex. On account of this suffering, a person desires above all other things to embrace and be embraced and to fulfill with reciprocated desire all the commands of love in that embrace].41 Jean translates: Amors, se bien sui apensee, c’est maladie de pensee antre .ii. persones annexe, franches entr’els, de divers sexe, venanz a genz par ardeur nee

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de vision desordenee, pour acoler et pour besier pour els charnelment aesier. (RR lines 4347–54) [Love, if I have rightly thought it out, is a sickness of thought between two persons, close to each other and freely interacting, of different sexes. It comes to people through the ardor born of a disordered vision, who burn to embrace and to kiss and to take carnal pleasure.]

Elements of the original definition have shied around in the French text. For example, Jean has removed thought (cogitatio) from its position as one of the two sources of love so that vision becomes its sole source or initiator.42 Andreas’s innata has been stripped in the French to its etymological meaning alone (through the elimination of the prefix), with the result that it, too, can signify that originating moment of vision. All the weight of Jean’s definition thus falls on sight, so it is appropriate that the adjective immoderata, too, should be transferred from thought to vision. This and the use of desordenee to translate immoderata produce a suggestive pairing. For there are two ways to understand a vision desordenee. We can take vision as the act of viewing and desordenee as a description of that action (“excessive,” “inappropriate”), to produce a gawking lover. Or we can take vision as what is seen and desordenee as a spatial description, to produce a sight that is all out of order—a phantasm, perhaps. The root ordo, even more than the root modus, lends itself to this spatial reading.43 If we take love as originating in a disordered sight, then the love poem is in some sense an inversion of the encyclopedic list.44 There are several possible ways to understand the relation between Jean’s Nature (as a palimpsest of the encyclopedia) and love as Guillaume’s Lover experiences it and Jean’s Reason defines it (“vision desordenee”). Nature could constitute the negation and correction of love by puing the disordered vision back in order. Such a conclusion would be in keeping with statements made by those critics who tend to view Jean’s poem as an undoing of Guillaume’s.45 As I have shown, however, Jean has transformed Nature herself into a figure of disorder by breaking down the list, with the result that the term vision desordenee applies as well to her as to Guillaume’s Lover. It is tempting, therefore, to collapse the opposition entirely, producing a conclusion about the opposition between Art and Nature similar to that of Dragonei: that it in fact veils an equivalence.46 Dragonei’s reading of oppositions in

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the Rose tends toward deconstruction; it leads him to argue against the possibility that the text can “affirm anything at all as true.”47 Nancy Freeman Regalado, on the other hand, reminds us that, for the good Aristotelian dialectician, opposition is the very basis for knowledge, the path to truth.48 This would suggest that order and disorder, the list and the trope, are each necessary for our comprehension of the other. Perhaps, on another level, it means that we must consider both Guillaume’s poem and Jean’s continuation if we are to understand either one and that natural and artistic order, the encyclopedia and the love poem, can inform each other.

The Limits of Encyclopedism I have suggested that the amorous trope ( figura) and its elaboration in extended personification allegory constitute an intermediate term between the order and the disorder of nature. Rhetorical rearrangement cannot be conflated with some notion of pure disorder, for rhetoric itself has rules that guarantee the comprehensibility of the text they govern. Jean sometimes follows and sometimes transgresses these, thus moving back and forth from rhetoric to verbal chaos. For instance, personifications, those creatures of rhetoric, are not supposed to talk about any subject that does not pertain to them, but, as Jean Gerson, among others, observed, many of Jean’s personifications do precisely that.49 This sort of game renders the personification inconsistent with itself. Fundamental inconsistencies of this kind are clustered particularly thickly about Lady Nature. Jean begins his description of Nature in a provocative manner, by claiming that her visual aspect cannot be described. Given his sources, encyclopedias and the prosimetra of Bernard and Alan, such a claim is highly problematic. Had not whole volumes already been devoted to the description of nature / Nature? Alan, in fact, places a double emphasis on the visibility and describability of this subject by giving us at once a personification of nature (a making present and, thus, in many cases, visible) and ekphrasis, and in this way he outdoes his own model, Bernard’s Megacosmus 3, where the personification Natura stands somewhat apart from the creation being described and seems indistinct as personification, even if distinct in the nature she represents. In both texts, however, Natura’s appearance as rhetorical figure is tied to a presentation of visibilia carefully ordered, in a cosmic scheme that points to its divine creator, thus lending herself to an Augustinian reading of the visibilia as figures. Jean distinguishes his text from Alan’s by not giving a physical description

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of Nature. Rather, he falls back on the commonplace of a beauty so great that it cannot be described: Car Dex, li biaus outre mesure, quant il biauté mist en Nature, il an i fist une fontaine tourjorz courant et tourjorz plaine, de cui toute biauté desrive, mes nus n’an set ne fonz ne rive. Por ce n’est droiz que conte face ne de son cors ne de sa face, qui tant est avenant et bele que fleur de lis en mai novele, rose seur rain ne naif seur branche n’est si vermeille ne si blanche. (RR lines 16203–14) [For when God, immeasurably beautiful, gave beauty to Nature, he made of it there a fountain, always flowing and always full, from which all beauty derives (desrive), but no one knows its boom or its bank (rive). For this reason, it would not be right to make a tale of her body or face, which is so aractive and beautiful that neither the new lily flower in May nor snow upon the branch is so white, nor the rose upon the bough so red.]

Though indescribability is a cliché,50 it is somewhat surprising to find it used at this moment in the text. For one thing, like most of Jean’s other speakers, and like the many inhabitants of Guillaume de Lorris’s garden, Nature is an abstraction represented by the human form, and her identity must be seen in her aspect or aributes. Thus, Guillaume has described minutely the physical aractions and careful toilee of the first personification the Lover encounters in the garden, Oiseuse, as a way of showing that she has leisure to look aer herself. He gives her a wreath of roses on her head (to imply, one may suppose, that she has been frolicking in a meadow), gloves to protect her hands from any roughness (which would indicate that she had actually done something with them), and a mirror with which to gaze on herself (since she has nothing else to do) (lines 522–72). To claim that a personification is indescribable, as Jean does, is to render her, not only invisible, but also, in a way, inconceivable. It is true that Nature first “appears” at work in her forge (line 15861), which rescues her in some sense by making her recognizable

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through her action; but for most of the text she will not be engaged in her defining activity. The problem remains of how we are to imagine her beyond simply her name. Even the metaphor that Jean has offered for Nature’s beauty poses difficulties. Unlike the other fountains in the Roman de la Rose, there is simply no way to visualize this one (paradoxically, since this is an image of beauty, the visual). It is possible to imagine a fountain whose boom is not discernible, but not one that does not have a bank. Even the largest bodies of water have banks. In fact, since water is shapeless, we name bodies of water according to the shape, length, and relative position of their edges (pool, lake, river, ocean). To call this a fountain is to imply a certain kind of edge—an edge that Jean takes away in the next breath. Hence the play on desriver. The verb functions in the sentence both abstractly (if this is the source from which beauty derives) and concretely (beauty, figured by water, flows from the spring), but etymologically it also anticipates Jean’s move in the next line: the removal of banks. Therefore, although this metaphor seems to offer a visible substitute for a beauty that cannot be visualized, it actually does the opposite, for neither term of the metaphor proves imaginable, and the personification threatens to dissolve. Yet, unlike personifications such as Idleness or Reason, Nature represents, not pure abstraction, but rather the “ensemble” of essences of things that have a physical, visible existence;51 she is the source of all those visibilia that, according to Paul and Augustine, give access to the invisibilia. To make Nature unvisualizable, then, both contradicts the visible quality of what she represents and introduces doubts about the very possibility of knowledge and of the move from the visible to the invisible that justifies the encyclopedia. Jean’s move here similarly undermines the principle of Guillaume’s amorous allegory—integument, as the word itself indicates, is visible or at the very least visualizable. This, too, the fountain can represent because the first fountain in the Roman de la Rose was a source of reflection (the surface of the water and the crystals at its base) that is called the “miroërs perilleus” [perilous mirror] (RR line 1569). The Roman de la Rose can also be called, as the God of Love tells us, the Miroër aus Amoreus [Mirror for Lovers] (line 10621). Nature, too, is thought of as a mirror—one way of describing how we can look at visibilia and see the invisibilia. But, if in its doubled reflections the mirror of Narcissus figures subjective vision and fictionality as much as—or at the same time as—objectively verifiable truth,52 if we can read the fountain of Narcissus as the figure for a fictionality that coexists with truth (takes priority over it? renders it irrelevant?), then the fountain of

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beauty that Jean describes when he introduces Nature could perhaps be said to problematize objective knowledge in a more extreme way. For it cannot be a mirror at all. It may well have crystals at its base, but, since no one can see the base, no one can see anything reflected in them. As for the surface of the water, one can see reflections there only if one can approach the water in some way. But a fountain without banks (or whose banks are unknown, uncharted) is a fountain inaccessible by land; only a bird can see reflections in its surface. In other words, like the proverbial tree crashing down in the uninhabited forest, since there is no one to see the reflections, it does not really maer whether they exist or not. The reflective fountain of beauty that God has placed in Nature cannot impart knowledge to the human mind.53 What more devastating challenge could anyone present to the justification of the medieval encyclopedia, the access to God’s invisibilia through the visibilia of nature? Not only does Jean decline to describe Nature, but he also gives precious lile description of nature. As we have seen, Natura comes, in the Cosmographia and the De planctu Naturae, with a catalog description of the world she represents. In the Roman de la Rose, as we have also seen, Nature’s speech does eventually list some creatures, but they are either identified broadly as classes (rather than species) or twisted into new forms by the dystopic thought experiment. If we consider the introduction of Nature narrated by the Lover (and thus parallel to the descriptions of Natura in the Latin texts), we find two catalogs, both of which could be said to be deflections of the norm established by the earlier writers. Oddly enough, at the very moment when Jean is first toying with the possibility of describing Nature, he does produce a list of creatures—if one wants to think of them in that way—but the creatures here are philosophers and artists, mentioned because they would all be incapable of describing Nature: Non feroit voir nus sans humains ne par voiz vive ne par notes, et fust Platons ou Aristotes, Algus, Euclidés, Tholomees, qui tant ont or granz renomees d’avoir esté bon escrivain: leur angin seroient si vain, s’il osaient la chose anprendre qu’il ne la porroient entendre; ne Pigmalion entaillier;

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an vain s’i porroit travaillier Parasyus; voire Apellés, que je mout bon paintre apel, les biautez de lui ja mes descrivre ne pourroit, tant eüst a vivre; ne Myro ne Policletus ja mes ne savroient cet us. Zeusys neïs par son biau paindre ne porroit a tel fourme ataindre. (RR lines 16138–56) [In fact, no human understanding could do it, neither aloud nor in writing, even if the person were Plato or Aristotle, Algus, Euclid, or Ptolemy, who are now so greatly renowned as good writers (escrivain). Their cunning would be vain if they undertook the task, for they would not be able to figure out how to do it. Nor would Pygmalion be able to sculpt her. In vain Parrhasios would labor over the subject, and Apelles, too, whom I call a very good painter, could never describe her beauties, however long he lived, nor would Myron or Polykleitos ever succeed at it. Even Zeuxis with his beautiful painting would not be able to reproduce such a form.]

Jean begins with a list of ancient thinkers, many of whose works became available in Latin translation only in the scholastic period. (The only name here likely to be unfamiliar is Algus, the Latin name for the Persian mathematician Abū ʿAbdallāh Muh.ammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. Despite his apparent obscurity, Algus’s texts played a crucial role in winning acceptance for arabic numerals in Western Europe.) All five writers were engaged with the problem of how the world can be described, and among them they represent three of the arts of the quadrivium (geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy). They are thus all beyond what many university scholars of the thirteenth century would have considered the more elementary realm of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and belong to the higher disciplines. However, with these writers’ projected failure in the description of nature, Jean falls back on a series of artists known to medieval readers through descriptions included in classical texts. I shall return to the first, Pygmalion, in a moment. All the rest are ancient Greek artists whose works, very few of which have survived to the present day, were still renowned by the cultivated Romans of the first century ce, for Pliny cites them in his excursus on art in the Naturalis historia, Quintilian as an illustration during his discussion

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of the diversity of rhetorical styles in the Institutionis oratoriae. Parrhasios, Apelles, and Zeuxis were painters; Myron and Polykleitos, sculptors.54 While an allusion to the Naturalis historia would seem to continue the list’s engagement with texts whose subject lies beyond the realm of the trivium, it also raises a number of questions. Why exploit the Naturalis historia, which has much evident relevance for Nature’s speech, only in the introduction to her speech and only for the Latin text’s discussion of Greek art? It is significant that Jean never mentions Pliny in the Roman de la Rose, and no other allusions to the Roman naturalist have been identified in the poem. If this is, indeed, an allusion to Pliny, then the Naturalis historia has, like the Speculum naturale, been so completely subsumed in the Roman de la Rose as to be nearly unrecognizable.55 In this case, the game is one of an ever-receding horizon of reality. Jean cites an encyclopedia of natural history, not for its descriptions of the real world, but for its discussion of artistic representation, which is itself based on lost Greek texts that Pliny cites with abandon, a proliferation of authors and titles that would have been wholly enigmatic to the thirteenth-century Parisian reader. On the other hand, if Quintilian alone is the source for this passage, then Jean has moved away from the kinds of texts exploited in advanced studies to a rhetorical handbook that medieval readers would have encountered at a young age, in their study of the trivium. Moreover, the list of artists is headed by Pygmalion, a fictional individual not mentioned by Pliny or Quintilian; Pygmalion owes his fame largely to Ovid’s tale in the Metamorphoses.56 The list could thus be taken to represent the triumph of rhetorical and artistic invention, were it not for that initial, disturbing consonance between escrivain and vain. As a further negation of the possibility of writing the world, the enumeration of artists here replaces the initial catalog of nature, turning creation on its head by suggesting that it is the writers and artists who create (or aempt to do so), rather than Nature or God. But it would be difficult to consider this an affirmation of the power of art over nature since the names are strung together with negative conjunctions, producing a kind of anticatalog, one that suggests the reduction to nothing. In a more complicated way, rhyme holds out the possibility of an assimilation between descrivre and vivre that the ne that stands between them negates. The text lists and simultaneously denies the list it produces, in a way that parallels the fountain of beauty whose description renders it unimaginable. Writing’s failed aempt to copy nature here recalls a slightly earlier passage where Jean compares Nature’s creations to those of Art, who is capable

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of making, but not of vivifying. This is much more clearly a deflection of the nature catalog, where we see nature’s creatures only through the imitations that Art produces: Car Art, combien qu’ele se peine par grant estuide et par grant peine de fere choses, quex qu’el saient, quelques figures qu’eles aient, paigne, taigne, forge ou antaille chevaliers armez en bataille seur biaus destriers tretouz couverz d’armes indes, jaunes ou verz, ou d’autres couleurs piolez se plus pioler les volez, biaus oisillons en verz boissons, de toutes eves les poissons, tretoutes les bestes sauvages qui pasturent par leur boschages, toutes herbes, toutes floretes que valletons et puceletes vont an printans es gauz cueillir, que florir voient et fueillir, oiseaus privez, bestes domesches, baleries, dances et tresches de beles dames bien parees, bien portretes, bien figurees, soit en metaill, en fust, en cire, soit en quelconque autre matire, soit en tableaus, soit en paraiz, tenanz biaus bachelers a raiz, bien figurez et bien portrez, ja por figures ne por trez ne les fera par eus aler, vivre, mouvoir, santir, paler. (RR lines 16005–34) [For Art, however much trouble she may labor in great study and pains to make things, whatever they are, and whatever their outward appearance ( figures), however much she paints, tints, forges, and sculpts knights armed

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in bale, astride handsome steeds all covered with blue, yellow, and green arms, or other mixed colors (if you want them variegated), beautiful lile birds in green bushes, the fish of all waters, all the wild beasts that graze in the woods, all grasses, all the lile flowers that girls and boys go to the woods to pick in the spring (for they see them flowering and leafing out), pet birds and domestic animals, all kinds of dances of beautiful, well dressed women, well depicted, well figured—in metal, or wood, or wax, or any other material, either in paintings or in frescoes—holding hands with handsome young men, in lines, well figured and well depicted—yet never, with figures or with brush strokes, will she make them go about, live, move, feel, speak.]

The list weaves together evocations of the dance in Guillaume’s garden of Deduit (hence the love poem or allegorical romance) with something resembling a nature catalog (birds, fishes, beasts) in the encyclopedic tradition, suggesting a possible fusion of the two genres based on the use of enumeration. Yet this catalog, too, is negated, as the representation of Art’s futility. The final lines suggest that the life that Art (and hence the texts cited) is incapable of giving is somehow comparable to the movement provided by verbs. And, indeed, however much the dancers may dance or the birds flit about, encyclopedias are essentially static, functioning primarily by nomination. Just as the lack of physical description of Nature reduces her to a name, so here the text reveals its own—the series’ own—dependence on names and its resulting inability to come to life through movement—anticipating the problem that Pygmalion will face in Jean’s own retelling toward the end of the Roman de la Rose. While the problem of visibility suggests a blockage in the function of the symbol, these two catalogs draw our aention to language’s limitations by emphasizing the disjunction between verbal representation and nature itself.57 Thus, the infusion of the encyclopedia with rhetorical or artistic invention, while introducing a wealth of possible modes of description, also calls aention to the artificiality and limitations of any verbal description of the world, to the gulf dividing words and things, to the ultimate impossibility of the kind of “interweaving of language and things, in a space common to both,” that Foucault aributes to the premodern encyclopedia.58 In his continuation of the Roman de la Rose, Jean de Meun experiments with numerous possible verbal representations of the world: from the encyclopedic list to the various rearrangements of the amorous trope to a futile gesture toward a truth beyond language. Thus, Nature’s speech can be read

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as a play on the way discursive structures can create both order and disorder in descriptions of the world. Even though its potential for disorder can compromise the structure of the encyclopedic compilation, metaphor also determines the relation between the book, the world, and God and, thus, remains the very condition of possibility of the medieval encyclopedia as mirror. Nature’s discussion of mirrors in the Roman de la Rose (lines 18123ff.) reveals the dynamics of Jean’s poem, the Miroër aus Amoreus, but also the epistemological fragility of the encyclopedic project. For here Nature considers all the possible relations between an object and its image in the glass. Some mirrors par veritez montrent les propres quantitez des choses que l’an i regarde (RR lines 18133–35) [show truly the proper dimensions of the things that one sees in them]

while others produce monstrosities; they font diverses ymages apparair en divers estages, droites, bellongues et anverses, par composicions diverses. (lines 18143–46) [make different images appear in different positions, upright, elongated, and inverted, in different arrangements.]

Yet others, by reflecting light back on the object, even destroy it, leaving only a pile of cinders (RR lines 18137–42). All these mirrors appear in Jean’s text, mirror of mirrors. The Roman de la Rose may not be an encyclopedia, but it evokes one, represents one, dreams one, perhaps, with all its aspirations and limitations. Jean’s poem is the fiing tribute to an impossible ideal.

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∂

Heterotopias

The fragmentation to which the Speculum maius was subject in its composition and manuscript transmission, the indifference that greeted the exquisitely ordered but virtually contentless Arbor scientiae, the wild popularity of Jean de Meun’s ironic dramatization of encyclopedic disorder: all suggest that too many conflicting paradigms of knowledge and order were circulating during the scholastic period for any one paradigm to dominate. This is the kind of epistemic heterogeneity that Foucault so carefully banished from The Order of Things, sketching out instead a historical succession of coherent, unified epistemes. Foucault did, however, briefly entertain the idea of heterogeneity; in fact, he began with it, citing as his inspiration a certain “Chinese encyclopedia.” This encyclopedia is no more real than the Libre de plasent visió. Like the laer, it owes its unreal existence to a description in a text that represents fiction at its most philosophical: the ficciones of Jorge Luis Borges. In one of these texts, the Argentine essayist describes the pages of this Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, on which “it is wrien that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, ( j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (1) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.”1 For Foucault, the Chinese encyclopedia raised “the suspicion that there is a worse 215

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kind of disorder than that of the incongruous, the linking together of things that are inappropriate . . . [that is,] the disorder in which fragments of a large number of possible orders glier separately in the dimension, without law or geometry, of the heteroclite.”2 And in reaction against such a heteroclite dimension Foucault elaborated the epistemes of the Renaissance, the neoclassical period, and the modern period. Nevertheless, if we take epistemes as orders, as paradigms for linking words and things, then an entry from the florilegium-as-encyclopedia has more in common with Borges’s fiction than with Foucault’s history, for the florilegium’s citations are demarcated only by the sparest of rubrics, and, as we shall see in part 3, its heteroclite “glier” threatens the consequences that Foucault aributed to heterotopias, to “destroy syntax” and “desiccate speech.”3 Yet such disasters never quite occur. The entry of the encyclopedic compendium proves less a space of destruction than a container for what Bakhtin dubbed heteroglossia, the mixing of social languages. These languages are not defined linguistically; rather, they constitute the usage proper to a given social group. If we acknowledge that the linguistic usage of a given group determines the way in which objects are described or known and the position of the knower with relation to them—that is, if we slightly expand on Bakhtin’s discussion of language to take fuller account of its epistemological import—then we can recognize in the social language something roughly analogous to Foucault’s notion of discourse. It is true that Bakhtin developed the concept of heteroglossia principally in relation to the novel, whose stylistics are, for the Soviet linguist, determined by the encounter between such languages. For this encounter, the novel is uniquely adapted to provide a stage because, in Bakhtin’s estimation, it alone among genres is able to hold all these languages together without reducing their dissonance.4 Yet the florilegium, too, draws dissonant languages, dissonant discourses, into contact with each other. Viewed in this light, the most salient difference between the two genres is that the florilegium is composed of real citations rather than fictional “images” (i.e., representations) of social languages.5 If the scholastic encyclopedia, with its radical heteroglossia, is not a heterotopia in the sense of a site where syntax is destroyed and speech desiccated, it can be thought of as another kind of heterotopia, one that Foucault would elaborate, not long aer publishing The Order of Things, in a lecture given to the Architectural Studies Circle. Reflecting on the topic of “different spaces,” Foucault described two “emplacements” (forms of relations between points) that “have the curious property of being connected to all the other emplacements, but in such a way that they suspend, neutralize, or reverse

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the set of relations that are designated, reflected, or represented [réflechis] by them.” These spaces are utopias and heterotopias. The former lack any real place, and they represent either a perfected or an inverted form of society. Heterotopias function like utopias, but they do occupy real places, in which all the real emplacements in a given culture are “represented, contested, and reversed.” The stage and the cinema are both heterotopias; by exhibiting diverse other places in rapid succession, they reveal their capacity to embrace multiple real emplacements that are incompatible with each other and could not be juxtaposed elsewhere in the real world. In addition to these spatial discontinuities, heterotopias also frequently absorb temporal discontinuities, thus becoming heterochronias. Into the laer category fall museums and libraries, “heterotopias in which time never ceases to pile up and perch on its own summit.”6 Foucault considered the library a heterotopia peculiar to modernity, distinguishing it from the collections of the seventeenth century, which reflected personal taste. The modern library is instead inspired by “the desire to contain all times, all ages, all forms, all tastes in one place, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside time and protected from its erosion.” It is thus a “heterotopia of compensation” because its organization compensates for the “muddle” elsewhere in the real world.7 Yet the desire to create such a space is not uniquely modern, a fact to which the Speculum maius bears most eloquent, most overwhelming testimony. Like the modern library, the scholastic encyclopedia compensated for the confusion of volumes piled into the armarium or book cabinet, for the heteroglot murmur of discourses circulating through the halls of the monastery, the school, the university, and the castle, by gathering them all into a single space, the book, and fixing them on the page, in some comprehensible order that, itself, lent order and meaning to the world it represented. The constitution of a utopia of knowledge, the realization of that utopia in an actual place: it would be difficult to find a beer summation of what drove the scholastic encyclopedists to pick up their quills. This lends a deeper, radically historical sense to Foucault’s brief, generally atemporal consideration of the mirror as a space that is at once both utopia and heterotopia.8 The encyclopedia as florilegium and as mirror is a medieval heterotopia that has survived, taered and rather the worse for wear, but preserving nonetheless traces of the scholastic archive. I therefore devote the final part of this book to a closer examination of the encyclopedic heterotopia: first, to the way in which it accommodates disparate discourses; then, to the kind of readerly subject that this heterogeneous

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space seems to presuppose. But, before seing out, a few methodological comments are in order. Readers may already have observed that the way in which I interpret text changes over the course of this book, as I focus on different aspects of encyclopedism. In the contextual work of part 1, I was using texts largely in the service of historiography, making generalizations based on a summary reading of a wide array of texts. In part 2, my argument about the order of a selection of encyclopedic texts was more strongly theoretical, but my modes of reading were still rather traditional, though of a different kind from part 1: I was engaged in the philological investigation of sources and in the close reading of programmatic passages. In part 3, my mode of reading will change more radically, as will my method of selection. The excerpts of the Speculum maius chosen for analysis in chapter 5 will not be prologues, summaries, or other programmatic passages. A reading limited to such passages produces no more complete an understanding of this encyclopedia, of how it was constituted and the specific uses to which it did (and did not) lend itself, than the understanding that we could achieve of the Britannica by reading only its preface. Any book-length study of encyclopedias must look beyond their introductions, to examine how they are constructed—not only in what order, but also with what materials and techniques. Hence, I have chosen a number of sample passages, not dealt with in earlier scholarship, in order to study Vincent of Beauvais’s practice of compilatio and to substantiate, at last, the broad claims that I made about heterogeneity in part 1. This task will require close reading, but of a different kind, for I must identify the discourses from which the extracts are drawn and describe the polyphonic effect created by their juxtaposition in the encyclopedia. That is, the theoretical presuppositions of this study will more fully shape the readings I offer. At the same time, the results will be less conclusive than those achieved in part 2 because the incoherencies I there identified in Vincent’s text are many times magnified in individual entries. Nonetheless, the aempt to describe those incoherencies is the necessary prerequisite for fully understanding the consequences of compilatio. The theoretical investment will continue into the final chapter, which is premised on the notion of a subject. As it happens, the textual community, which helped us in parts 1 and 2 to map the terrain in which these encyclopedic texts emerged, is not useful for describing the addressees of encyclopedias. The popularity of encyclopedias and other compilations among late medieval readers did create an atmosphere in which it was acceptable

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for a reasonably educated person to have read only bits and pieces of original texts, and this resulted in reading habits and educational standards that the highly literate elite in both the scholastic and the early modern periods would condemn.9 Yet we are not witnessing here the formation of new textual communities because such communities must coalesce around a single text or (as I have expanded the notion) a small group of texts and their coherence is determined by the primacy of those texts and the single way in which they are interpreted. Conversely, as a library in miniature, the scholastic encyclopedia represents all available texts and offers each individual reader a choice of how to understand them. In other words, the heterogeneity of these encyclopedias forecloses the possibility that they could give rise to a textual community of the ideological consistency of the communities that Stock describes or the thirteenth-century communities that I have identified. As Parkes and Minnis have already argued, it is no accident that some of the most compelling and popular fictions penned aer the publication of the Speculum maius and other encyclopedic florilegia, fictions such as the Roman de la Rose, the Decameron, and the Canterbury Tales, represent, not a unified community, but a variegated group of interpreters who cannot reach consensus. As more recent scholarship has shown, texts such as the Rose were in their turn subjected to diverse, usually fragmentary interpretations in the centuries following their publication.10 How, then, can we talk about the readers of encyclopedic florilegia? I have already said a few words—and have a few more to say in chapter 5—about manuscript transmission, which allows us to infer trends (and eccentricities) in the historical reception of scholastic encyclopedias. But my response to the question of readership in chapter 6 will be different. The only historical readers who will appear here are Ramon Llull and Jean de Meun as writers, responding to the encyclopedic tradition they have inherited. The nature of that response will be one focus of the chapter; the other will be the subject position that encyclopedic texts establish and make available to readers—in other words, a function of the texts themselves rather than an extratextual phenomenon. To this end, I shall consider the discussions of exegesis and of optics in the Speculum maius and the representations of writers, readers, or observers in the critical fictions of Jean and Llull. I shall suggest that these two vernacular writers were perfectly aware of the selective reading habits that their contemporaries brought to encyclopedic florilegia—and of the certain fate of their own literary creations, so closely connected to the encyclopedic tradition. They therefore used exemplary narratives (or caution-

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ary tales, depending on one’s point of view) to reflect on the act of reading.11 The final chapter is therefore synthetic, bringing together texts of all three writers, and, like the final chapter of part 2, it demonstrates how a deeper understanding of scholastic encyclopedism opens up new ways to read late medieval fiction.

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5 ∂

A Fissured Mirror The Speculum maius as Heterotopia

There was something artificial about the representation of the Speculum maius in part 2, a disjunction between the way I there approached this text and the way we normally experience encyclopedias. I wished to interrogate the ordering principles that determine the shape of the encyclopedia, yet, habitually, we do not experience or even think about the encyclopedia as a whole, with a beginning, an articulation of the parts, and an end. Some basic understanding of organization is prerequisite for navigating through these texts, of course, but it oen plays no more exalted role than that of a simple finding device. Even if all the volumes of the encyclopedia are lined up on the shelf in front of us, we are unlikely to pull more than one volume down at a time—and not the first volume, but the one in which we expect to find an entry on the object that interests us. The related topics cited in this first entry may send us back to the shelf for another volume or two, yet the experience of reading the encyclopedia continues to be a radically local one, in which we move from one strictly circumscribed entry to another without pausing to reflect on their place in the larger scheme. The present chapter will beer approximate this way of reading encyclopedias because it will trace just such a path through the Speculum maius, an idiosyncratic journey guided by a chain of associations. Yet I do not intend to write a phenomenology of the medieval encyclopedia. I shall have occasion to make a few comments about the consequences of compilatio for the way these encyclopedias can and cannot be used by schol221

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ars, but I shall not aempt to describe some shared subjective experience (the encyclopedic subject, which I understand differently, will be the topic of the final chapter). The argument of the present chapter is that, because the epistemological presuppositions of the diverse discourses that have been gathered into the individual encyclopedic entries are at variance, the text is mined by internal tensions far deeper than simple contradictions of fact and far more diverse than the tensions we saw in the earlier examination of the small number of passages relating to this text’s global structure. The Speculum maius constitutes a fissured mirror, or, perhaps beer, a house of mirrors containing glasses in all the myriad shapes cataloged for us by Jean de Meun’s Nature. Heterogeneity is beer demonstrated through the explication of examples than through linear argumentation, so three discrete case studies will follow. I shall begin with a single chapter. I have chosen the first chapter on the frog from the Speculum naturale, but it is only one of many entries to be fissured with discursive disjunctions. I shall look closely at the disjunction here between two discourses: Isidorian etymology, whose theoretical basis had been established by Augustine, and Plinian natural history, heavily influenced by Aristotelian empiricism yet also distinctly, explicitly imperial in its linguistic practice. The difference between the two discourses will be evident first in their disparate paradigms for relating words and things. In order beer to grasp these two paradigms and their epistemological role in the Speculum maius, we shall have recourse to the discussion of language in the Doctrinale. But the incompatibility of these two discourses is not solely a maer of the relations of words to things because each discourse was created and exploited by specific individuals or institutions in order to assert their authority. The contradictions—of fact or semiotic practice—that arise in the florilegium are thus vestiges of a deeper incompatibility between structures of intellectual authority. The necessity of making a journey through other volumes of the Speculum maius in order to address questions raised by one volume suggests to what degree the three specula overlap each other and to what degree language constitutes an object of contestation in all specula, rather than in the Doctrinale alone. This suggestion will be borne out by the second case study, one that deals with a rather different aspect of discourse: its material medium. If the material realization of a statement must be taken into account in its archaeological description, we must think about the visual aspect of the encyclopedic page rather than simply liing the words off of it, simply transcribing them for a modern readership. What kinds of marks help de-

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termine the discursive particularities of this page? This time, the entries in question will belong to the treatment of plants in the Naturale and to the literary history included in the Historiale, although the discussion of mise en page will also lead us to the entries on poetics in the Doctrinale, for some of these pages visually differentiate prose and poetry. The fractured appearance of the page projects the disjunction between the discourses represented in the varied citations, between, in this case, the superposition of levels of meaning proper to the carmen figuratum (and the monastic discourse of which it is the paradigmatic trace) and the juxtaposition of disparate elements in the prosimetrum and the florilegium (as well as scholastic discourse more generally, which these genres exemplify). In the final study, I shall take account of another way in which the discursive and the nondiscursive intersect on the page of the Speculum maius: in its decoration. This ornamentation is, by convention, inhabited by fantastic reptiles that skier around the borders of the page and entwine themselves in its initials. Yet the compass of the encyclopedic text is such that these same lizards are caught in its discursive web, classified among the reptiles and discussed in entries devoted to them. Thus, the chimeric plethora of discourses in the scholastic encyclopedia overlaps and replicates the fantastic painting of its pages.

Concerning the Frog: The Etymologiae and the Naturalis historia This first study will give us the opportunity to consider how a specific object of knowledge may be characterized differently, known differently, in distinct epistemes. We can thus observe how the movement from one encyclopedic citation to another, even within a single entry, can affect the object’s metamorphosis simply by redefining its relation to words. And this is true even of entries where Vincent has confined himself to a literal exposition of the creatures, without indulging in any of the figuration proper to spiritual exegesis. Therefore, my example comes from a class of creatures rather neglected in the Physiologus tradition, the reptiles. (In the thirteenth century, and for many centuries aer it, the word lacked the specificity it has today; it referred to a group of mainly egg-laying creatures that included snakes, various fantastic monsters, lizards, assorted amphibians, and worms.)1 The Physiologus speaks only of the most flamboyant of these species; I have chosen a more prosaic creature that would seem to provide lile scope for symbolism: the frog, introduced in book 20, chapter 59, of the Speculum naturale. In cases where the source of an animal’s name can be imagined, Vin-

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cent’s entry begins by treating this topic, usually by way of a quotation from Isidore. That is, the entry begins with the word itself, the liera. The discussion then continues with a description of the creature’s visible or sensible aspects, its appearance, its behavior, and its nutritional or medicinal purposes or poisonous effects. The final topics establish a tenuous connection between the natural world and the human being without transgressing the leer by resorting to elaborate moral interpretations. They also add another justification to the natural history encyclopedia: in addition to inviting readers to contemplate God’s greatness (or tempting them to indulge idle curiosity), the Speculum naturale serves as a medical manual. Thus, the first chapter on the frog (rana) begins with an Isidorian etymology: “Rana a garrulitate vocata est, eo quod circa genitales paludes strepit, et sonos vocis importunis clamoribus reddit” [The frog is so named on account of its garrulousness (garrulitas), because it croaks in its native marshes, and makes a racket with the sound of its voice].2 Vincent follows this with a string of loosely associated snippets from the De natura rerum: “Ranarum coitus magis est de nocte, quam de die, et in earuma coitu magna est mora, multumque seminis effundunt. Ranas habet mare, quae alas habent, et omnis piscis faetus nutrit, praeter ranam” [The copulation of frogs occurs more frequently during the night than during the day, and it is very difficult and involves much pouring out of seed. In the sea, there are frogs that have wings, and every fish except the frog nourishes its offspring].3 Next comes a longer citation from Avicenna, detailing the horrific symptoms exhibited by individuals who have ingested frog venom. A series of brief and sometimes imprecise quotations from Pliny’s Naturalis historia completes the chapter: Est rana parva et viridis et muta, quae forte si hauriatur bovem distendit. Haec in arundinetis et herbis maxime vivit. Carnes ejus supponuntur oculorum doloribus, hujus corporis humorem . . . claritatem oculis inunctis narrant afferre. Ranarum carnibus in hamum additis, purpurae alliciuntur. Canes vero quibus in offa rana viva data sit, latrare negantur.4 [There is a small, green, mute frog that causes cale to bloat should they chance to swallow it. It lives mainly in reeds and grass. Its flesh is applied to painful eyes, and they say that eyes see more clearly aer being anointed with the liquid from its body. . . . When placed on a fishhook, the flesh of frogs aracts purple-fish. And dogs that have been given a live frog in their food are prevented from barking.]

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The chapter is simple and relatively brief. But it is also mined by an internal conflict that becomes evident in a comparison of the first and the last citations in the entry. “Rana a garrulitate vocata est, eo quod circa genitales paludes strepit, et sonos vocis importunis clamoribus reddit,” according to Isidore. According to Pliny, however, “est rana parva et viridis et muta.” If frogs are so named for the noise they make, how can this silent creature be called a frog? The implicit contradiction is eloquent proof that, true to his word in the prologue, Vincent is not intervening to guarantee the internal coherence of the entries. But what is the source of the contradiction? Is it a simple difference of scientific opinion deriving from the fact that certain small Roman frogs are mute and Iberian frogs extraordinarily chay? That the two writers are referring to different species of frogs? It is, aer all, to geographic variations of flora and fauna that Vincent aributes the contradictions between the various authorities in natural history (LA ch. 8). As it turns out, Vincent’s explanation of the reason for factual contradictions is inadequate. Isidore read Pliny and used the Naturalis historia extensively when compiling the Etymologiae. He knew about the lile green voiceless frog, and he mentioned it slightly later, repeating information clearly taken from Pliny. But he added one detail absent from the Naturalis historia and, thus, transformed Pliny’s treatment: he cited the species’ name, calamitis, “calamites vocantur, quoniam inter arundines fruticesque vivunt” [they are called calamites (calamus = reed), since they live among reeds and shrubs].5 The connection between this small green frog and the word rana may be mysterious, but the species does possess its own name, which also imparts knowledge. In contrast, the entry in the Speculum naturale is constructed with the etymology—the one etymology relevant to the title of the entry—first. Vincent does not return to Isidore’s etymological text once he has delved into the medical lore of Avicenna and Pliny. He therefore omits the second etymology and the name itself. This omission obscures the distinction between individual species of frog, creating the apparent contradiction.6 More fundamentally, it also indicates that the end of this entry belongs to a different discourse from the one with which the entry began; the real contradiction is, not factual, but epistemological. It lies between discrete paradigms for the relation of words and things, guaranteed by discrete structures of authority. By the time Isidore set out to write an etymological encyclopedia, etymology was already an ancient practice, but its epistemological status had been contested as early as Plato, and the controversy had been revived by

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Latin writers such as Quintilian and Augustine.7 At issue were two related questions: first, the precise nature of the relation between words and things and, second, the authority of the etymologist himself.8 If words are related to things merely by human convention (Aristotle’s well-known position), then an etymological inquiry can illuminate only the conventional, human understanding of truth, not the nature of external reality or any transcendental idea of things. Etymology can give access to the laer only if words possess some original, necessary relation to things, as in the mimological theory expressed by Cratylus in the eponymous Platonic dialogue or the creation story of Genesis, where God speaks the world into being and Adam imposes names on the beasts in a language that Christian exegetes believed to have been perfect. According to this paradigm, not only can an inquiry into the origins of words produce knowledge about things, but it also constitutes the primary mode of access to that knowledge. Grammar (as the discipline that governed etymology in antiquity and the early Middle Ages) and epistemology are fused. Or, as Isidore would put it, “Nisi enim nomen scieris, cognitio rerum perit” [Unless you know the name, your understanding of the thing is lost].9 Etymology thus inserts an additional layer of discourse between words and things: the discourse, authoritative and potentially infinite, of the etymologist. This elevated the grammarian, arbitrator of etymology, into a self-declared arbitrator of all knowledge, a paradigm that struck many as offensive in antiquity, when the rhetorician was considered superior to the grammarian and insisted that the grammarian’s role should be restricted to basic training in literacy.10 In sum, ancient etymological practice both presumed an essential relation between words and things and established a particular kind of scientific and pedagogical authority that was at odds with the traditional structures for education and intellectual endeavor. Much would change in the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages. Although Augustine himself critiqued etymology, he found ways to recuperate it, and his hermeneutics would contribute to etymology’s dominance in the epistemology of the early Middle Ages.11 However, by the beginning of the twelh century, the philosophical and institutional context for ancient and early medieval etymology was lile understood; most of the texts that expressed it had been lost. As a result, when early scholastic grammarians took up the practice, they were, as Richard Hunt has put it, “unencumbered” by ancient epistemological problems.12 Etymologizing became freer, more inventive, and moved into the domain of rhetoric, as Suzanne Reynolds has shown in her study of twelh-century glosses on Horace’s Satires. Reynolds

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concludes from this that etymology’s “epistemological function is drastically curtailed.”13 It is not, in fact, necessary to see rhetoric as opposed to epistemology; the work of Copeland and Carruthers would seem to show instead that rhetoric structured knowledge making, and this is the very argument that I developed in part 2 of the present study. Nevertheless, by Vincent’s day, etymology no longer reigned unchallenged over the act of knowing. Given the shiing epistemological status of etymology, the confusion that pervades Vincent’s compilation of prior writing should come as no surprise. It is not clear what status Vincent aributes to Isidorian etymologies when he includes them in the Naturale; possibly, he cites Isidore more because of the authoritative status aached to his name than any conviction that etymology itself was epistemologically valid. Thus, it would not be the practice of etymology that guarantees the value of the knowledge it produces but rather the practice of citation from an authoritative source. The authoritative discourse of etymology, which Quintilian and others had contested when it was produced by ancient grammarians, would be assured by the kind of Christian citational practice that Antoine Compagnon has described in the patristic period and dubs the discourse of theology. However, such an explanation elides the fact that the patristic and scholastic periods did not treat citation in the same manner. We shall see in the next chapter that Vincent calls on the reader’s arbitration in dealing with sources of different levels of authority, an old topos that takes on added significance in a period when thinkers are developing new methods for critiquing source texts.14 Moreover, although Vincent cites Isidore admiringly in the prologue to the Speculum maius, he is preoccupied there with Isidore’s way of seing out topics one aer the other and says nothing about his etymological practice (LA ch. 7). Conversely, the discussion of etymology in the Speculum doctrinale aributes to it a clear epistemological priority. Following the lead of Peter Helias, a mid-twelh-century commentator on Priscian who serves as the principal grammatical source for the Doctrinale, Vincent places the discussion of etymology at the beginning of the discussion of grammatica, prior to the treatment of semantic systems.15 Tropes (belonging to grammatica or rhetorica) and propositions (dialectica) come only later. This order of presentation suggests that etymology is somehow more fundamental, a part of nomination itself. In fact, the grammatical tradition that Vincent follows aaches etymology to the uerance as a basic constituent of language. In Vincent’s chapter on voces, we read:

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Etymologia est expositio alicujus vocabuli per aliud vocabulum, sive unum, sive plura, magis secundum rei proprietatem et literarum similitudinem, ut: “lapis” quasi “laedens pedem”; “finestra” quasi “ferens extra.” (SD 2.3)16 [Etymology is the explanation of a given word through another, whether one or several, especially according to the property of the thing and similitude of the leers, for example, “stone” (lapis), as if striking the foot (laedens pedem), or window ( finestra), as if bearing one to the outside ( ferens extra).]

Now, there is something curious here. Despite his reliance on Isidore’s etymologies elsewhere in his compilation, when called on to define etymology, Vincent does not return to Isidore’s widely cited definition, “Etymologia est origo vocabulorum, cum vis verbi vel nominis per interpretationem colligitur” [Etymology is the origin of words, by which the meaning of a verb or a noun is understood through interpretation] (ET 1.29.1). Instead, whether by accident or by design, he offers a single, twelh-century definition that elides the notion of origin, suggesting that, instead of engaging in the hunt for origins, we can arrive at an understanding of words (and the objects they represent) simply by comparing them.17 Nevertheless, this coordination of the rei proprietas [property of the thing] and the lierarum similitudo [similitude of the leers] still binds the thing and the leer tightly together. Such blurring of distinctions is consonant with Augustinian semiotics, and it allows us to think of the material world as text open to exegesis—of a decidedly literal kind. Problems arise, however. On the one hand, if one collapses the material world and language too completely into each other, it becomes difficult to explain what precisely is invalid in the word games of schoolboys, such as the one that Vincent cites (and condemns) by way of Seneca in Doctrinale 1.31, “De his qui studiis inutilibus se occupant” [Concerning those who occupy themselves with useless studies]: “Mus syllaba est; mus autem caseum rodit; syllaba ergo caseum rodit. Puta me istud solvere non posse” [“Mouse” (mus) is a syllable. The mouse also gnaws cheese. Therefore the syllable gnaws cheese. I am ashamed not to be able to solve this puzzle] (SD 1.31). The fact that Vincent places this citation in his introductory material, rather than in his expositions of the various kinds of faulty syllogisms in book 3, suggests that he does not know what is wrong with the schoolboy’s reasoning. In any case, the cunning syllogism exemplifies the risk of mixing a discussion of the material world with a discussion of language. Hence, the clear division between the two in Vincent’s tripartite encyclopedia, where the former be-

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longs (mainly) to the Speculum naturale and the laer to the Speculum doctrinale. But, as we have seen, etymology crosses the divide. It appears both in the Naturale (in all the borrowings from Isidore) and in the Doctrinale, where Vincent finally explains the practice. Its presence in both specula marries the two parts of the encyclopedia, for beer (Augustinian semiotics) and for worse (the nibbling syllable). Furthermore, though it is tempting to assign a definitive epistemological value to the etymologies in the Naturale on the basis of the treatment of linguistic practice in the Doctrinale, we must bear in mind that the laer speculum is no less a compilation than the former; its own citations can no more be taken as definitive statements on etymology than the citations in the Naturale can be taken as definitive statements on the vocal abilities of frogs. If Vincent cites Peter Helias’s commentary on Priscian, that is because his treatment of the arts must begin with grammar, first of the trivium, and the text in question was one of the most widely read on the subject. And, because Priscian, writing in the early sixth century, began with etymology, so does his twelh-century commentator and the commentary’s thirteenth-century excerptor. This particular kind of grammatica represents one discourse; the encyclopedia also absorbs others incompatible to it, so no one of its myriad citations can represent the final word on the maer. The stark opposition between Isidore’s etymology of rana and Pliny’s description of the mute frog suggests that the rei proprietas and the lierarum similitudo do not, in fact, go hand in hand in all discourses and, thus, that etymologizing and the Plinian description of the natural world are not consonant with each other. Etymology is a function of language; it seeks meaningful connections within it, posits an essential symbolic relation between words and things. Plinian natural history, on the other hand, does not seek such connections. Like Aristotle, to whom he is indebted, Pliny takes language as a conventional tool to describe the natural world, and he therefore feels no obligation to explain rana as a word. Trevor Murphy has recently described the Naturalis historia as a work that “professes to put before the reader the world of elements as it impinges on our senses” and (since Pliny was a thoroughgoing imperialist) to assign to each object a place or role in Roman cultural practices.18 It is, then, the various possibilities of physical contact with the frog that determine Pliny’s treatment of the creature. He does not describe it as a unity, a confluence of properties that must be detailed and explained (as in the Etymologiae). He is interested in it only because it can supply particular cures, so he deals with it in a scaershot way, mentioning it only when its cures are relevant for the particular affliction

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being discussed. He here explicitly privileges medical utility over the intellectual pleasures that would be provided by a complete exposition of all the animals: “Hinc deinde in morbos digeremus aquatilia, non quia ignoremus gratiorem esse universitatem animalium majorisque miraculi, sed hoc utilius est vitae, contributa habere remedia” [Henceforth I shall distribute the water creatures according to diseases, not because I am unaware that a full account of the animals is more pleasing and more wonderful, but because it is more useful for humankind to have remedies brought together in groups].19 Therefore, the connection between Plinian natural history and exegesis proves much more distant than that between etymology and exegesis. For the determined exegete, the Naturalis historia may still bear some tenuous relevance to the creation story in Genesis 1, but not much. What this text privileges instead is the experience of, the direct contact with, things. This is not to say that Pliny deals with language as if it were wholly transparent. It does possess a certain density that serves his encyclopedic ends. Only his ends are different from those of Isidore. The naming of the animals in Genesis 2, the primal moment of imposition of names that for patristic and early medieval writers had justified the truth claims of etymology, plays no role in Pliny’s conception of the relation between words and things. If any imposition could be said to maer to Pliny, it is the Roman one, the imperial appropriation of things through language, the moment when Latin names are assigned or when earlier, foreign, “barbaric” names are Latinized. The large majority of his medical sources happen to be Greek; Pliny translates them. He loses no opportunity to cast aspersions on the medical profession, dominated by Greeks, because the doctor interposes himself between the individual and nature in a way that he finds intolerable and because he thinks that the social and economic mobility that medicine affords is exploited by foreign doctors in order to corrupt the Roman social system. Pliny would cultivate an older medicine, practiced in the home and based on herbal remedies, which he would have us take as peculiarly Roman.20 His encyclopedia will allow his compatriots to continue this rustic tradition. The Naturalis historia and the Latin language in which it is elaborated make it possible for Romans to possess the world of things in their own, quintessentially Roman way, transforming the foreign through appropriation.21 The apparent contradiction between the beginning and the end of this first chapter on the frog has thus given us a clearer understanding of the dynamics of texts created by compilatio and the difficulties they pose for readers. As the compiler takes excerpts, the original context that guaranteed their coherence is lost. When they are juxtaposed to other excerpts, new in-

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coherencies appear. Such a phenomenon fully justifies Vincent’s cautionary words in the prologue, his insistence that he is not a tractator and, hence, that his text cannot be held to the standards of consistency set for authored texts. Medieval thinkers did not, of course, practice the kind of literary and intellectual history that would have allowed them to trace the discursive origins of these contradictions, as I have just done. Vincent inserts Pliny and Isidore into the Historiale at the point where they belong chronologically but contents himself with listing their works and citing sparingly from those that he has not used elsewhere (his rare comments about the form of the literary flores in the Historiale will be discussed in the next section).22 Nevertheless, the apparent contradictions placed medieval readers of the Speculum maius in a situation where they could not take any given statement as authoritative, as unqualified truth, simply by virtue of the fact that it was found in an encyclopedia. They were obliged to reflect on the relative value of the original sources. By the thirteenth century, the common term for all these citations was auctoritates, yet authority was, in these compilations, an open question, and each successive extract had to be judged by a scale of the kind that Vincent had set out in the prologue. Thus, medieval readers, too, were obliged to confront the extreme heterogeneity of compilations. Perhaps this is another reason writers of the Middle Ages did not light on a singular generic term for encyclopedias, or indeed for other kinds of florilegia, but did employ a dizzying variety of metonymic expressions that identify the (singular) container through its (plural) contents (flores, excerpta, notabilia, auctoritates, sententiae, dicta), the multiplicity only uneasily brought together in a clever title, such as Libri deflorationum [Books of plucked flowers], Manipulus florum [Bouquet of flowers], or Florarium [Flower garden].23 From modern scholars, too, this version of the encyclopedia demands a shi in methods of reading, away from the kind of interpretation behind many explanatory footnotes, which cite relevant bits of information from the Speculum maius as if they transparently represented thirteenth-century ideas without considering the source from which Vincent has drawn them, its own discursive context, or how the process of excerpting and compiling may have modified, relativized, or even undercut its claims. The Speculum maius offers only a choice of distinct threads that scholars interested in the history of ideas can begin to pull in order to untangle medieval thought about a given topic. In this way, it remains an invaluable source for research into all manner of medieval topics, but we must bear in mind that the thread we catch hold of is likely to lead us back beyond the thirteenth century, even beyond the High Middle Ages, and that its reappearance in the Speculum

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maius indicates that it was a part of an esteemed literary tradition, but not necessarily that its truth claims were widely accepted in the thirteenth century, and certainly not that the compiler espoused them. (This is perhaps most stunningly demonstrated by the treatment of architecture in the Speculum doctrinale: as Gothic edifices were rising all over the kingdom, Vincent compiled a florilegium of excerpts—without commentary—from Vitruvius’s and Isidore’s descriptions of ancient architecture.)24 Determining the significance of a particular encyclopedic citation (which is not the same thing as its meaning) requires determining both where it came from and how and why it has been redeployed. Hence, this discussion of compilatio has led us, by a different path, to the same general conclusion that we were obliged to draw aer considering figura in chapter 3: scholastic encyclopedias demand radically different kinds of reading from the Encyclopédie or the Britannica. More fundamentally, our study of this chapter on the frog has allowed us to perceive the fissures between discourses that accord different significance to verbal signs, link them differently to things, and are undergirded by different institutional authorities or textual practices. The first and last quotations of this entry represent two distinct discourses, and, thus, the entry demonstrates eloquently the dialogism that, for Bakhtin, creates heteroglossia: “No living word relates to its object in a singular way: between the word and its object, between the word and the speaking subject, there exists an elastic environment of other, alien words about the same object, the same theme.”25 The scholastic encyclopedia gathers together these alien words without privileging one over another, and, thus, it creates a heterotopia of discourse in which each possible configuration of words and things, of institutions and authorities, is represented and contested.

The Ragged Margin: Carmen figuratum, Florilegium, Prosimetrum This heterotopia is a visible space because books are visible. A question can therefore be posed: Is the text’s heterogeneity also visible on the book’s pages, or can it be perceived only by those who decipher the text? In other words, is heterogeneity wholly contained within what Foucault would have called the discursive, or does that discursive heterogeneity also fracture the visual aspect of the page? I have already indicated that I believe the second to be true. In this second case study, I shall therefore describe such visible fractures, moments when the alternation between discourses is indicated in the very layout of the page. In this way, the present case study will substantiate my claim in the general introduction that the verbal and the visual

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cannot be split off from each other when we study medieval textuality, as Foucault was able to do when studying modern writing. Though medieval books were handwrien, they were not dashed off in the way that, today—with handwriting limited to exam books and shopping lists—we too oen associate with this means of inscription. The pages of all but the cheapest or most informal of books were ruled in preparation for copy, the lines for text perfectly parallel, the angle between them and the vertical lines delimiting the column, perfectly square. It appears that these lines appealed to medieval aesthetic sensibilities because they were oen traced lightly in ink and not subsequently effaced. Such sensibilities also appear to have appreciated the white space framing the text, for the margins were extraordinarily wide, particularly at the boom of the page. One could imagine that the proportions of text to blank space were determined by obscure but meaningful formulas, but this hypothesis is difficult to test. Too many codices have been rebound, their leaves mercilessly cropped in the process. Yet, though such vandalism may prevent us from knowing all the secrets of the medieval aesthetic of the page, we can be certain that there was such an aesthetic. These pages were planned, and the copyists and illustrators oen thought about the visual effect of their work as they were doing it.26 Readers most certainly thought about it. We have already seen that they used the visual aspect of the page to help them remember text. Moreover, the scholastic John of Garland (ca. 1190–ca. 1270) recommended that students in need of material for amplification analyze the four causes of their books, including the material (parchment and ink) and the formal (the layout and the size of the leers).27 The implications of this approach to books extend beyond the realm of aesthetics. The medieval page testifies to a system of classification, to distinctions between different kinds of text that were projected onto the page and, thus, perpetuated from generation to generation. (Was the text laid out just so because it had been classified in a particular way, or was it so classified because it had been laid out this way? Did anyone know the answer to that question or even bother to pose it?) Quantitative Latin verse, of whatever genre, was usually laid out on the manuscript page line by line, as it had been since antiquity, although the appearance in the Carolingian period of various kinds of word or syllabic separation and of minuscule book hands, in which the width of the leers varied considerably, rendered the right side of the column far more uneven than it had been in antique manuscripts, which had been copied without spaces between words, in capitals of fairly uniform width.28 We find the use of a line-by-line mise en page even in manuscripts

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juxtaposing verse and prose, such as those of Virgil’s works with commentary, where the verse is laid out line by line in a single column, the prose commentary copied in the opposite column or in the top and boom margins. This verse mise en page was not universal, however, as it is now because other, newer kinds of poetry were laid out like prose, with no line breaks corresponding to the ends of the verse lines. Rhythmic Latin verse was copied in this way. Again, even in composite manuscripts, such as the Carmina Burana codex, which contains both types of verse, the metrical verses are set out line by line, the rhythmic verses like prose.29 The same prose disposition was used for vernacular lyric, and, in the great troubadour and trouvère chansonniers, only the break between stanzas is indicated by a return to the le justification line. Since both rhythmic Latin meters and the vernacular meters were easily perceptible to the ear of native speakers of the Romance and Germanic languages, it is sometimes suggested that the line-by-line mise en page of quantitative verse was preserved in order to encourage the reader to identify a kind of paern, one based on the length of syllables rather than their number or stress, to which the medieval ear was becoming increasingly deaf. Yet, while the variety and complexity of quantitative lyric meters may well have posed difficulties for medieval readers, their childhood training in reading classical hexameters would likely have le them with a good sense for this common meter.30 The explanation for their use of the line-by-line mise en page of hexameters is therefore probably to be sought elsewhere, perhaps in a desire to adhere to some vestige of classical tradition, whatever other changes had been wrought on the page, although the paradoxical result was a page whose difference from the classical page was as evident as its similarity to it. This phenomenon would fit the paradigm that Michael McCormick has set out for both textual and artistic practices of the Carolingian period, according to which continuity with the ancient past results in rupture from it.31 The raggedness of the right margin in these medieval books marks this discourse as different from others, as a humanist discourse interwoven with the fabric of classical leers. The consequence is that, the moment a reader opens a book, before even beginning to read, he or she knows that the text, or parts of it, participates in this particular discourse. Such scribal practice is consonant with the decidedly spatial terms in which Latin writers formulated the common distinction between versus (a word that, even when rhythmic verse came into vogue, was used exclusively for quantitative verse) and prosa. Isidore of Seville had articulated the dis-

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tinction in two etymologies, and Vincent of Beauvais cites both in the Speculum doctrinale: Metra vocata sunt, quia certis pedum mensuris atque spatiis terminantur. Mensura enim Graece Metron dicitur. Versus dicti sunt ab eo quod pedibus in ordine suo dispositis, certo fine moderantur per articulos (qui caesa et membra nominantur) qui ne longius pervolverentur quam judicium posset sustinere, modum statuit ratio unde reverteretur, et ab eo ipso versum vocatum, quod revertitur. (SD 3.111)32 [Metrical lines (metra) are so named because their length is determined by the measures and intervals of the feet. In Greek “measure” is called metron. Verses (versus) are so named because with their feet set out in order, they are restrained to a certain length by divisions (which are called caesa and membra). So that they do not continue to unroll longer than good taste can support, they are reversed (reverteretur) at a boundary that reason has established, and thus they are called verses, because they are reversed.]

The fact that verse stops short at a certain point determined by taste and then returns justifies its name. Prose, on the other hand, is defined in terms of the absence or loosening of formal controls: “Prosa est producta oratio, et a lege metri soluta. Prosum enim antiqui productum dicebant et rectum. Alii prosam ajunt dictam, eo quod sit profusa” [Prose is extended speech, released from the law of meter. The ancients called prose “extended” (productum) and “straight.” Others say that prose is so named because it is poured forth (profusa)] (SD 3.111).33 In both the Speculum naturale and the Speculum historiale, Vincent quotes extensively from the metrical verse of classical and medieval poets, interspersing these citations with others drawn from prose texts. A copyist who laid out each citation on the page according to the traditional mise en page of the genre to which it belonged would render visible at first glance the generically and discursively composite nature of the encyclopedia (as, indeed, the conscientious printers of the Douai edition have done). He would also waste a great deal of expensive parchment by leaving incomplete the ends of so many lines, not a negligible consideration when producing a set of books as massive as the Speculum maius. In the majority of surviving manuscripts, practicality seems to have won out, for copyists distribute the verses of Virgil, Ovid, and medieval poets such as Hrabanus Maurus and Odo of Meung

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across the entire column, allowing the line breaks to fall where they may, as in prose (fig. 11). A small interpunct or semicolon frequently serves as a discreet indication of the ends of metrical lines, or the first leer of a new line is dabbed with red or yellow. But these indicators are noticeable only to a person reading the manuscript carefully, not to one thumbing through the book (precisely the kind of reading that the encyclopedia encourages), because the right edge of the column of text remains unbroken. Moreover, these indicators do not necessarily distinguish verse from prose quotations because various forms of punctuation are also used to separate sense units in prose or even individual citations and red and yellow ink frequently highlights the first leers of such units. The effect of the scribes’ pragmatism is therefore to flaen out visual distinctions between metrical and prose texts or between humanist and other kinds of discourse. Against the theoretical background provided by the Speculum maius itself, the typical mise en page of these manuscripts appears to treat verse also as language freed from quantitative constraint and extended, profuse, as a use of language that has lost its ancient, etymological roots, that no longer merits its name. The disposition implies that the formal characteristics of text are insignificant when it comes to encyclopedic writing, as if language were a transparent medium lacking quantifiable characteristics of its own. It thus homogenizes the citations, implying that there are no fissures between all these juxtaposed quotations, that the masonry wall is constructed all of a single block. In spite of this established encyclopedic mise en page, some copyists nevertheless set out line by line a few selected metrical texts. Perhaps surprisingly, the verse mise en page is used primarily for medieval rather than classical poetry, despite the lengthy flores of Horace, Virgil, and Ovid included in the Speculum historiale.34 In fact, it appears most oen in manuscripts of the Speculum naturale and affects citations that are not introduced with any reference to their poetic form or cited as flores, as examples of a writer’s oeuvre. Instead, these citations serve simply as another in the sequence of authorities on a given topic—as it happens, on plants, for all the citations so treated come from Odo of Meung’s De viribus herbarum (a medieval poem attributed to the classical poet Macer, as it frequently was in the period),35 and Vincent added them to the Naturale when he expanded his treatment of the third day of creation, books 9–14 in the second recension.36 The earliest of the manuscripts to set out the “Macer” citations in this way, Nb14, produced in Paris in the late 1250s,37 is particularly significant because it may well be the earliest surviving manuscript of the second version of the Naturale. Also early is Nb2 (fig. 12), produced in northern France in the second half of the

Figure 11. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale (ca. 1240–60) 24.29 (upper le column), Hd5, Hrabanus Maurus citations. The hexameters and other metrical lines of the In honorem sanctae crucis are set out as prose, with only an interpunct to indicate the ends of metrical lines. (Compare figs. 12 and 13 below.) Manuscript Hd5, of the famous Cambron set, made in Picardie, ca. 1280. Minneapolis, James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota, MS 1280 oVI, vol. 2, fol. 18v. Photograph by the author.

Figure 12. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale (ca. 1240–60) 11.166–12.1, Nb2, Macer citations. The hexameters from Macer are set out line by line, visually contrasting with the surrounding prose. (Compare fig. 11 above.) Manuscript Nb2 was probably made in the Artois in the late thirteenth century. Arras, Médiathèque municipale MS 566, vol. 1, fols. 11v–12r. Photograph by the author.

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thirteenth century and owned by the convent of Saint-Vaast. The other four manuscripts that exhibit this mise en page date to later periods. Nc1, which may be the only surviving copy of the first third of the final recension, was made 1320–60.38 Nb16 is a fourteenth-century French (probably Parisian) manuscript.39 Nb10 was made in Paris or the north of France for Pierre de Foix, cardinal from 1416–64, who gave it to the college of the same name that he founded in Toulouse in 1457.40 Nb4, of unknown origin and provenance, similarly dates to the fieenth century.41 An additional manuscript dating to the late thirteenth century and probably made in France, Nx14,42 may well have been copied from an exemplar in which the pseudo-Macer texts were set out line by line, for in this manuscript most of the Macer citations, though copied as prose, are placed in paragraphs detached from the preceding part of the chapter and set off with a red or blue paraph mark. Moreover, the first metrical line of the first quotation from pseudo-Macer, in book 9, chapter 39 (fol. 118v), has been given its own line in the manuscript, with the following line placed directly below it, as if the scribe began by reproducing the mise en page of his exemplar before deciding to proceed differently.43 Since, in the Naturale, it is always the verses of pseudo-Macer alone that are treated in this way, and since most of these manuscripts were made in the same region, it is possible that the copyists of the Nb and Nc recensions were working from closely related exemplars, produced by scribes who had a taste for this poem. However, the case Nx14 and the isolated cases of verse mise en page in the Historiale (which I shall discuss next) indicate that copyists or patrons may have come to individual decisions about how to treat the various citations. This, as Paulmier-Foucart suggests, points to the importance of the encyclopedic reader’s responsibility in recognizing the various kinds of discourse in the encyclopedia.44 Significantly, the sections devoted to the plants were among those that most concerned Vincent as lacking scriptural basis (and hence justification) and as indulgences of idle curiosity. The lengthening of these sections was thus among the most gratuitous revisions of the Speculum naturale, but our scribes have highlighted the particular status of the verse insertions, thus calling aention to the addition and expanding yet further the space required to copy these books. In contrast to the Naturale, the Historiale does weave something of a literary history into its ecclesiastical and political history. Thus, Vincent pauses in his description of events and historical personages to offer what he identifies as flores of the works of major poets and prose stylists of the time, which he introduces with basic biographical information about the author and sometimes a few comments about poetic form. In a few copies of

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the Historiale, some of the verse flores are set out line by line. For example, in two manuscripts of the Historiale, Hd1 and Hd4, the scribes have used the prose mise en page for the classical poets but set out one verse per line or one couplet per line the Metrica de laude crucis of the influential Carolingian writer Hrabanus Maurus (SH 24.29; fig. 13) and the metrical verse extracts from Hildebert of Lavardin (ca. 1055–1133), a poet much admired—at least in his own day—for his skills in versification (SH 25.109–11, 114–15). These copies were, like Nb2, made in the late thirteenth century or at the turn of the fourteenth century in northern France, and they were owned during the Middle Ages by the Benedictine convent of Saint-Vaast at Arras and the Augustinian convent of Mont Saint-Eloi in the Artois. Another manuscript, Hcb1, copied in Austria in the fourteenth century, gives the verse disposition for most of Hrabanus’s verses, though not for those of Hildebert.45 The use of the verse disposition in these instances may be predetermined by the fact that both sections are introduced by an overview of the writer’s work that specifically distinguishes his verse from his prose production. Of Hrabanus, for example, we read in the chapter preceding the verse text (SH 24.28): “Liber Rabani de laude crucis partim metricus est, partim prosaicus. De quo paucos flores qui sequuntur excerpsi, et sigillatim posui, primo metricos, deinde prosaicos” [Hrabanus’s book on the praise of the cross is partly in verse and partly in prose. From it, I have excerpted the brief flowers that follow and arranged them one by one, first the verse, then the prose].46 A similar note (SH 20.58) introduces the verses of Prosper of Aquitaine, a writer who had been a disciple of Augustine, and a fourth copy, He9, of which only the volume containing books 16–23 survives, shows the verse disposition for Prosper’s verses, cited in chapters 59–63. Like the first two that I have identified, this manuscript was made in northern France, but possibly later.47 Paradoxically, in the case of what Vincent calls the Metrica de laude crucis, the very mise en page that calls aention to the difference between these verse texts and the surrounding prose effaces the original, and highly significant, mise en page of the source text. Hrabanus’s In honorem sanctae crucis (ca. 810, otherwise known by the title given it at its first printing, the De laudibus sanctae crucis) constitutes the most accomplished carmen figuratum of the Middle Ages.48 The genre is closely related to the modern calligram. Its principle is redundancy between the visual and the verbal figure, and it could be thought of as an aempt, by those writing in languages that employ alphabets, to approximate the effect of the hieroglyph or pictograph by investing the very shape of the writing with meaning.49 Composed of twenty-eight individual

Figure 13. Speculum historiale (ca. 1240–60) 24.28–29 (right column), Hd1, Hrabanus Maurus citations. The hexameters and other metrical lines of the In honorem sanctae crucis, cited in ch. 29, are set out line by line and, thus, immediately visually distinguishable from the surrounding prose. (Compare fig. 11 above.) Manuscript Hd1, probably made in the Artois, late thirteenth century. Arras, Médiathèque municipale MS 566, vol. 2, fol. 109v. Photograph by the author.

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carmina figurata, each occupying the entire verso of a manuscript leaf, the In honorem rather resembles a modern crossword puzzle, except that no leer in the grid is superfluous; all belong to at least one word (fig. 14). Read in the conventional way—sequentially, in a line from le to right and top to boom—the background leer grid forms a poem in dactylic hexameters, the traditional meter for epic and didactic poetry in classical Latin. Each line contains one hexameter, which means that each hexameter contains exactly the same number of leers. However, among these leers some are highlighted because they are outlined, or have a background of a different color, or are wrien atop a graphic illustration of some sort. These leers, when read according to the instructions that Hrabanus provides in a prose text opposite, on the recto of the following leaf, form other poems, versus intexti [interwoven verses], some in hexameters, but others in meters preferred by classical lyricists: dactylic tetrameters, trochaic verses, and so on.50 Visually, their disposition on the page also forms meaningful shapes—simple crosses, leers and words, illustrations, or more shadowy shapes composed of a scattering of highlighted leers, as on the page reproduced in figure 14. It is this last layout that most clearly reflects Hrabanus’s description of his compositional practice as “sprinkling” (spargere) leers on the page.51 Paul Zumthor has observed that this adaptation of the carmen figuratum moves it beyond the calligram by rendering visually significant the interior of the textual space, rather than simply its outline: “The drawing arises from the interior [of the textual space], it is the text itself, integrated into the poetic macro-text, inseparably bound to it by the meaningful materiality of the leers.”52 Just as the text is overlaid on the graphic figure, so one layer of text is overlaid on another, like embroidery. Although the verses must be read separately, in succession, they are not set out in this way but rather superposed one on another, creating a concentration, rather than an extension, of meaning.53 Thus, in the prologue, while Hrabanus draws aention to the textum [net, web, cloth] of the In honorem sanctae crucis, he uses the verb perspicere, with its ambiguity, its ability to indicate both the act of looking at an object and that of looking through it, to another object, in order to describe the reader’s perception of the text. The eye that he names, however, is that of faith: “rogo, ut quicumque textum hujus operis perspexerit, non statim propter artificis vilitatem spernendo abiciat, sed, si velit et possit, legat et oculo sanae fidei intuendo atque per auctoritatem divinarum Scripturarum dijudicando” [I ask whoever inspects (perspexerit) this book not to throw it aside immediately, despising it for the meanness of its artifice, but rather to read it, if he wishes and is able, looking on it with the eye of a sound faith

Figure 14. Hrabanus Maurus, In honorem sanctae crucis (ca. 810). Inscribed on the scarlet squares scaered across the page in the form of a pixilated cross are verses that must be read from top to boom, first down the vertical axis, taking in the top and boom of the central square, then across the horizontal axis, taking in the le and right parts of the central square: “In cruce lex Domini decoratur luce corusca / Gentes et linguae sociantur laude sacrata” [In the cross the law of the Lord is beautified with a shimmering light / Peoples and tongues come together in holy praise]. (The scribe has forgoen to form a red square around the r of sociantur.) The background grid contains a long poem in hexameters on the same subject, of which the leers wrien on the red squares are also a part. Manuscript made at Fulda, ca. 842–47. Amiens, BM MS 223, fol. 26v. Photograph reproduced by permission of the Bibliothèques d’Amiens Métropole.

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and judging it through the authority of the divine Scriptures].54 This move from sensual to spiritual perception, so similar to that of Ramon Llull, must in Hrabanus’s case be understood in terms of monastic practices of reading. Literacy was more restricted in Carolingian times than in the High Middle Ages, and most Carolingian readers were monks, schooled in a slow, ruminative practice of reading proper to their milieu—a kind of reading that was to inspire Jean Leclercq to title his introduction to later monastic literature The Love of Leers and the Desire for God. The literature of monasticism is a literature of “compunction,” according to Leclercq. Its purpose was to cultivate the desire for God among those living a life that anticipated the eternal life to which they aspired. Thus, whereas the reading of the later university scholar would be directed toward the quaestio and the disputatio, the more venerable practice of monastic reading was directed toward meditation and prayer.55 Reading the In honorem sanctae crucis was to be a form of prayer.56 The work of compilatio must tear the delicate fabric of such a text. We will probably never know whether Vincent took his own extracts or whether he was already working from a manuscript that lacked the graphic figures and cited only a portion of the text; we have only the final result. A comparison of the extracts in the Speculum maius to the original text shows that Vincent cites exclusively from the versus intexti, ignoring the background hexameters, a choice that testifies to his appreciation for the most difficult lines (or, in some cases, squiggles) of Hrabanus’s text and to the expectation that readers will be able to cope with their syntactic and metrical complexity (the Speculum maius is decidedly not dumbed down for the common reader).57 But much has been lost in citation. The graphic figures formed by the calligrams have vanished since the verses have been copied out horizontally, le to right. The background grid of leers that contained those calligrams within further text has also been eliminated. Thus, two figurative relations, between text and image and between one poem and another, are dissolved. The resulting text is less dense and considerably easier to read than the original versus intexti, and it never requires the eye to move backward or skip about; it lends itself to an almost cursory reading of a kind entirely different from monastic lectio. The choice of some scribes to employ the line-by-line layout for Hrabanus’s “meters” distinguishes them from the surrounding citations while disabling their original, visual function. In place of monastic superposition of texts, the scholastic encyclopedia gives us a juxtaposition. Appropriately, although both Hrabanus and Vincent use textile metaphors to describe their work, the keyword for Hrabanus is intextus, while for Vincent it is contextus.58

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The Carolingian seems to be doing embroidery, the scholastic patchwork. Since the transition from superposition to juxtaposition marks what I view as a crucial rupture between the original text and its citation, between monastic and scholastic lectio, I would like to cite another instance of such juxtaposition in medieval manuscripts. This occurs in manuscripts of the prosimetrum (fig. 15), a genre that we have already identified as a near relation of the encyclopedic florilegium. The composite mise en page of the prosimetrum, where neat rectangular columns of prose alternate with jagged columns of verse, seems to have been common from an early period: it is found in manuscripts of Boethius’s De consolatione Philosophiae and Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii from the ninth to eleventh centuries at the Bibliothèque nationale in which, not only has the verse been set out line by line, but occasional aempts have also been made to visually distinguish different meters.59 This scribal practice was perpetuated in the later Middle Ages for the texts created in the prosimetrum boom of the twelh century.60 In fact, the manuscripts of the Cosmographia and the De planctu Naturae bear a yet greater resemblance to those of the Speculum maius in that several are copied two columns per page. Despite the difference in scale between the mammoth Speculum maius manuscripts mentioned above and Bibliothèque nationale MSS lat. 6415 and 6752A, both characteristically modest fourteenth-century copies of the Cosmographia, the visual similarity is striking. The fact that both these prosimetra devote significant space to descriptions of the natural world may have suggested to the Naturale scribes a continuity between such texts and Vincent’s writings on nature. If this is the case, it may also be fruitful to ask whether Vincent’s encyclopedia shares discursive characteristics, or may have been interpreted as sharing them, with the prosimetrum genre.61 The question is delicate for the reasons I set out in chapter 1. Prosimetra were authored texts, and, even when they obliquely cite past texts or literary traditions, their authors have subjected those texts to an artistic re-creation and elaboration in which the compiler-encyclopedists did not engage. Nevertheless, the literary effects produced by the juxtaposition of verse and prose in the former genre also arise in the encyclopedia. Here, I am thinking particularly of the dialogic or “polyphonic” effect that Jan Ziolkowski observes,62 which produces what both Gian Biaggio Conte and Peter Dronke characterize as dissonance. Conte concludes that prosimetrum writers were able “to experiment with a wide range of stylistic registers and levels and with every type of mixture and dissonance.”63 Dronke broadens the classic analyses of the genre from Bakhtin and Northrop Frye by drawing particular aention to the “Menippean linguistic and stylistic range,” argu-

Figure 15. Bernard Silvester, Cosmographia (ca. 1247). In this and other manuscripts of the prosimetra, the prose and verse sections are immediately visually distinguishable, creating an effect comparable to that of the manuscripts of the Speculum maius in which verse is set out line by line (i.e., figs. 12 and 13 above). Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 515, fols. 205v–206r. Photograph reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Libraries.

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ing that “in style and diction, too, the Menippean elements tend to a ‘willed lack of unity,’ or beer, to a discors concordia.” For Dronke, following the path that Bakhtin had taken by highlighting the “intense spirit of inquiry” of prosimetra, the different levels of language and style “qualify,” “relativize,” even “undermine” each other—not in a gesture of deconstruction, but in the pursuit of a truth that “emerges through testing.”64 If medieval readers recognized a similarity between the Speculum naturale and the prosimetrum, then, it may have been precisely this literary-philosophical approach to writing the world by juxtaposing dissonant elements, elaborated by twelh-century poets and then taken to an extreme in the thirteenth-century encyclopedists’ practice of direct citation. The prosimetrum and the florilegium are beer suited to the scholastic spirit of critical reading and debate than the carmen figuratum, with its emphasis on the various levels of superimposed text leading toward a unitary meaning. Hence, the transformation that these manuscripts effect, from a visual structure of superposition to one of juxtaposition, indicates far more than a simple interference between literary genres. It reveals that, when fragments of a text created according to an older discursive paradigm are integrated into the scholastic encyclopedia, that original paradigm may be destroyed even as visible fractures set the vestiges of that discourse off from the discourses that surround it, revealing their incommensurability. But the destruction is neither absolute nor irreversible. The In honorem sanctae crucis did continue to be copied, in its original form, during the scholastic period; people were reading it, perhaps because their curiosity had been roused by the excerpts in the Speculum historiale (this despite the standard complaint about florilegia, that by making briefer versions available they were responsible for the loss of complete texts).65 There is reason to believe that these same excerpts are also responsible for the In honorem’s first printing.66 In this way, the florilegium’s incomplete, one-dimensional representation of an epistemologically distinct discourse prevented the laer from disappearing and led later readers to rediscover its plenitude.

Illustrating the Leer: Chimeric Language and Reptilian Squiggles When the visual phenomenon under consideration is mise en page, as in the last study, discourse and visibility are united by a relation of identity. It is impossible to separate the discursive from the visual practice evoked by these books. Nor do visual phenomena serve as mere reflections of discursive dynamics because those visual phenomena help determine the discursive

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field by defining the relations of likeness and difference between statements: between the versus intexti and the background hexameters in the carmen figuratum, between the citations from Hrabanus and those from other writers in the Speculum historiale, between the scholastic florilegium and the prosimetrum. I would like to turn now to an association between discourse and visibility that is less intimate; it is probably best characterized as an interweaving of discursive and visual practices in which the visual sometimes mimes the discursive but sometimes intersects with it in other ways, even by pure coincidence, since the visual practice is largely determined by its own set of conventions. What I have in mind is, of course, illustration. Of Vincent’s three specula, it was generally the Speculum historiale that was must richly decorated: Alison Stones points out the rarity of “illustrated luxury copies” of the Naturale and the Doctrinale.67 As it happens, the Historiale lends itself more easily to illustration than do the other specula. The narrative subjects, the parallel of the early books with biblical history (allowing the artist to draw on biblical iconography), the depiction of significant historical figures like Charlemagne (suggesting possibilities for portraits): illustrators exploited all these possibilities. In one of the most sparsely illustrated copies, Heac1–He92, made ca. 1300 in Paris or Amiens and probably commissioned by the monks at Clairvaux (who owned it in the Middle Ages), the relation between biblical history and the encyclopedia is made particularly clear. In the tradition of Cistercian austerity, the two-volume set includes only one illustrated initial at the beginning of each volume. The first introduces the sequence of the prologue and books 1–15.68 This initial offers, not a portrait of the encyclopedist (as the initials of the prologue frequently do), but a depiction of Adam and Eve, naked, plucking fruit from the fatal tree, observed by the fantastic serpent coiled about its trunk. The second initial begins book 16, which recounts the reigns of Julius and Augustus Caesar, “sub quo natus est Dominus” [under whose reign the Lord was born] (according to the brief summary of the book given in the table). It depicts Christ leading two souls, one male and one female, out of the broken gate of hell while a demon peers jealously over the top. In symmetry with the initial in volume 1, it depicts the moment of redemption that is God’s response to the Fall. Thus, the two initials distill the entire Historiale into two crucial moments, both part of biblical narrative—that is, juxta Scripturam. This choice of illustration was not predetermined by a set iconographic tradition for the Speculum historiale text. Stones has found in the decoration of the Speculum historiale during its first century of manuscript transmission an iconographic diversity that indicates a close reading of the text and the

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production of manuscripts to order, rather than the kind of mass production that one sees for Bruneo Latini’s Tresor. At the same time, the remarkable uniformity of format, with illustration confined to illuminated initials and their stems and borders rather than laid out in framed miniatures, aligns the Historiale closely with the Latin Bible, the only other text to be consistently decorated in this way during the period. The situation was to change in the mid-fourteenth century. The translation of the Historiale into French and the other vernaculars gained it a wider readership among the royalty and nobility, who tended to be more interested in political history than in scriptural exegesis.69 Furthermore, the fragmentation of the Speculum maius, as the Speculum historiale became more popular while the other two specula became less so, obscured the text’s dependence on biblical narrative by reducing the need for a paradigm sufficient to hold the three specula together. But the early particularity of confining illustration to the interior of the initial at once confirms the encyclopedia’s dependence on the scriptural paradigm and suggests that even vision is tied to the liera, is essentially exegetical. The Speculum naturale was generally neglected by illustrators (or by patrons seeking illustrated copies). This may be because of its location at the crossroads between the Augustinian and the Aristotelian epistemes: the kind of illustration appropriate to such a heterogeneous and self-contradictory text would not have been clear. Illustrators were having enough trouble with books devoted to Aristotle alone. The symbolic bestiary that had so long been the authoritative genre for writing about the natural world came with an established formal and iconographic program. Artists, who by the late thirteenth century were working in commercial workshops where their sole responsibility would have been painting (without reading the text), knew this program so well that they would hardly have needed to glance at the tiny instructions sometimes le for them in the space for the illustration or at the outer edge of the page. But Aristotle’s De animalibus had resurfaced in the Latin West, and this “new” natural history text was gaining popularity. The De animalibus seemed to confound bookmakers. What, if any, was the most appropriate illustration? The most frequent solution was not to illustrate at all, but Michael Camille has brought to light a small number of illustrated Libri naturales manuscripts that exemplify a sort of compromise. Artists simply transferred the bestiary program into the Aristotelian text. Some illustrators even followed the former’s order of animals. Hence, the lion, king of the beasts and, thus, first in a bestiary, appears in the opening initial of a manuscript made in Paris ca. 1280, even though the text on this page deals with the division of animals into parts.70

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This was the state of affairs in the second half of the thirteenth century and the first decades of the fourteenth, when two artists in northeastern France, working separately, undertook to illustrate copies of the Speculum naturale. Both copies were originally four-volume sets but survive in incomplete form. The earlier set may have been made as early as the 1260s.71 Its first and fourth volumes have been lost. The second volume (Nb7) is now at the Bibliothèque municipale of Laon and has probably been in the city since the Middle Ages. The third volume (Nb12) seems to have made its way to Avignon, where it was integrated into the papal library. It is now at the Bibliothèque nationale de France but has only recently been connected to the Laon volume.72 The later set, Nb19, is now owned by the Praemonstratensian Abbey of Bonne-Espérance at Vellereille-les-Brayeux in Belgium. Stones has identified the artist as the “Maître au menton fuyant,” long known for the receding chins of his human figures.73 The historiation of these two Naturale manuscripts generally reflects content, depicting a teacher figure standing in the le part of the scene with hands raised in a declamatory gesture.74 Facing him on the right, a group of objects represent the subject of the book in question. For instance, the initial for book 16, “De volatilibus,” shows various species of birds; that for book 18, “De jumentis,” various domestic animals; and that for book 19, “De animalibus,” an assortment of wild animals (fig. 16).75 Even the more humble or visually unpromising subjects are represented in this way. In the Laon manuscript,76 the initial for book 11, “De seminibus,” shows the teacher touching a plate of seeds balanced atop a small stand (fig. 17). In these two initials, the decorator is still more or less able to depict the contents of the book (though the resulting image is far from aesthetically satisfactory), thus maintaining a denominative relation between illustration and text parallel to the traditional denominative titles.77 But, just as the sections on human psychology had required the invention of a new kind of chapter title (the “scholastic” title), so here books 23–27, devoted to the human soul, necessitate more complex, varied, and sometimes tenuous relations between illustration and text. In the initial beginning book 23, “De causis hominis creandi” [On the causes for the creation of human beings], the artist of the Laon manuscript depicts the creation of Adam by painting a Christ figure whose curly blond hair and neat beard, blue and gray aire, and position standing in the le part of the scene nevertheless connect him to the teacher figure elsewhere. He raises two fingers of his right hand and looks with a slight smile at a naked man seated in the cle of a rock, whose eyes are closed as if he is asleep or not yet alive (Nb12 fol. 118v).78

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Figure 16. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale (ca. 1240–60), bk. 18, “De animalibus.” Manuscript Nb19, made in northeastern France, ca. 1280–1300, and illustrated by the Maître au menton fuyant. Vellereille-les-Brayeux, Abbaye de Bonne-Espérance, MS 4, fol. 89v. Photograph by the author.

The Maître au menton fuyant also offers a creation scene, though he chooses the moment of Eve’s formation from Adam’s rib. These scenes from Genesis establish a connection with both the narrative frame of the entire Speculum maius and the history of the Speculum historiale while also making reference to Scripture itself and a system of visual representation that includes similar imagery (the decorative tradition of historiated Bibles). In other words, the relation between image and text is still denominative, but the image simultaneously creates connections beyond the text of the chapter in question: to other parts of the Speculum maius, to the scriptural narrative on which it comments, and to a nonverbal system of representation. The books that follow offer much less in the way of possible imagery. It is hard to imagine a topic more elusive to visualization than that of book 24, “De viribus animae, quibus corpus vegetat, et sustentat, ac tenetur in corpore, videlicet de naturali, vitali, et animali” [On the powers of the soul, by

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Figure 17. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale (ca. 1240–60), bk. 11, “De seminibus.” Manuscript Nb7, made in northeastern France, second half of thirteenth century. Laon, BM MS 426, fol. 60r. Photograph by the author.

which the body is quickened and sustains life, and by which the soul is held in the body, namely, the natural and vital and animal powers]. The Maître here has recourse to the iconography that was beginning to be used for copies of Aristotle’s De anima. In these manuscripts, the soul or intellect was depicted as a small, naked, sexless human, cradled in a cloth held alo by an angelic figure.79 The Maître gives us just such a soul, suspended opposite the teacher figure. For the other books on the soul, the Maître offers similar lile naked figures. The sensitive soul of book 25 rises from the mouth of a man in bed. A man asleep on the grass breathes out a depiction of the spiritual soul, which hesitates between a beckoning demon and an angel in the

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Figure 18. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale (ca. 1240–60), bk. 27, “De viribus animae quas habet quo ad se. . . .” Vellereille-les-Brayeux, Abbaye de Bonne-Espérance, MS 5, fol. 53v. Photograph by the author.

initial for book 27 (fig. 18). Unfortunately, such depictions of the soul rising out of the mouth oen represent death in medieval art; the Maître’s choice of iconography captures the soul visually only at the cost of implying the death of the human to whom it belongs. The artist of the Laon manuscript takes a different approach. He eschews all the existing, but awkward, soul iconography and introduces book 24 by depicting a teacher figure facing two other men, to whom the teacher seems to be speaking (Nb12 fol. 140v). It is the most generic of scenes and one that calls to mind, if anything, powers of the soul higher and more uniquely human than the humble powers that sustain our vegetal and animal natures. Thus, it can be compared to the illustration this artist gives for the final book on the soul (bk. 27), which treats its highest, spiritual powers. The initial shows a man teaching from a seat with an open book before him on a podium (Nb12 fol. 218v), an image of human communication like the earlier one, but much grander, with implications of formalized instruction and hence of the discourse of the arts and sciences to which the Speculum doctrinale is devoted. The initial for book 26, devoted to visions and dreams, similarly contributes to the tendency to make reference to both the contents of the book in ques-

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tion and systems of verbal or visual representation that extend beyond it (Nb12 fol. 188v). The illustration shows a man in bed, dreaming. The Maître will choose the same scene for this book, but the Laon artist includes elements absent from the Maître’s initial. Behind the bed stands a man with a drawn bow, aiming at a bird painted outside the leer but within the frame into which the leer has been set. Significantly, this is the only illustration in the surviving volumes of this Naturale manuscript to have an accompanying bas-de-page, the classic scene of a hound pursuing a hare (though two hounds also pursue a hare across the top of the initial for bk. 17). The stem of the initial for book 26 is also somewhat grander than the others and includes a chimera with a human head, a motif common in illustration during this period in this region80 but found in the stem of only two other initials in the Laon Naturale (for bks. 17 and 25; I shall discuss the laer below). The subject of this book seems to lend itself to the kind of imaginative decorative motifs that Camille has described in his Image on the Edge, yet these motifs here seem neither to “undermine” or “overturn” the text nor to buress it by framing it with yet shakier forms of representation—the two functions of marginalia that Camille suggests.81 Rather, the decoration for book 26 in the Laon manuscript seems to be an exercise in the combination and recombination of sense impressions—and, pursued further, an exercise in symbolization, of the kind that occurs in the sleeping or waking dreams that the book discusses. The peculiar subject of the book allows an organic continuum between the historiation within the leer and the decorative motifs and marginalia. Hence, while both the illustration within the initial and the marginalia maintain a tenuous denominative relation to the text, they also derive from a tradition of visual representation that occurs in other contexts, where its function can be quite different. For those readers who accept Camille’s interpretation, this imagery may function elsewhere in a destabilizing or restabilizing way, as visual counterpoint to the text. For those readers who do not find Camille’s argument convincing, these motifs function elsewhere either as complex symbols of subjects discussed in the text, as elliptical memorial cues, or as pure decoration, a tradition of graphic art whose historical development may be analyzed but whose semiotic function—if it has one—is not of interest. But, in all these cases, this imagery avoids a simple denominative relation to the text it frames. Sometimes, however, marginalia of this kind establish a new network of relations within the book, as Camille notes. The marginal motifs work, “not by reference to the text, but by reference to one another—the reflexivity of the imagery not just across single pages but in chains of linked motifs and

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signs that echo throughout a whole manuscript book.”82 We find such chains in this manuscript of the Naturale, where dragons and chimeras proliferate in the stems of illuminated initials.83 Such fantastic creatures remain part of the frame throughout the manuscript, with the exception of three initials. One begins the section on the human soul, book 25, “De viribus animae sensibilibus, in quibus anima res sensibiles exterius, vel interius apprehendit, vel appetit” [Concerning the sensitive powers of the soul, by which it apprehends or craves sensible things without or within]. Here, the person who planned the manuscript and the illustrator seem to have thrown up their hands, for this is the sole illuminated initial in this manuscript that has not been historiated (Nb12 fol. 164v). Rather, it contains an interlace of decorative motifs—chimeras, lions, and hounds twined among curling rose and blue serpent bodies—the leer itself supported on the shoulders of a chimera with a human head. The ensemble recalls the painted initials in many other manuscripts of the Naturale. One could aempt to interpret this decoration in relation to the subject of the chapter (a sort of haphazard collection of interiorized sense impressions), but I do not find this possibility compelling. The initial for book 26 invites such interpretation because, at the center, it shows a man asleep in bed, dreaming; that is, the initial gives an intermediary step to introduce the depiction of an interior, imaginative vision. But this is not the case for book 25. Instead, it seems to me that the motifs in this initial are meant to decorate but not to denote. If what has generally been kept outside the leer thus enters it here, nevertheless, on entry it does not gain any sort of referentiality, unless it is to the paerns of decoration that surround the text. The painting does not seem to mean anything and, thus, brings into the leer motifs that are not consonant with the text’s semiotic system in the way that paintings of horses or animal body parts or moments in the creation narrative are. While the initial for book 25 in this manuscript seems to me to demonstrate the divergence between different sign systems, those for books 17 and 20 seem to do the opposite. Here again appears the teacher figure, facing the collection of representative creatures. But the fish reservoir depicted in the initial for book 17, “De piscibus” (Nb12 fol. 213r) includes a mermaid (the Nereid, for Vincent, falls into the category of fish and marine “monsters” [SN 17.121] and, thus, to the illustrator’s mind belongs in the pond). Floating among her finned companions, she waves coqueishly back at the teacher. The hounds chasing the hare across the top of the leer charge the scene with a hint of desire, as in the scene of the dreamer for book 26, thus subtly emphasizing the human quality of the mermaid (and therefore her

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Figure 19. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale (ca. 1240–60), bk. 20, “De reptilibus.” Vellereille-les-Brayeux, Abbaye de Bonne-Espérance, MS 4, fol. 49r. Photograph by the author.

connection to the serious teacher) at the same time that the strict division of the scene between the element of human beings and that of the fish divides them. Yet more significant, to my mind, are the initials for book 20, devoted to reptiles, in both sets of the Naturale. Here, the man faces an assortment of fantastic dragons and chimeras: in the Bonne Espérance manuscript, there are winged serpents with hind legs (fig. 19); in the Laon manuscript, one creature has wings, a tail, two feet, and two heads, and another has wings, two feet, a tail, and the head of woman (Nb12 fol. 52r). The similarity between these creatures and the decorative motifs outside the initials is striking (fig. 20).84 The difference between these initials for book 20 and that of book 25 in the Laon manuscript, however, is that these creatures are indeed subjects under discussion in this book. Hence, in chapter 13: “In Aethiopica terra sunt serpentes, ut dictum est, alas habentes. Jamque apparuit serpens capita duo habens” [In the Ethiopian land, it is said, there are serpents that possess wings. Moreover there appears a serpent having two heads]. In chapter 43: “Syrenae sunt in Arabia serpentes cum alis quae plus currunt quam equi, sed etiam volare dicuntur” [Sirens are winged serpents found in Arabia, that run more than horses and are even said to fly]. So broad is the sweep of

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Figure 20. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale (ca. 1249–60), detail of decoration. Laon, BM MS 426, fol. 6r. Photograph by the author.

Vincent’s consideration of the creatures that he dredges up every imaginable animal, to the point where his text, ever expanding, intersects with its own fantastic decoration. This coincidence may remind us of Émile Mâle’s comments on the encyclopedic cathedral. When Mâle looked at a gothic cathedral, he saw the Speculum naturale represented, not only in the rare symbol drawn from the animal world (the symbols of the four evangelists, etc.), but also in the proliferation of flora and fauna, sometimes real, sometimes imagined, added around the edges as decoration, as “pure art,” rather than symbolism.85 For medieval sculptors, the church was “the ark that welcomes all creatures,” and “the chapters of the Mirror of Nature are wrien everywhere: on the pinnacles, the balustrades, the archivolts, and upon the smallest capital.”86 Mâle’s argument that both symbolic representations of the natural world and this sort of pure decoration may be related to the Speculum naturale implies a recognition that the encyclopedia brings together multiple discursive and visual systems. It is ironic that it should have been Mâle, one of the founders of iconography (since criticized for so rigorously subordinating the image to the wrien text, most spectacularly by reading the cathedral as an encyclopedia), who had this insight that the medieval encyclopedia can

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accommodate, not only verbal, but also purely visual systems of signs.87 In the initial for book 20 of the Naturale, those systems temporarily intersect. And the intersection is, not simply between denomination and decoration, but also between the literal and the figurative, and between the use and misuse of referentiality. Chapter 33 provides an extended treatment of the creature with the head of a woman, the draconopes, or “snake-foot.”88 This chapter, like so many others in the Speculum maius, sends out tendrils toward other parts of the encyclopedia. The De natura rerum is the source for the initial citation: Draconcopedes serpentes magni sunt et potentes, facies virgineas habentes humanis similes, in draconum corpus desinentes. Credibile est hujus generis illum fuisse, per quem diabolus Evam decepit, quia, sicut dicit Beda, virgineum vultum habuit. Huic etiam diabolus se conjungens vel applicans ut consimili forma mulierem alliceret faciem ei tantum ostendit et reliquam partem corporis arborum frondibus occultavit. (SN 20.33)89 [Snake-feet are large and powerful serpents, with faces very like those of human maidens and necks ending in serpent bodies. This species was said to inspire credulity and through it Satan deceived Eve because, as Bede says, it had the face of a maiden. Indeed, Satan joined himself to it in order to allure the woman with a form similar to her own, holding out its face to her and concealing the rest of its body in tree leaves.]

The citation establishes a initial connection between the snake-foot, the historical events recounted early in the Historiale (SH 1.42, 56), and the narrative frame of the Speculum maius as a whole. The strange creature’s reappearance in the illustration that opens the book on reptiles in this manuscript creates an additional connection to the manuscript’s iconography and decorative motifs. The mélange of discourses and visual systems toward which the image gestures becomes yet more complex in the second part of the entry on the snake-foot. Vincent may have found himself at a loss for authoritative texts (owing, no doubt, to the infrequent sightings of the creature), so, instead of adding more passages describing what is ostensibly the topic of the chapter, Vincent takes from Augustine’s De Genesi ad lieram a series of glosses on the temptation narrative, linked to the text above it because it explains how an animal could appear to be rational; that is, it aempts to come to terms with Gen. 3:1, “Sed et serpens erat callidior cunctis animantibus terrae quae

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fecerat Dominus Deus” [Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made]. Augustine’s text, however, does not give us the picture of a fantastic creature extending its human head and concealing its reptilian hind parts in the topiary because Augustine takes the serpent in the biblical narrative to be a garden-variety snake whose only human (or spiritual) aspect is its sudden accession to reason and language: Dicitur autem serpens ille callidissimus fuisse vel secundum alios sapientissimus, non proprie, sicut in bono solet accipi sapientia Dei vel angeli vel animae rationalis, sed translative sicut apes vel formicas dicuntura sapientes, propter opera sapientiam imitantia, quamvis serpens non anima rationali sed spiritu diabolico quo plenus erat possit sapientissimus dici. Mali enim angeli, quamvis superbia dejecti, natura tamen excellentiores sunt omnibus bestiis propter eminentiam rationis. Serpens enim non intelligebat verba nec rationalis est facta. Quod enim verbis Marsorumb serpentes trahuntur de latebris diabolica est vis, quod permiitur ad memoriam illius primi facti ut sciatur quia cum hoc genere familiaritasc sit ei locutus. Est autem ille serpens sicut asina Balaam, sed hoc fuit diabolicum, illud angelicam. Boni enim et mali angeli similiter operantur, sicut Moyses et Magi Pharaonis. (SN 20.33)90 [Moreover, the serpent is said to have been most subtle or, according to others, most wise. This is not properly speaking, in the positive sense we commonly use when speaking of the wisdom of God or of the angel or of the rational soul, but metaphorically, in the way that bees or ants are said to be wise, on account of their actions, which imitate wisdom. However, the serpent could be called most wise not on account of a rational soul but on account of the diabolical spirit with which it was filled. Indeed, the evil angels, although they were cast down because of their pride, are nevertheless naturally far superior to all beasts on account of the excellence of their reason. Now, the serpent in question did not understand speech, nor was it made rational. In fact, it is a diabolical power by which the Marsi are able to call serpents out of their hiding places, and this is allowed so that we should remember the first deed of this serpent and know that this species has a great familiarity with speech. It was with this serpent as with Balaam’s ass, though the former was diabolical and the laer angelic. Indeed, the good and evil angels accomplish their acts in a similar manner, as did Moses and Pharaoh’s conjurers.]

The passage is complex because Augustine is making two different points in rapid succession (the rapidity of the move from one to the other is height-

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ened by Vincent’s method of choosing a few lines here and a few there to represent the overall argument, rather than citing the passage in its entirety). First, Augustine addresses the question of language use, insisting that the irrational animal can be called rational only figuratively. Because Vincent has inserted Augustine’s discussion of the serpent’s possession by Satan into the entry on the snake-foot, as if it applied generally to the reasoning powers of the laer, the snake-foot’s most human aspect, its reason, represented by its human head, is by implication figurative, rather than literal. The creature with the lovely woman’s head and the hideous reptilian body becomes an emblem of figurative, rather than literal representation. This sets it apart from the animals or animal parts depicted in the initials for the other animal books, which work in tandem with denominative, literal speech. And it suggests that figurative speech alone can make connections across the categories in the Naturale, from rational to irrational creatures. Yet Augustine’s point about figurative language does not wholly explain the biblical account, for the verses that follow Gen. 3:1 describe a serpent that is, literally, rational and articulate. Hence Augustine’s subsequent discussion of the possession of mute animals by spiritual creatures. This raises the question of the other such account in the Bible, the story of Balaam’s ass, which provides a counterexample to Genesis 3 because the ass speaks true. Such a story compels Augustine to acknowledge that the spiritual creature speaking through the animal could be either good or evil. That is, the speaking animal is a profoundly ambivalent creature, and its words could be either lies or truths. Therefore, at the same time that the snake-foot serves as the emblem for figurative representation, it also evokes the possibility that language can be used to misrepresent. The decorator’s choice to depict fantastic serpents that connect the text to the decorative motifs, rather than garden-variety snakes that would complement the garden-variety horses and animal parts in the other illustrations, is thus highly suggestive. While implying some connection between this image and literal exegesis, it also sets the image apart, evoking language’s potential to communicate multiple and sometimes fallacious meanings. Aer all, the serpent’s was the first and the most outrageous lie: “nequaquam morte moriemini” [Ye shall not surely die] (Gen. 3:4). But lies can alter reality if they are taken for truths. And this particular lie constitutes the moment of transformation from the human condition in the Garden of Eden into the human condition that Vincent is describing in the Speculum maius; it is the pivotal moment in the narrative on which the encyclopedia is based. It is also the reason that the encyclopedia is necessary. The serpent’s lie and Eve’s

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deception, the resulting banishment from Eden, all the subsequent sins: all propelled humankind further and further away from that first, perfect life and its expression in a single, primal, perfect language. Now Scripture, that obscure narrative of human error and redemption, requires subtle interpretation. Now the arts must be learned, as an incomplete compensation for what has been lost. Now diseases and injuries plague the human race, for which the natural world may or may not provide the remedies—to those who know to recognize them. Now knowledge and the discourses that bear it—of theology and philosophy, of rhetoric and law, of natural history and medicine—proliferate, prefiguring the end of the world. Now the encyclopedist and the scribes and illuminators who follow him labor to contain them all within the book of the world.

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The Phoenix in the Mirror The Encyclopedic Subject

“Discourse,” Foucault states in The Archaeology of Knowledge, “is not the majestically unfolding manifestation of a thinking, knowing, speaking subject, but, on the contrary, a totality, in which the dispersion of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may be determined.”1 To no discursive practice might this statement seem more appropriate than scholastic encyclopedism. A single discourse can already create multiple subject positions; the phenomenon is multiplied when distinct discourses are fragmented and juxtaposed to each other. The subject of the In honorem sanctae crucis, who addresses himself in the first person directly to the God he seeks to discern somewhere on the other side of the scrim created by language, is quite different from the subject of Pliny’s Naturalis historia, who is limited in terms of personal expression, but who stamps latinitas on every object that his senses perceive. Within this heterotopia, can there be any discernible position for a subject who takes in all fragmentary discourses? This is not simply a rhetorical question. Foucault’s statement paradoxically posits a subject even while making it discontinuous with itself. Wolfgang Iser, on the other hand, has argued that the fragmentary nature of modern texts makes the reader aware of his or her own interpretive work and choices, a rather different understanding of the way heterogeneity can shape—even evoke—a subject.2 Iser is, of course, taking a phenomenological approach of which Foucault would not approve, but in this final chapter we will be obliged to reflect more explicitly on the experience of reading 263

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scholastic encyclopedias because that is the object of Jean de Meun’s and Ramon Llull’s reflections. For this task Iser’s insights are suggestive because they move us away from thinking about the literary subject solely as expressed in the first person and allow us to consider a second-person subject called into existence by the text. The juxtaposition of Foucault’s and Iser’s views therefore points the way to a multifaceted understanding of subjectivity in the scholastic encyclopedia. I would like to suggest that these florilegia open up (and occasionally conflate) both first- and second-person subject positions. Similarly, they hold out the possibility of either dispersing or concentrating that subjective experience. With the encyclopedic subject, as with the scholastic encyclopedia, what is significant is the dynamic tension between opposed impulses, centrifugal and centripetal, between continuity and discontinuity, between identity and difference, between assimilation and resistance.3 Thus the encyclopedic subject is, not uniform, but rather composite and chameleon, not fixed, but ever in the act of becoming. Such pronouncements may seem oracular at this point, but they can be elucidated only through the interpretation of texts: first the Speculum maius, then the vernacular responses. Because the Latin encyclopedias show only rare glimmers of an elusive, self-effacing authorial subject, the reader’s exegetical activity must compensate, and the text assumes whatever sense it can with relation to this readerly subject. I shall therefore begin by considering the role that is explicitly accorded to the reader of the Speculum maius. This role will be dual: first the critical role of sorting among statements, judging their relative authority, then the exegetical role of relating one layer of discourse to another or to the self. The laer is opened up by Vincent’s references, via Hugh of Saint-Victor, to tropological exegesis, the interpretation of revelation as it relates to the individual. Vincent’s citation from texts whose rhetorical deployment is more significant than their dialectical argument, most significantly Augustine’s Confessions, complements tropological practices by emphasizing the charged relation between text and reader, thus creating a space for subjective response to creation. The classic word play on speculare, speculum, and specula, which Vincent exploits in the prologue, confirms the complex role of the reader-observer in the proper functioning of the encyclopedia. But these passages will have allowed us only to define a role. Subjectivity hovers above the page; its operation cannot be glimpsed in the text itself, unless we look in the mirror—that is, in the description of mirrors in the Speculum naturale. For here Vincent copies out the very latest discussions of cognition, light, and mirrors (either as material objects or as analogies for the mind or light). These treatments derive from several

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distinct textual communities and are, therefore, based on conflicting assumptions, but each can be taken (tropologically) to represent the protean relation between subject, discourse, and objects of knowledge proper to the scholastic encyclopedia and, thus, to capture the readerly subject—momentarily—on the surface of the glass. One could say that, rather than simply vacating the space that would otherwise be occupied by the authorial subject, medieval encyclopedists shaped that space to accommodate this readerly subject and engage him or her actively in the interpretation of the text. The two symmetrical subjects could then be thought of as a composite, the author-reader or reader-author. In the later thirteenth century, the implications of creating such a composite subject will be worked out in the Roman de la Rose, the Libre de meravelles, and the Arbre de filosofia d’amor. The second half of this chapter will be devoted to these texts—to their use of both the mirror trope and the mise en abyme (which we could understand as a dramatization of mirror reflection). We shall see once again how the texts of Ramon Llull and Jean de Meun are not in disjunction but rather in continuum with the Latin encyclopedias of the first half of the thirteenth century. In the case of the laer (predictably), this means pushing the composite subject to the point of absurdity as Jean deploys his own peculiar style of critical fiction. Llull’s exploitation of the encyclopedic subject lacks Jean’s absurdist edge but is in its own way even stranger. The Libre de meravelles can be understood as an elegant fictional elaboration of the encyclopedic subject posited by Vincent of Beauvais, with a few significant twists borrowed from the Roman de la Rose. When in 1298 Llull returns to the problem of the subject, in a clearer and stronger response to Jean’s continuation of the Rose, he fuses the encyclopedic subject with the subjects hitherto developed in the romance and lyric traditions, in what could be thought of as the ultimate synthesis of thirteenth-century writing, the Arbre de filosofia d’amor. My treatment of the literary subject in this final chapter intersects with the fascinating approaches to medieval subjectivity by Alastair Minnis, Michel Zink, Sarah Kay, Sarah Spence, and Gerald Bond.4 Though, like Zink, I see the subject as largely a product of the thirteenth century’s new spiritualities and its critical reflection on the vernacular literature of the preceding century (and on literature in general), I do not locate it using the temporal coordinates within a text. Since the medieval encyclopedic subject must be discerned in the thirteenth-century polyvocal and polygeneric anthology as I have described it, this subject can be understood as taking shape in the interstices of intertextuality, rather like Kay’s troubadour subject. For the

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same reason, the encyclopedic subject cannot be constituted in Spence’s twelh-century “gap between Latinity and the vernacular,”5 but I do retain her emphasis on spatiality, on the location of the subject with respect to surrounding objects. This way of discussing the subject is beautifully suited to the subject’s position in the encyclopedia as mirror as well as his or her relation to the encyclopedia as physical object. I find similarly inspiring Bond’s appropriation (with modifications) of Althusserian interpellation, the way in which a subject can be called into existence by what I would call, figuratively, ambient voices. My vague reference to the agent of interpellation here is motivated by prudence; my own study is not sociological, and, moreover, Louis Althusser’s brief explanation of interpellation and ideology in the medieval period has appeared perplexing and unsatisfying to scholars such as Ricoeur. Nonetheless, Althusser’s point that a subject is called on to subject him- or herself to other forces creates a way to understand the reader’s relation to a text, especially if we follow Bond’s lead in emphasizing the liberty of the individual to respond (or not) to interpellation, which creates a potential for diverse responses.6 Finally, I shall reproduce Bond’s expansion of the subject in language as Émile Benveniste describes it7 in order to accommodate expressions of subjectivity in the third person, for reasons that will become evident in my discussion of the Roman de la Rose and the Lullian texts. But, though my analysis will sometimes focus on the grammatical category of the person, it should not be taken as bearing only on linguistic phenomena; following these other critics, and following Foucault, I consider subjectivity a phenomenon that extends beyond the personal pronoun.

Locating the Subject in the Speculum maius We have already seen that Vincent of Beauvais justifies his inclusion of contradictory sources by calling on the reader’s arbitration (LA ch. 8). Having divested himself of the necessity of interpretation, the encyclopedist is free to include sources whose authority is controversial. Vincent does propose a model hierarchy of authorities in chapters 11–12 of the prologue (Scripture, then decretals, then patristic writings, and so on), but, just as he provides a symbolic frame for his natural history while leaving the practice of symbolic interpretation of the individual creatures almost entirely to the reader, so he gives this hierarchy in the prologue but leaves the practice of applying it to the various parts of the Speculum maius to the reader. In other words, the liberty and responsibility of the laer increases as the compiler renounces his own. In these passages, explanation of the reader’s active role is accom-

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panied by yet more repetition of the all-important distinction between the compiler and the author, this time couched in terms of excerptor versus tractator. This opens up the encyclopedia to absorb the variety of discourses that we have already seen because the resulting compilation requires neither that coherence be imposed on it by its maker nor that all the sources quoted be unimpeachable authorities. Coherence, then, is ultimately constructed by the critical reader, who judges between the various sources, retaining some and rejecting—or merely skipping—others. We can think of this readerly subjectivity as proper to the critical reading of the scholastics. Insofar as this subject is created at an intersection of discourses, it also bears some similarity to the subjectivity created by tropological exegesis, which involves bringing scriptural text and personal narrative into some perhaps temporary, perhaps fortuitous, perhaps strained alignment. In the second of the two discussions of hermeneutics that frame the natural history, Vincent cites Hugh of Saint-Victor’s tropological exposition of how the birds that Noah sent out from the ark (Gen. 8:6–12) figure the different ways in which we can contemplate nature (implicitly, by means of the Speculum naturale): consideration of the creature for what it is in itself, for what it is by the gi of the Creator, for how God may use it (all figured by the dove), or for our own pleasure (figured by the raven):8 Tria prima contemplationum genera in exitu columbae de arca sunt figurata, quae vacua quidem exivit sed vacua non rediit, quia foris invenit quod intus non habuit nec tamen foris amavit quod intus detulit. Ramus olivae virentis demonstrat bonum affectum mentis, quia saepe viri sancti quanto magis opera divina foris aspiciunt, tantomagis intus in conditoris amore viridescunt. Qui vero quarto modo per cogitationem exeunt similes sunt corvo, qui reversus non est, quia dum foris quod male delectat inveniunt, ad arcam conscientiae amplius redire nolunt. In primo ergo materia vanitatis inspecta in nobis generat contemptum mundi. In secundo simulachrum rationis laudem Dei. In tertio instrumentum dispensationis timorem et amorem Dei. In quarto cupiditas incentivum libidinis, etc. (SN 29.27)9 [The first three kinds of contemplation are figured in the departure of the dove from the ark. It went out with nothing but returned with something, since it found outside the ark what it did not possess inside. And yet, outside, it did not love what it offered inside. The fresh olive branch shows the good disposition of the mind, since oen holy men flourish the more in their inward love of the one who governs the universe, the more they

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observe the divine works outside themselves. But those who depart while thinking in the fourth way are similar to the raven, which did not return, because while they are outside they find something in which they take unwholesome pleasure and do not want to return to the ark of conscience. Therefore, through the first mode, the things of vanity that we have considered inspire in us contempt of the world. Through the second, the likeness of reason inspires the praise of God. Through the third, the instruments of God’s stewardship inspire fear and love. Through the fourth, desire sets fire to lust, and so on.]

This quotation provides a spiritual interpretation for a biblical narrative that will be recounted in the Historiale. Thus, like the chapter on the draconopes that we have already studied, the passage draws together both created and scriptural revelation, both natural and human history, both the Speculum naturale and the Speculum historiale, by providing a single spiritual gloss for the whole. But this particular spiritual gloss, this confluence of discourses, is made possible only by drawing aention to a readerly subject that is situated above the fray, so to speak. Hence the image of the bird soaring above a ruined world from which the floodwaters have only just receded, viewing its topography from a height that allows the eye to take in the greatest expansion and diversity (the image recalls Vincent’s description of the mens surveying the created world in ch. 6 of the prologue, which we considered in chapter 1), or of the bird returning to the safe interior space provided by the “ark of conscience.” Vincent’s citation of Hugh illuminates the subject’s possible responses to the encyclopedic text. Both the necessity of creating some coherence among the jumble of citations and the tropological exposition of the birds suggest that the readerly subject’s role in the encyclopedia (whichever way he or she chooses to play it) is not incidental or supplementary to the text but rather constitutes a necessary linkage between otherwise disconnected objects, discourses, and volumes. Such linkage is beer elucidated by Robert Javelet’s monumental study of twelh-century resemblance, which serves as a remarkably apt commentary on the discussions of hermeneutics in the Naturale, themselves woven of citations from twelh-century and earlier writers. According to Javelet, the medieval play of resemblances—on which our encyclopedia as speculum is based—depends on two corresponding and interrelated hierarchies, the one ontological, the other noetic. The human person provides the crucial link that allows the ontological chain to extend from God as pure spirit to the stones as pure material. But this descending ontological chain is

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complemented by an ascending noetic chain, given impulsion by the human person’s growing knowledge and love of God: Already we have seen the human microcosm as the link between the universe and God. Not only does it render possible the knowledge of all the chain of beings through the (human) individual who recapitulates them, but, since he makes a unity, he associates them to each other, joining them in himself. Man is thus the connection of the world—no longer, clearly, as Resemblance, with its dynamic overview, but through the convergence in himself of the diverse reflections of that Resemblance that he coordinates in order to exist and thus aain knowledge of creation and of God. And to know, is to unite. If man was made of reflections that were unaware of each other, he would be disarticulated and would no longer be a forum, but rather a labyrinth.10

Thus, the flight of the dove and the ascent of the mens indicate a unifying principle for the whole work: that of the individual human mind transforming the apparent “labyrinth” of this text into a coherent image or mirror of God. This sort of complementary noetic connection has its roots in the Latin patristic writers, particularly Augustine. While the Greek fathers concentrate on the cosmos as reflection of the divine, the Latins make the comparison between the Trinity and the human soul, which inspires a deeper exploration of human psychology and also draws aention to the human subject, the ego: “The Latin fathers scarcely take note of the historical drama of the cosmos, but the Confessions mark the advent of the ego.”11 In order for this self to accede to an understanding of God, it must be reformed and redirected: [In Augustine’s writing] the knowledge of God and the realization of the self go together, for the point is to know and at the same time to make real the image of God in the best of the self. Spiritual life is thus fulfilled when the image perfects itself in the soul that remembers God, thinks God, loves God. To know oneself as an image is to reach towards the model, a model that, for its part, aims to express itself in its image. The psychology of Saint Augustine is neither truly a knowledge of man nor a knowledge of the Trinity; it is a path from the one to the other. . . . [Augustine] is fixed upon the knowing—and loving—subject.12

We could say that yet another way that citations from Augustine complicate and enrich the Speculum maius is by introducing this consideration of the

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ego, who is omnipresent in Vincent’s citations from the Confessions. It is no accident that Augustinian subjectivity appears in the Speculum naturale principally in concert with the discussions of symbolism that frame the natural history. For example, in book 1: Interrogavi caelum et luminaria ejus, et haec quae circunstant fores carnis meae, dixi omnibus: dicite mihi de Deo meo aliquid, quod vos non estis, exclamaverunt omnia voce magna, vere Deus non sumus nos, sed ipse nos fecit. Interrogatio mea, intentio mea; responsio eorum, species eorum. (SN 1.13) [I questioned the heavens and their lights and all things that stood round the gates of my flesh. I said to them all, “Tell me something of my God, since you are not he.” They all exclaimed with a loud voice, “Truly we are not God, but he made us.” My questioning was the aention of my mind, and their response was their beauty.]

We find a similar eruption of subjective discourse from the Confessions in Naturale 29.18, one of the chapters preceding the second section on symbolism. This chapter discusses the blinding influence of sin. Vincent chooses a number of quotations from Augustinian texts, including the Confessions: “Heu mihi Domine! Quam excelsus es in excelsis et quam profundus in profundis, et nusquam recedis, et vix redimus ad te. Age, Domine! Fac excita et revoca nos. Accende et rape, flagra et dulcesce. Amemus, curramus” [Woe is me, Lord! How exalted you are on high and how deep in the depths, and you do not withdraw from us, yet we are scarcely able to return to you. Act, Lord! Awaken and recall us. Enflame and ravish, blaze and grow sweet. Let us love you, let us run to you].13 Because Vincent includes this kind of material, and because he also devotes significant portions of the encyclopedia to scholastic discussions of psychology, the Speculum maius is more fully representative of the medieval understanding of the human person than Thomas’s De natura rerum or Bartholomeus’s De proprietatibus rerum. While these other encyclopedias with their moralizing glosses do point the way toward contemplation of God, their main texts privilege the human body over the mind by according the former a treatment many times longer than the laer. In the Speculum maius, despite Vincent’s evident fascination with medicine, even the discussion of the human person in the Speculum naturale, the part of the work specifically devoted to the physical world, begins with the soul and its powers, to which Vincent devotes five books as against one to the body (hence the challenge

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that the text posed to illustrators). Moreover, the other two parts of the encyclopedia, entirely devoted to the discussion of the human being, have lile to do with the materiality of the body, yet they are also titled specula,14 implying a relation of resemblance that largely escapes the material. Vincent’s modification of the encyclopedia does indeed open it up to a more complete representation of what it is to be, to know, and to respond, as a human subject, made in the image of God.

Reflections in the Greater Mirror As support for my argument that the Speculum maius posits a knowing subject, I should like to offer the elaborate play in this text on the words speculare, specula, and speculum. The verb speculare appears in the prologue as Vincent’s term for the inquiry into and the spiritual exegesis of revelation. It comprehends both introspection and the contemplation of the created world as signs of God, thus connecting the individual to external truths.15 The rather odd image of the specula rationis [watchtower of reason] derives from an old pun on speculare, and we have already seen that its effect is to situate the readerly subject. He is not to take up just any position; nor is the specula rationis a position for mere analytic, critical reading, for sorting among the citations. It is, because of that pun, a position for contemplation and must be stable enough to resist the “aliquid vagum et instabile” [something wandering and unstable] that Vincent later aributes, by means of a citation from Seneca’s second epistle, to the “lectio multorum auctorum et diversi generis voluminum” [reading of many authors and volumes of diverse kinds] because “nusquam est qui ubique est” [he who is everywhere is nowhere] (SD 1.33). Unlike the compiler, “tossed in the wide sea of writings” (LA ch. 18), this subject can trust the stones and mortar of his tower of contemplation because he keeps his eye on God. Vincent uses a similarly spatial image when he connects the word speculare (speculatio) to his title, telling us that he has chosen “Speculum” because his encyclopedia contains “quicquid fere speculatione, id est admiratione vel imitatione dignum” [whatever is worthy of contemplation (speculatio), that is, admiration or imitation] (LA ch. 3). The word speculum establishes a complex series of links. We can begin with that between the reader and Scripture, which was itself thought of as a mirror. Saint Paul had wrien in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians: “Nos vero omnes, revelata facie gloriam Domini speculantes, in eandem imaginem transformamur a claritate in claritatem, tanquam a Domini Spiritu” [But we all, with unveiled face

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beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from splendor to splendor, even as by the Spirit of the Lord] (3:18). Saint Augustine had several times glossed this by connecting the speculum to the sacred text itself: “posuit tibi speculum Scripturam suam” [he has placed before you the mirror of his Scripture]; “Scriptura sit tibi tanquam speculum” [let Scripture be as a mirror to you].16 It is this sort of connection that leads to the development of tropological exegesis, as de Lubac shows.17 The reading of the encyclopedia as speculum is genealogically connected to the tropological interpretation of Scripture. Thus, Vincent makes yet another connection between the Speculum maius and exegesis, not by placing the encyclopedia in the position of a gloss on Scripture, but by implying a triangular relation between Scripture, encyclopedia, and reader. There has been much scholarship on the development of the speculum as a genre for medieval writing.18 The speculum in its initial metaphoric sense serves, as Sister Ritamary Bradley puts it, as a “paragon for right living” because it shows us both what we are and what we should be.19 That is, it presents something of a double reflection and, thus, serves a double function.20 According to Hugh, Scripture serves as such a mirror because it “nobis . . . nostram interiorem repraesentat imaginem; ostendit quid formosum, quid deforme sit in anima, et qualiter pulchritudo justitiae debeat observari, qualiter debeat virtutum decor componi; quomodo vitiorum macula debeat abstergi” [represents our interior image to us, exposing what is beautiful and what deformed in the soul, and how the beauty of justice should be aended to, the beauty of the virtues arranged, and the stains of the vices bloed out].21 (In an anonymous twelh-century Speculum virginum, this idea is developed through a gloss of the Song of Songs, by means of the image of the bride using a mirror to prepare herself to meet the bridegroom.)22 The scriptural mirror—which comprehends not only the books of the Bible but also the lives of saints etc.—is complemented by two others. The mirror of the human soul permits the kinds of reflections I have just mentioned, between a vision of our condition and an indirect vision of God, motivating spiritual change, reform, and growth.23 At the same time, partly because of its close relation to scriptural revelation, the created world takes on its own properties of mirror, as the speculum creaturae, so the metaphor appears in texts that do not deal “exclusively with doctrinal or moral subject maer,” such as Alan of Lille’s De planctu Naturae and Anticlaudianus.24 Thus, in its full extension, the patristic and medieval writers used the topos to refer, not to a single mirror, but to “a series of mirrors transmiing the same image one to another.”25

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Parallel with these ideas we also find the idea of the convex mirror that gathers together disparate and dispersed objects, as in Augustine’s own Speculum, a brief compendium of texts cited from various different locations in Scripture.26 This is, perhaps, the origin of the connection between the textual compilation and the mirror. It overdetermines the title of Speculum for the medieval encyclopedia, applying as it does both to the form of the book (a collection of citations) and to its content (treatments of the world or human soul as mirror, in exegetical relation to the mirror of Scripture). However, not all medieval works titled speculum can also be considered encyclopedias in the common sense of the term because despite their didactic aims their subject maer is oen too restricted (they are frequently instructional manuals). The two genres overlap, but they are not one and the same. The twelh-century specula, which Einar Már Jónsson has studied at length, include texts such as Honorius Augustodunensis’s Speculum Ecclesiae, an anonymous Speculum virginum, William of Saint-Thierry’s Speculum fidei, Aelred of Rievaulx’s Speculum caritatis, Nigel of Longchamps’s Speculum stultorum, and so on. Honorius’s Imago mundi, which Vincent cites under the title of Speculum mundi, may also belong to this group and would provide a clearer ancestor of the thirteenth-century encyclopedia than an instructional manual for nuns like the Speculum virginum. Vincent’s Speculum maius, however, generally receives only an obligatory but brief reference in studies of the speculum genre. Bradley devotes to it the final footnote in her article, Jónsson part of the penultimate paragraph of his book.27 Since the subject of the book is the origins of the mirror as literary genre, the relegation of the Speculum maius to a final gesture is comprehensible. Less comprehensible is the fact that Jónsson does the same in a paper presented at a conference on Vincent of Beauvais, giving the Speculum maius the last page of a twenty-page exposition.28 This odd deflection may be caused by the common assumption that Vincent’s encyclopedia is objective (while the speculum is a subjective genre) or that it provides a literal reading of the world rather than an allegorical or tropological one (while the speculum implies tropological exegesis). It may also derive from Le Goff ’s cautious speculation that the thirteenth-century speculum was no longer what the genre had been before: “One may well ask . . . and here we touch on these difficult aspects of cultural history (the most difficult kind of history): do Speculum or Thesaurus still possess in the thirteenth century the same meaning that they possessed earlier? Do they not become, more or less, a species of slightly worn metaphors, used in order to locate oneself in a tradition whose fundamental sense one no longer shares? A difficult question that I

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pose without giving a response.”29 The response becomes yet more difficult when one considers that even in the twelh century the writers of specula tended to limit their references to the symbolism of the mirror to brief comments in the prologue—a practice that Jónsson interprets as the indication, not that the title had become a simple topos, but rather that “these titles and the explanations that accompany them are references to something known that remains subjacent.” The transition from the twelh century to the thirteenth alone does not allow us to distinguish between a known sense that remains “subjacent” and a “slightly worn metaphor” that places a text in a tradition “whose fundamental sense one no longer shares.” If Vincent is very sparing in the explanation of his choice of title, that alone cannot prove that he has lost the fundamental sense of the word speculum. Moreover, Jónsson’s conclusion that “the idea of the knowledge of the self is absent” in the Speculum maius is mistaken, as we have just seen.30 It seems to me far more just to say that the displacement on the readerly subject of much of the responsibility for sorting through and interpreting the material has made the mirror more difficult for modern scholars to perceive because we have been made wholly responsible for making it function. Another possible explanation for the general lack of discussion of Vincent’s title is the fact that he cites in the Naturale various thirteenth-century treatments of the mirror, including a Neoaristotelian one that may be perceived to shut down the symbolic dynamism of the speculum, which had its roots in Neoplatonism. But no scholar has studied these passages; no one has asked what implications they have for the way a text placed under the title mirror can be understood. The question is a necessary one, and it justifies a survey of the references to the mirror in the Naturale. My discussion of these passages must be brief, and, in the present book, I cannot enter into complex discussions of how the texts in question fit into a broader understanding of thirteenth-century theology or optics. I shall instead conclude this rapid survey with a rather different reading, a symbolic and tropological exegesis in the medieval mode. I am aware that this move is problematic because it collapses the difference I have generally maintained between premodern text and postmodern scholar. Yet only by momentarily assuming the subject position that the Speculum maius offers can I show how these passages can potentially complement an older understanding of the encyclopedia as mirror and illuminate the position of the readerly subject. We find an interpretation of Paul’s use of the mirror buried in an unexpected place: book 26, devoted to sense impressions. Since the senses are

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not (according to traditional Christian doctrine) the only source of human knowledge, Vincent finds it necessary to insert a digression on the ways in which Satan and the angels can “imprint” ideas on the human soul. This leads to a discussion of prophetic visions, “quia vero prophetae in libro praescientiae Dei, ubi omnia scripta sunt, dicuntur legere sive in speculo aeternitatis, in quo ab aeterno resplendenta omnium rerum formae” [since in truth the prophets are said to read in the book of the foreknowledge of God, where all things are wrien, as in the mirror of eternity, in which the forms of all things are luminously reflected from all eternity] (SN 26.85).31 The chapter on this issue is taken entirely, and with very lile abbreviation, from a corpus (or master’s response) in Thomas Aquinas’s discussion of prophesy in the Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, a text elaborated during the theologian’s early teaching at the University of Paris (ca. 1256–59), coinciding with the final years of Vincent’s long labor on the Speculum maius.32 Aempting to explain the problematic notion of the speculum aeternitatis, Thomas was obliged to cite First Corinthians, “Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate, tunc autem facie ad faciem” [Now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face] (13:12), but was careful to point out that the use of speculum in such references is not literal: Sciendum itaque quod speculum proprie loquendo non invenitur nisi in rebus materialibus, sed in rebus spiritualibus per quandam transsumptionem dicitur, scilicet per similitudinem acceptam a speculo materiali, ut scilicet in rebus spiritualibus dicatur esse speculum id ina quo alia repraesentantur, sicut in speculo materiali apparent forme rerum visibilium. (SN 26.85)33 [And so let it be known that the mirror is not found as a literal designation except when speaking of material things. In spiritual things, on the other hand, it is employed by a certain figurative adaptation (transumptio) of the word, namely, by a similitude taken from the material mirror, in order that, in spiritual things, the thing in which other things are represented may be called a mirror, just as in the material mirror the forms of visible things appear.]

Applied to its new context, this citation would seem to suggest that there is no literal connection between Aquinas’s discussion of human and prophetic vision and the scientific discussion of optics that Vincent cites elsewhere, or, for that maer, between the encyclopedia and the mirror. Such insistence

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that figurative speech not be taken literally was characteristic of Thomas, but we have already seen that the citations in the Speculum maius are too varied for any such exegetical discipline to be long maintained. In fact, in Vincent’s treatment of light at the beginning of the Naturale (bk. 2), his reliance on texts representing a different school of thought has the result of literalizing a number of words that Thomas would have considered metaphors. The questions here arise from Vincent’s treatment of God’s act on the first day of creation, the division of the light from the darkness. Augustine’s De Genesi ad lieram again pulls Vincent toward a reading of the biblical text that eschews the common definitions of words. The problem is similar to that of the first day, located on the very boundary of time and, thus, giving rise to a great deal of exegetical confusion about the nature of the day. Similarly, light—and particularly this first light, which preceded the creation of the heavenly bodies—is located on the boundary of the spiritual and the material. It occupies a mediating position between the visibilia and the invisibilia, rendering communication possible by reproducing or multiplying form apart from substance. For both reasons, it occupies the densest point of similitude and the locus of beauty (SN 2.38). The topic of God’s separation of the light from the darkness leads Vincent to a text that he refers to as the Memoriale rerum difficilium but is beer known to scholars as the De intelligentiis. Vincent does not appear to know who the author is (nor do we), but the treatise was clearly wrien in the early thirteenth century by someone interested, like Grosseteste, in the metaphysics of light.34 These metaphysicians maintained that God and the angels are spiritual light, the former uncreated, the laer created, while physical light, also created, is the principle of being. More importantly, for the present purposes, the author of the Memoriale claims that light is also the principle of knowledge. Thus, the text makes an explicit link between light and the mind. Even though cognition will be the topic of books 26 and 27, Vincent seems to find the anonymous author’s comments relevant in the second book as well, and he includes them here. The opening words of his chapter 37, “exordium cognitionis” [the beginning of knowledge], implicitly justify the displacement and redundancy, as if the beginning of light and the beginning of human knowledge took place at the same moment: Si autem exordium cognitionis inspicimus, dicemus quod lux est ipsa virtus cognitiva: principium enim cognitionis est lux, sensitivae autem operationis calor. In ipsa quoque luce cum virtute vivificativa est virtus exemplaris, secundum quem in ea species rerum apparere possunt, quod ipsius proprium

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est, sicut patet in materiali speculo, quia per naturam lucis rerum intentiones suscipita, non tamen cognoscit, quia in ipso non est virtus vivificans actualiter ordinata ad rerum exemplaria.35 [Now, if we examine the beginning of knowledge, we shall say that light is that cognitive power: truly, light is the beginning of knowledge, and also the warmth of the sensitive operation. In this light, too, along with the quickening power, there is the exemplary power, by which the species of things are able to appear in the light, since this is proper to it, just as (sicut) it may be seen in a material mirror, since by its nature this light sustains the application of the mind. It does not, however, know, since its quickening power is not actively directed to the exemplars of things.]

The mirror reappears in this passage, once again as an analogy, but it cannot be strictly circumscribed as mere metaphor in a passage that conflates light itself with knowledge. The power of this analogy is also enhanced by its repetition, a few lines later, introduced by another sicut: “Si autem luci debetur virtus cognoscitiva, quanto simplicior et purior est, tanto magis in ea species rerum apparent, sicut in speculo materiali, quanto magis est politum et purum, eo magis apparent imagines” [Moreover, if the cognitive power is owed to light, the simpler and purer it is, the more the species of things appear in it, just as (sicut) in a material mirror, and the more it is polished and pure, the beer the images appear].36 The exact alignment of this superimposition, with the surface that receives images carefully distinguished from the power able to judge those images, is significant, as will soon become clearer. The material mirror becomes the subject of scientific analysis slightly later in the book. Here, Vincent copies out long passages from Albert the Great’s Summa Parisiensis. This text is an elaboration of Albert’s disputations at the University of Paris in the mid-1240s; in it, Albert cites Aristotle and his commentators but also deploys his own arguments, sometimes based on empirical observation or even experimentation.37 One of the questions that Vincent reproduces concerns the nature of the thing we see in the mirror. Is it light, color, or form, or does it possess any esse at all? Albert discusses all the possible responses at length and considers the various phenomena associated with images in mirrors (even when the mirror remains in one place, the image moves as the observer moves etc.). He concludes: Dicimus ergo, quod ipsa aliquod est ens, non tamen corpus, nec substantia, sed accidens, nec motu locali movetur, sed potius generatur, sic superius de

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lumine diximus, quod semper novam essentiam habet generatam, ad novam praesentiam illuminantis. Ita dicimus de imagine speculi, quod semper generatur ad presentiam aspicientis. (SN 2.72)38 [We say, therefore, that this is some thing, but not a body or substance. Rather, it is an accident. Nor is it moved by local motion, but rather it is generated, as we said above concerning light, whose essence is always generated anew in relation to the new situation of the source of light. Thus we say concerning the image in the mirror that it is constantly generated in relation to the situation of the viewer.]

A solution becomes possible only when one considers the image in the glass in relation to the spectator. The spectator’s presence, in fact, is necessary even for the generation of the image. We can say that, as in the case of the mirror analogy for cognition, the production of significance results from the contact between the series of images presented (by whatever means) and the aention directed toward those images by an active intellectual power. I would suggest that this can be read as a figure of the mirror-encyclopedia, which depends on the active participation of the readerly subject in order to generate meaning. Albert’s discussion of mirrors continues to suggest parallels to the encyclopedic text when, in chapter 76 of the Naturale, the presence and position of the spectator again provides a solution to the paradoxes of the mirror. This chapter deals with the question of whether the mirror receives a form on its whole surface or in a single point of its surface. The tiny point of the human eye becomes a useful analogy. The importance and complexity of the entry justifies a longer citation: Inter hec omnibus difficillimum est videre, utrum recipiatur illa forma in superficie speculi, ut in puncto, vel in superficie. Videtur autem, quod ut in superficie, quia secundum rationem superficiei apparet quicquid apparet sub longitudine et latitudine. Quod si concedatur multis rationibus improbatur. Quicquid enim apparet ut in superficie, si ipsum est totum in una superficie alicujus quantitatis, ipsum totum in minori non erit. Si ergo speculi forma tota est ut in superficie alicujus quantitatis totius ut in superficiea, tunc non erit tota in minori superficie, quod est contra sensum manifeste. Si enim speculum frangatur in decem partes in qualibet illarum partium eritb forma tota, praeterea forma illa secundum eandem quantitatem simul et semel resultat in majori speculo et minori, sicut patet ad sensum si duo specula majus

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et minus opponantur simul aspicienti, non est ergo in eis per dimensionem quantitatis. Nam ratio dimensionis quantitatis est esse secundum majorem dimensionem in majori, et secundum minorem in minori: patet ergo quod non est in superficie speculi secundum superficiei rationem. Nos quoque solvendo dicimus quod non est ibi ut in superficie, sed ut in puncto. Cujus evidens est exemplum in forma totius spherae dimidii caeli quae tota resultat in una parva acie oculi, quod utique patet fieri non posse si reciperetur ibi ut in superficie. Eadem vero est ratio de speculo, quae et de oculo. (SN 2.76)39 [Among all these questions, it is most difficult to see whether that form is received by the surface of the mirror at a single point, or across the whole surface. It does seem that images are received upon the whole surface, since whatever appears there does so with length and breadth according to the manner of surfaces. But this conclusion is to be rejected for many reasons. Indeed, whatever appears upon a surface, if all of it appears upon a surface of given dimensions, it cannot all appear upon one of lesser dimensions. If, therefore, the image appearing in one mirror is displayed in its entirety upon a surface of given total dimensions, it will not all appear upon a surface of lesser dimensions, which is clearly nonsense. Now, if the mirror is broken into ten parts, and in any given part the whole image appears, that image springs up at once with the dimensions proportionate to the larger and smaller mirrors, as is evident to the sense if two mirrors, one larger and one smaller, are placed at once before a viewer. For the manner of such dimension is to be according to a greater measure in the larger, and a lesser in the smaller. It is therefore evident that the image on the surface of a mirror does not appear according to the manner of a surface. In order to solve this problem, we say that it does not appear there as upon a surface, but as in a single point. The proof of this may be found in the small pupil of the eye, in which the image of all the sphere of half the heavens springs up, which would not be possible if the eye received the image as upon its surface. The law of the mirror governs the eye as well.]

The passage suggests more than one comparison to the encyclopedia. The comparison between the mirror and the human eye recalls the encyclopedia’s role as receptacle of information, which, however, remains to be processed by a mind. The reduction of the space that receives the information to a single point, which the viewer then translates into a spatial extension, suggests the mass of material that the encyclopedist must deploy through the space of the book in an arrangement that, while not necessarily arti-

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ficial, serves to make the information receivable by the human mind, just as Augustine suggested that the deployment of the creation narrative over the space of six days translated an event that was incomprehensible to the human mind into terms that readers could comprehend. The possibility that a mirror can be broken but that each of the resulting fragments can, despite their distinct size and shape, give reflections of the same object can even be compared to the fragmentation of the Speculum maius into two, then three, and, finally, four specula, all of which are held together by the kind of tropological interpretation that Hugh describes, that is, by their relation to the reader, just as the images in the fragments of the mirror are all roughly similar from the perspective of a single viewer. In sum, while none of the thirteenth-century texts that Vincent cites in the Naturale employ mirrors in the heavily symbolic way that earlier texts had done, neither do they disable the potential symbolic connections between the mirror and the encyclopedia. On the contrary, the widely dispersed citations from Aquinas’s De veritate (which acknowledges the metaphoric function of the mirror), the Memoriale (which takes the mirror as an analogy for cognition), and Albert’s Summa Parisiensis (which elucidates the physical function of the mirror) invite a figurative reading of the mirror title, particularly enriched by the suggestive detail of Albert’s scientific account. (Such a reading requires some modest exegetical dexterity, but not the prestidigitation by which Hugh managed to spin his tropology out of the story of Noah’s birds.) And most significant in Albert’s account is the role of the observer as the one who makes all the connections, comprehends the resemblances. This observer may be the encyclopedist, gathering materials from all over the library into a single volume. Or it may be the reader, responding to that ungainly volume by making connections across the text, by reprocessing the order that the encyclopedist has provided. He or she thus joins in a relay with the authorial subject. Knowledge is created by a subject who is not singular but plural, composite. It is now time to consider how the composite subject born from the scholastic encyclopedia is elaborated in the critical fictions of Jean de Meun and Ramon Llull.

“Vez ci” the Composite Subject of the Roman de la Rose Although the Roman de la Rose is generally known under that title, Jean also gives it the alternative title of the Miroër aux Amoreus [Mirror for lovers], thus connecting his text to the genres of instructional manual and encyclopedia. However, we saw at the end of chapter 4 that the depiction of mir-

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rors in Nature’s speech gives a dystopian view, emblem of the breakdown of such genres. Furthermore, Jean announces this new title at the midpoint of the conjoined romance, during his tardy and curious dramatization of the change in authorship. In this way, the appearance of the mirror genre coincides with the fragmentation, not simply of visions of the world (as for Vincent), but also and especially of the subject position itself. This is one of the most disorienting moments in the entire romance.40 The god of love, Amor, addresses the troops that he has assembled to “storm the tower” (a metaphor, of course, for the seduction or rape of the girl). Amor presents to his army the narrator-lover, on whose account war is being waged: Vez ci Guillaume de Lorriz, cui Jalousie, sa contraire, fet tant d’angoisse et de deul traire qu’il est en perill de morir, se je ne pens du secorir. (RR lines 10496–500) [Voilà Guillaume de Lorris, whom Jealousy, his adversary, afflicts with such anguish and grief that he is in danger of dying, if I don’t take the trouble to rescue him.]

Amor is preparing to come to the lover’s rescue and render him successful in love, but poor Guillaume is indeed going to die, as Amor soon makes clear. Guillaume’s loyal service to Amor will lead him to recount his experiences in a poem (the Roman de la Rose), but he will not complete it: jusque la le fornira ou il a Bel Acueill dira, qui languist ore en la prison par douleur et par mesprison . . . (lines 10521–24) [he will take it up to the point where he will say to Fair Welcoming, who now languishes, sadly and unjustly, in prison . . .]

The next three couplets are a citation of the final lines of Guillaume’s part of the romance, some six thousand lines earlier. Amors follows this quotation with the bombshell:

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Ci se reposera Guillaumes, cui li tombleaus soit pleins de baumes, d’encens, de mirre et d’aloé, tant m’a servi, tant m’a loé. (lines 10531–34) [Here Guillaume will take his rest. May his tomb be full of balm, incense, myrrh, and aloes, for he has much served and celebrated me.]

The death of the lover is a very old theme of poetry. Courtly lyric poets frequently allude to it, and its paradigmatic expression in narrative is perhaps the myth of Tristan and Iseut, which was wrien and rewrien numerous times in the High Middle Ages. But Jean de Meun’s innovation is to recount the death of the narrator-lover not, at the end, but in the middle of a first-person romance—a narratorial feat made possible by contriving a prophesy. However, because the god of love gives its temporal coordinates only in terms of the redaction of the romance, its place in relation to the other events narrated remains unclear. Another way to articulate the problem would be in terms of the distinction between narrator and lover. It is in fact the narrator, not the lover, whose death is prophesied, but, because this is a first-person romance, these two persons are difficult to untangle from each other. Both are implicated in the first-person je of the poem. It is true that some passages permit an easy distinction between the two referents of the je, as, for example, when the lover speaks directly to another character or when the narrator addresses his readers. But in other passages, such as in the lover’s lament at the end of Guillaume’s part of the poem (from which come the six lines that Amor cites here), the distinction is all but impossible to make. In this lament, a speaking subject that David Hult has identified with that of lyric poetry speaks of his woes in the present tense, directly addressing a lady to whom—at least within the fiction—he has no direct access.41 Is this the babble of the lover or a lyricized iteration of the narrator himself? Because of this kind of confusion, the death of the lover is implicit in the death of the narrator, and one can only marvel at Jean’s cheek in referring to that unfortunate event a full ten thousand lines before the consummation, the culmination of the lover’s service. The subject of the second half of the poem is under death sentence, but no date is fixed. His voice will be silenced, but when? In one sense, it already has been (at the end of Guillaume’s portion), but, in another sense, because within the fiction the writing of the romance must follow the consummation of love (which has not yet taken

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place), the silencing has been postponed indefinitely. And it is not his death alone that calls into question the first-person subject in this passage. The strangeness also derives from the fact that the subject is being viewed from the outside. Amor with his “Vez ci” reverses the gaze that has governed the poem until this moment, the amorous gaze of the narrator-lover on the Rose or, when deprived of the sight of the Rose, on the various characters who come to console and counsel him. It is the narrator-lover who is now the object of the gaze of all the assembled characters of his poem. In other words, the desiring subject, who has also heretofore been the speaking subject, becomes subject to the gaze and speech of another person. It is as if Guillaume’s entombment is the moment when, robbed of his own subjectivity, he coalesces as a material, visible being. And at this same moment he acquires what he has not assumed in the poem before this moment, a proper name. All this is figured in the grammar of the text by the designation of Guillaume in the third person. The transformation calls aention to itself when Amor cites the final lines of Guillaume’s portion of the poem, thus juxtaposing the present third-person designation (“il a Bel Acueill dira” [RR line 10522]) with the former first person (“Mout sui durement esmaiez” [line 10525]). It is true that Amor’s entire speech is being cited by the new narrator, Jean de Meun. But, though Jean de Meun simultaneously maintains the firstperson roles of the lover and the narrator, both these first persons exit, in a sense, and remain in the wings for the majority of the second half of the romance. From now on, the various other characters talk much less to the lover, and much more to each other, than they had done in the first half, allowing the lover to be forgoen for long periods. This apparent absence can be misleading. Critics have frequently succumbed to the temptation to disassociate Jean de Meun entirely from the lover and to a great extent even from the narrator—a dissociation that makes it possible to view Jean as an anti-Guillaume, an anti-courtly writer, a deconstructor of Guillaume’s lovely romance, and so on. However, Hult has suggested that we read Jean’s first-person subject, not in terms of its opposition to that of Guillaume, but rather as a “multireferential” subject, a voice that is “personal and impersonal” at the same time. It is impersonal in the sense that Jean is not Guillaume and does not share his erotic experience but personal in the sense that Jean identifies with Guillaume’s poetic / creative urge. Thus, Jean’s treatment of Guillaume’s first-person subject constitutes the “abstraction of a poetic principle henceforth viewed from the outside.”42 Hult’s approach beer articulates the principle of the literary continuation, which requires first and

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foremost some continuity with the prior text. But one detail of this central passage leads me to suggest a modified approach. For what is being seen “from the outside” at this pivotal moment is, not only Guillaume, but also Jean. The presentation of the Rose’s two authors is perfectly symmetrical, with a third-person reference, a name, and a quotation. What is seen from the outside is both the subject as lover and the subject as narrator. It is, in fact, the subject tout court. Thus, the subject of the Rose is, by turns, articulated in the first, and the second, and even the third person while remaining recognizable as a subject. Benveniste’s distinction between the “person,” that is, the referent of the first- and second-person pronouns, and the “object,” the referent of the third-person pronouns, allows us to appreciate the strangeness of this move, the way it undermines assumptions about verbal exchange.43 The illocutionary situation in which a first person recounts his conversation with a second person (this describes most of the first part of the Rose) is not inverted by the use of the third person. Such an inversion would be produced if the second person assumed the first person and vice versa, and the participants in the speech act would still provide the referents for the pronouns. The transformation of a first person into a third, on the other hand, banishes or alienates that person from the illocutionary situation; he loses his privileged connection to the instance of discourse, and, if we were to follow Benveniste strictly here, we would have to say that the subject of the text had been transformed into its object. This is precisely where Jean shows more subtlety than the celebrated linguist of the Collège de France because, in Amor’s speech, the third person, il, refers to what is—outside the frame of the character’s speech but within the global “instance of discourse” that is the Roman de la Rose—the subject, the speaker. Il’s appearance here therefore creates a new perspective on a subject that has hitherto been constituted only by je and tu. Il’s appearance also permits the inhabitation of that subject position by more than one individual. This is the potential slippage of the third-person pronoun: the vexing possibility, which does not belong to the first-person singular, to refer to more than one noun. It is one of the few characteristics common to very bad and very good writing. Consider the following: Cist avra le romanz si chier qu’il le voudra tout parfenir, se tens et leus l’en peut venir, car quant Guillaumes cessera, Jehans le continuera,

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enprés sa mort, que je ne mante, anz trespassez plus de .xl., et dira por la mescheance, par poor de desesperance qu’il n’ait de Bel Acueill perdue la bienvoillance avant eüe. . . . (RR line 10554–64) [This one will so treasure the romance that he will want to complete it, if he has the time and occasion, for when Guillaume leaves off, Jean will continue it, aer his death (may I not lie), before more than forty years have passed, and he will say, on account of the misadventure, for fear of the despair of losing the good favor of Fair Welcoming, which he had had before. . . .]

What is the antecedent of the le in line 10558? Is it the romanz of line 10554 or rather the closest possible singular masculine antecedent, Guillaume, in line 10557? The first possibility is more immediately acceptable, but the second can be defended on the grounds that, in continuing the romance, Jean is indeed bringing about the continuation of Guillaume’s subject. The next line provides another intriguing coincidence of possible antecedents with the possessive sa. Clearly, the death is Guillaume’s, yet, to the degree that Jean (again, the closer antecedent) is implicating himself in Guillaume’s subject, he is implicated in the same death. These small confusions give way to a greater one beginning at line 10561: Who is the subject of the verb dira; who is the il of line 10563?44 This third-person slippage makes it impossible to see Guillaume’s and Jean’s subjects in simple opposition to one another: how could they be if at moments like this they are indistinguishable? It is, I think, more accurate to see the addition of another poet-subject as an accumulation within this one subject position. And, in fact, this moment in the Rose is one of accumulation in other senses as well. The army has gathered, and it provides a large and appreciative audience for the god of love’s speech. It is suggestive that the internal audience for the various speakers is multiplied at precisely the same moment that the global first-person voice, that of the narrator-lover, is stretched to accommodate a second authorial subject. The symmetry has a certain pleasing logic, for in the first half of the text the fictional audience and that first person are one and the same (the lover). The symmetry also suggests another approach to the problem of the doubled first person. For this first person is simultaneously, and throughout most of the text primar-

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ily, a second person, someone whom the speakers address. He has one task but otherwise does lile more than listen and choose among the various counsels that he receives. As the internal addressee, he occupies a position similar to that of the readers that the god of love predicts for the romance, the lovers who wish to learn Amor’s commands. In this sense, the narratorlover occupies a position that may be, must be occupied by others aer him— not simply Jean de Meun, but all the legions of the besoed. These are the “Amoreus” cited in the title Miroër aux Amoreus. The coincidence between the subject’s role as Amant and all the amants who will follow him implicates him in the very audience for whom the text is destined.

Mirrors and Citations This constant shiing between speaker and audience, between first, second, and third persons, this replacement or accumulation or multiplication, is beautifully figured by the mirror in the title that Jean chooses this particular moment to announce. What does a person see in a mirror? She sees her own face as if it were not her own; she sees it from the outside, so to speak. And, just as it is transformed, so are the objects that surround her and their spatial relations to her. She takes her place among those objects in a tableau that she views from outside the frame. That is, the viewer is resituated in the mirror. And I fully intend all the ambiguity of the preposition in. It is difficult to look merely at a mirror. Neither the English language nor the French admits this as a normal construction. We do not look at mirrors; we look in them. We do not see them; we see ourselves in them. On ne regarde pas le miroir; on se regarde dans le miroir. In other words, mirrors are loci rather than objects of vision. Jean de Meun does not miss the opportunity to play on this in his own presentation of mirrors, for Nature states that certain mirrors are capable of making four eyes appear in a single head, then, in the next breath, explains that the phantasms created by mirrors appear to occupy space between the eye and the mirror. Those who know how to use mirrors font .iiii. euz en une teste, s’il ont a ce la fourme preste. Si font fantosmes apparanz a ceus qui regardent par anz, font les neïs dehors parair touz vis, soit par aigue ou par air,

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et les peut l’en voair jouer antre l’ueill et le mirouer. (RR lines 18149–56) [make four eyes in one head, if they have prepared the glass for this. They make phantasms appear to those who look into (the mirror), and make the phantasms appear to be outside, perfectly alive, either in water or in air, and one can see them playing between the eye and the mirror.]

That is, the eye appears first as an object in the mirror, then as a subject outside it. This play of inside / outside is emphasized by the opposition of anz / dehors (lines 18152–53), where, in fact, the subject is looking in the mirror, whereas the reflection is what appears outside it. Jean’s play on eyes in mirrors recalls Vincent’s citation of Albert’s analogy between the human eye’s ability to take in all the heavens and the mirror’s ability to receive all of a form in a single point on its surface. The implicit presence of the subject in the mirror that can be discerned in the Speculum maius becomes explicit in Nature’s discussion of mirrors in the Roman de la Rose. In a sense, Jean’s play on the subject could also be said to be prefigured in Vincent’s description of the ascent of the mind through contemplation, which is worth citing once more: Ego quidem—ut taceam de mundis corde, quorum est proprium Deum videre et in ipso delectari—ego inquam—ut fateor—licet peccator indignus, cujus nimirum mens adhuc in fecibus carnis sue jacet ejusdem sordibus obvoluta quadam tamen spirituali suavitate in mundi creatorem ac rectorem afficior. (LA ch. 6) [I indeed (without mentioning those pure in heart who have the privilege of seeing God in himself and delighting in him), I, as I say, who acknowledge myself to be an unworthy sinner, whose mind doubtless lies yet in the impurities of its flesh and is wrapped round with its filth, am nevertheless moved by a certain spiritual sweetness towards the creator and guider of the world.]

This is an example of uncharacteristically personal writing on Vincent’s part. In a language in which the first-person pronoun is not necessary, the repetition of ego calls aention to itself. Its appearance just before that of the ascending mind suggests Vincent’s own implication in the encyclopedic

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subject—not as an authorial subject, not as the tractator that he declines to be, but as another possible inhabitant of the tower, the mirror. At the same time, the second person appears implicitly in the pun on specula. While in the nominative the watchtower, specula, is identical to the plural for mirrors, in the ablative case in which the watchtower appears here it is identical to the imperative of the verb speculare, “to contemplate.” For a brief moment, the second person of this text, the reader called on to ascend to contemplation, appears side-by-side with the first person, and the two meet in the brief third-person recital of the mind’s vision. But there is a significant difference between the two images of the watchtower and the mirror that is obscured by the specula pun. For, while the tower locates the viewer at a distance from the object of vision, the mirror places him or her within that object (the mirror), side-by-side with other objects (the other creatures there reflected). If Vincent was concerned that the reading of too many books might disperse the reader, “nusquam est qui ubique est” [he who is everywhere is nowhere] (SD 1.33), his two simultaneous metaphors have a similar effect by assigning the reader different locations. I would suggest that they figure rather different ways in which a readerly subject can be positioned with relation to the citations in the anthology. One is the critical distance that a reader can assume when faced with the contradictions in the discussions of natural history, where the citations set out all indicate some lack, some inadequacy in their description of the object, and the reader therefore uses them merely as preliminary indicators of a truth to be arrived at through his or her own synthesis. Though on a very different level, this is a symmetrical position to that of the contemplative reader who has passed through the citation to a more intimate contemplation of the world and God. In both cases, the encyclopedia and the citations that compose it are a glass to be passed through but not inhabited. Another, quite different position is one in which the reader identifies with the (literary) subject elaborated in a citation (just as he or she may identify with Guillaume’s or Jean’s subject). This is the sort of reading that Vincent’s citations of Augustine’s Confessions invite; the reader recognizes in one of the reflections in the mirror his or her own self and is thus caught, so to speak, on the surface of the glass itself. Both these positions with relation to citation (distancing and identification) can have a positive moral effect on the reader—provided the citation is prudently chosen—but the two alternatives do create ambiguity and ambivalence. This problem is most evident when Ramon Llull cites courtly texts of genres he considers unwholesome in order to inspire re-

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flection on how they ought to be read as moral exempla. At these moments, he, too, plays on the ambiguity of identification and distancing, of within and without. For example, the first episode of the Libre de meravelles incorporates one of the lyric genres that lends itself most easily to narrativizing, the pastourelle or pastorela, in which the poet sings of his encounter with a shepherdess in some isolated, wild place where she is protecting her sheep from wolves and bears. The song is a fictional dialogue between the traveler, generally a man of some nobility or education, and the countrywoman. He makes advances, and she parries them. Ultimately, it is he who has the power, and, except when the shepherdess proves particularly clever or is rescued by a shepherd, the dialogue may be presumed to be followed by acquiescence or rape (though this is not always described).45 The genre exploits a cruel and occasionally obscene humor that the prudish writers of the Leys d’amors will, in the early fourteenth century, aempt to reform by dictating that a poem in this genre “deu tractar d’esquern per donar solas” [should treat of mockery in order to give comfort], but a man should be particularly careful in exploiting the genre “quar en aquest se peca hom mays que en los autres que hom no diga vils paraulas ni laias ni procezisca en son dictat a degu vil fag, quar trufar se pot hom am femna e far esquern la un a l’autre ses dire e ses far viltat o dezonestat” [for in it a man sins more than in the others, and may the poet avoid using base or ugly words or going on to any base deed, for a man can joke with a woman and they can mock one another without doing anything base or indecent]. In accordance with its “light” humor, the song requires a “gay” melody more lively than that of the canso.46 Like the writers of the Leys, Llull is a moralist, but he is also a writer of considerable sophistication. Rather than purifying the pastourelle by rendering it light and superficial, he takes the opposite track, emphasizing the dark, violent subtext.47 Fèlix, having le his father, wanders in a wood, where he comes on a shepherdess guarding her flock: “Amiga,” dix Fèlix, “molt me meravell de vós com tota sola estats en est boscatge, en què són moltes males bísties qui porien dar dampnatge a vostra persona; e vós no havets força que vostres ovelles als lops ne a les males bísties defendre poguéssets.” Dix la pastoressa: “Sènyer, Déus és esperança, companyia e confort de mon coratge; e en sa guarda e virtut estic en aquest boscatge, car ell ajuda a tots aquells qui en ell se confien; cor ha tot poder e tota saviesa e tota bondat, són-me mesa en sa guarda e en sa companyia.” (LM 1.1)

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[“Friend,” said Fèlix, “I marvel that you remain alone in this wood, in which there are many evil beasts who could do harm to your person. You do not have the strength to defend your sheep against the wolves and evil beasts.” Said the shepherdess: “Lord, God is the hope, company, and comfort of my heart, and under his care and influence I remain in this wood, for he helps all those who trust in him. Since he has all power and wisdom and goodness, I have placed myself under his protection and in his company.”]

The reference to the isolation of the shepherdess emphasizes the vulnerability on which the knight preyed; in this context Fèlix’s naïveté in expressing his concern for the menace of wild animals is touching. It will be clear from what follows that he does not consider himself among the “males bísties” who could do her harm, so the implicit threat appears involuntary on the protagonist’s part, an irony of the author, perhaps, that subsists as the only humor of what will soon become a bleak episode indeed. The pure Fèlix does not pursue the dialogue but instead departs, happily “marveling” at the shepherdess’s faith. He turns back when he hears her cries of distress: a wolf has aacked the flock and carried off a lamb. The shepherdess runs aer the wolf to rescue the lamb, while Fèlix runs aer the shepherdess to rescue her, but before he arrives the wolf turns on the girl and devours her. For readers familiar with the French pastourelle, this odd turn of events may recall the song “L’autrier quant chevauchoie” of Jean Bodel (ca. 1165–1210), in which the poet offers to save a sheep that a wolf has carried off if the shepherdess will agree to have sex with him. She agrees, he kills the wolf, and, when she appears to forget her promise, he rapes her. Thus, in Jean Bodel’s song, the real predator proves to be, not the animal at all, but the poet. Llull reworks this kind of narrative by dissociating his protagonist, witness to the marvels of the world and, hence, a reflection of the reader, from the subject of the lyric text that the book here cites. Though, by stumbling on the citation of the pastourelle, Fèlix has effectively stumbled into the role, the subject position, of the lustful poet, his naïveté has prevented him from recognizing that role. He is at once inside and outside the citation of the pastourelle genre, and, when he wanders off prematurely (because he fails to comprehend that this dialogue requires multiple questions and responses or because the ultimate motivation for seeing the conversation through to a conclusion escapes him), the artifice of the pastourelle is annihilated by the appearance of a wholly externalized beast who assumes what would otherwise have been the subject’s violent role. The tableau of the shepherdess’s death then becomes a lesson for the pro-

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tagonist. The sight leads Fèlix to question the existence of the God in whom she had trusted. Tormented by doubt, he wanders until he happens on a hermit “qui longament en theologia e en philosofia havia studiat, e, ab sos libres e ab sa saviesa, en aquell armitatge Déu contemplava e adorava” [who had long studied theology and philosophy and, with his books and his wisdom, contemplated and adored God in that hermitage] (LM 1.1). The change in interlocutor indicates the passage from one discourse to another, from an erotic discourse in which the subject exploited rhetoric and poetry in a gendered game of power and domination, founded on a social structure in which the peasant could be prey to the nobility, to a theological discourse authorized by the study of wrien texts but practiced by a solitary individual who is, to all appearances, an autodidact and claims no authorization from secular or religious authorities.48 In the Libre de meravelles, the omnipresent hermits serve both as interpreters of Fèlix’s experiences and as figures of the encyclopedist, the compiler. This particular hermit perceives Fèlix’s trouble, draws the story from him, and responds with a semblança: “Fèlix,” dix l’ermità, “en una terra havia un rei qui molt amava justícia, e sobre sa cadira reial havia fet un braç d’home qui era de pedra, e en sa mà tenia una espasa, e·n la punta de l’espasa estava un cor qui era d’una pedre vermella, e açò ha significança que lo cor del rei havia volentat a moure lo braç que mogués l’espasa, qui justícia significava. E esdevenc-se que per una gran serpent lo palau fo jaquit, e null home no hi poch habitar; e un jorn un sant home entrà en aquell palau, lo qual cercava on pogués fer penitència e contemplar Déu, e viu lo braç e l’espasa, e lo cor qui en l’espasa estava. Sí que molt fort se meravellà d’açò que l’espasa, lo braç e lo cor significava; emperò tan longament cogità en aquella figura, d’entrò que apercebé ço per què aquella figura era feta.” (LM 1.1) [“Fèlix,” said the hermit, “in a certain country there was a king who much loved justice, and above the royal throne he had placed the arm of a man, fashioned in stone, and in its hand it held a sword, and upon the point of the sword there was a heart made of a red stone. This signifies that the heart of the king had the will to move the arm, which would move the sword, which signified justice. And it so happened that, on account of a great serpent, the palace was given up, and no one could live there. And one day a holy man entered the palace, searching for a place to do penance and contemplate God, and he saw the arm and the sword, and the heart that was on the sword, so that he marveled greatly concerning their meaning, but he thought about

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the figure for so long that he finally perceived the reason for which it had been made.”]

Thus, the hermit answers the pastourelle with a visual symbol. But Fèlix does not understand the hermit’s point and asks what the parable means: “Bell amic,” dix l’ermità, “considerar devets que aquest món és per alcuna ocasió de bé; car sens ocasió de bé no poria esser tan bell món com aquest. E, si Déus res no era, seria lo món per ocasió de mal, car més seria de mal que de bé. E car bé se cové ab esser, e mal se cové ab no esser, és semblant que ço per que·l món és bo, és Déus; e ço per què aquest món seria major en mal que en bé, seria no esser Déu, sens l’esser del qual tot quant és seria debades, e seguir-s’hia que bé fos per ço que fos mal, e mal seria per si mateix, e seria la fi de bé, e eçò és molt inconvenient; per lo qual és declarat Déus esser.” (LM 1.1) [“Fair friend,” said the hermit, “you should consider this world as an occasion for good, for without such an occasion there could not be a world as beautiful as this one. And if God did not exist, the world would be an occasion for evil, for there would be more evil in it than good. And since good accords with being and evil with nonbeing, it seems that God is that on account of which the world is good. The nonbeing of God would cause the world to have greater evil than good, for without God’s being everything that is would be in vain, and it would follow that good would exist for the sake of evil, and evil would exist for its own sake and would be the end of good. But this is inconsistent. Hence it is shown that God exists.”]

It is not one incident or situation but many, a larger accumulation of diverse symbols, that must be considered before drawing conclusions about God, the hermit seems to be saying. When one does so, one realizes that the world is more good than evil. By implication, lyric and narrative may be drawn into the encyclopedia, and the encyclopedia itself may be thus to some degree lyricized or narrativized, but these genres do not suffice for contemplation; they must be reworked, juxtaposed, interwoven with other forms of figuration in order to create a universal whole, a book of the kind that the hermit has spent his life studying. The pastourelle of the Libre de meravelles is but the first panel of the tapestry, the first page of the book that the encyclopedic subject has before him.

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The Subject Enclosed in the Arbre de filosofia d’amor Llull stages a more elaborate and perplexing encounter between a subject and different kinds of citation in the Arbre de filosofia d’amor. I have postponed my discussion of this text to the very end of the present study because of the Arbre’s complexity: it engages Llull’s own prior encyclopedias (the Libre de meravelles, the Arbor scientiae) and absorbs courtly lyric and romance (the Lancelot en prose, the Roman de la Rose), all in a slender treatise on the love of God. Like the other texts—whether well-known or unknown—that I have discussed, it is illuminating for the way that it reveals the stakes, the epistemological power and at the same time the snares of scholastic and encyclopedic literary practices. As such, it provides a synthesis and a fiing end to this study. I must nonetheless acknowledge the text’s limited diffusion in the Middle Ages. I suspect that this can be aributed, in large part, to the challenges that the text posed, specifically, to the degree to which it obliges readers to think about how they read and to experiment with other ways of reading. Such challenges are unwelcome to all but the most selfaware and intrepid. Nevertheless, Llull intended the Arbre de filosofia d’amor for wide diffusion in courtly circles. He wrote it in Paris and states explicitly in the epilogue that it was to be presented, in Latin, to the king of France, Philippe le Bel, and “en volgar” [in the vernacular] to the queen, Jeanne de Navarre. It is not clear whether the vernacular text presented to Jeanne was Llull’s Catalan original or whether it was a French translation done by one of the Parisian collaborators who was translating a number of Llull’s more popularizing texts at the time. Despite her ties to Navarre, Jeanne’s ancestry and experience were predominantly French, and there is no reason to believe that she would have been particularly proficient in Catalan, nor would she have been able to share a Catalan text with her French court. It would have been more practical for Llull to present her with a French text, but, if he did so, no trace of it has survived.49 As its title indicates, the Arbre de filosofia d’amor is structured according to the tree paradigm that Llull had most fully elaborated in his earlier encyclopedia, the Arbor scientiae. It incorporates the paradigms of the Art, yet its purpose is less to promulgate the Art as a specific method of contemplation than to develop a theory of love sufficiently aractive to counteract the noxious influence of what Llull refers to darkly as “fals·amor, qui és contra l’amor de Déu” [false love, which is opposed to the love of God] (AFA ch. 95). This polemic leads Llull to exclude any kind of love between humans; he of-

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fers us a meditation on the love of God alone. The Arbre de filosofia d’amor is thus not an encyclopedia but an expression of theme and variations organized according to an encyclopedic figure. And, unlike Peter Dronke, I do see this tree specifically as a figure drawn from the encyclopedia rather than an instance of “scaered allegory” showing up the insufficiency of schematic structures since the correspondence between the figure and the deployment of the text is in fact quite rigid and since the elements of the text that would appear to compromise the figure are never allowed to bring down the whole structure and are, as I shall show, extended citations of other texts.50 Though the Arbre de filosofia d’amor cannot be called an encyclopedia, it nevertheless preserves the genre’s form, its juxtaposition of citations, and its subject position. Llull states in the epilogue that he intends to present the text to the royal couple, in Latin and in the vernacular, “per so que·l montipliquen en lo regne de Fransa, a honor de nostra dona santa Maria, que és subirana dona d’amor” [so that they may have it distributed in the kingdom of France, to the honor of Our Lady Saint Mary, who is the sovereign lady of love] (AFA ch. 95). The emphasis on the diffusion of the work in a language appropriate to all the kingdom of France recalls the god of love’s prophecy that Jean, endoctrinez de ma sciance, si fleütera noz paroles par carrefors et par escoles selonc le langage de France, par tout le regne, en audiance, que ja mes cil qui les orront des douz mauz d’amer ne morront. (RR lines 10610–16) [instructed with my knowledge, will flute our words in crossroads and schools, in the language of France, throughout the whole kingdom, declaiming, so that never more will those who hear them die of the sweet ills of loving.]

Llull’s engagement of the Rose is evident, and his reference to “false” love may very well be a means of placing his own text in opposition to that romance.51 Though scholarship has shown that moral censure of the Rose was neither simple nor universal among even clerical readers, one of the few negative references to the Rose that has survived from this early period, in

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an anonymous translation of the Song of Songs, similarly levels the criticism that the text’s depiction of the love is not “vrai”: [Car] rimer wel, douce pucelle en cui mes cuers est e repose, pour vostre amour rime novelle tele com mes cuers le propose: plus plaisans assés et plus belle et plus vraie, bien dire l’ose, et plus honeste que n’est celle dou Roumant c’on dist [de] la Rose.52 [For I wish, sweet girl in whom my heart reposes, to make a new rime for love of you, just as my heart proposes it: more pleasing and more beautiful and more true (I dare to say it) and more decent than that of the Romance that one calls of the Rose.]

Like this translator, therefore, Llull may well aspire to compete with the Rose for readers. Very lile of the Arbre de filosofia d’amor, however, appears to have anything to do with romance of any kind, much less with Jean’s idiosyncratic version of the genre. The first four of the seven books are schematic and abstract in the extreme. But the fih book rewards the persistent reader with a brief narrative. The book is devoted to the leaves of love, which are only three: sighs, tears, and fear. Aer treating them, Llull inserts what appears to be a digression, a narrative of the sickness and difficult death of the lover. No special title sets this section off from the surrounding text, and the progression of rubrics sutures the narrative to the earlier part of the book: “Dels suspirs d’amor; Dels plors d’amor; De temor d’amor; De la malautia que l’amic ha per amor . . .” [Concerning the sighs of love; Concerning the tears of love; Concerning the fear of love; Concerning the malady that the lover had on account of love . . .].53 But the rubrics that follow are clearly in the narrative genre, and the passage appears uerly unmotivated with reference to the surrounding text, except perhaps as a demonstration of the three leaves of the tree of love. The death of the lover comes as as much of a surprise in the Arbre de filosofia d’amor as it does in the Roman de la Rose. Moreover, the Rose is not the only earlier text that Llull evokes in this passage. The lover seeks a cure for his lovesickness, necessitating the intervention of the “doctor of love”:

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Lo metge d’amor féu jaer l’amic en una bella cambra d’amor, pintada de beles figures qui a l’amic remembraven son amat e les sues noblees e valors, axí com figures de bels e grans arbres carregats de fuyles, flors e fruyts, dels quals ix gran odor, e figures d’aucels, bèsties e de bels hòmens e beles dones. E aqueles figures fan remembrar a l’amic que son amat és bel e gran en bontat, qui tantes, tan grans e tan beles creatures à creades. (AFA ch. 75) [The doctor of love made the lover lie in a beautiful chamber of love, painted with beautiful figures that reminded him of his beloved and his nobility and worth, such as figures of great and beautiful trees burdened with leaves, flowers, and fruits, from which a great fragrance issued, and figures of birds, beasts, and handsome men and women. These figures reminded the lover that his beloved was handsome and great in goodness, for he had created so many great and beautiful creatures.]

The passage initially recalls the Libre de plasent visió, in which such figures might also be seen. The chamber, like the book, is an enclosed space, and we must bear in mind this implicit citation of the Libre de meravelles. Yet the overtones of French romance are also strong in the Libre de filosofia d’amor. Jordi Rubío suggests that the painted room evokes the paintings on the outside of the wall of Deduit’s garden. Because the images are interior, they seem to me to recall much more strongly the painted chamber from the Lancelot en prose (ca. 1210–ca. 1230), Lancelot’s prison in the castle of Morgain.54 Llull knew parts, if not all, of the Vulgate cycle of Arthurian romances. We have already seen the likely influence of the Queste del saint Graal on the form of the Libre de meravelles; more significantly, for present purposes, he had drawn on the Lancelot in his early Libre del orde de cavallería (Majorca, ca. 1275).55 Since, in the Libre de filosofia d’amor, the lover, like Lancelot, cannot bear being enclosed and eventually escapes, this is very likely a reference to the prose romance. Llull is gesturing simultaneously toward an old, familiar courtly text and his devout, encyclopedic reworking of romance conventions in the Libre de meravelles. Lancelot had painted his chamber himself and derived his only comfort from kissing the images of the queen: Quant il estoit levez chascun matin, si venoit a chascunne figure qui estoit pointe en leu de la roine, si les baisoit es ieux et es bouches ausi com se ce fust sa dame la roine; si plouroit et se demantoit trop durement. Et quant il avoit grant piece dementé et plaint sa mescheance, si revenoit as ymages et

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les baisoit et lor faisoit la greignor honor que il pooit et ainsi se reconfortoit par lui meismes, et ce estoit la chose qui plus li avenoit.56 [Once he had risen each morning, he came to each figure that was painted in the place of the queen, and he kissed each upon the eyes and the mouth as if it were his lady the queen; and he wept and lamented bierly. And when he had long lamented his misadventure, he returned to the images and kissed them and reverenced them as greatly as he could and thus comforted himself by himself, and this was the thing that most suited him.]

The nameless lover of the Arbre de filosofia d’amor is instead placed in a chamber already painted (a book already wrien, a citation), where he is so overwhelmed with love that he cannot long support the sight of the figures: Can l’amic fo mes en la cambra d’amor, e en lo lit d’amor fo posat, cuydà durmir e aver repòs. E per veer les beles figures de la cambra, e per la natura del lit d’amor ac major trebayl per amor que d’abans no avia. E dix a sos servidors que.l levassen d’aquel lit e lo traguessen d’aquela cambra, car on mais hi estava, sa amor montiplicava e sa malautia crexia. (AFA ch. 75) [When the lover was placed in the chamber of love, and in the bed of love, he expected to sleep and take his rest, but because of the sight of the beautiful figures of the chamber, and because of the nature of the bed of love, he was more troubled by love than he had been before. And he asked his servants to li him out of the bed and carry him out of the chamber, for the more he remained there, the more his love multiplied and his malady increased.]

Thus, the lover escapes, flees the encyclopedia / romance and its citations. Lancelot, on the other hand, escapes because one day he sees a rose in the garden outside his window that reminds him of his love and makes him forget the images on the wall. He breaks the bars on his window and emerges into the garden, where he approaches the rose immediately, plucks it, and kisses it “por l’amor de sa dame a cui ele resambloit; si l’atoche a ses ieux et a sa bouche et la met en son sain emprés sa char” [for the love of his lady, which it resembled; and he touched it to his eyes and mouth and placed it on his breast, next to his skin], a likely reference to Guillaume de Lorris’s portion of the Roman de la Rose, which is more or less contemporary with the Lancelot.57 Read in 1298, the date of the Arbre de filosofia d’amor, Llull’s passage would seem less an emergence from an enclosed space of figuration and contem-

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plation into the world of living things, on the road to a carnal consummation, than an emergence from one instance of figuration to another, from one book to another, from the Lancelot en prose or the Libre de meravelles to the Roman de la Rose, from the enclosed space of one citation into that of another. And, indeed, the lover’s escape will be punished by imprisonment. Eventually, he will be sentenced to death for his disobedience, well before the end of the book (it doesn’t really maer if he dies; aer his entombment, he is immediately replaced by another without any explanation whatsoever). That is, the lover’s entry into the next citation leads to his entry into the role of the lover of the Rose. Rather than rising into Vincent’s watchtower or soaring like Noah’s dove above the receding waters of the great flood, the lover of the Arbre de filosofia d’amor is entrapped by one citation aer another. Moreover, as in the Rose, both the authorial subject and the readerly subject are implicated in the succession of lovers. The narration is entirely in the third person—as are Llull’s references to himself at the beginning and the end of the book. At the end Llull writes that he “soplega aytant com pot a son amat que lo libre sia per él guardat, e que per ell sia per molts bons amadors servit e honrat” [strongly entreated his beloved to protect the book, so that through it he would be served and honored by many good lovers] (AFA ch. 95 [my emphasis]). The authorial subject describes a lover enclosed within the chamber of images that is an old, worldly romance, newly rewritten as a divine encyclopedia. This lover is a reflection of himself. He invites his reader to occupy the same subject space (where he will certainly suffer and likely die, yet death and rebirth are central to the Christian experience, and martyrdom was one of Llull’s aspirations).58 Llull cautions the reader not to aempt escape into the garden of false love that is the citation of another kind of text, a romance of “false love,” for there will occur another kind of entrapment.

The Death of the Phoenix It is the death and rebirth of the encyclopedic subject that figures its potential for infinite multiplication in these enigmatic texts. And that this is, specifically, a feature of the encyclopedic subject is evident in the parable of the encyclopedia from the Libre de meravelles. The philosopher-hermit who made the Libre de plasent visió eventually dies and on his deathbed requests that the book be sent to a wise king, who then repeats the hermit’s act of contemplative reading. Eventually, as an outgrowth of this exercise, the king abdicates his throne and establishes a monastery, where he lives out his

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days discussing with saintly men the meanings of the encyclopedia. At his own death, he sends a message to his son (now the king), entreating him to imitate his (i.e., the former king’s) example. The stage is set for an unbroken series of encyclopedic subjects, each moving through an established series of roles: king, monk, reader. This alone would merely give us a fable about repeated reading. However, we should recall that the book’s first reader was the encyclopedist himself. At the origin of this long genealogy of readers is one who was also a writer. Moreover, the end of the Libre de meravelles creates a dizzying mise en abyme that shows that long before Gide writers were staging their own writing within their texts in order to demonstrate the mutual construction of author and text. In the Libre, aer a lifetime of travel, adventures, and marvels, Fèlix comes on an abbey, where he remains for some time in order to recount his adventures to the monks. These adventures are evoked in the narrative as if they have already been put into a book, for the narrator refers to them collectively as the Libre de meravelles, that is, the very text that we happen to be reading. Aer having instructed the monks, Fèlix makes preparations to set out again, but, before he can depart, he falls ill and dies. During his funeral, one of the monks is amazed by a new marvel that is lacking from the Libre de meravelles. The monk therefore adds the new marvel and asks the abbot to grant him Fèlix’s office, that of traveling through the world collecting and recounting marvels. The abbot agrees, dubs the monk the Second Fèlix, and sends him out, and thus is established a practice whereby each Fèlix is replaced at his death by another. The multiplication of encyclopedic subjects is here complemented by a play on the first, second, and third persons worthy of Jean de Meun himself (and, perhaps, inspired by him). The Libre de meravelles is a third-person narration. However, when Fèlix recounts the adventures that have been recounted by the omniscient narrator, the protagonist can be expected to take up the narrative in the first person. This creates an implicit shadow narration for the entire preceding text, a mirror image viewed from the perspective of the encyclopedic subject whose subjectivity has throughout the text been veiled, if you will, by the use of the third-person pronoun. Moreover, when Fèlix recounts his experiences to the monks, he can be expected to address his audience in the second person, and it is a member of this audience who will then accede to a new encyclopedic subjectivity, which would naturally be expressed in the first person, except for the fact that this is still a third-person narration. Thus, the new subject is absorbed into the ell that renders him indistinguishable from his predecessor—a fusion highlighted by his assumption of the same name. Therefore, the repeated death and re-

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placement of encyclopedists in the Libre de meravelles constitutes a citation and inversion of the Roman de la Rose—and this inversion serves as the frame for a new encyclopedia. It is a way of showing how the encyclopedic subject can be at once one and many, can both give voice to the text and become its object, can manipulate the text yet remain dependent on it for his (or her) own constitution as subject. Fèlix’s very name figures the encyclopedic subject, for readers such as Martí de Riquer have recognized the near identity of Fèlix and fènix, the legendary bird that is ever reborn from the ashes of its own destruction. The phoenix, too, may be inspired by the Roman de la Rose, where it serves as an image of Nature’s power over death, the preservation of a common form from which new exemplars of a species can always be reborn (RR lines 15913–74). But it is in the Roman a perplexing image, an example of autoreproduction introducing a speech that will argue the all importance of sex. It seems much more consonant with the representation of Pygmalion, the figure of the artist’s ability to reproduce alone and unnaturally. Thus, its presence in the lines preceding Nature’s speech subtly undermines the ostensible celebration of her ability to give life as art cannot. The phoenix is also among the topoi of troubadour lyric, an antecedent that is closer conceptually to Llull’s use of the symbol. The troubadours’ phoenix is a polyvalent image that seems to figure at once erotic consummation, the constancy of an injured lover, and the reembodiment of that lover each time a song is resung, so that love will never die. Such is the implication of the pun fenis [finish] / fenics [phoenix].59 Thus, the bird appears at the end of songs, when troubadours dedicate them to their ladies, as in a song of Peire Vidal (fl. ca. 1175–1205): Amiga, tant vos sui amics, Qu’az autras paresc enemics, E vuelh esser en vos Fenics; Qu’autra jamais non amarai Et en vos m’amor fenirai.60 [Friend, I am so much your friend that to others I appear to be an enemy, and I wish to be a phoenix in you, for I shall never love another, and my love will have its end in you.]

Or another of Raimbaut d’Aurenga: “Plus qe ja fenis fenics / Non er q’ieu non si’amics” [I shall no more cease being a lover than the phoenix ceases to be a

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phoenix].61 Llull’s phoenix, like those of Peire and Raimbaut, becomes recognizable as such at the end of the text, in what could be called an encyclopedic tornada. Like the troubadours’ phoenix, the encyclopedic subject is reborn each time an individual responds to the text’s interpellation, its invitation to read, and, thus, gives voice to the leers on the page. He is reborn each time he recognizes the face staring back at him from the mirror of the text, performs the tropological exegesis necessary to understand its relation to himself, or assumes the subject position indicated by its personal pronouns. But the encyclopedic subject is a fugitive and protean being. When traversing citations, he must assume varied positions, identifying with the first person of some, with the second or third person of others, or assuming a critical distance, or simply flipping handfuls of manuscript leaves whose extracts offer too much challenge or too lile interest—or passing beyond the citation, beyond the book, into contemplation of God himself. To circle back to observations I made in parts 1 and 2, that last mode, the passage through the looking glass, is Vincent’s and Lull’s ultimate ideal of reading and of subjective experience. Jean is too tricky—or too playful or too cynical—to declare any ideal. But in the end it is Llull, I think, who despite his unambiguous evangelic mission had the fullest understanding of the diverse and not always salvific ways in which a subject could take form in the encyclopedic mirror.

AFTERWORD

0

“There is,” writes Jorge Luis Borges, a writer much preoccupied by encyclopedias and labyrinths, “no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and conjectural”: The reason is very simple: we do not know what the universe is. . . . [W]e must suspect that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense inherent in that ambitious word. If there is, we must conjecture its purpose; we must conjecture the words, the definitions, the etymologies, the synonymies of God’s secret dictionary. But the impossibility of penetrating the divine scheme of the universe cannot dissuade us from outlining human schemes, even though we are aware that they are provisional.1

Borges’ initial statement would seem a categorical rejection of order and system in the universe, but he is in fact about to acknowledge all the possibilities. He remains acutely aware of the limitations of the human perspective, claiming ignorance of the universe, couching his most extreme statement in terms of a “suspicion,” and then qualifying it immediately with an alternative. It is certainly this alternative that medieval encyclopedists claimed to pursue. Hence the hermeneutic exercise that inspired the encyclopedia and the rhetorical models that shaped it. Borges’s doubts about such an enterprise would seem to be confirmed by 303

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the problems that scholastic encyclopedism creates. Although Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum maius purports to be modeled on the hexameral tradition and to employ the exegetical mode of historia, we have seen that the text ultimately exceeds these precedents, demonstrating their limitations and seling on an order that can best be described (according to the Speculum’s own definitions) as rhetorical historia, one of the varieties of narratio. The Speculum maius’s moments of excess and disorder offer fertile ground for Jean de Meun’s ironic palimpsest, the discourse of Nature, where rhetorical practices are driven to the point of absurdity. The hexameral narrative that had, at least to some limited degree, undergirded the Speculum naturale is here emptied of its exegetical significance and, thus, takes on the appearance of fragmentation and arbitrariness, while the compromise of discrete categories undermines metaphor, the trope that defines the relation between the encyclopedia as mirror and the world. Though Jean probably was not familiar with Ramon Llull’s Arbor scientiae, the destabilization of metaphor in the Roman de la Rose could also serve as a critique for the Catalan evangelist’s encyclopedia, although in this text Llull would otherwise appear to have solved the problems encountered by Vincent of Beauvais (the unrestrainable proliferation of discourses and objects) by forgoing the narrative model and basing his text instead on hierarchy and symbolism. Thus, the discourse of Nature in the Roman de la Rose demonstrates that, however necessary rhetoric may be to the project of writing the world, it also possesses the potential to disorder, even disable that project. Intellectual developments in the early modern period would eventually inspire new generations of encylopedists to remodel the genre entirely, abandoning the symbolic paradigm of the book as mirror of the world, a transformation that would finally render alphabetical order fully acceptable as a global organizational principle. However, although this principle was allowed to determine the linear order of the text in its stable, material form of the book, a more subtle, infinitely mutable network of relations among segments of text was created by the multiple cross-references that concluded each article, inviting readers to order their own experience of the encyclopedia, free of the tyranny of a linear text.2 A more absolute independence from the linear has in recent decades prompted many voices to celebrate the technology of hypertext. Unfortunately, the hype surrounding hypertext cultivates the impression among the general public that it is the first technology to free readers from linearity.3 Oen overlooked is the fact that the codex itself, whose early development coincided with the transition from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages, constituted an initial triumph

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over the linearity of language, as the sequential scroll ceded its place on the library shelves to compact bundles of discrete pages bound together only along a single edge, allowing readers to consult diverse, disparate passages simultaneously. (Paradoxically, microfilm, exploited by many libraries as a way of sparing codices from the ravages of scholarly fingers, is only a mechanical avatar of the scroll and, hence, a more primitive technology than the book it replaces.) Nevertheless, it is true that hypertext renders effortless and tidy the hypertextual reading practices that were so long responsible for the scandalous cluer of scholars’ desks. Hypertext’s effect on the encyclopedia has been no less revolutionary, for it has obviated the need for any global organizational principle at all. In whatever order readers choose to experience the text, a book is a physical object that sets the text out according to fixed spatial coordinates. Encyclopedists can choose either to exploit the symbolic potential of the shape that this object lends the text (as the scholastics did) or to repudiate it (as the philosophes did), but in the laer case the shape of the text is no less significant, no less bound up with a given ideology, no less eloquent in its expression of an intellectual movement. For the repudiation of symbolism is itself a statement about symbolism. On the other hand, hypertext, as a technology that frees text from fixed, stable deployment in space, simultaneously frees encyclopedists from the need to either articulate or repudiate a structure of human knowledge. It imposes a kind of universal encyclopedic agnosticism. Whether the disappearance of these exercises in structure is to be celebrated or regreed is a question of individual viewpoint. The multiplication of possible structures even in the Middle Ages would indicate that they were not simply the agent of dogma; they certainly inspired reflections on the relation between various fields of knowledge that, otherwise, only a few scholars would have engaged in. In this, at least, they introduced productive debate not unrelated to today’s discussions of interdisciplinarity (how it is to be carried out and why). More radically, it could be argued that the failure to give any sequential structure to the “cycle” of learning undercuts the etymological ground of the encyclopedia as a cycle (hence the omission of cycle from Wikipedia). This etymological treachery would not, of course, disturb everyone—Jean de Meun, for one, might have found it delightful. In any case, with hypertext, the puzzle that occupied a Vincent of Beauvais, a Ramon Llull, and a d’Alembert and inspired some of their most fascinating pages has, quite simply, vanished. If, in this sense, Wikipedia must be recognized as radically different from the scholastic encyclopedia, in other ways it is possible to think of it as far

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closer to this older model than to the print encyclopedias that have dominated for so long. We have seen that the individual articles of the scholastic encyclopedia introduce another kind of complexity, one that derives from the practice of direct citation. Exegetical texts, poetry, and other forms of heavily figurative writing provide only the minority of the citations used by Vincent, Bartholomeus Anglicus, or Thomas of Cantimpré; a larger proportion come from the natural history texts of Aristotle, his Arab commentators, Pliny, and even thirteenth-century writers. Few of these citations acknowledge the power of language to generate meaning or knowledge, and the difference between the roles of language in the various citations creates a dissonance of discourses. Metaphorically, I have described this dissonance as fissures in the encyclopedic mirror. Poetically, Jean de Meun satirizes it with the multiple and contradictory speakers of the Rose. More concretely, the mise en page of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscripts realizes the internal contradictions of the text by moving much of the exegetical component of the encyclopedia to the margins, as in the program of glosses on the De proprietatibus rerum, or by seing out the poetic citations differently from the prose, as in some manuscripts of the Speculum naturale and Speculum historiale. This creation of visual distinctions between different fragments of text, a visual decomposition of the mosaic of citations that make up the text, is not without parallels in the online encyclopedia, although, enabled by the more flexible technology of open source soware, the present-day examples are more extreme. Wikipedia allows users to view the history of revisions of an article, on a page that juxtaposes two versions of the text. In this way, it is possible for users (at least, the most patient ones) to distinguish the parts of an article draed by different contributors. Although, unlike readers of the Speculum maius, they cannot identify the author of the various passages, users can see the text’s polyvocal nature visually represented. And it is in this last aspect, the polyvocal nature of the text, that Wikipedia most strongly recalls the medieval encyclopedia, even as polyvocality has also become the Achilles heel of the Wikipedia project. Beyond the problem of style, which is not the “essential thing” for many contributors and, even when respectable, tends to vary from paragraph to paragraph within any given article, this editing model renders the text vulnerable to prejudice and error. Hence the necessity of analyzing footnotes, bibliographies, and the history of revisions to an article—much as the medieval reader had to decide for herself which quotation was the most likely to be accurate. In the end, a truly conscientious, careful reading of Wikipedia may be not much different from such a reading of the Speculum maius: a great feat. In

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this lies the paradox of these two texts: as encyclopedias, they purport to disseminate knowledge to the un- or underinformed, to make it available beyond the guarded doors of the well-stocked monastic, or university, or national library. But only aer a sophisticated analysis of the content, form, and sources of a given article (an exercise that only a small proportion of the reading public has been adequately educated to carry out—and many of these sophisticated readers already have access to the large libraries) can any reader arrive at knowledge, whether that be construed as a meditation on God’s greatness and power (as for Vincent) or as an accurate description of phenomena (which is what most readers seek in Wikipedia). If a more ambitious reader were to go beyond this local reading of individual articles and try to grasp the Speculum maius as a unified whole, it would take not only long weeks of reading, not only the critical sense to determine which authorities should receive what degree of credibility, not only an unusual tolerance for the dissonant effects produced by the juxtaposition of different kinds of discourse, but also an apprenticeship in spiritual exegesis and the patience (and creativity) to subject to such reading both the easily and traditionally allegorized descriptions of the pelican and the more obtuse discussions of venomous frogs. Only this sort of exegesis, only consistent repositioning of the reader, can establish anything more than simply the occasional connection among and within the three different specula. Without it, the fragments of the mirror reflect very different images. Such feats of readership would have been rare even in the Middle Ages. The present writer, who has traced her own path through the scholastic encyclopedia, pretends to no such universality (or heroism or tyranny). As for Wikipedia, the goal of reading that text in its complete form would be no less than madness. However, the near certainty of failure in such an enterprise opens up other possibilities. These impossibly long texts drive readers to recognize that their reading is always incomplete and citational—rather like the reading in which the encyclopedist(s) engaged when constructing the text. Such reading easily takes the form of play in the musical sense that Roland Barthes describes, a readerly jouissance that transforms what could otherwise have become a work into a text in the fullest sense. Yet this game, if it is a game, is shaped by the peculiar kind of text that is the medieval encyclopedia. For the reader is required, more explicitly than in most other kinds of texts, to collaborate with the encyclopedist in the construction of meaning. The encyclopedist himself occupies only a most elusive subject position in these texts, and always there is the implication that the reader can usurp that position. Thus, the oddly composite, protean

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subject that Jean de Meun and Ramon Llull elaborate appeared first in the encyclopedia, and it is to this genre that we owe the complex subjectivity of late thirteenth-century literature. The hermit who compiled the Libre de plasent visió performs this usurpation by changing roles, by becoming the reader of his own text; the second and third and fourth Fèlix and their infinite successor-namesakes, who all begin as readers, take over the Libre de meravelles from its original author and add new material. In each case, however, that usurpation is preceded by the death of the previous author; the reader of today can be forgiven for wondering (idly and absurdly) whether Jean de Meun and Ramon Llull had read Barthes! She may also be forgiven for wondering ( just as idly, just as absurdly) whether the designers of Wikipedia had read Jean de Meun or Ramon Llull, for the role of the Wikipedian harks back to that long line of Fèlixes and to the problems of literary subjectivity on which writers such as Jean and Ramon played with such delight. We must conclude that the transformation of the author that Barthes theorized and in which hypertext has allowed the multitude to collaborate was imagined as early as the thirteenth century. There remains the question, which should not be longer deferred, about whether encyclopedism should be conceived as a game, or (perhaps more productively articulated) what the stakes of such a game would be. For the encyclopedia, in any age, always purports to represent reality, and as such it actively forms readers’ perceptions of the world they inhabit; it shapes, not only their subjectivity, but also, simultaneously, their perception of and interaction with the objects of knowledge. The insight that this study of the medieval encyclopedia has allowed into that process should not come as a surprise to readers versed in postmodern thought: that it is oen, perhaps always, impossible to dissociate the objects of our knowledge from the discourse in which those objects are articulated and that problems arise when the same object is described in multiple ways in multiple texts, for this creates disjunctures and overlaps, fissures in the smooth mirror of the individual’s understanding. Thus, the reader’s task, in constructing a coherent representation of the world from the encyclopedic text, is to si through dissonant voices, and his own subjectivity is constructed in the space of a mosaic of citations. That is, unless he seeks a more coherent representation elsewhere, perhaps in one of the careful, neutral entries of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. For here lies another paradox of the medieval encyclopedia: that the most complete medieval representation of the world in language, the text that most closely approached the encyclopedic goal of a representation of all

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knowledge organized according to a single system, fell prey to the contradictions and incoherencies of that knowledge and was abandoned, at least in part, by readers who sought a less complicated representation elsewhere. But simplification is not without its own dangers. This, too, is a problem that Borges explored. In one of his many provocative fictions, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” a spurious interpolation in a pirated (and equally fictional) encyclopedia (The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, calqued on the Encyclopaedia Britannica) gives the first sign of the infiltration of an imaginary world, Tlön, invented by a secret society, into the real world. The philosophy of this invented world is purely idealist, and, therefore, science as we know it does not exist. Nevertheless, Tlön’s philosophers have proved particularly prolific in the invention of “systems of thought”: “There are systems upon systems that are incredible but possessed of a pleasing architecture or a certain agreeable sensationalism. The metaphysicians of Tlön seek not truth, or even plausibility—they seek to astound. In their view, metaphysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy. They know that a system is naught but the subordination of all the aspects of the universe to one of those aspects— any one of them.”4 This can be taken as a subtle lesson about the delusion that follows on believing any one of these systems. But the lesson proves too subtle for most readers, and, when the secret society engineers the discovery in the real world of a complete copy of The First Encyclopedia of Tlön, reality, as the narrator puts it, “caved in” and “contact with Tlön, the habit of Tlön, has disintegrated this world. Spellbound by Tlön’s rigor, humanity has forgoen, and continues to forget, that it is the rigor of chess masters, not of angels.” Relating these events in a postscript dated to 1947, the narrator concludes that Tlön disrupted reality to such a degree because the laer actually “wanted to cave in”: Ten years ago, any symmetry, any system with an appearance of order— dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism—could spellbind and hypnotize mankind. How could the world not fall under the sway of Tlön, how could it not yield to the vast and minutely detailed evidence of an ordered planet? It would be futile to reply that reality is also orderly. Perhaps it is, but in accordance with divine laws (read: “inhuman laws”) that we can never quite manage to penetrate. Tlön may well be a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth forged by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.5

Perhaps the chaotic elements of the scholastic encyclopedia or of Wikipedia are therefore not to be regreed, for they thwart absolute order and

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confront readers with contradictions that cannot be ignored. Thus, they force readers to acknowledge the multitude of competing understandings of the world. The mirror may indeed deceive, as Jean de Meun and Borges both knew. We have already seen the former’s extended play on the distortions of “funny” mirrors; the laer characterizes even ordinary mirrors as “something monstrous” and offers the epigram (aributed to one of the heresiarchs of Tlön) “Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of mankind.”6 Nevertheless, this instrument of vision can also be conceived in a far more positive light: its multiplications and distortions render the sophisticated viewer aware of his or her own situation in relation to the objects of sight and inspire an inquiry into the process of seeing. The “conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia” that opens this fiction of Borges and leads to the “discovery” of Tlön had, in the late Middle Ages, a rather different effect. It initiated a reflection on the order and writing of the world.

ABBREVIATION S

0

AC

Llull, Arbre de ciència, ed. Carreras i Artau et al.

AdS

Foucault, L’archéologie du savoir

AFA

Llull, Arbre de filosofia d’amor, ed. Schib

AHDL

Archives d’histoire doctrinale et liéraire du Moyen Âge

AK

Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge

ALRL

Bonner, The Art and Logic of Ramon Llull: A User’s Guide

AR

Mâle, L’art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France

AS

Llull, Arbor scientiae, ed. Villalba Varneda

ASNE

Badia, “The Arbor scientiae: A ‘New’ Encyclopedia”

BA

Matfre Ermengaud, Breviari d’amor, ed. Rickes

BAOSA

Bibliothèque augustinienne: Oeuvres de saint Augustin

BM

Bibliothèque / médiathèque municipale

BNF

Bibliothèque nationale de France

BSGR

Bibliotheca scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum

BW

Arbor Scientiae: Der Baum des Wissens von Ramon Lull, Akten des Internationalen Kongresses, ed. Domínguez Reboiras et al.

CCCM

Corpus christianorum continuatio mediaevalis

CNRS

Centre national de la recherche scientifique (France)

CTPM

Llull, L’arbre de philosophie d’amour, Le livre de l’ami et de l’aimé, et choix de textes philosophiques et mystiques, trans. Sala-Molins

DC

Augustine, De doctrina christiana, ed. Moreau et al.

DE

Foucault, Dits et écrits

DNR

Thomas of Cantimpré, De naturis rerum, ed. Boese

311

312 

Abbreviations

DPN

Alan of Lille, De planctu Naturae, ed. Häring

DS

Hugh of Saint-Victor, Didascalicon, ed. Buimer

EL

Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages

ELL

Estudios lulianos

EM

de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale: Les quatre sens de l’Ecriture

EMAC

L’enciclopedismo medievale: Ai del convegno “L’enciclopedismo medievale,” San Gimignano 8–10 oobre 1992, ed. Picone

ENC

Els nostres clàssics

EP

Allen, The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages

ERRL

Johnston, The Evangelical Rhetoric of Ramon Llull

ET

Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, ed. Lindsay

EWF

Essential Works of Foucault

GL

Augustine, De Genesi ad lieram, ed. Zycha et al.

GLSTP

Les genres liéraires dans les sources théologiques et philosophiques médiévales

GMIL

Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis (Du Cange)

HLC

Riquer, Història de la literatura catalana, vol. 1

IC

Parkes, “The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book”

KP

Armstrong and Kay, Knowing Poetry

LA

Vincent of Beauvais, Libellus apologeticus (prologue to the Speculum maius), ed. von den Brincken

LC LCVB

Llull, Libre de contemplació, ed. Rubió et al. Lector et compilator: Vincent de Beauvais, frère prêcheur, un intellectuel et son milieu au XIIIe siècle, ed. Lusignan and Paulmier-Foucart

LGTS

Llull, Llibre del gentil e dels tres savis, ed. Bonner

LM

Llull, Libre de meravelles, in OSRL

MC

Foucault, Les mots et les choses

MEP

Mise en page et mise en texte du livre manuscrit, ed. Martin and Vezin

MF

Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics

MSPI

Weijers, Le maniement du savoir: Pratiques intellectuelles à l’époque des

NEORL

Nova edició de les obres de Ramon Llull

NH

Pliny the Elder, Naturalis historia, ed. von Jan and Mayhoff

NML

New Medieval Literatures

premières universités

OC

Balint, Ordering Chaos

OE

Obres essencials de Ramon Llull, ed. Batllori et al.

OEOM

Paulmier-Foucart, “Ordre encyclopédique et organisation de la matière dans le Speculum maius”

OSRL

Obres selectes de Ramon Llull, ed. Bonner

OT

Foucault, The Order of Things

PL

Patrologia latina

Abbreviations



313

PMH

Flynn, A Postmodern Mapping of History

PN

Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria nova

PSM

Lusignan, ed., Préface au “Speculum maius” de Vincent de Beauvais

RHT

Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation

RLL

Hillgarth, Ramon Lull and Lullism in Fourteenth-Century France

RLOL

Raimundi Lulli Opera Latina

RR

Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Lecoy

RRMR

Huot, The “Romance of the Rose” and Its Medieval Readers

RRQ

Badel, Le “Roman de la Rose” au XIVe siècle: Étude de la réception de l’oeuvre

SAS

Bonner, “The Structure of the Arbor scientiae”

SD

Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum docrinale, Douai edition (1624), modified

SH

Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale, Douai edition (1624), modified

SHVB

Voorbij, Het “Speculum historiale” van Vincent van Beauvais

SL

Studia Lulliana

SM

Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum maius (see the explanatory notes in the front maer)

SN

Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale, Douai edition (1624), modified

ST

Studies and Texts

SWRL

Selected Works of Ramon Llull, trans. Bonner

THL

Theory and History of Literature

TMTK

Blair, Too Much to Know

USTF

Rosemann, Understanding Scholastic Thought with Foucault

VBGM

Paulmier-Foucart, Vincent de Beauvais et le grand miroir du monde

VBHSM Paulmier-Foucart and Lusignan, “Vincent de Beauvais et l’histoire du Speculum maius” VBIR

Vincent de Beauvais: Intentions et réceptions d’une oeuvre encyclopédique au Moyen Âge, ed. Paulmier-Foucart, Lusignan, and Nadeau

VBN

Vincent of Beauvais Newsleer

VIL

Teeuwen, The Vocabulary of Intellectual Life in the Middle Ages

Italicized notations consisting of a majuscule followed by a minuscule are not abbreviations but rather the sigla of manuscripts of the Speculum maius.

N OTES

0

Explanatory Notes 1. For a critique, see B. L. Ullman, “Classical Authors in Certain Medieval Florilegia,” Classical Philology 27 (1932): 1–42, “A Project for a New Edition of Vincent de Beauvais,” Speculum 8 (1933): 312–26, and “The Need for a New Edition of Vincent de Beauvais,” in Actes du premier congrès de la Fédération internationale des associations d’études classiques (Paris: Klincksieck, 1950), 254–58. 2. Alison Stones, “A Note on Some Re-Discovered Vincent of Beauvais Volumes,” VBN 26 (2001): 10–13. 3. Paulmier-Foucart, VBGM, 147–73. 4. See, most recently, Eva Albrecht, “Summary of PhD: ‘De ontstaansgeschiedenis en de compilatie van het Speculum naturale van Vincent van Beauvais (†1264)’ (The Genesis and Compilation of the Speculum naturale of Vincent of Beauvais),” VBN 34 (2009): 3–9, 3. 5. In 1965 by the Graz publishing house Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt. 6. Ullman, “Classical Authors,” 13n1. 7. Eva Albrecht, “De ontstaansgeschiedenis en de compilatie van het Speculum naturale van Vincent van Beauvais (†1264),” 2 vols. (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2007). Introduction 1. Larry Sanger, “Why Wikipedia Must Jeison Its Anti-Elitism,” Kur05hin, December 31, 2004, hp: // www.kuro5hin.org / story / 2004 / 12 / 30 / 142458 / 25. 2. The choice to solicit the collaboration of the entire online community has been aributed to a sentiment of “anti-elitism,” according to the accusation leveled by the Wikipedia community at those who would otherwise be recognized as experts (ibid.). Whether or not the community practices active disrespect for expertise, and whether or not that disrespect is prompted by the perception that experts are “elitists,” the 315

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terms elitism and antielitism are perhaps not the best articulation of the nature of the Wiki revolution. Their lack of neutrality in current usage renders a disinterested assessment difficult. Expertise and authority are beer choices; I prefer the laer because it makes most readily apparent the link between particular kinds of knowledge and institutions. 3. Eric Steven Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” 1997, hp: // www.catb .org / ~esr / writings / cathedral-bazaar / cathedral-bazaar / index.html#catbmain. This article is related to Wikipedia by Simon Waldman, who provides a more or less neutral assessment of that encyclopedia’s strengths and weaknesses in “Who Knows?” Guardian, October 26, 2004. 4. Mâle, AR, 23–26. 5. Pappas quoted in Waldman, “Who Knows?” 6. Danah Boyd, “Academia and Wikipedia,” Many-2-Many, January 4, 2005, hp: // many.corante.com / archives / 2005 / 01 / 04 / academia_and_wikipedia.php. 7. Similarly, George Bornstein observes that the “rise of new electronic media” has resulted in a “new awareness of the book or journal as an artifact having material form. The dance of pixels across the screen denaturalized for us the dance of print and revealed the material conditions of its creation and display on the page” (“Pages, Pixels, and the Profession,” Journal of Scholarly Publishing 34 [2003]: 197–207, 198). 8. See Noam Cohen, “When Knowledge Isn’t Wrien, Does It Still Count?” New York Times, August 8, 2011; and Achal R. Prabhala’s short film People Are Knowledge (2011), at hp: // vimeo.com / 26469276. 9. The idea that past ways of dealing with accumulated knowledge may be productively studied in relation to current paradigms is receiving a great deal of aention at the moment. Blair’s 2010 TMTK deals with early modern reference books, showing how the creators of these books were engaged in what we would today call information management. The present study shares many of the same aims, though Blair’s and my different disciplinary training will be reflected in differences of terminology, methodology, and emphasis. For example, I have chosen to employ the term knowledge, an approximate English translation of the Latin scientia, rather than today’s information, which Blair prefers. As Blair points out, knowledge posits an “individual knower,” whereas she is interested in information as “a kind of public property distinct from personal knowledge” (TMTK, 2). Such a distinction reflects what Jean-François Lyotard has called the “exteriorization of knowledge with respect to the ‘knower,’” which became possible aer the introduction of computers (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, THL 10 [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984], 4). The intentional anachronism proves a powerful methodological tool for Blair, allowing her to isolate a group of scholarly techniques and demonstrate their deep historical roots, which had been obscured by common modern assumptions about, and value judgments of, learning in past ages. For my part, I am interested in the relation between that “public property” (another useful modern notion) and the individual—that is to say, in the ways in which knowledge is interiorized in the premodern world. Twentieth-century literary criticism has given us ways to talk about fictional or implied readers and knowing subjects, their ethical dispositions and aesthetic responses. I shall have recourse to these notions at the end of the present book, in order to consider the subject that is shaped by scholastic compilations.

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10. The intellectual paradigms and discursive practices proper to thirteenthcentury scholasticism will be discussed in chapter 1. Readers seeking a fuller account of the political, social, and intellectual terrain of scholasticism may consult a variety of introductory texts and broad historical studies, representing diverse scholarly positions (particularly contested have been the chronological boundaries of the scholastic movement, the relation between scholasticism and humanism, variously defined, the relative influence that biblical commentary and Aristotelian logic had on the development of the dominant scholastic genres of the disputatio and the quaestio, and the precise relation of Augustinian and Aristotelian thought). Recent introductions include Rolf Schönberger’s Was ist Scholastik? (Hildesheim: Bernward, 1991) and Gangolf Schrimpf ’s “Bausteine für einen historischen Begriff der scholastischen Philosophie” (in Philosophie im Mielalter, Entwicklungslinien und Paradigmen, ed. Jan P. Beckmann, Ludger Honnefelder, Gangolf Schrimpf, and Georg Wieland [Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1996], 1–25). David Knowles’s The Evolution of Medieval Thought (New York: Vintage, 1962), though much older, is succinct and eminently readable and remains useful because it is one of the few broad surveys to devote significant space to the accomplishments of the eleventh century that paved the way for scholasticism. A more recent treatment of changing social structures during the eleventh century is R. I. Moore, The First European Revolution, c. 970–1215 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). Focused on the role of debate, interpretation, and textual cultures in eleventh- and twelh-century communities are Brian Stock’s The Implications of Literacy: Wrien Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelh Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983) and Leidulf Melve’s Inventing the Public Sphere: The Public Debate during the Investiture Contest (c. 1030–1122) (2 vols. [Leiden: Brill, 2007]). The twelh century has probably received more scholarly aention than any other scholastic century, and the studies are too numerous to list. Among the classic accounts are Martin Grabmann, Die Geschichte der scholastischen Methode, 2 vols. (1909–11; reprint, Basel: Schwabe, 1961); and M.-D. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelh Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Lile (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). Recently, Richard Southern (Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, 2 vols. [Oxford: Blackwell, 1995–2001]) has provided a good summation of one scholarly view of the period, but his work should be read alongside texts that exemplify other views. See esp. John Marenbon, “Humanism, Scholasticism and the School of Chartres,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 6 (2000): 569–77 (Marenbon contests Southern’s notion of a decline in the late thirteenth century); and R. M. Thomson, review of Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, by Richard Southern, Journal of Religious History 26 (2002): 264–73 (Thomson brings out the revisionary aspect of Southern’s argument while critiquing his use of terminology). For mid- and late scholasticism, the reader can begin with Étienne Gilson’s classic A History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New York: Random House, 1955); John Marenbon, Later Medieval Philosophy (1150–1350): An Introduction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987); and Anthony Kenny and Jan Pinborg’s compact synthesis of scholarship in “Medieval Philosophical Literature” (in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism, 1100–1600, ed. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982], 11–42). Charles Lohr’s “The Medieval Interpretation of Aristotle” (in ibid., 80–98) is particularly useful as an

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introduction to the scholastic adaptation of / to Aristotelian science. A. J. Minnis and A. B. Sco’s Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100–1375 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988) is an anthology of translations from literary theory and criticism of the period, with invaluable introductory essays, that gives the lie to the old notions that medieval writers did not engage in such literary discussions and that, as the editors put it, scholasticism was a “malevolent tide which caused the submersion of literary awareness.” Minnis and Sco show instead that the movement “actually channeled such awareness into areas of study where it was enabled to enjoy a new prestige” (7). More expansive and in-depth studies of thirteenth-century scholastic thought, diverse in their methodologies, include Fernand Van Steenberghen, The Philosophical Movement in the Thirteenth Century (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1955); Weijers, MSPI; and Rosemann, USTF. The last two (as well as Schönberger’s Was ist Scholastik?) reflect a strong recent interest in the intellectual and textual practices that define scholasticism. 11. While the scholastic assimilation of the Greek texts has been the subject of countless studies, the full implications of their transmission through Arabic translations, accompanied by the commentaries of Muslim thinkers, have only begun to be seriously considered by scholars in the last few decades. One of the most important early books to approach the subject is Alain de Libera’s Penser au Moyen Âge (Paris: Seuil, 1991). Charles Burne’s ongoing work has been particularly illuminating in this area. 12. On the possible reasons for the eclipse of Plato by Aristotle in this period, see James Hankins, “Antiplatonism in the Renaissance and the Middle Ages,” Classica et mediaevalia 47 (1996): 359–77, esp. 372–77. 13. There are several good studies of the cathedral schools and the development of the new universities. On the schools, see C. Stephen Jaeger, The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950–1200 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). For the French university context with which the present study will be preoccupied, see, among others, Stephen C. Ferruolo, The Origins of the University: The Schools of Paris and Their Critics, 1100–1215 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985); and Serge Lusignan, “Vérité garde le roy”: La construction d’une identité universitaire en France (XIIIe–XVe siècle) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999). 14. A great deal of excellent work has been done on medieval books and the book trade. For book production in the scholastic period in France and its relation to the intellectual work of the period, one should consult esp. Christopher de Hamel, Glossed Books of the Bible and the Origins of the Paris Booktrade (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1984); and Mary A. Rouse and Richard H. Rouse, Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts, Publications in Medieval Studies, 27 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991). Thirteenth-century book production in the region has recently been the object of two book-length studies: Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, Manuscripts and Their Makers: Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris, 1200–1500 (Turnhout: H. Miller, 2000); and Alison Stones, Gothic Manuscripts, c. 1260–1320: A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in France (London: Harvey Miller, 2011). 15. There survive a few texts in early Romance dialects from before 1000 and several longer texts in Old French, Occitan, and perhaps Catalan from the eleventh century, but it was not until the twelh that French and Occitan seem to have become common vehicles for (wrien) literary expression. Catalan, Castilian, Galician-Portuguese, and

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the Sicilian dialect of Italian seem to have come into their own as literary languages at the end of the twelh century or in the thirteenth. Again, the studies are too numerous to list. For the status of the vernacular as the language of intellectual endeavor in France, particularly useful is Serge Lusignan, Parler vulgairement: Les intellectuels et la langue française aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles (Paris: Vrin; Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1986). My summary history is wrien from the perspective of the lands where the vernaculars were Gallo-Romance (French, Occitan, Catalan) because that is the geographic focus of this study. Germanic vernaculars (Old High German, Anglo-Saxon), on the other hand, began to be used for writing and translating longer texts earlier than their Romance neighbors, then developed in ways specific to their geographic, cultural, and political context. 16. Mâle, AR, 23; Jacques Le Goff, “Pourquoi le XIIIe siècle a-t-il été plus particulièrement un siècle d’encyclopédisme?” in EMAC, 23–40. 17. Blair suggests that the term was likely first used by the early Venetian printer Aldus Manutius (TMTK, 34–35). 18. I have chosen to use the word florilegium freely in the present study because, as I shall argue in chapter 5 below, the failure to recognize these encyclopedias as florilegia encourages scholars to read them in ways that their genesis and literary form do not support. Nevertheless, by classing an encyclopedia such as the Speculum maius among florilegia, I am going against the grain of recent scholarship, which has tended to distinguish between florilegia and encyclopedias (both modern generic categories) on the basis of the more limited role of the florilegium compiler, who usually abstains from editorial comment (Jacqueline Hamesse, “Les florilèges philosophiques du XIIIe au XVe siècle,” in GLSTP, 181–91, 181). Perhaps also operative in the distinction commonly assumed are the anonymity of so many compilers of florilegia (whereas we have the names of many encyclopedists) and the broader scope of the texts identified as encyclopedias. The trouble is that, with the first criterion, we are talking about a scale of degrees of editorial intervention, and it is not clear where on this scale the break is to be made. B. Munk Olsen’s list of the possible interventions of the compiler in the florilegium (“Les florilèges d’auteurs classiques,” in GLSTP, 151–64, 152–54) would accommodate virtually all the interventions of early thirteenth-century encyclopedists. Similarly problematic is the question of authorship. None of these encyclopedists identified himself as an author (Vincent of Beauvais called himself an excerptator [see chapter 1 below], and his description of his work echoes that of the compilers of florilegia). Furthermore, Thomas of Cantimpré’s text was frequently aributed by rubricators to other scholars (particularly Albert the Great), suggesting that the compiler had not exerted himself to ensure that the text would circulate under his name. At the same time, not all compilers of florilegia remained anonymous (see Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, “Florilegia of Patristic Texts,” in GLSTP, 165–80, 176–78). All this suggests that we are again dealing with a scale (this time of degrees of anonymity)—as, indeed, we are when we think about the scope of these texts. Moreover, one of the most frequently cited purposes of thirteenth-century encyclopedias—to provide resources for preachers—also seems to have been the goal of thirteenth-century copyists of older florilegia, such as the Florilegium Angelicum and the Florilegium Gallicum (Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, “The Florilegium Angelicumain : Its Origin, Content, and Influence,” in Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to Richard William Hunt, ed. J. J. G. Alexander and M. T. Gibson [Oxford: Clarendon, 1976], 66–114, 92–93).

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Hence the prudence with which Jacqueline Hamesse cautions us that “il est difficile de plaquer sur des réalités médiévales fluctuantes des distinctions modernes trop rigoureuses” (“Le vocabulaire des florilèges médiévaux,” in Méthodes et instruments du travail intellectuel au Moyen Âge: Études sur le vocabulaire, ed. Olga Weijers, Études sur le vocabulaire intellectuel du Moyen Âge, 3 [Turnhout: Brepols, 1990], 209–30, 229) and Lusignan’s balanced description of Vincent’s Speculum maius (ca. 1235–ca. 1264) as “un incroyable florilège dont l’universalité des sources en fait une encyclopédie” (Lusignan, ed., PSM, 110). On the florilegium genre, see, in addition to the articles cited above, B. Munk Olsen, “Les classiques latins dans les florilèges médiévaux antérieurs au XIIIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire des textes 9 (1979): 47–121; 10 (1980): 115–64; Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, Preachers, Florilegia and Sermons: Studies on the “Manipulus florum” of Thomas of Ireland, ST, 47 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1979); and Mary A. Rouse and Richard H. Rouse, “Florilegia of Patristic Texts,” in GLSTP, 165–80, and Authentic Witnesses. 19. My project thus parallels that of Ivan Illich, who argues that studying the slightly earlier transition from monastic to scholastic reading “may then throw some light on a very different transition now” (In the Vinyard of the Text: A Commentary on Hugh’s Didascalicon [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993], 4). I shall suggest, however, that this transition did not occur in the punctual way that Illich suggests (Illich locates Hugh of Saint-Victor as one of the last of the monastic readers). Instead, the view of scholasticism that I shall develop embraces the older practice of monastic reading as one among several ways of processing the text on the page. The simplest form of evidence for this theory is that texts that necessitated the slower, ruminative monastic reading, such as Hrabanus Maurus’s In honorem sanctae crucis (see chapter 5 below), continued to be copied during the scholastic period. Therefore, scholastic reading should be understood, not as a single practice, but as a constellation of practices exploited by different individuals or even the same individual in different contexts. Similarly, today, individuals who were trained in a culture of print books have learned to process and create electronic texts, and most can move back and forth effortlessly from one technology to the other. 20. For the influence of rhetoric on late medieval textual practice, see esp. Copeland, RHT. 21. Foucault’s notion of discourse is most clearly articulated in AK (translation of AdS [1969]), although readers new to Foucault may find it easier to grasp the concept through its application in the earlier OT (translation of MC [1966]). Because of the difficulty of Foucault’s texts (which derives, not only from his opaque style, but also from the shiing, self-revisionary nature of his thought), readers may also wish to consult Dreyfus and Rabinow, MF, esp. pt. 1. 22. This has been Minnis’s suggestion, which resolves the difficulties that arise from referring to compilatio as a genre in and of itself. See Alastair J. Minnis, “Nolens auctor sed compilator reputari: The Late-Medieval Discourse of Compilation,” in La méthode critique au Moyen Âge, ed. Mireille Chazan and Gilbert Dahan (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 47–63. 23. Robert L. Fowler provides a succinct overview of the etymology and early attestations, as well as further bibliography, in his most useful discussion of the notion of the encyclopedia through the ages, “Encyclopaedias: Definitions and Theoretical Prob-

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lems,” in Pre-Modern Encyclopedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1–4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 3–29, 14–15 and 27–29. 24. Pliny, NH prologue 14. For the long-standing disagreement among classicists concerning the significance of this pair of Greek terms in antiquity, see the recent comments in Aude Doody, “Pliny’s Natural History: Enkuklios Paideia and the Ancient Encyclopedia,” Journal of the History of Ideas 70 (2009): 1–21, 10–17. A summary bibliography is provided in ibid., 10n21, 11n22. 25. François Rabelais, Pantagruel (1532), ed. Mireille Huchon, with the collaboration of François Moreau, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 290 (ch. 20). The word had first appeared in English a year earlier, in Sir Thomas Elyot’s The boke named The gouernour (1.13). 26. According to Blair, this usage first appeared in Latin in 1583, with an edition of Gregor Reisch’s Margarita philosophica (first published 1503), newly subtitled the perfectissima kyklopaideia. Its first appearances in English and French were much later: in 1728, with Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, and in 1751, with the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert. By this time, the word had already been applied to at least one scholastic text, the Speculum docrinale, the portion of the Speculum maius devoted to the arts and sciences. This volume is referred to on the title page of the 1624 Douai edition as the omnium artium et scientiarum perfecta Encyclopedia (Blair, TMTK, 168–71). 27. Though florilegus was used by Ovid to describe bees (Metamorphoses 15.366). For the generic term’s modern pedigree, see Hamesse, “Le vocabulaire des florilèges,” 209. 28. Le Goff, “Pourquoi,” 29. 29. Allen, EP, 87, 88. On the medieval version of Aristotle’s Poetics, see ibid., 19–38. 30. This is not to imply that there are no genres with medieval designators. In the field of vernacular literature, there are spectacular examples: the romance and the troubadour canso and sirventes. However, texts in these genres were produced in far larger numbers than were encyclopedias, constituting a critical mass that quickly became perceptible to the authors and their public. Only then, aer the textual tradition had established itself, did that community invent names for the genres in question. 31. See Hans Robert Jauss, “Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature” (1972), in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti, with an introduction by Paul de Man, THL 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 76–109. 32. Among the many scholars not working in the literary field who have demonstrated the discursive nature of medieval knowledge in their discipline, I would cite particularly Gabrielle M. Spiegel in history and Charles Burne in the history of science. 33. Quintilian (ca. 35–ca. 100 CE) cites lieratura as a synonym of grammatica (Institutionis oratoriae 2.1.4); the term refers either to writing in general or to the discipline of grammar, philology in the restricted sense. The adjective lieratus could have two meanings, corresponding to our literate, on the one hand, and our learned or well-read, on the other (Teeuwen, VIL, 94). A person who was lieratus had read a great deal, be the field poetry, philosophy, natural history, or mathematics; he or she was not exclusively a person who read a great deal of poetry or who had any particular appreciation for the aesthetic qualities of writing (Curtius, EL, 42). During the early Middle Ages, as the ability to speak Latin was gradually restricted to an educated, clerical elite, the term lieratus became more or less synonymous with clericus (clerk, cleric). Begin-

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ning in the late eleventh century, increasing numbers of lay people were educated in Latin, but the basic classical sense of lieratus as “literate” was not revived. The word maintained only the second of its classical senses, “well-read in Latin” (Teeuwen, VIL, 92–93). 34. For the vernacular text’s position on the fence between oral and literate cultures, troubadour lyric provides an instructive case. See esp. Laura Kendrick, The Game of Love: Troubadour Wordplay (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988); and Amelia Van Vleck, Memory and Re-Creation in Troubadour Lyric (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991). On the orality of the vernacular text in general, Paul Zumthor’s La lere et la voix: De la “liérature” médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1987) remains the classic study, while Joyce Coleman’s Public Reading and Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) shows the degree to which even literate communities in the later Middle Ages enjoyed and cultivated the “aurality” of texts. The early use of the vernacular in learned circles is described in Lusignan, Parler vulgairement. 35. James A. Weisheipl, “Classification of the Sciences in Medieval Thought,” Mediaeval Studies 27 (1965): 54–90, 54; Teeuwen, VIL, 358–60. 36. This is the central point of Allen’s EP, introduced in ch. 1. See also the medieval prefaces collected in Minnis and Sco, eds. and trans., Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, ch. 1. 37. The former term is employed by Dominicus Gundissalinus in the De divisione philosophiae (ca. 1150), the laer by Robert Kilwardby in the De ortu scientiarum (ca. 1250). See the De divisione 18.1–19.2 and the De ortu chs. 45–48 for a discussion of the status of these disciplines, as well as chapter 1 below. Weijers identifies the other scholastic writers who employ these terms and discusses the subtle differences in their terminology. See Olga Weijers [as Olga Weyers], “L’appellation des disciplines dans les classifications des sciences au XIIe et XIIIe siècles,” Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi 46–47 (1986–87): 39–64, 57–60. Poetics was not usually identified as a discipline apart (most considered it a component of grammatical study), but Ralph of Longchamp (ca. 1155–ca. 1215), a philosopher with a taste for poetry, does distinguish it from the discursive disciplines of the trivium (in his commentary on the Anticlaudianus [see Weijers, “Appellation,” 57]). 38. The citation, on which see chapter 2 below, comes from the prologue (ca. 1244) to the Speculum maius; the biblical source is Dan. 12:4. 39. In The Development of Physical Theory in the Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971), James A. Weisheipl introduces the diverse approaches to the physical sciences in the scholastic period. For a brief explanation of the differences between modern and medieval physical science, see esp. David C. Lindberg, ed., Science in the Middle Ages, Chicago History of Science and Medicine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), xi–xv. 40. Observation and experimentation have traditionally been aributed to the thirteenth-century thinkers Robert Grossetest, Albert the Great, and Roger Bacon, who have variously been credited with opening the way for modern science. However, if we strip aside legend, it is not always easy to tell how much of these writers’ observation is their own and how much they relate from their Greek and Arabic sources. For Grosseteste, the discussion in James McEvoy’s “Grosseteste’s Place in the History of

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Science” (in The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste [Oxford: Clarendon, 1982], 206–22) is most useful. 41. In “Textual Deference” (American Philosophical Quarterly 28, no. 1 [1991]: 1–12), Barry Smith argues that the elaboration of medieval philosophy through commentary indicates a much closer relation between the disciplines of literary criticism, law, theology, philosophy, and medicine than we admit today. 42. Hence the acknowledgment that there was no independent aesthetic category of literature in the Middle Ages cannot be called reductive because it allows us to see that what we appreciate in the “literary” (inventiveness, figuration, self-consciousness concerning form and style) was in fact far more pervasive in the medieval period than in the modern, influencing fields of thought from which it has since been banished. For this understanding of medieval writing, Allen’s account in EP, though now thirty years old, remains invaluable, as does Foucault’s discussion of the invention of the modern conception of literature in OT, ch. 2, esp. 43–44 / MC, 58–59. 43. See Brian Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelh Century: A Study of Bernard Silvester (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972); and Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelh Century: The Literary Influence of the School of Chartres (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972). 44. See Parkes, IC (1976); and Alastair Minnis, “Late Medieval Discussions of Compilatio and the Rôle of the Compilator,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache und Literatur 101 (1979): 385–421. See also Minnis’s more recent “Nolens auctor sed compilator reputari” (2006). 45. I have found especially thought provoking the work of Christel Meier on encyclopedias in general, of Heinz Meyer and Baudouin Van den Abeele on Bartholomeus Anglicus, and of Monique Paulmier-Foucart and other scholars on Vincent of Beauvais (for a fuller list, see chapter 2 below and the bibliography). 46. A few exceptional contributions do consider the interface between encyclopedic and imaginative writing. An early example is Robert Pring-Mill’s brilliant “Els recontaments de l’Arbre Exemplifical de Ramon Llull: La transmutacio de la ciencia en literatura” ([1976], reprinted in Estudis sobre Ramon Llull [1956–78] [Barcelona: Curial, 1991], 307–18), which may be partly responsible for the fact that scholars of Llull have more readily considered the formal or aesthetic aspects of his writing as integral to his philosophical practice, and vice versa (see, e.g., the work of Armand Llinarès, Anthony Bonner, Lola Badia, and Xavier Bonillo Hoyos). 47. In the opening pages of De natura rerum: Études sur les encyclopédies médiévales (Orléans: Paradigme, 1995), Bernard Ribémont decries the fact that the separation of disciplines in the modern university has kept literary scholars from reading encyclopedias; nevertheless, the binary paradigm by which he will link literary and encyclopedic writing is already implicit: “Pour les liéraires, qui oublient que les encyclopédies furent très lues par les écrivains médiévaux qui y cherchaient les informations, ces textes ne font en général pas partie de la ‘liérature,’ ressortant davantage du domaine de la ‘science’” (5). His later Liérature et encyclopédies du Moyen Âge (Orléans: Paradigme, 2002) does begin to articulate a more complex relation between literature and encyclopedism, but here as well he devotes his energies mainly to a series of fragmentary and highly localized studies of courtly writers’ borrowings from the contents, the information transmied by the encyclopedia. (Ribémont is only the latest in a long line

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of scholars who have aempted to project a modern distinction between science and literature on these medieval texts. For an influential precedent, see Michel de Boüard, “Encyclopédies médiévales: Sur la ‘connaisance de la nature du monde’ au Moyen Âge,” Revue des questions historiques 112 [1930]: 358–404.) 48. Ribémont, De natura rerum, 20. Later in this book, he elaborates: “L’encyclopédiste . . . ne prétend rien inventer. . . . Si l’on veut avoir une vision diachronique de l’encyclopédisme médiéval, il faut a priori se garder de procéder selon les schémas de progrès, de nouveauté. Si progrès il y a, il se fait en dehors du texte encyclopédique; lui ne fait qu’en rendre compte” (53). And further: “La dynamique de l’encyclopédisme est lancée par un mouvement culturel et scientifique dont les textes encyclopédiques ne forment qu’un relais second; cee dynamique ne peut donc s’animer réellement que dans un phénomène de réexploitation continue, éventuellement d’invention, mais dont les cadres sont fixés a priori” (59–60). It seems to me that the concept of the a priori is not reconcilable with Jauss’s theory of genres, dependent as this laer is on a series of texts rather than on a paradigm imposed from without. 49. Berel Lang, The Anatomy of Philosophical Style: Literary Philosophy and the Philosophy of Literature (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 2, 18. For an earlier reflection on the mutual dependency of form and idea in medieval theological writing, see M.-D. Chenu, Toward Understanding Saint Thomas, trans. A.-M. Landry and D. Hughes (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1964), ch. 2, esp. 79–80. 50. See esp. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 114, and Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 233. In the 1970s and 1980s, Foucault paid considerably more aention than he had in the 1960s to the role of nondiscursive practices in shaping the subject, so the claim that Foucault was entirely absorbed with the discursive, which was fair when White first began writing about Foucault in the early 1970s, is not really an accurate assessment of the French philosopher’s work as a whole. See Flynn, PMH, 34. 51. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 20. 52. For a brief, highly accessible presentation of Foucault’s archaeological methods (and the problems they raise), see Mark Poster, “The Future according to Foucault: The Archaeology of Knowledge and Intellectual History,” in Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives, ed. Dominick LaCapra and Steven Kaplan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 137–52. Fuller, very helpful accounts are Dreyfus and Rabinow, MF, 16–43; and Pamela Major-Poetzl, Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Western Culture: Toward a New Science of History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), esp. 149–200. 53. See, e.g., George Huppert, “Divinatio et Eruditio: Thoughts on Foucault,” History and Theory 13 (1974): 191–207; Major-Poetzl, Michel Foucault’s Archaeology, 149, 162, 168; Anne Clark Bartle, “Foucault’s Medievalism,” Mystics Quarterly 20, no. 1 (1994): 10–18, 15; David Cohen and Richard Saller, “Foucault on Sexuality in Greco-Roman Antiquity,” in Foucault and the Writing of History, ed. Jan Goldstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 35–59, 35; and Carolyn Dinshaw, Geing Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 191–206. In a later interview (1977), Foucault acknowledged “fictioning” history for political ends, a medieval move if ever there was one: “Je me rends bien compte que je n’ai jamais rien écrit que des

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fictions. Je ne veux pas dire pour autant que cela soit hors vérité. . . . On ‘fictionne’ de l’histoire à partir d’une réalité politique qui la rend vraie, on ‘fictionne’ une politique qui n’existe pas encore à partir d’une vérité historique” (“Les rapports de pouvoir passent à l’intérieur des corps,” in DE, 3:228–36, 236). Dinshaw discusses this approach to history, pointing out: “The utopian, the elegiac, what I have been calling the nostalgic, functions as part of a serious ethical and aesthetic vision of the present and future” (Geing Medieval, 200). This (circumscribed) defense of Foucault’s historiography fits with Dinshaw’s politically engaged study of sexualities and communities, but to my mind Foucault’s fictionalizations of the distant past are less defensible when, as in the OT, they make it into a monolithic Other whose sole apparent purpose is to allow the mise en relief of the complexities of modernity (on this function of the medieval in Foucault’s work, see also Paul Freedman and Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Medievalisms Old and New: The Rediscovery of Alterity in North American Medieval Studies,” American Historical Review 103 [1998]: 677–704, 698). 54. This kind of revision is perfectly in the spirit of Foucault, who was constantly reworking his own paradigms, as he acknowledged throughout his career. See, e.g., “Pouvoir et savoir” (1977), in DE, 2:399–414, 404–6; “Interview with Michel Foucault” (1980), in EWF, 3:239–97, 239–41; and “Entretien avec Michel Foucault,” in DE, 2:860–914, 860–61. Hence, while acknowledging the problems that his studies pose for medievalists, Karma Lochrie nevertheless suggests that “we can always follow the spirit if not the leer of Foucault” by “resisting the kind of monolithic dispositifs that Foucault consistently challenged” (“Desiring Foucault,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27 [1997]: 3–16, 13). 55. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), 3, 19, 39. For medievalists familiar with the work of Lee Paerson, this idea of dialogue may be compared to the laer’s “elaborate and endless negotiations [between ourselves and the past], struggles between desire and knowledge that can never be granted closure” (Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987], 72–73). Negotiating the Past was published before Hutcheon’s A Poetics of Postmodernism, but Paerson takes account of her work in the later “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies,” Speculum 65 (1990): 87–108, 90. Like both these scholars, I am wary of Lyotard’s conception of postmodernism, which would seem to make historical thought impossible (see, e.g., Paerson, “On the Margin,” 89–90). 56. Jan Goldstein, ed., Foucault and the Writing of History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Flynn, PMH. 57. Rosemann, USTF. In an earlier, wonderfully thought-provoking article, “Medieval Textuality and the Archaeology of Textual Culture” (in Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies, ed. Allen J. Frantzen [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991], 181–210), Martin Irvine had already sketched the outlines of an archaeological approach to medieval textuality. This would be the approach that he took in his The Making of Textual Culture: “Grammatica” and Literary Theory, 350–1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Most recently, Suzanne Conklin Akbari has also adapted Foucauldian archaeology; see her Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1450 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). Nevertheless, it is Foucault’s late writings on sexuality that have evoked the most sustained and explicit discussion by medievalists. In the field

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of literary criticism, one could cite, among many others, Dinshaw, Geing Medieval; and James A. Schultz, Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 58. Rosemann, USTF, ix. See, in a similar vein, Paerson, Negotiating the Past, x, 44–45; and Peter L. Allen, “A Frame for the Text? History, Literary Theory, Subjectivity, and the Study of Medieval Literature,” Exemplaria 3 (1991): 1–25. Defenses of the use of theory in medieval studies were common in the 1980s and 1990s; they are less so today, probably a sign that theoretical approaches have gained wider acceptance. Nevertheless, postmodern theory has had virtually no representation in some fields, among them medieval encyclopedism (the few exceptions of which I am aware are Minnis’s “Nolens auctor sed compilator reputari” and Sarah Kay’s recent work [listed in the bibliography]). Perhaps this is because encyclopedias still pose such great challenges to traditional philology that the topic tends to be chosen mainly by those whose interests and training are philological. In this situation, mutual misunderstandings between philology and theory are, unfortunately, still possible. 59. Roger Chartier, “The Chimera of the Origin: Archaeology, Cultural History, and the French Revolution,” in Goldstein, ed., Foucault and the Writing of History, 167–86, 185. 60. Paul Veyne, “Foucault Revolutionizes History,” trans. Catherine Porter, in Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 146–82, 159. For a further discussion of Foucault’s nominalism, see John Rajchman, Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 50–60; and Flynn, PMH, ch. 2. The laer describes it as “a kind of methodological individualism”: “It treats collectives such as socioeconomic class and the State or abstractions like ‘man’ and ‘power’ as reducible, for purposes of explanation, to the individuals that comprise them” (ibid., 32). 61. Gilles Deleuze, “What Is a Dispositif?” in Michel Foucault, Philosopher, ed. Tim J. Armstrong (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 166. 62. Foucault understood this emphasis on the discontinuous to be what distinguished his work from that of more traditional historians and allied him with those who were revising the disciplinary methodology. See esp. AK, 9 / AdS, 17. Flynn has pointed out that Foucault was ultimately more interested in the transformations that led to discontinuity than in the fact of discontinuity itself (PMH, 120). If many scholars have overlooked this interest (see, e.g., Jean Piaget, as cited in White, Tropics of Discourse, 251), it is probably owing to Foucault’s insistence on discontinuity in AK. 63. Armstrong and Kay, KP. 64. Foucault, OT, 9–10 / MC, 25. 65. Michel Foucault, “This Is Not a Pipe” (1968), in EWF, 2:187–203, 191 / “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” in DE, 1:663–78, 667. 66. See Michel Foucault, “On the Archaeology of the Sciences: Response to the Epistemology Circle” (1968), in EWF, 2:297–333, 308 / “Sur l’archéologie des sciences: Réponse au Cercle d’épistémologie,” in DE, 1:724–59, 735, and AK, 100 / AdS, 132. In AK, Foucault goes on to complicate the idea of the material medium through which statements are made by claiming that some possess a “repeatable materiality,” a claim that he elaborates in a discussion (AK, 102 / AdS, 134–35) that reveals his uer ignorance of the significance of textual criticism. I do not have space here to pursue this topic, but readers seeking an explanation of the importance of textual criticism to literary and

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historical studies can begin with Jerome J. McGann’s luminous The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985). The problems that textual critics face when working with manuscript texts, and the diverse solutions that they have devised, are helpfully summarized by Alfred Foulet and Mary Blakely Speer in “A Historical Orientation,” in On Editing Old French Texts (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1979), 1–39. Discussions of the theoretical implications of the various approaches to textual criticism include Lee Paerson, “The Logic of Textual Criticism and the Way of Genius,” in Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 55–91; and David F. Hult, “Reading It Right: The Ideology of Text Editing,” in The New Medievalism, ed. Marina S. Brownlee, Kevin Brownlee, and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 113–30. 67. Deleuze, Foucault, 64–65. 68. Foucault, OT, 43, 33 / MC, 58, 48. 69. Foucault, “Les mots et les images,” in DE, 1:648–51, 650. 70. Insofar as it emphasizes the visual form and context of the wrien word, the present study is deeply indebted to the New Philology or what Stephen Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel have dubbed material philology. One of the guiding principals of this (no longer so) new approach is that medieval texts cannot be adequately understood apart from their individual manuscript realizations. For a description of the New Philologists’ philosophy and methodology, see Stephen G. Nichols, ed., “The New Philology,” special issue, Speculum 65, no. 1 (1990): esp. 7–8. “If one considers only the dimensions of the medieval illuminated manuscript, it is evident that philological practices that have treated the manuscript from the perspective of text and language alone have seriously neglected the important supplements that were part and parcel of medieval text production: visual images and annotation of various forms (rubrics, ‘captions,’ glosses, and interpolations)” (ibid., 7). Nevertheless, Sarah Kay has pointed out the danger of forgeing that the study of the material artifact also “passes through interpretive grids, those of perception and language” (“The New Philology,” NML 3 [1999]: 295–326, 318). Her analytic survey of the New Philology should be read in tandem with the work of Nichols. 71. See, e.g., Foucault, “On the Archaeology of the Sciences,” 308 / “Sur l’archéologie des sciences,” 735. 72. Foucault, AK, 121–22 / AdS, 160. The problem is treated extensively in Dreyfus and Rabinow, MF, xxiv, 17, 57–58. Also helpful are the discussions in Deleuze, Foucault, 9–10; and Flynn, PMH, 136–37. 73. Compare Foucault, AK, 60, 62 / AdS, 81, 83, an inconsistency pointed out in Dreyfus and Rabinow, MF, 70. 74. Foucault, “Pouvoir et savoir,” 402. 75. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 18 / Histoire de sexualité 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 26–27. 76. Deleuze, Foucault, 17. 77. Stock, Implications of Literacy, pt. 2. For the abstract definition of textual communities, see ibid., 90. 78. The degree to which various thirteenth-century thinkers were Aristotelian or Augustinian has been maer for scholarly debate, and I do not wish to oversimplify

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the issue, but I cannot enter into the particulars here. For Bonaventure, I follow the assessment of Etienne Gilson in The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure (trans. Illtyd Trethowan and F. J. Sheed [New York: Sheed & Ward, 1938]) (for a summary of Gilson’s argument concerning Bonaventure’s use of Aristotle, see ibid., 2–10), admiedly an older piece of scholarship than Van Steenberghen’s The Philosophical Movement, which suggests that Bonaventure and Albert held similar positions on Aristotle (lecture 4). Not everyone finds Van Steenberghen’s argument on this point convincing. See, e.g., the discussion in Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought, 243–46. For a recent summary of the debate by a scholar who sides with Gilson, see Christopher M. Cullen, Bonaventure, Great Medieval Thinkers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 79. Again, there is ongoing discussion among scholars concerning the nature of these encyclopedists’ allegiances, Aristotelian or Neoplatonist. Vincent, at least, strikes me as a lile of both: conservative in his organizational schemas (see chapter 2 below), and not the kind of intellectual trailblazer who would forge forward to wrestle with the difficulties of Aristotle, but nevertheless susceptible, through the practice of compilatio, to the Philosopher’s influence, either directly or indirectly, through other classical and scholastic writers (see esp. Charles Burne, “The Coherence of the Arabic-Latin Translation Program in Toledo in the Twelh Century,” Science in Context 14 [2001]: 249–88; Alain Naudeau, “Le statut des extraits du De homine dans le Speculum naturale de Vincent de Beauvais,” in Albert le Grand et sa réception au Moyen Âge: Hommage à Zénon Kaluza, ed. Fr. Cheneval, R. Imbach, and Th. Ricklin [Fribourg: Freiburger Zeitschri für Philosophie und Theologie, 1998], 84–95; and Eva Albrecht, “Excursus: Aristotle and Other Greek and Arabic Scientific Sources in Three Thirteenth-Century Latin Encyclopedias,” in The Medieval Hebrew Encyclopedias of Science and Philosophy, ed. Steven Harvey [Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2000], 58–70). The mendicant encyclopedists would thus represent a textual community in the process of transformation. 80. White, Tropics of Discourse, 238. Poster observes that, paradoxically, the task of writing about Foucauldian archaeology obliges one to have recourse to precisely the notions of author and subject that Foucault ostensibly rejected (“The Future according to Foucault,” 152). Foucault’s inadequately theorized approach to authors in OT occasioned considerable criticism, to which he responded in the now classic “What Is an Author?” (1969), in EWF, 2:205–22 / “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” in DE, 1:817–49, which also includes a critique of the notion of the oeuvre (in the sense of a body of works aributed to a single author). Authorship in the Middle Ages has been treated extensively in Alastair J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Aitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London: Scholar, 1984). For the peculiarities of the “author function” in the Middle Ages, also very helpful is Sarah Kay, “Who Was Chrétien de Troyes?” Arthurian Literature 15 (1997): 1–35. 81. In “What Is a ‘Book’? Some Post-Foucauldian Ruminations (a Prolegomenon),” Journal of Scholarly Publishing 34 (2003): 182–97, an article that medievalists could productively ponder, David Greetham has posed a question that has recently been reiterated in Alexandra Gillespie, “The History of the Book,” NML 9 (2007): 245–86. The laer argues that, despite the considerable interest in this field, the relation between manuscript books and print books remains inadequately explored, compromising any larger claims about the history of the book, generally speaking. 82. John Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the “Libro de buen amor” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 22. Huot’s RRMR, a

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study of the manuscripts of the Roman de la Rose, beautifully demonstrates the way late medieval readers responded to and reshaped one of the primary texts dealt with in the present study. Her book could thus be taken as a demonstration of the way the unity of the author / oeuvre breaks down in medieval textual transmission. 83. See Vincent of Beauvais, SD 1.33, De illis qui omnia legere volunt (Concerning those who want to read everything), for a number of well-chosen dicta on the impossibility and dangers of the enterprise. For Foucault’s refusal to acknowledge such limitations, see Foucault, “The Order of Things,” in EWF, 2:261–67, 262–63 / “Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses,” in DE, 1:526–32, 527. Introduction to Part I 1. Foucault, AK, 128 / AdS, 169. 2. Knowledge here in the sense of “denotation” and “description,” i.e., statements of truth. We shall have reason in pts. 2 and (esp.) 3 to expand this notion of knowledge to include an ethical and aesthetic competence, as described by Jean-François Lyotard (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, THL 10 [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984], 18). I do not have space here to linger over questions about Foucault’s notion of the statement, though it raises many. See the French philosopher’s via negativa definition of the statement in AK, 79–87 / AdS, 105–15. See also the helpful discussion in Dreyfus and Rabinow, MF, 45–58. 3. On the enunciative field, see Foucault, AK, 96–100 / AdS, 126–31. The reader is advised that the section devoted to the enunciative field in the English translation begins with an error that renders all that follows it incomprehensible: in fact, the third characteristic of the enunciative function is that “it can[not] operate without the existence of an associated domain” (AK, 96), i.e., in the French, “[la fonction énonciative] ne peut s’exercer sans l’existence d’un domaine associé” (AdS, 126). 4. Foucault in fact once referred to himself in an interview as a cartographer (“Sur la sellee” [1975], in DE, 1:1588–93, 1593). On philosophical history as cartography, see Flynn, PMH, 139–42. 5. Foucault, AK, 129 / AdS, 171. See also Michel Foucault, “On the Archaeology of the Sciences: Response to the Epistemology Circle” (1968), in EWF, 2:297–333 / “Sur l’archéologie des sciences: Réponse au Cercle d’épistémologie,” in DE, 1:724–59: “I shall call an archive, not the totality of texts that have been preserved by a civilization or the set of traces that could be salvaged from its downfall, but the series of rules which determine in a culture the appearance and disappearance of statements, their retention and destruction, their paradoxical existence as events and things” (ibid., 309 / 736). 6. Martin Irvine, “Medieval Textuality and the Archaeology of Textual Culture,” in Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies, ed. Allen J. Frantzen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 181–210, 183–84. Chapter 1 1. While I cite the Libre de meravelles from OSRL, there are also older editions by Salvador Galmés (in the ENC series) and by Miquel Batllori (in the invaluable collection of Llull’s more literary texts [OE, 1:309–511]). Bonner’s edition lightly modernizes the

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orthography and is not based on consultation of all the manuscripts, but he uses five manuscripts, more than the two consulted by Galmés (following the practice of the editors for OE, Batllori does not indicate which or how many manuscripts he used). A true critical edition by Badia for the NEORL series is announced. Seven medieval manuscripts of the Catalan text survive, of which the earliest may date to around the year 1300; the greatest number (four) are from the fieenth century (Anthony Bonner, “Estadístiques sobre la recepció de l’obra de Ramon Llull,” SL 43 [2003]: 83–92; Xavier Bonillo Hoyos, Literatura al “Llibre de meravelles” de Ramon Llull [Barcelona: Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, 2008], 19–20). Despite speculation among early scholars of Llull, there is no evidence that a Latin version ever existed. However, of all Llull’s texts, the Libre de meravelles was transmied in the greatest number of vernacular languages: French, Italian, and Castilian translations survive from the Middle Ages. The French translation may have been made very early; on the basis of archaic traits in the language and linguistic analogies between the Livre de merveilles and the other French translations of Llull’s texts, all of which date to the late thirteenth century or the early fourteenth, Gret Schib suggests that the former, too, may have been part of this campaign of translation, contemporary with Llull’s own life, and possibly undertaken with his blessing; see Traduction française du “Libre de meravelles” de Ramon Llull, ed. Gret Schib (Scha@ausen: Buchdruckerei Bolli, Böcherer AG Scha@ausen, 1969), 15, 24, 25–38; and also Hillgarth, RLL, 153–54. Unfortunately, the Old French version has not been edited in its entirety. Schib’s edition includes the prologue, bks. 4–6, and the final chapters. The seventh book, the famous Book of the Beasts, has been edited by G. E. Sansone (Rome, 1964) and Armand Llinarès (Paris, 1964). For a modern English translation of this and many of the other Lullian texts treated in the current study, see Bonner, trans., SWRL, which constitutes the essential point of entry into Llull’s writings for readers not at ease with Catalan. The Libre de meravelles has also been translated into a number of other modern languages. For recent interpretations of the Libre de meravelles, see Fernando Domínguez Reboiras, “Una lectura del Llibre de meravelles como ars praedicandi,” Caplletra 43 (2007): 131–60; and Bonillo Hoyos, Literatura. 2. British Library Add. MS 16428, fols. 92r–v. The manuscript dates to 1386, but the underlining may be later. 3. Scholars apparently misread a hypothetical statement from the rambling introductory epistle that Joan Bonlabii contributed to the 1521 Valencian edition of the Blanquerna (now available in facsimile as no. 3 of the Biblioteca Hispánica Puvill series [Valencia, 1975]). Both twentieth-century editors of the Libre de meravelles seem to assume that Bonlabii had actually seen the book; they cite him alone in their notes about the “lost” book (LM, 4:327; OE, 1:510n38). 4. Anthony Bonner, “Notes de bibliografia i cronologia lul·lianes,” ELL 12 (1980): 71–86, 71–73. 5. Art historians have proved particularly sensitive to the import of such representations. Gerald Guest, e.g., argues that images of books in the Bibles moralisées should be “seen as a mixture of artistic convention, ideological assertion, and pictorial fantasy” and that we should interpret them as a complex “model of thought” (“Authorizing the Toledo Moralized Bible: Exegesis and the Gothic Matrix,” Word and Image 18 [2002]: 231–51, 231). Also relevant is Michael Camille, “Visual Signs of the Sacred Page: Books in the Bible moralisée,” Word and Image 5 (1989): 111–30. Helpful, more general treatments of images of books and scrolls in medieval art are provided in Michael

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Camille, “Seeing and Reading: Some Visual Implications of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy,” Art History 8 (1985): 26–49; and Walter Cahn, “Représentation de la parole,” Connaissance des arts, November 1982, 82–89. The Bibles moralisées will remain a point of comparison throughout the present study; heading the essential bibliography is now John Lowden, The Making of the Bibles moralisées, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). 6. For the print / manuscript sources from which I cite the Speculum maius, see the explanatory notes in the front maer. Paulmier-Foucart has provided a French translation of the (as yet unedited) second version of the prologue: VBGM, 147–73. No English translation of any version is currently available. The criticisms to which Vincent responds in the prologue appear to have borne on the encyclopedia’s length, its coverage of fields in which Vincent was not an expert, its inclusion of selections from pagan poets and philosophers and apocryphal texts, and the way in which certain texts were quoted. Our only testimony for these criticisms is the prologue itself, where Vincent mentions real and possible ones but never identifies his critics, present or anticipated. See LA chs. 4, 7–10, 16, 19; as well as ch. 11 of the version accompanying the tripartite encyclopedia, Lusignan, ed., PSM, 132–33. 7. What must be le aside in this overview—because these topics are only tangential to encyclopedism—are the oral pedagogical practices of scholasticism and their development into various literary forms. Interested readers can find presentations elsewhere, beginning with Bernardo C. Bazàn, “La quaestio disputata,” J.-G. Bougerol, “De la reportatio à la redactio,” and J. F. Wippel, “The Quodlibetal Question as a Distinctive Literary Genre,” all in GLSTP, 31–49, 51–65, 67–84; Martin Grabmann, Die Geschichte der scholastischen Methode, 2 vols. (1909–11; reprint, Basel: Schwabe, 1961), vol. 2; Bernardo C. Bazàn, Les questions disputées et les questions quodlibétiques dans les facultés de théologie, de droit et de médicine (Turnhout: Brepols, 1985); and Olga Weijers, La “disputatio” à la Faculté des arts de Paris (1200–1350 environ): Esquisse d’une typologie (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995), and MSPI. Encyclopedism does connect with oral practices in predication; encyclopedias were oen exploited in the preparation of sermons, and their utility for pastors likely contributed much to the texts’ success (Jacques Berlioz and Marie-Anne Polo de Beaulieu, “Les recueils d’exempla et la diffusion de l’encyclopédisme médiéval,” in EMAC, 179–212). For an introduction to medieval predication, see Marianne G. Briscoe and Barbara H. Jaye, Artes praedicandi and Artes orandi (Turnhout: Brepols, 1992); and Beverly Mayne Kienzle, ed., The Sermon (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000). 8. See esp. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, published by Charles Bailly and Albert Séchehaye, with the collaboration of Albert Riedlinger, critical edition prepared by Tullio de Mauro (Paris: Payot, 1998), 158–62. 9. In addition to the editions of Bonlabii, Galmés, and Batllori, cited in nn. 1 and 3 above, there are Miquel Colom Mateu, who draws from this passage in the Libre de meravelles the only examples of the second definition of figura in his glossary of Lullian usage, “Imatges o dibuixos amb què s’illustra el text d’un llibre o altre escrit” (Glossari General Lul·lià, 5 vols. [Mallorca: Editorial Moll, 1983], 2:456–57), and Bonner, who translates the passage in such a way as to make his interpretation of figures as “illustrations” clear (SWRL, 2:865–66). 10. For other pages from the autograph manuscript of the Liber floridus, see figs. 4–5 below. Eight medieval copies, full or partial, survive, as does a French translation

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from 1512. Albert Derolez has edited a facsimile / diplomatic edition of the autograph manuscript, Ghent, Rijksuniversiteit, MS 92 (see Liber floridus, codex autographus bibliothecae universitatis gandavensis [Ghent: Story-Scientia, 1968]). The definitive codicological study of the Liber is Albert Derolez, The Autograph Manuscript of the “Liber Floridus”: A Key to the Encyclopedia of Lambert of Saint-Omer, Corpus Christianorum Autographa Medii Aevi, 4 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998). For a critical bibliography of earlier scholarship, see ibid., 5–8. Particularly significant for placing the Liber in the context of medieval encyclopedic writing are Fritz Saxl, “Illustrated Mediaeval Encyclopaedias” (lecture, Warburg Institute, 1939), printed in Lectures, 2 vols. (London, 1957), 1:228–54; and Yves Lefèvre, “Le Liber Floridus et la liérature encyclopédique au Moyen Âge,” in “Liber Floridus” Colloquium: Papers Read at the International Meeting Held in the University Library Ghent on 3–5 September 1967, ed. Albert Derolez (Ghent: E. Story-Scientia, 1973), 1–9. The fullest treatment of the Liber floridus’s transmission remains Léopold Delisle, Notice sur les manuscrits du “Liber Floridus” de Lambert, Chanoine de Saint-Omer, Publications de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-leres (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale / Klincksieck, 1906). More recent work has moderated some of Delisle’s assertions while contributing significant new information. See Gerard Isaac Lieinck, “Observations codicologiques sur le groupe W des manuscrits du Liber Floridus,” in Derolez, ed., “Liber Floridus” Colloquium (Ghent: E. Story-Scientia, 1973), 31–36; and J. Peter Gumbert, “Recherches sur le stemma des copies du Liber Floridus,” in ibid., 37–50. 11. Richard de Fournival, Le bestiaire d’amour et la response du bestiaire, ed. Gabriel Biancioo, Champion Classiques—Moyen Âge, 27 (Paris: Champion, 2009), 154–56. Mary Carruthers provides a perceptive commentary on this passage in The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 223–24. Helen Solterer discusses Richard’s manipulation of the senses in “Leer Writing and Picture Reading: Medieval Textuality and the Bestiaire d’Amour,” Word and Image 5 (1989): 131–47. For further scholarship on Richard, see n. 102 below. 12. Stephen G. Nichols has extensively studied the role of the nonverbal—specifically, of illustration—in medieval manuscripts. See esp. his “‘Art’ and ‘Nature’: Looking for (Medieval) Principles of Order in Occitan Chansonnier N (Morgan 819),” in The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany, ed. Stephen G. Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 83–121, “The Image as Textual Unconscious: Medieval Manuscripts,” L’esprit créateur 29, no. 1 (1989): 7–23, and “Reading and Seeing: Troubadours in a Manuscript Context,” Poetica 38 (2006): 297–328. 13. Priscian, Institutionum grammaticarum volumen maius, ed. Augustus Krehl, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Libraria Weidmannia, 1819), 1.6. For scholastic usage, see, e.g., Hugh of SaintVictor, DS 2.28: “Liera proprie est figura que scribitur” [Properly speaking, the leer is a wrien figure]. 14. On the development and variations of Gothic script, there is now Albert Derolez, The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books: From the Twelh to the Early Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). For a broader survey of scripts and the purposes for which they were used, Bernard Bischoff, Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Daibhm O. Cróinin and David Ganz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), is still invaluable. On the hierarchy of scripts in Carolingian manuscripts, see esp. Rosamond McKierick, “Text and Image in the

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Carolingian World,” in The Uses of Literacy in Early Mediaeval Europe, ed. Rosamond McKierick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 297–318, 301–4. 15. Hugh of Saint-Victor, De tribus maximis circumstantiis gestorum, ed. William M. Green, Speculum 18 (1943): 484–93, 490. 16. See Mary Carruthers, The Cra of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and The Book of Memory; M. B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Aldershot: Scolar, 1992); Paul Saenger, Space between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading, Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); and the essays collected in MEP. Huot demonstrates how the visual evidence provided by manuscripts can shape and enrich the interpretation of a medieval text in RRMR. For a more general discussion of the visual aspect of medieval reading, see Jacqueline Hamesse, “The Scholastic Model of Reading,” M. B. Parkes, “Reading, Copying and Interpreting a Text in the Early Middle Ages,” and Paul Saenger, “Reading in the Later Middle Ages,” in A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Amherst: University of Massachuses Press, 1999), 103–19, 90–102, 120–48. For an excellent bibliography on medieval reading, see ibid., 449–53. 17. Martha Rust, Imaginary Worlds in Medieval Books: Exploring the Manuscript Matrix (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 19. 18. In addition to its rhetorical and exegetical acceptations, medieval Latin historia could be synonymous with figura or imago (GMIL, s.v. historia) and could designate a narrative program of manuscript painting. The Catalan similarly intersects with narrative painting (Diccionari Català-Valencià-Balear, ed. Antoni M. Alcover, 10 vols. [Palma de Mallorca: Editorial Moll, 1993], s.v. història). Llull also understood enough French to remain current with literature of the court in Paris, and the French hystoire was as polysemic as its Latin and Catalan cognates. See Jacqueline Cerquiglini, “Histoire, image: Accord et discord des sens à la fin du Moyen Âge,” Liérature 74 (1989): 110–26. Cerquiglini deals principally with Middle French usage but also cites such earlier texts as Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amour. 19. Richard de Fournival, Le bestiaire d’amour, 158. 20. The definitive study of the development of word separation is Saenger, Space between Words. 21. It is not necessary or even advisable to aribute a single, rather literal-minded meaning to the word in this passage. The principle of the lectio difficilior would dictate instead that we aempt to understand the role of the word’s polyvalence in this description of the encyclopedia. 22. Erich Auerbach, “Figura” (1938), in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays (New York: Meridian, 1959), 11–76. 23. On Llull’s usage of figura, see esp. Thomàs Carreras i Artau, “L’obra i el pensament de R. Llull,” in OE, 1:55–68, 61. Notably, Llull also used the term to describe Christ, as Robert D. Hughes shows in “Speculum, Similitude, and Signification: The Incarnation as Exemplary and Proportionate Sign in the Arts of Ramon Llull,” SL 45–46 (2005–6): 3–37, 12–20. 24. For the Art of Finding Truth, see chapter 3 below. For the purposes of its figures, see Bonner, ALRL, esp. 23–24. However, as Bonner has observed elsewhere, the descrip-

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tion of the Libre de plasent visió does not seem to indicate this particular kind of figure (Anthony Bonner, “Notes de bibliografia i cronologia lul·lianes,” ELL 12 [1980]: 71–86, 71). 25. Quintilian, Institutionis oratoriae libri duodecimi, ed. M. Winterboom, Oxford Classical Texts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 9.1.4. 26. For Augustine’s semiotics and hermeneutics, see, among others, R. A. Markus, “St. Augustine on Signs,” Phronesis 2 (1957): 60–83, reprinted in Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R. A. Markus (New York: Anchor, 1972), 61–91; B. Darrell Jackson, “The Theory of Signs in St. Augustine’s De doctrina christiana,” Revue des études augustiniennes 15 (1969): 9–49, reprinted in ibid., 92–147; Cornelius Petrus Mayer, Die Zeichen in der geistigen Entwicklung und in der Theologie des jungen Augustinus (Würzburg: Augustinus-Verlag, 1969); Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pt. 2; and Isabelle Bochet, “Le firmament de l’écriture”: L’herméneutique augustinienne (Paris: Institut d’études augustiniennes, 2004). On the De doctrina, there is an invaluable anthology, “De doctrina christiana”: A Classic of Western Culture, ed. Duane W. H. Arnold and Pamela Bright (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995). 27. The argument of this and the following paragraph is inspired by Jacques Le Goff (“Pourquoi le XIIIe siècle a-t-il été plus particulièrement un siècle d’encyclopédisme?” in EMAC, 23–40, 31), but I have reformulated his explanation of Augustine’s transformative role to beer reflect the content and context of the De doctrina. 28. The Antiquitates has not survived, nor has Varro’s most wide-ranging effort, the Disciplinae libri IX (ca. 34–33 BCE), which seems to have been truly encyclopedic in its treatment of nine distinct disciplines, discursive (the trivium), mathematical (the quadrivium), and practical (medicine and architecture). It would have been the only text of this period to fully bridge the divide between the discussion of objects in the world and that of sign systems, although the discussion of the laer in only the books relating to the trivium would have made this text very different from Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, in which a sustained reflection on words shapes even the discussion of objects in the world. Nevertheless, what Varro really wrote and what genre he intended remains obscure. I. Hadot has recently questioned the contents of the Disciplinae in Arts libéraux et philosophie dans la pensée antique (Paris: Institut d’études augustiniennes, 1984), but see the response to Hadot in Danuta R. Shanzer, “Augustine’s Disciplines: Silent diutius Musae Varronis?” in Augustine and the Disciplines: From Cassiciacum to Confessions, ed. Karla Pollmann and Mark Vessey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 69–112. More importantly, in the present context, Aude Doody has recently questioned whether any of Varro’s texts constituted encyclopedic efforts, as has generally been assumed (see “Pliny’s Natural History: Enkuklios Paideia and the Ancient Encyclopedia,” Journal of the History of Ideas 70 [2009]: 1–21). 29. See M. Reydellet, “La diffusion des Origines d’Isidore de Séville au Haut Moyen Âge,” Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire publiés par l’École française de Rome 78 (1966): 383–437. Saxl (“Illustrated Medieval Encyclopedias”) argues that an early program of illustrations accompanied the text. 30. Hrabanus Maurus, De universo, PL 111, col. 8. The PL reproduces the text of the fieenth-century edition of Adolf Rusch. William Schipper has announced a new edition, under the more correct title De rerum naturis, forthcoming in the Brepols’s CCCM series.

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31. Ernst Robert Curtius’s “The Book as Symbol” (in EL, 302–47) remains an excellent overview of book symbolism in the Middle Ages (and beyond). 32. See, e.g., Confessiones 13.15.16, 18.22; as well as Bochet, “Le firmament de l’écriture.” 33. I here employ the term paradigm in the sense that Thomas S. Kuhn elaborated, as a piece of scientific work that is recognized by the scientific community to be an exemplar of good practice and that guides new scientific work in any given period. Kuhn understood these models to function nondiscursively and without recourse to the explicit formulation of rules (see The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996], 192), whereas Foucault, whose notion of discourse is in other ways quite similar, was interested in the rules that can be extrapolated from the discursive practices of a science or discipline (the contrast between Kuhn and Foucault and the laer’s misunderstanding of the former are discussed in Dreyfus and Rabinow, MF, 60, 65–67, 76–78). 34. Macrobius, Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis, ed. J. Willis, BSGR (Leipzig: Teubner, 1970), 1.2.17–18. 35. “Est autem allegoria oratio sub historica narratione verum et ab exteriori diversum involuens intellectum, ut de lucta Jacob. Integumentum vero est oratio sub fabulosa narratione verum claudens intellectum, ut de Orpheo. Nam et ibi historia et hic fabula misterium habent occultum. . . . Allegoria quidem divine pagine, integumentum vero philosophice competit.” The text being commented on here is Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae (470s–480s?), a difficult text to which Danuta Shanzer has provided a helpful introduction in A Philosophical and Literary Commentary on Martianus Capella’s “De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii,” Book 1 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986). For a discussion of this passage and of the use of allegoria and integumentum in the twelh century, see Brian Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelh Century: A Study of Bernard Silvester (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 31–62. Integumentum and involucrum are discussed in the still useful M. D. Chenu, “Involucrum, Le mythe selon les théologiens médiévaux,” AHDL 30 (1955): 75–79; and Edouard Jeauneau, “L’usage de la notion d’integumentumn à travers les gloses de Guillaume de Conches,” AHDL 32 (1957): 35–100. For the reliance of twelhcentury writers on figurative modes of reasoning in general, the classic treatment is M. D. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelh Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Lile (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), ch. 3. Winthrop Wetherbee (Platonism and Poetry in the Twelh Century: The Literary Influence of the School of Chartres [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972], 16) emphasizes the distinction between metaphoric / rationalist approaches, by which thinkers extrapolated knowledge of God from the study of the structure and laws of universe, and symbolic ones, which proceeded anagogically to a mystical understanding. He nevertheless acknowledges that “the symbolist and rationalist points of view were closely interrelated, and appear at times to be virtually indistinguishable,” while insisting that “the differences between them provided the occasion for an ongoing debate which affected every area of twelh-century thought.” See also Winthrop Wetherbee, “The Function of Poetry in the ‘De planctu Naturae’ of Alain de Lille,” Traditio 25 (1969): 87–125, 91–99. 36. For a general introduction to learned translation in the scholastic period, see David C. Lindberg, “The Transmission of Greek and Arabic Learning to the West,”

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Notes to Pages 50–52

in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg, Chicago History of Science and Medicine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 52–90; Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny, “Translations and Translators,” in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelh Century, ed. R. L. Benson and G. Constable (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 421–62; and Charles Burne, “The Coherence of the Arabic-Latin Translation Program in Toledo in the Twelh Century,” Science in Context 14 (2001): 249–88. This last argues that the translations coming out of Toledo were being produced according to a conscious plan to provide the foundational texts for disciplines underrepresented in the Latin literature. 37. For an overview of the Latin translations and translators of Aristotelian and pseudo-Aristotelian texts as well as the numbers of surviving manuscripts, see Bernard G. Dod, “Aristoteles latinus,” in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism, 1100–1600, ed. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 45–79. Charles Lohr provides an introduction to the scholastic reception of Aristotle in “The Medieval Interpretation of Aristotle,” in ibid., 80–98. My exposition of Aristotelian thought and methods largely follows those of Stephen F. Mason, A History of the Sciences, rev. ed. (New York: Collier, 1962), 41–46; James A. Weisheipl, The Development of Physical Theory in the Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971); Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 87–91; and Patricia Fara, Science: A Four Thousand Year History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 28–29 and, for the scholastic reception of Aristotle, 77–83. However, in the subsequent notes, I provide more extensive references to Aristotelian texts than do these authors, using Aristotle, Complete Works (Revised Oxford Translation), ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols., Bollingen Series 71, pt. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). 38. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1013a–1014a (5.2; translation 2:1600–1601). 39. See Aristotle’s discussion of how one should study the natural world in the opening chapter of On the Parts of Animals 639a–642b (translation 1:994–1000). 40. This comparative methodology is set out in Aristotle, History of Animals 588a– 589a (8.1; translation 1:921–22). 41. Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals 760b (3.10; translation 1:1178). 42. Aristotle, On the Soul 427b (3.3; translation 1:680). 43. A doctrine that Augustine would develop in the De Magistro, ch. 11, and the De Trinitate, bk. 12. 44. Here, my understanding of why Aristotle was read voraciously but to so lile effect by scholastics interested in natural history differs from those of Mason (A History of the Sciences, 117) and Mayr (The Growth of Biological Thought, 92), who aribute the phenomenon to the strong rationalist tendencies of the period. Aristotle, too, was a rationalist, and he observed nature. The scholastics, on the other hand, simply could not get out of the library. 45. The idea that the thirteenth century saw the triumph of Aristotelian natural history over the symbolic tradition is most clearly articulated in Michel de Boüard, “Encyclopédies médiévales: Sur la ‘connaisance de la nature du monde’ au Moyen Âge,” Revue des questions historiques 112 (1930): 358–404, which has remained influential despite its early date.

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46. Bruno Roy, “La trente-sixième main: Vincent de Beauvais et Thomas de Cantimpré,” in VBIR, 241–51, 247–48. 47. Monique Paulmier-Foucart, “Une des tâches de l’encyclopédiste, intituler: Les titres des chapitres du Speculum naturale de Vincent de Beauvais,” in EMAC, 147–62, 153. 48. See F. J. E. Raby, “Nuda Natura and Twelh-Century Cosmology,” Speculum 43 (1968): 72–77. 49. In a 1215 leer to University of Paris masters and students, Cardinal Robert of Courçon informed the arts faculty that rhetoric could be taught only on holidays; the discipline was not mentioned at all in this faculty’s statutes in 1255 or in later documents of this kind (Weijers, MSPI, 9–15). For speculative grammar, see e Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ch. 13. 50. Bonaventure, Breviloquium 2.12, in Opera omnia, 10 vols. (Quaracchi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1882–1902), 5:230. 51. Heinz Meyer (Die Enzyklopädie des Bartholomäus Anglicus: Untersuchungen zur Überlieferungs- und Rezeptionsgeschichte von De Proprietatibus Rerum [Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2000], esp. 205–23, 283–96) has brought to light the importance of this program of glosses, which had long been obscured by their absence from the printed versions of the text. On the glosses, see also, among others, Heinz Meyer, “Zum Verhältnis von Enzyklopädik und Allegorese im Mielalter,” Frühmielalterliche Studien 24 (1990): 290–313; and Baudouin Van den Abeele, “Simbolismo sui margini: Le moralizzazioni del De proprietatibus rerum di Bartolomeo Anglico,” in Simbolismo animale e leeratura, ed. Dora Faraci (Rome: Vecchiarelli, 2003), 159–83. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be any way to know the glosses’ origin, but, since they are present in the majority of early manuscripts and do not vary in any more than the occasional slips produced by copying, they must have been created either by Bartholomeus himself or by someone closely involved in the redaction or diffusion of the encyclopedia. Van den Abeele has recently drawn aention to an analogous series of glosses in some manuscripts of Thomas of Cantimpré’s encyclopedia (see “Diffusion et avatars d’une encyclopédie: Le Liber de natura rerum de Thomas de Cantimpré,” in Une lumière venue d’ailleurs: Héritages et ouvertures dans les encyclopédies d’Orient et d’Occident au Moyen-Âge: Actes du colloque de Louvain-la-Neuve, 19–21 mai 2005, ed. G. de Callataÿ and Baudouin Van den Abeele [Turnhout: Brepols, 2008], 141–76). 52. Vincent of Beauvais, SN 1.10–15, 29.3–33. Paulmier-Foucart has argued that Vincent of Beauvais’s revisions to the Naturale (e.g., his reduction of the length of the book devoted to God, eliminating the treatment of the divine names) indicate a progressive “naturalization” of discourse and “un certain ‘abandon’ de la matière théologique” (VBGM, 45). There is, here, grounds for debate. Paulmier-Foucart’s understanding of Vincent’s progressively less theological encyclopedism (see ibid., 68–72, particularly her speculations about the significance of the fact that Vincent never completed the theological portion of the Doctrinale) recalls Boüard’s much earlier judgment, but her discussion is considerably more nuanced, based on a careful reading of the text and a thorough knowledge of the writings of the Dominicans who surrounded Vincent. For my part, I do not wish to argue that Vincent’s encyclopedism is purely theological. In fact, I agree with Paulmier-Foucart’s conclusion that the text is marked by tension between twelh-century learning and that—ever changing—of Vincent’s contemporaries, although I would describe this tension as the discursive dissonance inherent to compilatio. In my view, the two dissertations on hermeneutics are particularly

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 Notes to Pages 54–61

significant in this regard because they preserve the theological potential of discourse about the natural world but displace the responsibility of realizing that potential on the reader, just as the responsibility of judging the reliability of the various bits of information cited has been displaced on him or her (an argument that I shall develop in pt. 3). 53. “Porro ipsam rerum naturam, quam diligentius ut potui descripsi, nullus—ut estimo—superfluam vel inutilem reputabit, qui in ipso creaturarum libro nobis ad legendum proposito creatoris, gubernatoris et conservatoris omnium Dei potentiam, sapientiam, bonitatem, ipsa veritate rationem illuminante legere consueverit” (Vincent of Beauvais, LA ch. 6). 54. Ibid., ch. 18. Nevertheless, Vincent does not seem to be as concerned about curiositas as some of his superiors; Paulmier-Foucart notes that he does not cite this danger as oen as Humbert of Romans, master general of the Dominican order from 1254 to 1263 (VBGM, 28). 55. Barry Smith provides a fascinating reflection on the importance of commentary to philosophical writing and how philosophical traditions articulated through commentary differ from those that are not (see “Textual Deference,” American Philosophical Quarterly 28, no. 1 [1991]: 1–12). 56. De Lubac, EM, 1:123–24, 2:407. 57. Augustine, Confessiones 13.24.37 (critical text from M. Skutella’s edition for BSGR). 58. For the use of the Bible in the scholastic period, the standard reference remains Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964). For the Glossa ordinaria, there is now Lesley Smith, The Glossa ordinaria: The Making of a Medieval Bible Commentary, Commentaria, 3 (Leiden: Brill, 2009). 59. See Smith, The Glossa ordinaria, ch. 2. 60. See the description of exegetical figura in Auerbach, “Figura,” 47–60. Auerbach acknowledges that this sense of figura intersects with allegoria but nevertheless goes on to distinguish the two kinds of interpretation. Therefore, his essay needs the corrective provided by de Lubac’s later study of the four senses of Scripture, which develops a more precise understanding of the sense of allegoria in medieval biblical exegesis (EM, 2:489–548). 61. Carmen Codoñer, “De l’antiquité au Moyen Âge: Isidore de Séville,” in L’encyclopédisme: Actes du Colloque de Caen, 12–16 janvier 1987, ed. Annie Becq (Paris: Éditions aux amateurs de livres / Klincksieck, 1991), 19–35, 29. 62. See the comments about the composition of the commentary in the helpful introduction to Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. William Harris Stahl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), esp. 11–12. 63. Codoñer, “De l’antiquité au Moyen Âge,” 35. 64. Gilbert Dahan, L’exégèse chrétienne de la Bible en Occident médiéval, XIIe–XIVe siècle (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1999), 281–83. 65. On the change of textbook, see ibid., 109. On the ascendance of the quaestio, see Weijers, MSPI, 110. This is not to imply that later scholastic theology lacks exegetical motivation, for it could be argued that all Christian theology is essentially exegetical. The difference is that earlier exegesis had followed the order of Scripture, whereas later theological writing was structured according to other conceptual paradigms.

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Nevertheless, it is possible to maintain, with Lohr, that the thirteenth-century summae remain exegetical since they take Scripture as their starting point and “try to make the res, the transient things of this world, shine in light of the voces, the divine words as bearers of immutable truth” (“The Medieval Interpretation of Aristotle,” 89). 66. This organization makes the Speculum maius accord with the definition of commentary offered by Barry Smith, as a text that follows “an order of exposition that is determined not, in the first place, by the content of . . . arguments, but rather by the order of the [authoritative] text itself ” and that “will strive to do justice to this text as a unitary object to be taken as a whole” (“Textual Deference,” 1–2). 67. Gilbert Dahan, “Encyclopédies et exégèse de la Bible aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles,” in “Vulgariser la science: Les encyclopédies médiévales,” ed. Bernard Ribémont, special issue, Cahiers de recherches médiévales (XIIIe–XVe s.) 6 (1999): 19–40, 21, and L’exégèse, 335–38. 68. For the catalog of the Dijon library, see A. Dondaine, “La bibliothèque du couvent des Dominicains de Dijon au début du quatorzième siècle (1307),” Archivum fratrum praedicatorum 7 (1937): 112–33. For the Paris taxatio list, see Juris G. Lidaka, “Glossing Conception, Infancy, Childhood, and Adolescence in Book VI of De proprietatibus rerum,” in Bartholomaeus Anglicus, “De proprietatibus rerum”: Texte latin et réception vernaculaire: Actes du colloque international, Münster, 9.–11.10.2003, ed. Baudouin Van den Abeele and Heinz Meyer (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 117–36, 123. 69. Christopher Burdon, “The Margin Is the Message: Commentary’s Displacement of Canon,” Literature and Theology 13 (1999): 222–34, 222. 70. The Latins had precedents for such innovative scientific commentary in the Arabic texts that were available to them. See, e.g., Ruth Glasner, Averroes’ Physics: A Turning Point in Medieval Natural Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), esp. 1–5; and R. C. Taylor, “Averroes on Psychology and the Principles of Metaphysics,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 36 (1998): 507–23, 508. Weisheipl describes the innovations made in the Latin commentaries in The Development of Physical Theory. The situation began to change in the fourteenth century as influential Mertonians used the commentary form less and less. 71. Copeland, RHT. For a discussion that turns inside out the discourse of integumentum (discussed above), see also Rita Copeland and Stephen Melville, “Allegory and Allegoresis, Rhetoric and Hermeneutics,” Exemplaria 3 (1991): 159–87. 72. Compilatio is not the only practice that permied discursive dissonance in the scholastic period, of course. Another (closely related) practice that deserves comment in this regard is the creation of the distinctio, a collection of discrete (and widely diverse) usages of a given word that are ostensibly intended to define it. Allen has suggested that the distinctio provided to “normative” late medieval thinkers “a sense of certainty, of adequacy of evidence, in spite of the fact that in broad terms the specific evidence involved was not uniform for any given case” (EP, 101). Such an assessment could also be made of the entry in an encyclopedic compilation. 73. The visual analogy to the heterogeneity of thirteenth-century encyclopedism is striking but superficial; compiled by a rather old-fashioned individual at the very beginning of the scholastic period, the text of the Liber floridus is dominated by the early medieval symbolic tradition. Derolez has dubbed the book a “metaphysical encyclopedia,” which redirects Isidorian natural history toward “an entirely symbolic, theological and finally also eschatological signification.” Its ultimate purpose is purely

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the transformation of the reader’s intellect and soul through the spiritual interpretation of a symbolic universe (The Autograph Manuscript, 183, 83). 74. Richard Rouse has worked on twelh-century florilegia and their transmission in later centuries. See esp. his “Florilegia and Latin Classical Authors in Twelh- and Thirteenth-Century Orléans,” in Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts, by Mary A. Rouse and Richard H. Rouse, Publications in Medieval Studies, 27 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 153–88. For more theoretical discussions of compilatio, see Parkes, IC; Alastair J. Minnis, “Late Medieval Discussions of Compilatio and the Rôle of the Compilator,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache und Literatur 101 (1979): 385–421; Bernard Guenée, “L’historien et la compilation au XIIIe siècle,” Journal des savants, 1984, 119–35; and Neil Hathaway, “Compilatio: From Plagiarism to Compiling,” Viator 20 (1989): 19–44. Minnis has recently returned to the subject in “Nolens auctor sed compilator reputari: The Late-Medieval Discourse of Compilation,” in La méthode critique au Moyen Âge, ed. Mireille Chazan and Gilbert Dahan (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 47–63, a response to critiques of his earlier work. 75. Guenée, “L’historien et la compilation au XIIIe siècle,” 119–22, 126. 76. Perhaps inspired by the prologue to the Liber deflorationum, beer known by its modern title, the Florilegium Duacense (compiled in the first half of the twelh century), on which see B. Munk Olsen, “Les classiques latins dans les florilèges médiévaux antérieurs au XIIIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire des textes 9 (1979): 47–121; 10 (1980): 115–64, 84–89. This prologue is itself inspired by Seneca’s second leer to Lucilius (G. Munk Olsen, “Les florilèges d’auteurs classiques,” in GLSTP, 163). In any case, the multitudo librorum was already a cliché, however appropriate it may have seemed to describe Vincent’s day. 77. In this vein, Paulmier-Foucart writes: “La compilation selon Vincent de Beauvais n’est pas une reprise du savoir ancien, mais une reconstruction, une mise à jour avec enrichissement. Il s’agit, comme ailleurs dans le Speculum maius, de tirer parti de ce qui existe—la tradition des florilèges anciens, éthiques et spirituels—et de reprendre les textes à nouveaux frais, pour une relecture adaptée à une culture plus exigeante, plus précise, celle des Prêcheurs” (VBGM, 92–93). 78. Bonaventure, Commentarius in i. librum sententiarum, pro., qu. 4, concl., in Opera omnia, 1:14. 79. Long neglected, Peter Lombard’s Sentences have recently received more scholarly aention. For a recent English text, see The Sentences, trans. Giulio Silano, 3 vols., Medieval Sources in Translation (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2007). For an overview of the Sentences and an explanation of the text’s historical significance, readers may consult Philipp W. Rosemann’s Peter Lombard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). For more in-depth research, one can begin with Marcia Colish, Peter Lombard, 2 vols., Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 41 (Leiden: Brill, 1994), and Studies in Scholasticism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 80. According to Bonaventure, Peter “sententias suas ponit et Patrum sententiis confirmat. Unde vere debet dici auctor hujus libri” (Commentarius in i. librum sententiarum, pro., qu. 4, concl., in Opera omnia, 1:14). 81. “. . . ipse non invenit rationes, sed potius ab aliis inventas compilavit: et in hoc tangit unam utilitatem, scilicet exclusionem erroris” (Aquinas, In quauor libros sententiarum, 1.1.pr, in Opera omnia, ed. Roberto Busa et al., 7 vols. [Stugart: FrommannHolzboog, 1980], 1:1).

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82. Anna Sigrídur Arnar, Encyclopedism from Pliny to Borges (Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 1990), 1. 83. Although the quaestio was once thought to be the result of the introduction of Aristotelian logic in the schools, scholars today tend to point out that such logic bears no relation to an authoritative text, as the quaestio does, and, thus, that the laer’s more likely origin lies in the discussion of the Bible. For an introduction to both the quaestio and the summa, see John Marenbon, Later Medieval Philosophy (1150–1350): An Introduction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 10–14, 24–34; Weijers, MSPI, 61–75; and Rosemann, Peter Lombard, 66–70. It should be noted that, in the thirteenth century, the approach of the masters of arts, who were philosophers rather than theologians, diverged from that of the masters of theology, the former admiing of contradiction (pure and simple) between authorities in a way that the laer were not willing to accept (Lohr, “The Medieval Interpretation of Aristotle”). 84. Arnar, Encyclopedism from Pliny to Borges, 1. 85. That is, the eventual narrowing of focus to Thomistic thought alone, which would dominate early historical scholarship on scholasticism (“Neo-Scholastic” scholarship). Philipp Rosemann traces the history of the modern understanding of scholasticism, observing how recent scholarship has begun to break free of the assumption that the movement was doctrinally and intellectually homogeneous (USTF, 2–9). 86. Parkes, IC, 130; Minnis, “Late Medieval Discussions,” 408–12. 87. On this text’s reworking of old material, see esp. Alexandre Leupin’s study of “modernity” and the “caduc” in the Poetria nova, “Absolute Reflexivity: Geoffrey of Vinsauf ’s Poetria nova,” in Barbarolexis: Medieval Writing and Sexuality, trans. Kate M. Cooper (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 17–38. 88. Here, I differ from Guenée’s conclusion, which opposes the “literary” or “rhetorical” practice of classical historians to “le sérieux et la solidité d’une science” that compilational historiography aains in the late Middle Ages (“L’historien et la compilation au XIIIe siècle,” 134–35). These medieval historians did indeed exploit a different textual practice from that of the classical historians and were involved in serious writing like their colleagues in theology or law, but it does not follow that their work was not in its own way literary or rhetorical. Guenée seems to be falling back here on the same literature vs. science binary that has vitiated much scholarship on medieval encyclopedias (see my introduction). His article is valuable, but Parkes (IC) and Minnis (“Late Medieval Discussions”) provide a more balanced representation of late medieval textual practice by showing the continuities between historical or encyclopedic writing and what moderns consider literary writing. 89. On these challenging and fascinating texts, see, among others, the recent Balint, OC; as well as Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelh Century; Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelh Century, and “The Function of Poetry”; Linda Lomperis, “From God’s Book to the Play of the Text in the Cosmographia,” Medievalia et humanistica 16 (1988): 51–71; and Peter Dronke, Verse with Prose from Petronius to Dante: The Art and Scope of the Mixed Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 90. Balint observes that the animals in the De planctu are described in ways quite different from those of the bestiary: “The De planctu imposes its own significations on the animals, leaving no room for the reader to do so; and these significations are, for the most part, absurd” (OC, 131). 91. The one exception to the distinction that I am making between prosimetrum and

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encyclopedia is the much older De nuptiis, a genuine encyclopedia and one of the less aesthetically successful prosimetra. This text is, however, the exception that proves the rule, for it comes apart at the seams. The narrative of mythology and personification allegory frames the encyclopedic exposition but does not shape it (the order in which the liberal arts are treated and the structure of those treatments obey no narrative necessity), and that exposition is too different in tone and content from its frame to suture well to it. The contrast makes the laer appear more contrived than the allegories of the other prosimetrists. 92. Mikhail M. Bakhtin describes such “images” in “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson, University of Texas Press Slavic Series, 1 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 259–422, 276–79, 327–30. He is, of course, speaking specifically of novelistic prose, but he acknowledges that such images can also be elaborated (to a lesser extent) in other genres, and his comments about the “atmosphere of the novel,” in which “the direct and unmediated intention of the word presents itself as something impermissibly naive, something in fact impossible, for naïveté itself, under authentic novelistic conditions, takes on the nature of an internal polemic and is consequently dialogized” (278), also have relevance for such prosimetra as the De planctu. 93. A particularly helpful explanation of the imbrication of the philosophical and the aesthetic in the prosimetrum can be found in Wetherbee, “The Function of Poetry.” Wetherbee argues that the De planctu constitutes an “aesthetic whole, providing its own peculiarly poetic kind of insight into realities which the philosophy and theology of Alain’s day labored to express in rational terms” (88). Of the Cosmographia, in his edition of the Cosmographia (Leiden: Brill, 1978) Peter Dronke suggests that the “cosmic drama” is “a reflection of—and on—the poetic process” (58), a suggestion taken up by Lomperis (“From God’s Book to the Play of Text”). 94. In my view, vernacular prosimetra constitute a case apart. They flourished in the thirteenth century, yet none show any close relation to the Latin prosimetra. Romances with lyric inserts, e.g., were born from the marriage of the vernacular romance and lyric traditions, while Dante’s Vita nuova (1295) follows the paradigm of the chansonniers, large anthologies of troubadour poetry (most compiled in Italy). In these manuscripts, as in the Vita nuova, personal lyric is framed and contextualized by biographical prose narratives. The vernacular texts of the thirteenth century and the early fourteenth that owe the greatest intellectual debt to the Latin prosimetra, most notably Jean de Meun’s continuation of the Roman de la Rose and Dante’s Commedia, are not prosimetrical in form. 95. Balint, OC, 110 (quotes), 134, 143, 161. 96. Alexander of Hales, Summa theologica (Quaracchi, 1924), intr., 1.1.4, ad secundum. 97. “Sunt ergo quatuor genera scripturarum, circa quae oportet ordinate procedere et exerceri. Primi libri sunt sacrae Scripturae, secundi libri sunt originalia sanctorum, tertii sententiae magistrorum, quarti doctrinarum mundialium sive philosophorum” (Bonaventure, Collatio xix in Hexaemeron, in Opera omnia, 5:421). 98. On the four senses of Scripture, see esp. de Lubac, EM. 99. Smith, The Glossa ordinaria, 66–68. 100. “Causa formalis tractatus que est ordinatio librorum partialium et capitulorum” (Nicholas of Paris, quoted in Parkes, IC, 121).

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101. See Parkes, IC; and Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, “Statim invenire,” in Authentic Witnesses, esp. 217. 102. Richard is now best known for his courtly writing in French. He also published in French a treatise on urine and in Latin a treatise on alchemy and an astronomical autobiography, the Nativitas, which would be glossed in the second half of the thirteenth century by Pierre of Limoges (d. 1306). (The laer was also a polymath book collector, and he would become an early supporter of Ramon Llull.) For the autobiography and Pierre’s commentary, see Aleksander Birkenmajer, “Pierre de Limoges, commentateur de Richard de Fournival” (1949), reprinted in Études d’histoire des sciences et de la philosophie du Moyen Âge, Studia Copernica 1 (Krakow: Zaklad Historii Nauki I Teckniki Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1970), 222–35. On Richard’s library and the catalog, which dates to sometime between 1242 and 1250, see esp. Aleksander Birkenmajer, “La bibliothèque de Richard de Fournival, poète et érudit français du début du XIIIe siècle et son sort ultérieur” (1919), reprinted in ibid., 117–210; as well as P. Glorieux, “Études sur la Biblionomia de Richard de Fournival,” Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 30 (1963): 205–31; Richard H. Rouse, “The Early Library of the Sorbonne,” Scriptorium 21 (1967): 42–71, reprinted in Authentic Witnesses, 341–408, and “Manuscripts Belonging to Richard de Fournival,” Revue d’histoire des textes 3 (1973): 253–69; and Thomas Haye, “Canon ou catalogue? Perspectives historico-liéraires dans la Biblionomia de Richard de Fournival,” Romania 128 (2010): 213–33. Pace Haye, the Biblionomia does seem to describe a real library, from which Birkenmajer and Rouse (whose work Haye seems not to know) have been able to identify about forty surviving manuscripts. The catalog itself has been edited by Léopold Delisle as Le cabinet des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque impériale [puis nationale], 3 vols. (Paris, 1868–81), 2:518–35. It specifically identifies 162 volumes, but Richard’s more general references to volumes falling into the categories of law, theology, or what he refers to intriguingly as “aliud genus tractatuum secretorum, quorum profunditas publicis oculis dedignatur exponi” (521) (probably treatises on alchemy) led Birkenmajer to conclude that the actual library numbered some three hundred volumes (“La bibliothèque,” 126). 103. It could also occasionally be used to refer to all human knowledge, including theology. On the expansive and shiing sense of philosophia, see Marenbon, Later Medieval Philosophy, 66–67; and Teeuwen, VIL, 395–99. 104. Likely no slight was intended; Richard’s father had been doctor to King Philippe Auguste of France, and Richard himself was a surgeon. But if these men’s professional practice was indeed lucrative, then we need seek no further for an explanation for Richard’s wealth. 105. Boethius, In Isagogen Porphyrii commenta 1.3–4, and De Trinitate ch. 2. Medieval readers could also find versions of this paradigm in Cassiodorus, Institutiones 2.3, and Isidore of Seville, ET 2.24.3–4, 8.6.3–6. The classification of the disciplines in late antiquity and the Middle Ages is discussed by Joseph Mariétan, Classification des sciences, d’Aristote à St. Thomas (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1901); James A. Weisheipl, “Classification of the Sciences in Medieval Thought,” Mediaeval Studies 27 (1965): 54–90, and “The Nature, Scope, and Classification of the Sciences,” in Lindberg, ed., Science in the Middle Ages, 460–82; Fernand Van Steenberghen, “L’organisation des études au Moyen Âge et ses répercussions sur le mouvement philosophique,” Revue philosophique de Louvain 52 (1954): 572–92; and Olga Weijers [as Olga Weyers], “L’appellation des disciplines dans

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les classifications des sciences au XIIe et XIIIe siècles,” Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi 46–47 (1986–87): 39–64. My summary is based on this scholarship. 106. For an explanation of the inclusion of the quadrivial disciplines in the category of mathematics, see Boethius, De arithmetica 1.1; and Hugh of Saint-Victor, DS 2.3–6. Readers interested in the diverse fortunes of the liberal arts in the Aristotelian schema should consult esp. Godefroi de Callataÿ, “Trivium et quadrivium en Islam: Des trajectoires contrastées,” in Callataÿ and Van de Abeele, eds., Une lumière venue d’ailleurs, 1–30. 107. The debate is ancient. It is summarized in Boethius, In Isagogen Porphyrii commenta 1.4. 108. Hugh of Saint-Victor, DS 2.28–30. 109. For Hugh’s definition of philosophy, see esp. DS 1.4. On the status of the mechanical arts in the scholastic period and the ways in which they were accommodated in schemas of the disciplines, see George Ovi Jr., “The Status of the Mechanical Arts in Medieval Classifications of Learning,” Viator 14 (1983): 89–105. 110. For the genre of introductions to philosophy, see P. O. Lewry, “ThirteenthCentury Examination Compendia from the Faculty of Arts,” in GLSTP, 101–16. For other, less well-developed examples, see Claude Lafleur, Quatre introductions à la philosophie au XIIIe siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1988). 111. On Dominicus Gundissalinus’s classification of the disciplines and his use of earlier sources, see esp. Henri Hugonnard-Roche, “La classification des sciences de Gundissalinus et l’influence d’Avicenne,” in Études sur Avicenne, ed. Jean Jolivet and Rushdi Rachid (Paris: Belles leres 1984), 41–75, which corrects the account given by Weisheipl. 112. See Weisheipl, “Classification of the Sciences in Medieval Thought,” 68–72. 113. See Weisheipl, “The Nature, Scope, and Classification of the Sciences,” 478–80. 114. Grosseteste, commentary on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics; Roger Bacon, commentary on the Aristotle’s Metaphysics; Albert the Great, paraphrase of the Metaphysics, and commentary on the Posterior Analytics; Aquinas, commentary on Boethius’s De Trinitate, and commentary on the Metaphysics. The Posterior Analytics was first translated into Latin in the second quarter of the twelh century, by James of Venice. A staggering 275 copies of this translation survive, indicating that it was one of the most popular Aristotelian texts in the scholastic period. 115. See Weisheipl (whom I follow here), “Classification of the Sciences in Medieval Thought,” 72–89, and The Development of Physical Theory, 48–62; as well as Benedict M. Ashley, “St. Albert and the Nature of Natural Sciences,” in Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, 1980, ed. James A. Weisheipl, ST, 49 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1980), 73–102. 116. Ovi, “The Status of the Mechanical Arts,” 91. 117. Christel Meier has surveyed the solutions of various medieval encyclopedists to the problem of order in two recent articles: “Organisation of Knowledge and Encyclopedic Ordo: Functions and Purposes of a Universal Literary Genre,” in Pre-Modern Encyclopedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1–4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 103–26; and “Über den Zusammenhang von Erkenntnistheorie und enzyklopädischem Ordo in Mielalter und Früher Neuzeit,” Frühmielalterliche Studien 36 (2002): 171–92. 118. Bruneo Latini, Li livres dou tresor, ed. Spurgeon Baldwin and Paul Barree, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 257 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2003), 1.2.

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119. Ibid., p. xviii. 120. See Charles Burne, “Vincent of Beauvais, Michael Scot, and the ‘New Aristotle,’” in LCVB, 189–213; Paulmier-Foucart, VBGM, 59–72; and Marie-Christine Duchenne and Monique Paulmier-Foucart, “Vincent de Beauvais à l’atelier,” in Ribémont, ed., “Vulgariser la science,” 59–74. 121. See Benedikt Konrad Vollmann, “La vitalità delle enciclopedie di scienza naturale: Isidoro di Siviglia, Tommaso di Cantimpré, e le redazioni del cosiddeo ‘Thommaso III,’” in EMAC, 135–45, 139. 122. For the purpose of the text as an aid for preaching, see the prologue, lines 63–74, 91–96. The explicitly acknowledged presence of these moralitates and the overall, clearly stated spiritual purpose of the work lead me to disagree with Vollmann’s claim that Thomas’s work isolates a discussion of nature from theology, geography, and history and, thus, represents the first “scientific” encyclopedia sensu stricto (“La vitalità delle enciclopedie,” 139). 123. Thomas of Cantimpré, DNR prologue lines 60–62. 124. For a discussion of the organization of the De proprietatibus rerum, see Heinz Meyer, “Die Zielsetzung des Bartholomäus Anglicus in De proprietatibus rerum,” in Geistliche Aspekte mielalterlicher Maturlehre, ed. Benedikt Konrad Vollmann (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert, 1993), 86–98, 151–59. 125. Michael Evans, “The Geometry of the Mind,” Architectural Association Quarterly 12, no. 4 (1980): 32–55. 126. See Penelope C. Mayo, “The Crusaders under the Palm: Allegorical Plants and Cosmic Kingship in the Liber floridus,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 27 (1973): 29–67, 48–52. 127. See Leonard E. Boyle, The Seing of the Summa theologica of Saint Thomas (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1982), 23. 128. Foucault, OT, xxii / MC, 14. 129. Foucault usually refers to the period as the sixteenth century, but that term is misleading because his source texts were published mainly in the period 1550–1650, as Rosemann points out (USTF, 105). 130. Foucault, OT, 17 / MC, 33. 131. Ibid., 19–24 / 34–39. 132. Ibid., 29 / 44. 133. Ibid., 27 / 42. The example is one of many signatures collected under the title “De signaturis plantarum, humana membra similitudine repraesentantium” in Oswald Croll’s Tractatus de signaturis internis rerum, seu de vera et viva anatomia majoris et minoris mundi ([Prague], 1608), 17. The passage on the aconite reads: “Grana nigra Herbae Paris seu Aconiti salutiferi, habent Pupillae signaturam: Oleum inde Chymice prolectum vel expressum ad oculorum affectus efficacissimum est medicamentum, a nonnullis Anima oculorum vocatum” (19). Foucault has embroidered on the description from Croll. 134. Foucault, OT, 27 / MC, 42. 135. Ibid., 29–30 / 44–45. 136. Ibid., 39, 35 / 54, 50. 137. George Huppert, “Divinatio et Eruditio: Thoughts on Foucault,” History and Theory 13 (1974): 191–207, 198–204. In addition to Croll’s Tractatus, Foucault cites frequently from the writings of Giambaista della Porta (ca. 1535–1615) and Paracelsus (1493–1541), proponents of the hermetic tradition and magical practice who represent

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neither the scholasticism of the conservative establishment nor the humanism of the innovators. This is not, perhaps, reason to dismiss them as completely as Huppert does; it is possible to see in medieval and Renaissance magical practice the precursor of the kind of active manipulation of the natural world that distinguishes modern science (on this issue, see Frances Yates, “The Hermetic Tradition in Renaissance Science,” in Art, Science and History in the Renaissance, ed. Charles S. Singleton [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967], 255–74; and Bert Hansen, “Science and Magic,” in Lindberg, ed., Science in the Middle Ages, 483–506). I nevertheless find Huppert’s point that a description of the Renaissance cannot be based solely on such texts valid, though I disagree with his conclusion that the archaeological method itself is necessarily invalidated by the fact that Foucault offers, in this instance, a description distorted by incomplete readings of poorly chosen texts (“Divinatio et Eruditio,” 207). 138. Foucault, OT, 30 / MC 45. 139. He will eventually reveal it, cryptically: “The truth of all these marks—whether they are woven into nature itself or whether they exist in lines on parchments in libraries—is everywhere the same; coeval with the institution of God” (ibid., 34 / 49). 140. “The grammar of beings is an exegesis of these things. And what the language they speak has to tell us is quite simply what the syntax is that binds them together. The nature of things, their coexistence, the way in which they are linked together and communicate is nothing other than their resemblance” (ibid., 29 / 45). 141. Rosemann, USTF, 110. 142. Croll, Tractatus de signaturis internis rerum, 3. 143. We cannot, of course, ignore the possibility that Foucault’s clearly stated opposition to the tenets and methods of contemporary hermeneutics may have led him to slight the exegetical practice of Renaissance writers in The Order of Things, but such a suggestion moves us into the realm of psychological speculation while obscuring the more serious issue of compatibility between research methodology and object. 144. Foucault, AK, 109 / AdS, 143–44. 145. Ibid., 110 / 144. 146. Ibid., 160 / 209. 147. Only in later work would Foucault begin to distinguish among discourses contemporary with each other. For example: “We are dealing less with a discourse on sex than with a multiplicity of discourses produced by a whole series of mechanisms operating in different institutions” (Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley [New York: Pantheon, 1978], 33; Histoire de sexualité 1 [Paris: Gallimard, 1976], 46). But, by this time, Foucault had moved away from the study of knowledge, so he did not correct his earlier work. 148. Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, vol. 1 (Paris: Dufart, 1799), 9, 31–33. 149. Foucault, OT, 39 / MC, 55. I have not been able to locate this line in Buffon’s text; it certainly does not follow directly on the citation that Foucault gives. 150. Ibid., 39–40 / 55. Introduction to Part II 1. See the explanation of the three “regions” of order in Foucault, OT, xx–xxi / MC, 11–13. The proposition that we can become aware of “order in its primary state” is a strikingly antinominalist suggestion from this “nominalist” philosopher.

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Chapter 2 1. Unfortunately, we do not yet know what libraries Vincent used, apart from those in the houses where he is known to have resided (Beauvais, Royaumont) or to have had influential contacts (Saint-Jacques in Paris and perhaps the royal library), all in the Île-de-France. What lile is known of his life is summarized below. Paulmier-Foucart has set out the few biographical certainties in VBGM, 10–21, where she also provides the clearest published explanation to date of the relation between Vincent’s project and Dominican needs and interests. (This recent study provides an invaluable introduction to the Speculum maius, its composition, organization, sources, and historical context.) For a slightly different treatment of Vincent’s biography, taking fuller account of the speculations of various scholars, see Lusignan, ed., PSM, 15–18. 2. In the prologue, Vincent makes reference to a prior meus who requested the encyclopedia; Paulmier-Foucart has identified this individual as Hugh of Saint-Cher, an early Dominican and prior of the province of France (1229–33), then prior of the Dominican house of Saint-Jacques in Paris (1233–36) before serving once again as prior of France (1236–44) (VBGM, 10–11). Although there is no documentation for this early period of his life, Vincent probably began work on the Speculum maius sometime during the 1230s and seems to have been in contact with William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris (1227–49). If he was indeed working in Paris at this time, then he would most likely have come to know Hugh at Saint-Jacques. In 1246, Vincent, who was serving as subprior in the Dominican house of Beauvais, was named lector [instructor] at the Cistercian monastery of Royaumont, just outside Paris, as part of a concerted aempt by the Cistercian order to improve the education of its members by engaging Dominicans as instructors. But there is evidence that Vincent was already acquainted with Raoul, abbot of the monastery, in 1243. His friendly relations with the Cistercians seem also to have won him access to wellstocked monastic libraries, where he carried out research for his encyclopedia. 3. The first certain information that we have about Vincent’s activities dates to 1243, when Raoul, abbot of Royaumont, put him in contact with the famously devout Louis IX, who had founded the monastery and continued to frequent it. Once Vincent became lector at Royaumont, he had the occasion to make the personal acquaintance of the king, gaining a new patron for whom he prepared a presentation copy of the Speculum historiale. Several of Vincent’s shorter texts were wrien for royal eyes; the De eruditione filiorum nobilium (1246–47) was dedicated to Queen Marguerite of France, while the Liber consolatorius pro morte amici (ca. 1260) was wrien for Louis on the occasion of the death of his son and heir. For an overview of Vincent’s shorter texts, see Lusignan, ed., PSM, 19–27. 4. B. L. Ullman, “A Project for a New Edition of Vincent de Beauvais,” Speculum 8 (1933): 312–26, 326. Ullman’s is the lowest of the estimates that I have seen of the total word count of the encyclopedia. See also Blair, TMTK, 41 (4.5 million words for the four-part encyclopedia); and Hans Voorbij, “Purpose and Audience: Perspectives on the Thirteenth-Century Encyclopedias of Alexander Neckham, Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Thomas of Cantimpré, and Vincent of Beauvais,” in The Medieval Hebrew Encyclopedias of Science and Philosophy, ed. Steven Harvey (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2000), 31–45, 39 (6.5 million). 5. There are some two-volume copies of the Naturale and the Historiale, but they are rarer than the four-volume copies. The Doctrinale could be copied into either one or two volumes.

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6. Jacques Le Goff, “Pourquoi le XIIIe siècle a-t-il été plus particulièrement un siècle d’encyclopédisme?” in EMAC, 34. 7. For the preference shown by literary writers for the De proprietatibus rerum, see Michael Twomey, “Towards a Reception History of Western Medieval Encyclopedias in England Before 1500,” in Pre-Modern Encyclopedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1–4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 329–62, 362. This is not to suggest that such writers did not use the Speculum maius: it is mentioned by Chaucer (The Legend of Good Women G line 307) and used by no lesser lights than Dante and Jean de Meun (on the laer, see chapter 4 below). This encyclopedia’s influence on medieval texts in the most widely practiced medieval genres (chronicles, sermons, collections of exempla, and florilegia) all over Western Europe is undeniable (see Paulmier-Foucart, VBGM, 109–15). The number of surviving manuscripts indicates that the De proprietatibus rerum (298 manuscripts at latest count) was rather more popular than the Speculum maius (some 200 manuscripts) but that the laer was also extraordinarily well received. The Speculum historiale was translated into Dutch (by Jacob van Maerlant) in the late thirteenth century and into French (by Jean de Vignay, for Jeanne de Bourgogne, the wife of Philippe VI of Valois) and Catalan (by Jaume Domenech, for Pedro IV of Aragon) in the fourteenth century. 8. Bartholomeus’s encyclopedia has been the object of considerable scholarly attention in recent years; interested readers can consult particularly the work of Van den Abeele, Meier, Meyer, and Ribémont included in the bibliography. 9. See Copeland, RHT. 10. For overviews of the Speculum maius’s development, especially useful are (in order of publication) Monique Paulmier-Foucart, “Étude sur l’état des connaissances au milieu du XIIIe siècle: Nouvelles recherches sur la genèse du Speculum maius de Vincent de Beauvais,” Spicae 1 (1978): 91–121; Paulmier-Foucart and Lusignan, VBHSM; Paulmier-Foucart, OEOM; Voorbij, SHVB; and, most recently, Paulmier-Foucart, VBGM. Since the publication of this last book, Eva Albrecht has completed a dissertation on the Naturale that promises to revise and deepen our understanding of how this rather neglected portion of the Speculum maius was compiled: “De ontstaansgeschiedenis en de compilatie van het Speculum naturale van Vincent van Beauvais (†1264),” 2 vols. (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2007). Unfortunately, I have not been able to consult this dissertation, but Albrecht has published an overview. See Eva Albrecht, “Summary of PhD: ‘De ontstaansgeschiedenis en de compilatie van het Speculum naturale van Vincent van Beauvais (†1264)’ (The Genesis and Compilation of the Speculum naturale of Vincent of Beauvais),” VBN 34 (2009): 3–9. The explanation that follows of the Speculum maius’s different redactions is based principally on PaulmierFoucart, VBGM, updated to the degree possible with Albrecht’s article and our private correspondance of May 2011. Voorbij’s SHVB established sigla for all manuscripts known at the time, which Albrecht has revised (see the explanatory notes in the front maer). Albrecht and Voorbij have mounted a Web site on Vincent of Beauvais that reflects all this recent scholarship, hp: // www.vincentiusbelvacensis.eu. The Archives de liérature du Moyen Âge maintain another Web site with a full list of manuscripts (identified with Voorbij’s sigla, but also including manuscripts that have come to light since the publication of SHVB) and a more limited bibliography, hp: // www.arlima .net / uz / vincent_de_beauvais.html#spe. The most recent scholarship is always listed in

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the invaluable VBN, founded and edited until 2009 by Gregory Guzman and since that date by Albrecht and Voorbij. 11. BNF MS lat. 13702, to which Albrecht assigns the siglum Rm1 (private communication, May 2011). 12. Represented as Na and Ha in the manuscript sigla assigned by Voorbij in SHVB. For a recent discussion of the changes that Vincent made to the Naturale in moving from a bipartite to a tripartite encyclopedia, see Monique Paulmier-Foucart, “Le plan et l’évolution du Speculum maius de Vincent de Beauvais: De la version bifaria à la version trifaria,” in Die Enzyklopädie im Wandel vom Hochmielalter bis zur Frühen Neuzeit: Akten des Kolloquiums des Projekts D im Sonderforschungsbereich 231 (29. 11.–1. 12. 1996), ed. Christel Meier (Munich: W. Fink, 2002), 245–67. 13. Previously, it was thought that there were only two recensions of the Naturale; it now appears that there are three, including an Nb (which Albrecht dubs the version Bruges and is represented in eighteen surviving copies [counting Nb7 / 12 as a single copy]) and an Nc (version Douai, which is represented in five copies). Four additional copies may represent either Nb or Nc. See Albrecht, “Summary of PhD.” The numbers of manuscripts are from a private communication with Albrecht, May 2011. 14. Represented as Hb–Hd. It is worth noting that most of the small number of surviving copies of Ha and Hc were made in Germany and Austria, rather than France. He is represented in by far the largest number of manuscripts and served as the basis for Jean de Vignay’s French translation (see Laurent Brun and Maia Cavagna, “Pour une édition du Miroir Historial de Jean de Vignay,” Romania 124 [2006]: 378–428, 383–84). 15. Eva Albrecht, private communication, May 2011. The Morale is formally quite distinct from the other three specula, modeled on a different paradigm of compilatio that made it susceptible to the charge of plagiarism. Since, from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century, the Morale was believed to be the work of Vincent himself, it created something of a stain on his reputation. Not until the early eighteenth century was it recognized that others must have compiled the Morale ( Jacques Échard, Sancti Thomae Summa suo auctori vindicata sive di Vincentii Bellovacensis scriptis dissertatio [Paris, 1708]). The Morale is now the object of a theoretically and methodologically innovative project at Monash University, Australia. See Constant J. Mews, Tomas Zahora, Dmitri Nikulin, and David Squire, “The Speculum morale (c. 1300) and the Study of Textual Transformations: A Research Project in Progress,” VBN 35 (2010): 5–15. 16. Naturale, MS Na2, fol. 6v, cited in Paulmier-Foucart and Lusignan, VBHSM, 105n23. In many manuscripts, this text provides the transition from the prologue, which opens the manuscript, to a sequential table of the titles of all the chapters included in the volume, which precedes the text of the Speculum itself (e.g., MSS Nb10, Nb13, Nb14, Nb16, D07, D08, D09). Such a table, when the compiler has also given a table at the beginning of each book (Nb11) and when, in the Historiale manuscripts, an alphabetical table is placed at the beginning or end of the volume (He70, He83), serves to frame the text entirely with lists. It is worth noting that, at the time when Vincent announced his intentions to annex such a table to his work (in 1244, in the “cover leer” that accompanied the copy of the Historiale sent to Saint Louis), the concordance and index were recent inventions and still in the process of development. The biblical concordance was created at the Dominican house on the rue Saint-Jacques in Paris in the

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1230s but not perfected until the 1270s, while the subject index of the Bible appeared in the second quarter of the thirteenth century and the index of patristic writings about 1260 (Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, “Concordances et index,” in MEP, 219–28). The compromise that Vincent reached between the ordering of the material that he preferred and the ease of reference to his work provides evidence of his willingness to balance a conservative approach to human knowledge (the logical ordering of material was well rooted in tradition, while the alphabetical ordering would have been new and innovative) with an exploitation of the latest in scholarly methodologies. 17. According to Hugh, the ancients “ut plane omnes ita in memoria tenerent, ut, quascunque scripturas deinde ad manum sumpsissent, quascumque quaestiones solvendas aut comprobandas proposuissent, ex his regulas et rationes ad definiendum id de quo ambigeretur folia librorum revolvendo non quaererent, sed statim singula corde parata haberent” (DS 3.3). 18. See my “The Speculum maius, between Thesaurus and Lieu de mémoire,” in Memory and Commemoration in the Medieval World, c. 500–c. 1400, ed. Elma Brenner, Meredith Cohen, and Mary Franklin-Brown (Farnham: Ashgate, forthcoming). 19. Paulmier-Foucart, OEOM, 223. 20. See Monique Paulmier-Foucart, “Une des tâches de l’encyclopédiste, intituler: Les titres des chapitres du Speculum naturale de Vincent de Beauvais,” in EMAC, 147–62, 151–58. 21. Lusignan (Lusignan, ed., PSM, 93) and Paulmier-Foucart (OEOM, 205–6) contrast the aitudes of the two writers with relation to the totality of human knowledge: Isidore sets out to conserve the knowledge of the ancients, which is gradually disappearing, while Vincent sets out to control or even “enclose” a rapidly “proliferating” contemporary science. This contrast is particularly marked, in my view, because of the other, profound affinities between the two writers. 22. There are more than 900, according to Paulmier-Foucart, compared to more than 150 in the Doctrinale and about 50 in the Historiale (OEOM, 205). 23. Paulmier-Foucart, OEOM, 205. 24. See Baudouin Van den Abeele, “Vincent de Beauvais naturaliste: Les sources des livres d’animaux du Speculum naturale,” in LCVB, 127–51, 136. 25. Richard of Saint-Victor, Liber exceptionum, 1.1. 26. Paulmier-Foucart and Lusignan, VBHSM, 107–8. 27. M.-D. Chenu provides a helpful introduction to twelh-century historical thought in Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelh Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Lile (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), ch. 5 (“Theology and the New Awarness of History”). 28. Paulmier-Foucart and Lusignan, VBHSM, 25–26. 29. Honorius Augustodunensis, Imago mundi 1.2, ed. Valerie I. J. Flint, AHDL 49 (1982): 7–153. 30. a) geveris Douai] Nb10 Nb11 Nb13 Nb14 Nb16.—b) verbum Deo dicenti coaeternum Douai] verbum coaeternum Nb10 Nb11 Nb13 Nb14 Nb16. (Please refer to the explanatory notes for an explanation of the citations from the Speculum maius.) I have discovered that the part of this passage devoted to scriptural citations is problematic in the manuscript tradition. In all five Paris manuscripts that include the passage (including Nb14, which may date to Vincent’s lifetime) as well as all but two of the other manuscripts of Nb that I have been able to consult and the one surviving copy

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of this portion of Nc, the citation from Ecclesiasticus is missing. Instead, the citation for the third mode is aributed to the second, and none is given for the third, the text going directly on to the fourth (it is worth noting that all these scriptural citations are fully wrien out in the manuscripts, so we are not dealing here with an abbreviated reference that would be easily overlooked). The text of the first version (Na) in the two surviving manuscripts reads like the Douai edition, as do the texts of Nb8 (the Cambron manuscript of the 1280s) and Nb3 (a fourteenth-century manuscript that was owned in the Middle Ages by the Cistercian monastery at Ter Duinen but whose place of copy is not known). Adulf Rusch’s Strasbourg edition of 1478, the 1481 Strasbourg edition by the Legenda aurea printer, and the two Venice editions, of 1492 and 1591, also give all the scriptural citations. It appears that the Ecclesiasticus verse was omied from the Nb text, either accidentally or intentionally, by Vincent himself or early copyists. If Vincent eliminated it, then it was restored by a few copyists with access to the Na version. Eva Albrecht and I speculate that the printers either used one of these corrected Nb manuscripts or corrected the text themselves (private communication, May 2011). Given the problems that the Ecclesiasticus passage creates for the structural principle of the Historiale, this is not an insignificant change. 31. Paulmier-Foucart, OEOM, 207–9. Albrecht’s “De ontstaansgeschiedenis en de compilatie van het Speculum naturale” deals extensively with Vincent’s use of Honorius and the influence of the doctors of the early French university on his work, so the present discussion of his revisions to the Honorian model must remain provisional. 32. This revision appears in the second version (Nb). 33. a) descriptionis Douai] Nb10 Nb11 Nb13 Nb14 Nb16.—b) om. Douai] Nb10 Nb11 Nb13 Nb14 Nb16. 34. Paulmier-Foucart, OEOM, 212; Paulmier-Foucart and Lusignan, VBHSM, 107. 35. Vincent’s treatment of psychology expanded considerably between the first version of the Naturale and the one on which the Douai edition was based. In Na, it occupied a single book (bk. 11 or 12), balanced against the single book (bk. 12 or 13) devoted to the body, though the book on the soul had more chapters (183 as against 158). In the Douai edition, the discussion of the soul occupies five books (bks. 23–27), totaling 486 chapters, followed by a single book of 96 chapters on the body. 36. Paulmier-Foucart and Lusignan, VBHSM, 207. 37. Augustine, Confessiones 13.34. For Augustine’s comparison of Scripture to the firmament, see Confessiones 13.15.16, 13.18.22; and Isabelle Bochet, “Le firmament de l’écriture”: L’herméneutique augustinienne (Paris: Institut d’études augustiniennes, 2004). 38. Le Goff calls the Bible itself the fundamental medieval encyclopedia (“Pourquoi,” 30). 39. Paulmier-Foucart and Lusignan, VBHSM, 97–98. 40. “It is as if Vincent wanted to enclose in his Speculum this knowledge that was proliferating without limit” (Paulmier-Foucart, OEOM, 205–6). 41. Volui is an emendation, following the reading in the Lusignan edition, from von den Brincken’s volvi. 42. Paulmier-Foucart, OEOM, 215, 212. 43. Serge Lusignan, “Le temps de l’homme au temps de monseigneur Saint Louis: Le Speculum historiale et les Grandes Chroniques de France,” in VBIR, 495–505, 501. 44. De Lubac, EM, 2:425. 45. Ibid., 426.

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46. Adam Scotus, De tripartito tabernaculo 2.8.92, PL 198, col. 697. 47. Cited from Isidore of Seville, ET 1.41.1. Isidore goes on in this passage to associate history and the leer when he says that the discipline of history “ad Grammaticam pertinet, quia quidquid dignum memoria est lieris mandatur” (1.41.2), although Vincent’s excerpt eliminates this sentence. 48. “Liera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, / Moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia” (cited in de Lubac, EM, 1:23). 49. Ibid., 2:436, 425, 429. 50. Thus bk. 3, De opere secunda diei, begins: “Comestor: Secunda die fecit Deus firmamentum in medio aquarum, idest quandam exteriorem mundi superficiem, ex aquis coagulatis, ad instar chrystalli solidatam, et perlucidam, intra se cetera sensibilia continentem, ad imaginem testae, quae in ovo est” (SN 3.1, citing from Peter Comestor, Historia libri Genesis 4, PL 198, col. 1058), while the actual biblical text reads: “Dixit quoque Deus: Fiat firmamentum in medio aquarum, et dividat aquas ab aquis. Et fecit Deus firmamentum divisitque aquas quae erant sub firmamento ab his quae erant super firmamentum. Et factum est ita. Vocavitque Deus firmamentum, Caelum. Et factum est vespere et mane, dies secundus” (Gen. 1:6–8). 51. Copeland notes a similar inversion in the grammatical exercise of paraphrase, which allows the commentary to become “the container of, no longer supplement to, the original text, at least in terms of graphic, formal disposition” (RHT, 83). 52. See E. Mangenot, “Hexaméron,” Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, vol. 6, cols. 2325–54. 53. See Augustine, GL 4.5.12. 54. Cited in Vincent’s introduction of Augustine’s position, SN 2.15. Augustine cites this verse numerous times in De Genesi ad lieram as a counterpoint to the narrative of Genesis 1. See, e.g., 4.33.52, 5.3.6. The Ecclesiasticus passage also depicts a more powerful (and hence more convincing) God than that of Genesis, who laboriously fashions one object aer the next (likewise part of Vincent’s summary: “Quod enim singulus et quilibet artifex materialis operatur successive, hoc provenit ex infirmitate, quia scilicet non potest subito operari” [SN 2.15]). 55. In the first version (Na), these are chs. 26–33. The treatment of Augustine’s position and Vincent’s response (Nb chs. 23–24; Na ch. 34) does not change substantially among the three recensions. On the De Genesi ad lieram and Augustine’s other commentaries on Genesis, see Gilles Pelland, Cinq études d’Augustine sur le début de la Genèse (Tournai: Desclée, 1972). 56. a) quo Douai] Nb10 Nb11 Nb13 Nb14 Nb16. Cited from Augustine, GL 5.5. 57. Mangenot, “Hexaméron,” col. 2335. 58. On Hugh’s opposition to Augustine, see Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society, 171. 59. I am indebted to Monique Paulmier-Foucart for pointing out the significance of the words communem and communiter in this and the following passage (private communication, April 2005). 60. a) aliis Douai] Nb10 Nb11 Nb13 Nb14 Nb16. 61. Mireille Schmidt-Chazan, “L’idée d’empire dans le Speculum historiale de Vincent de Beauvais,” in VBIR, 253–84, 254. 62. See Marie-Christine Duchenne, “Un historien et sa source: Utilisation de la Chronique de Sigebert de Gembloux par Vincent de Beauvais,” Spicae 4 (1986): 31–79.

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63. Marinus M. Woesthuis, “Vincent of Beauvais and Helinand of Froidmont,” in LCVB, 233–47, 242, 243–44. 64. Cited from Cicero, De inventione 1.19.27. 65. Cited from Isidore of Seville, ET 2.7.1. 66. Cited from ibid., 1.44.5. For various permutations of the three categories of rhetorical narratio, see the Rhetorica ad Herennium 1.8.13; Cicero’s De inventione 1.19.27; and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria 2.4.2; as well as the overview of their Hellenistic sources in Roos Meijering, Literary and Rhetorical Theories in Greek Scholia (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1987), 72–98. The classical rhetorician’s approach will be reworked by Martianus Capella in the De nuptiis 5.550. 67. Quintilian, Institutio 2.4.2; and Cicero, De oratore 2.40.169. 68. Thesaurus linguae latinae, 10 vols. to date (Leipzig: Teubner, 1900–), s.v. enarro. 69. Copeland, RHT, 58, 61. 70. a) narrantur Douai] Nb10 Nb11 Nb13 Nb14 Nb16. This may well be a correction or error of the late medieval and early modern printers because all the manuscripts (of all versions) give the reading enarrantur. The printed editions, on the other hand, drop the initial e. It is possible that readers of the late fieenth century and later simply did not comprehend the resonances that the term enarratio would have had for medieval intellectuals. 71. Augustine, GL 4.35.56, cited in SN 2.21. 72. See Augustine, Confessiones 13.24.37. 73. Cited from Augustine, GL 4.28.45. 74. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, PL 37, col. 1. 75. Augustine, Sermones ad populum, PL 38, col. 2. 76. The De Genesi ad lieram’s recent editors, P. Agaësse and A. Solignac, describe this process; see La Genèse au sens liéral, 2nd ed., 2 vols., BAOSA 48, 49 (Paris: Institut d’études augustiniennes, 1970–72), 1:40 (“Introduction générale”). 77. a) temporum om. Douai] Nb10 Nb11 Nb13 Nb14 Nb16.—b) modo om. Douai] Nb10 Nb11 Nb13 Nb14 Nb16. 78. Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit, 3 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 1:10. 79. Ibid., 12. 80. The fullest published description to date of this corpus is Voorbij, SHVB, although a few additional manuscripts, including the important Collège de BonneEspérance copies, have been discovered since the book’s publication in 1991. For a comparison of the numbers of manuscripts of each speculum, see Voorbij, “Purpose and Audience,” 42–43. 81. For example, the Cîteaux manuscript of the Historiale (Ha3) is one of the earliest surviving manuscripts (it may have come from Royaumont, the abbey where Vincent served as a lector), and the Cîteaux manuscript of the Naturale (Nc2) has also been dated to the thirteenth century. The Tournai manuscript of the Naturale (Na2) dates to 1270–80 and is one of only two surviving manuscripts of the first redaction. One of the monastery’s Historiale manuscripts (Hde1) is also from the late thirteenth century, though the other (Hd6) dates to the following century. 82. The set is composed of Nb8, D05, and Hd5. 83. The set is composed of Nb16, D10, and He83. This set has generally been overlooked by scholars, though Voorbij does aribute all the manuscripts to the same set

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(SHVB, 322–23, 334, 337). An analysis of the manuscripts confirms their unity. They share the same format and decoration. 84. For example, the Carmelites in Paris seem to have owned fourteenth-century copies of the Historiale and the De proprietatibus rerum but not the Naturale (the Historiale was He72; the De proprietatibus rerum is now Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal MS 696). More impressive by way of example is the Cistercian cloister at Clairvaux, which had a vast library of over two thousand manuscripts (of which nearly fourteen hundred have survived). See André Vernet et al., eds., La bibliothèque de l’abbaye de Clairvaux du XIIe au XVIIIe siècle, 2 vols. (Paris: CNRS, 1979). The 1472 catalog lists a relatively early (thirteenth- or fourteenth-century) copy of the Historiale (Heac1 and He92, nos. 1427 and 1428, respectively, in the catalog) and no fewer than five copies of the De proprietatibus rerum (of which several were from the fourteenth century; the surviving manuscripts are now Montpellier, Bibliothèque de l’École de médecine, MSS 189 and 190, and Troyes, BM MS 979, catalog nos. 1376, 1377, and 1380), but no Naturale. The catalog also records reference works that would have facilitated access to the two encyclopedias, a copy of Hautfuney’s table to the Historiale and a manuscript containing a table of the books of the De proprietatibus rerum (the table to the Historiale, now Troyes, BM MS 270, is no. 1429 in the catalog, and the manuscript with the table to the De proprietatibus rerum, which has been lost, is no. 1367). In such a library, the absence of the Naturale, aested not only by the lack of surviving manuscripts but also by the silence of the late medieval catalog, is striking. At Clairvaux, the failure to procure a copy of the Naturale cannot be aributed to limited funds or restricted space. Nor, considering the number of De proprietatibus rerum manuscripts, can we aribute it to a lack of interest in natural history. Clairvaux was, moreover, Cistercian, and the order had contributed greatly to the composition and diffusion of the Speculum maius. So the absence of a Naturale at Clairvaux is indeed surprising and calls for explanation. Moreover, the fact that it is the De proprietatibus rerum that seems to have replaced the Naturale deserves aention here because Lusignan (“La réception de Vincent de Beauvais,” 42–43) has suggested that the failure of the Naturale to aract readers may be due to the popularity of Bartholomeus’s encyclopedia (the idea has recently been reiterated by Voorbij, “Purpose and Audience,” 43). This suggestion is inspired partly by the fact that both the Historiale and the De proprietatibus rerum were translated into French in the fourteenth century, but not the Naturale, which leads Lusignan to draw further parallels between the manuscript traditions of these texts in their original Latin versions. Lusignan’s interpretation of the evidence would seem to be confirmed by the fact that the De proprietatibus rerum is included in the Sorbonne’s pecia lists while the Speculum maius is omied in its entirety. (The De proprietatibus rerum is included in both early lists; see Henri Denifle and Emile Chatelain, eds., Cartularium universitatis parisiensis, 4 vols. [Paris: Frères Delalain, 1889], 1:644, 2:109.) 85. Voorbij (“Purpose and Audience,” 43) and Paulmier-Foucart (VBGM, 107–8) both credit the printing press with reassembling the Speculum maius. Blair observes that printing created both new possibilities and new constraints for reference books; it was possible to distribute large books as they had never been distributed before, but the considerable costs that were still involved obliged printers to choose texts that would have broad appeal to a diverse readership (TMTK, 13). This certainly accounts for the multiple editions of the polymath Speculum maius and also likely for the Douai editors’ expansion and “correction” of Vincent’s quotations. Of course, if we had the

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printing press alone, most libraries would still not own copies of Vincent’s encyclopedia; it was last printed in 1624. Its availability today is due to yet another technology, the photographic facsimile. Chapter 3 1. It is somewhat easier to construct a biography of Llull on the basis of medieval documentation than of Vincent of Beauvais or Jean de Meun. Archival documents survive; they have been collected by J. N. Hillgarth in Diplomatari lul·lià: Documents relatius a Ramon Llull i a la seva família (Barcelona: Ediciones de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2001). There is also a contemporary biography (Vita beati Raymundi Lulli, ed. B. de Gaiffier, Analecta Bollandiana 48 [1930]: 130–78; fieenth-century Catalan translation edited in OE, 1:31–54), as does a piece of apparently autobiographical poetry, the Desconhort (in OE, 1:1308–28). (These texts and the first-person passages in some of Llull’s other writing are probably responsible for the tendency of earlier scholars of Llull to resort to biographical criticism.) The Vita dates to 1311 and purports to have been taken from Llull’s dictation. There is no reason to doubt this, but it is wrien in a Latin at once more cultivated and more conventional than Llull’s idiosyncratic usage, so the Parisian Carthusian charged with writing it down must have spent some time polishing the text (see Mario Ruffini, “Il ritmo prosaico nella Vita beati Raymundi Lulli,” ELL 5 [1961]: 5–60). It is also strongly influenced by the generic conventions of the saint’s life and the apologia, and it misrepresents some biographical details (for a general discussion, see Fernando Domínguez Reboiras and Jordi Gayà, “Life,” in Raimundus Lullus: An Introduction to His Life, Works and Thought, ed. Alexander Fidora and Josep E. Rubio, CCCM 214, RLOL Supplementum Lullianum 2 [Turnhout: Brepols, 2008], 3–124). One of these details concerns Llull’s social standing: the Vita identifies his position as seneschal of James of Majorca, which would have made him a member of the nobility (Domínguez and Gayà, “Life,” 20–22). Domínguez and Gayà’s “Life” provides the most up-to-date biography of Llull; for a slightly older but complementary account, see Hillgarth, RLL, chs. 1–2. A briefer introduction, which brings out the degree to which Llull was a man of his time yet also (because he had been an autodidact) an original thinker who occasionally struggled to communicate with his contemporaries, is given in Josep Maria Ruiz and Albert Soler, “Ramon Llull in His Historical Context,” Catalan Historical Review 1 (2008): 47–61. Of the three writers treated in the present study, Llull has accumulated the largest and most varied scholarly bibliography. Access to this work is provided by the invaluable SL, formerly ELL, published annually by the Maioricensis Schola Lullistica, which includes articles, abstracts / reviews, and a bibliography of scholarship published elsewhere. The Centre de documentació Ramon Llull at the Universitat de Barcelona also maintains a searchable online bibliography as part of the Ramon Llull Database, hp: // orbita.bib.ub.es / ramon / p.asp. 2. These poets, commonly identified as troubadours, are the earliest vernacular writers of note in Catalonia and the only ones before Llull himself. For an overview of this early lyric in Catalonia, see Riquer, HLC, 21–196. 3. The Vita states that his first visions occurred while he was composing a vernacular song for a woman with whom he was enamored—a sentiment that is qualified as “vil” [base] and “fada” [senseless] (Vita ch. 2). On the way legend embroidered on this meager information, and on Llull’s own statements about worldly love in other texts, see Hillgarth, RLL, 3, 35–38.

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4. For Llull’s allusions to French and Occitan literature, Riquer’s HLC, from 1964, remains the most extensive treatment. See especially ibid., 269–71, 277, 313–16, and 324–25. Elspeth Kennedy has argued for Llull’s knowledge of French romance in “The Knight as Reader of Arthurian Romance” (in Culture and the King: The Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend: Essays in Honor of Valerie M. Lagorio, ed. Martin B. Schichtman and James B. Carley [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994], 70–90). Xavier Bonillo Hoyos suggests a few French precedents for aspects of the Libre de meravelles (Literatura al “Llibre de meravelles” de Ramon Llull [Barcelona: Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, 2008], 45, 66–67). He emphasizes the commonalities between the Libre de meravelles and the Livre de Sidrac le philosophe (ibid., 45, 105–6), but, given the likelihood that the laer text was wrien in the last decade of the thirteenth century, these must be either coincidental or due to the influence of the Libre de meravelles (which, otherwise, seems to have had very lile influence in France) on the author of the Sidrac—not, as Bonillo Hoyos would have it, vice versa. For the date of the Livre de Sidrac, see Sylvie-Marie Steiner, Un temoignage de la diffusion encyclopédique au XIIIe siècle: Le Livre de Sidrach (Melun: Association “Mémoires,” 1994), 5–6. Lola Badia has wrien about Llull’s relation to the troubadour tradition. See her “L’aportació de Ramon Llull a la literatura en llengua d’oc: Per un replantejament de les relacions Occitània-Catalunya a la baixa edat mitjana” (in Actes del vuitè col·loqui internacional de llengua i literatura catalanes, 12–17 de setembre de 1988, Biblioteca “Abat Oliba,” 77 [Montserrat: Associació Internacional de Llangua i Literatura Catalanes, Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 1989], 261–95), and ASNE. She has also argued that Llull’s use of poetic and narrative conventions resulted from a strategy to promulgate his otherwise rather intimidating Art of Finding Truth. See her “Literature as an Ancilla artis: The Transformation of Science into Literature according to Robert Pring-Mill and Ramon Llull,” Hispanic Research Journal 10 (2009): 18–28. 5. As far as I know, the connection between the Libre de meravelles and the Queste has not been made previously, but the structure of the Catalan text is too similar to that of the French romance for me to think that Llull invented the Libre de meravelles out of the blue. Although the dialogue structure had a long tradition in Latin literature (for a discussion of the Libre de meravelles’s relation to Latin precedents, see Bonillo Hoyos, Literatura, 77–85), the Libre de meravelles reflects two innovations of the Queste: the introduction of a large number of unnamed but authoritative interlocutors (monks, hermits, and recluses) and the intricate interweaving of quest narrative and dialogue, the rapid alternation between each discrete episode and its interpretation, that this multiplication of interlocutors makes possible. However, with the Queste, as with the Lancelot en prose (another portion of this romance cycle), it need not have been the French text that Llull knew. Lile Arthurian romance survives in Occitan, but a manuscript fragment and a fourteenth-century library catalog suggest that translations did circulate. See Pierre Bec, ed., Anthologie de la prose occitane du Moyen Âge (XIIe–Xve siècle), vol. 1, Les classiques d’oc (Avignon: Aubanel, 1977), 141. 6. Hillgarth, RLL, 1–2. 7. The Vita says that Llull converted aer experiencing visions, then hearing a sermon on the life of Saint Francis of Assisi in the Franciscan church (Vita chs. 2–9), and from that point on he appears to have maintained cordial relations with the Franciscan order, absorbing their mysticism and the Franciscan ethos of conversion through persuasion (Hillgarth, RLL, 13, 38). In 1290, no less a figure than the general

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of the order, Raymond Gaufredi, wrote him a leer of recommendation. At the same time, Llull was also strongly aracted to the intellectual work of the Dominicans. Not long aer his conversion, he met Ramon de Penyafort, former master-general of the Dominican order, who advised him on how he should conduct his studies and probably helped shaped his missionary approach along lines similar to that of the Dominicans (Vita ch. 10; Hillgarth, RLL, 5–6). Llull’s approach to interfaith debate would be different, however, from that taken by such Dominicans as Thomas Aquinas (in the Summa contra gentiles) and Ramon Martí (in the Pugio fidei); on these differences, see below. Tradition has it that, aer seriously considering joining the Dominicans, Llull entered the Franciscan third order toward the end of his life, but there is no evidence. In 1311, it was to a Carthusian that he dictated the Vita. He destined the Chartreuse de Vauvert in Paris, along with the house of the Genoese nobleman Perceval Spinola and that of his own son-in-law, Pere de Sentmenat, in Majorca, to receive collections of his writings (Vita ch. 45). While Llull was clearly trying to ensure that his texts would continued to be read in these three cities, it is interesting that, instead of the mendicant houses, it was a monastery and two secular households that were to preserve his books. For a nuanced discussion of Llull’s philosophical affinities and differences with the mendicants and religious orders more generally, see Fernando Domínguez Reboiras, “Raimundo Lulio y el ideal mendicante: Afinidades y divergencias,” in Aristotelica et Lulliana: Magistro doctissimo Charles H. Lohr septuagesimum annum feliciter agenti dedicata, ed. Fernando Domínguez Reboiras, Ruedi Imbach, Theodor Pindl-Büchel, and Peter Walter (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1995), 377–413. 8. On Llull’s rhetoric and logic, see Mark D. Johnston, The Spiritual Logic of Ramon Llull (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), and ERRL. Hillgarth provides a brief explanation of how Llull came to develop the Art in RLL, 7–27. For a fuller explanation of the development and context of the Art and how Llull intended it to be used, see the introduction by Josep Enric Rubio (“Thought: The Art,” in Fidora and Rubio, eds., Raimundus Lullus, 243–310) and the recent work of J. M. Ruiz Simon (L’art de Ramon Llull i la teoria escolàstica de la ciència [Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1999]) and Bonner (ALRL). The laer serves the double purpose of providing an introduction to Lullian thought for nonspecialists and proposing, for specialists, important revisions to the current understanding of the Art. 9. See Harvey J. Hames, The Art of Conversion: Christianity and Kabbalah in the Thirteenth Century, The Medieval Mediterranean, 26 (Leiden: Brill, 2000), and “The Language of Conversion: Ramon Llull’s Art as a Vernacular,” in The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity, ed. Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 43–56. Hames treats the possible relations between Llull’s development of the Art and contemporary developments in the Jewish kabbalah. For Llull’s possible uses of Muslim thought, see, among others, Dominique Urvoy, “Nature et portée desliens de Ramon Lull avec l’univers arabe,” in Ramon Llull y el Islam, by Sebastian Garcias Palou (Palma de Mallorca, 1981); and Charles H. Lohr, “Christanus arabicus cuius nomen Raimundus Lullus,” Freiburger Zeitschri für Philosophie und Theologie 31 (1984): 57–88, “Ramon Llull: ‘Christianus arabicus,’” Randa 19 (1986): 9–29, and “Ramon Llull: Logica nova,” in Interpretationen Hauptwerke der Philosophie Mielalter, ed. K. Flasch (Stugart: P. Reclam, 1998), 333–51. There is also a recent anthology, Ramon Llull i l’Islam: L’inici del diàleg (Barcelona: La Magrana, 2008). On Llull’s aitudes toward Jews and Muslims, which appear to have

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been more complex than those of many of his contemporaries, see especially Eusebio Colomer, “La actitud compleja y ambivalente de Ramon Llull ante el judaísmo y el islamismo,” in Constantes y fragmentos del pensamiento luliano, ed. F. Domínguez and J. de Salas, Beihee zur Iberoromania, 12 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996), 77–90. 10. For the nature of this response, see esp. Ruiz Simon, L’art de Ramon Llull. 11. A recent account of Llull’s use of natural philosophy is Josep Enric Rubio, “The Natural Realm,” in Fidora and Rubio, eds., Raimundus Lullus, 311–62. For Llull’s exploitation of Neoplatonic paradigms, see Frances Yates, “Ramon Lull and John Scotus Erigena,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23 (1960): 1–44; and Lola Badia, “La filosofia natural de Guillem de Conches en català,” Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 40 (1985–86): 137–69. 12. Johnston argues in Spiritual Logic of Ramon Llull and ERRL against the older view that Llull was a hopeless eccentric by showing that, despite the fact that he reworked his sources, his thought bears discernible relations to that of his contemporaries. 13. See the scholarship listed in nn. 4 and 9 above. 14. One of the earliest surviving Lullian codices (Paris, BNF MS fr. 22933) contains a French translation of the Libre del gentil et dels tres savis, which Llull had wrien in Majorca ca. 1274. The manuscript, which will be discussed below, was probably made in Paris ca. 1300 (Alison Stones, private communication, 2006). On the French translation of the Libre de meravelles, which is perhaps contemporary to that of the Libre del gentil e dels tres savis, see chapter 1, n. 1, above. 15. One of three such libraries, the others being in Majorca and Genoa (see n. 7 above). On Llull’s relations with Parisian intellectuals, see Hillgarth, RLL, esp. 46–134. 16. Llull’s most notable collaborators in northern France were two, both members of the clerical elite and educated in Paris, but not mendicants. Pierre of Limoges (the glossator of Richard de Fournival’s autobiography) held a chair of theology, was a doctor of medicine, and was also known for his knowledge of astronomy; he died as a canon of Évreux, willing his substantial library to the Sorbonne. Thomas Le Myésier (d. 1336), who devoted himself more exclusively to Llull’s work, had also been trained in Paris. He was a canon of Arras but also a doctor of medicine and personal doctor to Mahaut, Countess of Artois. Le Myésier arranged for several substantial compilations of Lullian texts. See Hillgarth, RLL, 150–85. 17. The discussion, provided by the text’s most recent editor, of the various ways in which the Arbor scientiae has been categorized and cataloged furnishes an excellent example of this sort of debate. See AS, 1:5–9* (the introductory material is paginated separately from the text, but with arabic numerals; I here distinguish them from the other page numbers by an asterisk). 18. For the manuscripts and versions of the Libre de contemplació, see n. 94 below. For the manuscripts of the Libre de meravelles, see chapter 1, n. 1, above. The text of the Arbor scientiae survives in both Latin and Catalan versions, the former represented by seventeen medieval manuscripts or fragments, the laer by three. 19. The Arbor scientiae proved appealing to early modern readers (in contrast to the Libre de meravelles, which was never printed during the period); seven Latin editions of the Arbor scientiae appeared before the year 1700, beginning with Pere Posa’s Barcelona edition of 1482 (reissued in 1505) and Gilbert de Villiers’s 1515 Lyon edition, reissued in the same city by Jean Pillehoe in 1635 (and perhaps earlier, in 1605). In addition, two Castilian translations appeared in 1663 and 1664. Thus, the 1995 exhibition Tous les

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savoirs du monde, celebrating the opening of the BNF site François-Mierrand, omied the Arbor scientiae from the medieval section and coupled it instead with the work of Pierre de La Ramée (1515–72). As the exhibition catalog explains: “L’encyclopédie humaniste était une préparation à la sagesse de Dieu, l’encyclopédie lullisto-ramiste s’en voudra une démonstration” (Tous les savoirs du monde: Encyclopédies et bibliothèques, du Sumer au XXIe siècle, ed. Roland Schaer [Paris: BNF / Flammarion, 1996], 58). Yates’s extraordinarily influential scholarship similarly followed a trajectory from the sixteenth century back to Llull (and beyond him to John Scotus Erigena). Although Yates did not view Llull through the kind of anachronistic lens implicit in the exhibition catalog, the collection of her essays that was published posthumously (Lull and Bruno: Collected Essays [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982]) makes it more likely for scholars to encounter the medieval Majorcan thinker through bibliographic research on the Renaissance. 20. For the diverse images produced by mirrors, see chapters 4 and 6 below. The Lullian encyclopedias have begun to benefit from the work of scholars willing to place them in their contemporary context. Badia has taken the occasion of a colloquium celebrating the Corpus Christianorum edition of the Arbor scientiae to criticize the placement of that text next to Renaissance examples in the BNF exhibition and to suggest the alternative of thinking of the Arbor scientiae as a “new encyclopedia,” innovative yet participating fully in the medieval tradition (ASNE, 1–2). Maria Teresa Fumagalli has included excerpts of Llull’s encyclopedic texts in her anthology of medieval encyclopedic writing, arguing that texts such as the Arbor scientiae represent a dynamic, “projectural” encyclopedism, which teaches a system for acquiring knowledge, to be contrasted to the static encyclopedism of writers who transmit an inventory of knowledge, such as Vincent of Beauvais (Le enciclopedie dell’occidente medioevale [Turin: Loescher, 1981], 47–48). 21. The contrast between the Speculum maius and the Arbor scientiae has been recognized by a number of scholars; see, e.g., Fumagalli, ed., Le enciclopedie dell’occidente medioevale. Badia notes that Llull cites hardly at all but raises “the ordering of the parts . . . to a superior intellectual standard” (ASNE, 6). For Bonner, Llull is “trying to do something more important and more profound” than constructing a “mere data-bank,” by showing the “chain of isomorphisms” that leads from the elements to God (SAS, 33). 22. Scholarship on this text was rare until the last decade. The acts of a colloquium that coincided with the publication of the new edition have been printed (see BW). 23. Hames, “The Language of Conversion,” 45. 24. Many possible explanations have been suggested. Ruiz and Soler aribute this aspect of Llull’s writing to the fact that he was self-taught. Whereas clerical writers tended “to conceal novelty under the mask of repetition,” Llull, “as a layman, had not acquired this habit and he pretends to be innovating even when he is really repeating” (“Ramon Llull,” 50). For Josep Rubio, Llull’s failure to have recourse to auctoritates can be aributed to his personal illumination “since, in his eyes, the direct source and guarantee of the veracity of his own discourse is God” (“Thought: The Art,” 244). 25. In this regard, Sarah Kay’s comments about Matfre Ermengaud (who will be discussed below) could also apply to Llull. Of the former, Kay concludes: “His knowledge of troubadour poetry is extraordinary, but he faces huge problems of selection and interpretation. Quotation in the Breviari could never be equated with simple verbatim repetition because it depends on radical revision” (“How Long Is a Quotation?

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Quotations from the Troubadours in the Text and Manuscripts of the Breviari d’amor,” Romania 127 [2009]: 1–29, 22). In light of their shared aims and interests and the similarity of their cultural contexts, it may be productive to pursue the path opened by Badia in ASNE and carry out a fuller comparison of these two writers. 26. However, it would be a mistake to exaggerate the mechanical nature of the compiler’s citations, especially when the sources are in prose. My comparison of the Speculum maius text with some of its verse and prose sources has shown that metrical verse has been reproduced word-for-word (at least in the case I have investigated, that of Hrabanus Maurus) but that the word order of classical or late antique prose sources has sometimes been reworked to beer conform to scholastic word order, whether by Vincent, by the copyist of the source manuscript he was working from, or by the brother who was copying citations for him. 27. The seminal study of the expanding use of vernacular prose in late medieval France is Wlad Godzich and Jeffrey Kiay, The Emergence of Prose: An Essay in Prosaics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Armstrong and Kay have, in KP, recently provided a nuanced and invaluable reassessment of the relation between verse and prose in the later Middle Ages. 28. Pierre Bec notes that prose in Occitania never achieved the literary success that it did in northern France. See Bec, ed., Anthologie de la prose occitane, 8–9. On Arthurian romance, see ibid., 141. The most famous Occitan prose texts of the period are, of course, the pseudobiographical vidas and razos that appear in troubadour anthologies from the second half of the thirteenth century on. 29. For the translations and sermons, see Riquer, HLC, 203–6. On Arnau, see Jordi Rubío Balaguer, “Sobre la prosa rimada en Ramon Llull,” in Estudios dedicados a Menéndez Pidal 5 (1954): 307–18. 30. Bruneo Latini, Li livres dou tresor, ed. Spurgeon Baldwin and Paul Barree, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 257 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2003), 3.10. 31. For a nuanced discussion of the prosifiers’ claims about the falsity of verse, see esp. David Hult, “Poetry and the Translation of Knowledge in Jean de Meun,” in Poetry, Knowledge and Community in Late Medieval France, ed. Rebecca Dixon and Finn E. Sinclair, Gallica 13 (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 19–41. Hult argues convincingly that such aacks are a rhetorical strategy that must be understood in the context of a competition between verse and prose versions of various texts (ibid., 27–32). In KP, Armstrong and Kay show the necessity of reading late medieval literature against the grain of these antiverse sentiments. 32. BA line 29402. For the significance of this pun, see Armstrong and Kay, KP, 1, 6–8. 33. One can, nonetheless, argue that prose is already beginning to establish itself as the norm in the North. This argument would be butressed by two prose encyclopedias in French from the very end of the century, the Placides et Timeo (or Li secrés as philosophes) and the Livre de Sidrac le philosophe (or Livre de la fontaine de toutes sciences). The Roman de la Rose is, of course, the principal counterexample. Though its engagement with the encyclopedic tradition is far more complex and problematic than that of the other French texts I have mentioned, Amstrong and Kay argue that its “success and prestige . . . ensure an association between intellectual adventure and poetic form” that will last through the rest of the Midde Ages (KP, 74).

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34. For the comparison between Llull’s prose and that of Arnau, see Rubió, “Sobre la prosa rimada,” 314–15. For the form of the Arbre de ciència, see ibid., 316–17. For a description of how his rhymed prose functions, see ibid., 311. 35. Aer comparing the two versions, the most recent editor of the Latin text, Pere Villalba Varneda, concludes that it was first wrien in that language (AS, 1:52*; see also Pere Villalba Varneda, “Ramon Llull: Arbor scientiae o Arbre de sciencia,” Faventia 17, no. 2 [1995]: 69–76). Badia, however, maintains that the Latin archetype was made from the Catalan text (ASNE, 2). The text’s aesthetic qualities appear more clearly in the Catalan version, but I concur with Villalba Varneda that the laer version is more precise (“Ramon Llull: Arbor scientiae o Arbre de sciencia,” 76). 36. In fact, the antecedents that I shall discuss had already been brought together with the tree of knowledge, though these links were made only implicitly and in passing, in broad studies devoted not so much to genealogical issues as to larger theoretical questions. The first was Gerhart B. Ladner, “Medieval and Modern Understanding of Symbolism: A Comparison,” Speculum 54 (1979): 223–56. Ladner (ibid., 252–54) discusses the Arbor scientiae and the Arbre de filosofia d’amor (a later text that reproduces its structure), aer touching briefly on the trees of the Liber floridus, Bonaventure’s Lignum vitae, Joachim of Fiore’s tree figures, and Matfre Ermengaud’s tree of love. Peter Dronke juxtaposes Lambert’s, Joachim’s and Matfre’s trees to that of Llull’s Arbre de filosofia d’amor in a wide-ranging study of late medieval allegory but mentions the Arbor scientiae only briefly, aer discussing the later text (“Arbor Caritatis,” in Intellectuals and Poets in Medieval Europe, Storia e leeratura, raccolta di studi e testi, 183 [Rome: Storia e leeratura, 1992], 103–41, 111–12, 120–21, 125–28). While not a genealogical study, Michael Evans’s perceptive discussion of diagrammatic trees is also useful because it situates them in the context of the scholastic exploitation of geometric forms (“The Geometry of the Mind,” Architectural Association Quarterly 12, no. 4 [1980]: 32–55). 37. Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 40 vols. (Paris, 1751–72; facsimile, Stugart–Bad Cannsta: Frommann, 1966), vol. 5, fol. 648r. 38. The term comes from Anna C. Esmeijer, Divina Quaternitas: A Preliminary Study in the Method and Application of Visual Exegesis (Assen: Gorcum, 1978), which remains essential. The more recent bibliography is extensive. See, among others, Michael Curschmann, “Imagined Exegesis: Text and Picture in the Exegetical Words of Rupert of Deutz, Honorius Augustodunensis, and Gerhoch of Reichersberg,” Traditio 44 (1988): 145–69; Barbara Obrist, “La figure géométrique dans l’oeuvre de Joachim de Flore,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 31 (1988): 297–321; and Patrice Sicard, Diagrammes médiévaux et exégèse visuelle: Le “Libellus de formatione arche” de Hugues de Saint-Victor (Turnhout: Brepols, 1993). It should be noted that the term visual exegesis has recently been criticized for its “too easy elision of pictura and scriptura” ( Jeffrey F. Hamburger, “The Place of Theology in Medieval Art History: Problems, Positions, Possibilities,” in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché [Princeton, NJ: Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, in association with the Princeton University Press, 2006], 11–31, 22–23). I hope to show here, not only how the two elements come together, but also how they come apart. 39. Two copies were made in the second half of the thirteenth century. Nothing is known about the persons or institutions that ordered the manuscripts, but both were owned in the later Middle Ages by Carthusian monasteries in France, and one contains

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a fieenth-century ex libris from the Chartreuse de Vauvert (Leiden, University Library, MS Voss. lat. fol. 31, fols. 1, 224; see J. Peter Gumbert, “Recherches sur le stemma des copies du Liber Floridus,” in “Liber Floridus” Colloquium: Papers Read at the International Meeting Held in the University Library Ghent on 3–5 September 1967, ed. Albert Derolez [Ghent: E. Story-Scientia, 1973], 37–50, 39n18). It is possible that Llull could have seen it there if it was made for the monastery or entered its collection soon aer being copied. (The other thirteenth-century copy was owned by the Chartreuse de Montdieu, in Champagne; it is now Paris, BNF MS lat. 8865.) 40. See Penelope C. Mayo’s detailed commentary on the visual sequence of these two trees and the second dream of Nebuchadnezzar (“The Crusaders under the Palm: Allegorical Plants and Cosmic Kingship in the Liber floridus,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 27 [1973]: 29–67, 52–67). Mayo points out the important differences between these trees and the schemas of virtues and vices from Hugh of Saint-Victor, Conrad of Hirsau, and Honorius Augustodunensis (ibid., 33–34, 54–55). 41. Ghent, Rijksuniversiteit, MS 92, fol. 76v. 42. Mayo, “The Crusaders under the Palm,” 54. 43. Ghent, Rijksuniversiteit, MS 92, fol. 232v. 44. Mayo’s interpretation here (“The Crusaders under the Palm,” 55–56) depends more on trees of virtues and vices from other sources, which spring from pride and humility, than on the trees of the previous opening. 45. Llull, LGTS, 6–12. I cite from Anthony Bonner’s critical edition, Llibre del gentil e dels tres savis, 2nd ed., NEORL, 2 (Palma: Abadía de Montserrat, 2001). An edition of the Catalan version, without critical apparatus, appears in OSRL, 1:89–272; and there is a much older edition, also without apparatus, in OE, 1:1047–142. On this text, see Roger Friedlein, Der Dialog bei Ramon Llull: Literarische Gestaltung als apologetische Strategie (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004), 59–98. 46. These are labeled virtues in Llull’s early texts and dignities in his later work. Bonner explains their role in Llull’s thought in ALRL, 284–87. On the relation between the dignities and the Islamic divine names, see Charles H. Lohr, “The Islamic ‘Beautiful Names of God’ and the Lullian Art,” in Jews, Muslims, and Christians in and around the Crown of Aragon: Essays in Honour of Professor Elena Lourie, ed. Harvey J. Hames (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 197–205. 47. Bonner, ALRL, 30–31. 48. For a discussion of this phenomenon, see Evans, “The Geometry of the Mind,” 45. 49. Paris, BNF MS lat. 15450, fols. 457v–458r. This is the famous Electorium magnum of Thomas Le Myésier. 50. Paris, BNF MS fr. 22933. Alison Stones believes that the manuscript may have been made in Paris ca. 1300, but it is not easy to date (private communication, 2006). 51. For a fuller, historically situated explanation of the problem of trying to debate via the exegesis of authorities, see Bonner, ALRL, 13–14. 52. See esp. Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). 53. Llull appears to have wrien first the Catalan version, which nevertheless survives in only three manuscripts. The Latin versions survive in twelve medieval manuscripts or fragments. Bonner provides a useful introduction in SWRL, 2:1109–18.

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I cite the Catalan text from the edition of Lola Badia in Començaments de medicina, Tractat d’astronomia, 1–120, NEORL, 5 (Palma: Abadía de Montserrat, 2002). There is also an edition by Bonner, without critical apparatus, in OSRL, 2:397–496. 54. There has been a trend in the last decade or so to view medieval diagrams as objects with multiple functions, rather than as mnemonics alone. With reference to Hugh of Saint-Victor’s diagrams, Sicard has argued that the aspects of the diagram that scholars tend to emphasize (its origins, its mnemonic role, its relation to temporality, etc.) are all relevant but that our interpretation of the image should not be limited to any one of them because visual exegesis always has as its ultimate goal contemplation (Diagrammes médiévaux, 149–50). Whether or not one agrees with Sicard’s conclusions about the existence of early graphic realizations of Hugh’s ark, the larger argument is important because it shows the necessity of moving beyond the discussion of the tree of knowledge as a memory diagram, just as Bonner has done with the figures of the Art (ALRL, 23–24). Therefore, the tree figure can be more productively discussed in the context of Mary Carruthers’s The Cra of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) than of her earlier The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 55. Llull le Majorca for pilgrimages to Compostella and Rocamadour (in Quercy, a province located between Languedoc and the Limousin) soon aer his conversion in 1263, and he clearly spent part of the 1270s in Montpellier, but—as far as can be known from the documentation—he did not begin making longer journeys until the late 1280s. His first visit to the papal court occurred in 1287; his first visit to Paris followed in the same year. 56. It has been customary to refer to this collection of drawings as the Liber figurarum, but Marco Rainini has recently suggested that Joachim may not have compiled the anthology of his figures and that, rather than thinking of it as a book, we should see it as a loose portfolio, circulating in somewhat fragmentary form among Joachim’s disciples (see Disegni dei tempi: Il “Liber figurarum” e la teologia figurativa di Gioacchino da Fiore [Rome: Viella, 2006]). The fullest earlier treatments of this material are Leone Tondelli’s Il Libro delle figure dell’abate Gioachino da Fiore, 2nd ed. (Turin: Società editrice internazionale, 1953) and Marjorie Reeves and Beatrice Hirsch-Reich’s The Figurae of Joachim of Fiore (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972). See also, more recently, Fabio Troncarelli, “Il Liber figurarum tra ‘gioachimiti’ e ‘gioachimisti,’” in Gioacchino da Fiore tra Bernardo di Clairvaux e Innocenzo III, ed. Roberto Rusconi (Rome: Viella, 2001), 267–86. Bernard McGinn draws aention to the more general tendency, which Joachim shares with a few other twelh-century monastic theologians, to use his visions to authenticate his “daring” biblical exegesis (“Ratio and Visio: Reflections on Joachim of Fiore’s Place in Twelh-Century Theology,” in ibid., 27–39). In this sense it may be possible to see Llull’s dependence on his own vision as an authentification of his Art as closer to twelh- than to thirteenth-century thought. The willingness to invent new synthetic symbols that McGinn also aributes to Joachim may provide another connection to Ramon Llull (see “Symbolism in the Thought of Joachim of Fiore,” in Prophecy and Millenarianism: Essays in Honour of Marjorie Reeves, ed. Ann Williams [Burnt Hill: Longman, 1990], 143–64). 57. Joachim of Fiore, Liber Concordie, fols. 13v–14v, 19r–23r, quotation fol. 22r. For

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useful commentaries on these passages and their manuscript tradition, see Marjorie Reeves, “The Arbores of Joachim of Fiore,” Papers of the British School at Rome 24 (1956): 124–36; and Reeves and Hirsch-Reich, The Figurae, 30–38. 58. Reeves, “The Arbores,” 129–31. 59. For an overview of scholarship on this important manuscript, see Rainini, Disegni dei tempi, 248–58. 60. For a commentary, see Reeves and Hirsch-Reich, The Figurae, 164–69. 61. Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 255A, fol. 12v. See the commentary in Reeves and Hirsch-Reich, The Figurae, 170–73. 62. Henri de Lubac, La postérité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore, 2 vols. (Paris: Lethielleux, 1979), 1:44–45. 63. On fols. 9v–10r. Reeves and Hirsch-Reich, The Figurae, 155 (see also 166–68). 64. On the diffusion of Joachim’s figurae, in addition to the evidence of surviving manuscripts, see Morton Bloomfield and Marjorie Reeves, “The Penetration of Joachism into Northern Europe,” Speculum 29 (1954): 772–93; and de Lubac, La postérité spirituelle. Llull was generally closer to the Franciscan order than the Dominican, especially aer his spiritual crisis at Genoa (1292–93). Already in 1290 he had obtained from Raymond Gaufredi, general of the Franciscan order (1289–95), protector of the Spirituals, and defender of the ideas of Peter John Olivi, a leer authorizing him to teach in the order’s Italian convents. On the nature of his exchanges with the Spirituals, see Hillgarth, RLL, 52–56. Llull did not espouse their suspect doctrines (he had, aer all, enough suspect doctrines of his own) but nevertheless seems to have felt what Hillgarth characterizes as an “instinctive sympathy” for their reforming ideas (ibid., 55). 65. Bonaventure, Lignum vitae prologue 2, in Opera omnia, 10 vols. (Quaracchi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1882–1902), 8:68–86. 66. The text survives in twelve complete manuscripts, all from these two regions. The Breviari d’amor, long marginalized in scholarship, has received considerable aention in the past few years, as Peter Rickes’s edition (BA) has appeared in print. Paolo Cherchi provides a helpful introduction in “L’enciclopedia nel mondo dei trovatori: Il Breviari d’amor di Matfre Ermengau,” in EMAC, 277–91. Among more recent work, most relevant to the present inquiry are Valerie Galent-Fasseur, “La dame de l’arbre: Rôle de la ‘vue’ structurale dans le Bréviaire d’amour de Matfre Ermengau,” Romania 117, nos. 1–2 (1999): 32–50; Michelle Bolduc, The Medieval Poetics of Contraries (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), ch. 3, and “Naming Names: Matfre Ermengaud’s Use of Troubadour Quotations,” Tenso 22 (2007): 41–74; Sarah Kay, “Graing the Knowledge Community: The Purposes of Verse in the Breviari d’amor of Matfre Ermengaud,” Neophilologus 91 (2007): 361–73, “How Long Is a Quotation?” and The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in Late Medieval French Didactic Poetry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), ch. 1; and Armstrong and Kay, KP, 111–21. 67. It is important here to distinguish encyclopedism from the didactic tradition, more broadly conceived, of which encyclopedias form only one branch. Although I argue in this study against ossified generic categories, encyclopedias of whatever kind always represent some totalizing impulse; accordingly, these texts are always lengthy. Thus, while a brief treatise on the virtues and vices (the genre of didactic text oen accompanied by tree diagrams) lacks the breadth to be considered an encyclopedia, Matfre’s long text, which treats all possible subjects relating to love (which is, as it turns

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out, just about everything), shares the totalizing encyclopedic impulse. The Brevairi’s structure and other particularities certainly render it a problematic text from the perspective of genre, but it can legitimately be described as participating in encyclopedism. Yet complex exigetical tree figures had been absent from this genre for 150 years. 68. For the miniatures in surviving manuscripts, see Katja Laske-Fix, Der Bildzyklus des Breviari d’amor (Munich: Schnell & Steiner, 1973). 69. Matfre Ermengaud, BA lines 114p–127p (the Breviari d’amor contains a few prose passages in vol. 2 only; the line numbers are distinguished with a p from those of the verse text). 70. For the genealogical gesture and its coordination with a descending movement, see BA vol. 2, lines 1p–19p. Kay argues that this movement of descent is conditioned by the Tree of Porphyry, well-known in the Middle Ages (The Place of Thought, 24–27). 71. BA lines 19p–29p. 72. For a fascinating study of early genealogical trees and the problem of upward versus downward movement, see Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “La genèse de l’arbre généalogique,” in L’arbre: Histoire naturelle et symbolique de l’arbre, du bois et du fruit au Moyen Âge, ed. Michel Pastoureau (Paris: Le léopard d’or, 1993), 41–81. 73. BA lines 104p–112p. 74. As in Escurial, Bibl. Real de San Lorenzo, MS S.I.3; London, British Library, MS Royal 19.C.1; and Paris, BNF MS fr. 858. 75. BA lines 48p–56p. 76. For yet more divergences, see Kay, The Place of Thought, 34–40. 77. BA line 415. Kay interprets this gra in terms of the mixing of verse, prose, and graphic image; the first of these provides the stalk onto which the other two are graed (“Graing the Knowledge Community,” 367). 78. Guilhem Molinier offers the simple example of “mon cor” in the couplet “Mon cor se mor / quar per lunh for.” He explains that the hemistich is called a “graed line” or “bordos enpeutatz” because the rhymed ending earns it the status of a “line” while its role in the longer line means that it cannot be considered wholly independent of it (Las flors del gay saber, estier dichas las leys d’amors, ed. M. Gatien-Arnoult, 3 vols., Monumens de la liérature romane depuis le quatorzième siècle [Paris: Silvestre; Toulouse: Bon et Privat, 1841–43], 1:124). 79. On these disjunctions, see Galent-Fasseur, “La dame de l’arbre”; and Kay, “Graing the Knowledge Community,” 363–64. 80. The most complete survey is provided in Jan M. Ziolkowski, “Theories of Obscurity in the Latin Tradition,” Mediaevalia 19 (1996): 101–70. Particularly relevant to Llull’s obscure figures is Carruthers’s discussion of invention and difficulty in The Cra of Thought, 124–30. 81. Augustine, DC 11.17, 6.7. 82. Readers interested in the trobar clus or troubadours in general can begin with the recent anthology Lark in the Morning: The Verses of the Troubadours, ed. Robert Kehew, trans. Ezra Pound, W. D. Snodgrass, and Robert Kehew (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), which includes selected lyrics of Marcabru as well as the clus poets Peire d’Alvernhe, Raimbaut d’Aurenga, and Arnaut Daniel, with translations that capture the playfulness of the original lyric. The standard classification of troubadour lyric is Alfred Pillet and Henry Carstens, Bibliographie der Troubadours, Schrien der Königsberger Gelehrten Gesellscha 3 (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1933).

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Notes to Pages 154–158

83. Three of the four surviving troubadour anthologies from the region transmit a substantial number of Marcabru’s songs, including the celebrated chansonnier d’Urfé (Paris, BNF MS fr. 22543), which accords him pride of place at the beginning of the lyric collection. 84. “Per savi teing ses doptanza / celui qu’e mon chan devina / cho que chascus moz declina / si com la razos despleia / qu’eu meteis sui en erranza / d’esclarzir paraula escura” [I think him undoubtedly wise who can make out the meaning of every word in my song, as the reasoning unfolds, for I myself err in clarifying obscure speech] (Pillet and Carstens, Bibliographie der Troubadours, 293.37; Simon Gaunt, Ruth Harvey, and Linda Paterson, eds. and trans., Marcabru: A Critical Edition [Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000], 37.1–6). Generalizations about the trobar clus are always flawed because each troubadour developed his own particular approach. I draw here on Linda Paterson’s careful treatment of these diverse approaches, Troubadours and Eloquence (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975). 85. Paterson, Troubadours and Eloquence, 41. 86. Matfre cites sixteen times from twelve different songs of Bernart de Ventadorn, a leu poet with forty-one surviving songs, but only twice from the songs of Arnaut Daniel, a clus poet with eighteen surviving songs much admired in Matfre’s own time (most famously by Dante). Matfre does cite several times from four of Marcabru’s songs, perhaps because the laer’s moralizing tendencies were consonant with his own, but this is in no way proportionate to the size of Marcabru’s oeuvre (forty-four surviving songs). 87. BA lines 536–40. 88. See, e.g., ibid., lines 27676, 31943. 89. Matfre’s redeployment of the alba would seem to be in keeping with the movement in the later thirteenth century to reshape the previously erotic genre in response to the increasing censure leveled at such lyric during the Inquisition. On this remodeling of the genre, see Dominique Billy, “Nouvelles perspectives sur l’alba,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 53 (2010): 355–77. 90. For an overview of Llull’s theories of language and exploitation of obscurity, see Riquer, HLC, 345–50. Jordi Rubió i Balaguer provides a sensitive description of Llull’s literary practices and style in “L’expressió literària en l’obra lul·liana,” in OE, 1:85–110. An invaluable recent treatment of Llull’s rhetoric that situates it in the broader field of medieval rhetoric is Johnston, ERRL. Badia has productively compared the obscurity of passages in Arbor exemplificalis to the style of the Catalan troubadour Cerverí de Girona (ASNE, 14–18). 91. Alexandre Leupin, Barbarolexis: Medieval Writing and Sexuality, trans. Kate M. Cooper (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 22. Leupin’s argument for the “modernity” of this poetry provides a particularly useful (but entirely neglected) context for understanding Llull’s references to the new. 92. Paterson, Troubadours and Eloquence, 108–9, 170–71. 93. BA lines 529–56. 94. Llull first wrote the Libre de contemplació in Arabic, but this earliest version has been lost, and the oldest surviving manuscript is of one of the two surviving Catalan versions. Nineteen other manuscripts or fragments of the Catalan versions survive. The Latin text survives in the different versions, represented in eighteen manuscripts (Fernando Domínguez Reboiras, “Works,” in Fidora and Rubio, eds., Raimundus

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Lullus, 125–242, 137–38). The first book of the Latin text was edited by Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and printed in Paris in 1505, but the only nearly complete Latin print edition is a translation commissioned in the eighteenth century (16 vols., Palma de Mallorca, 1746–49). A new edition of the Catalan text by Antoni Ignasi Alomar for the NEORL series has been announced. For a useful introduction to the Libre de contemplació, see Josep Enric Rubio, Les bases del pensament de Ramon Llull: Els orígens de l’Art lul·liana (Valencia and Barcelona: PAM, 1999), 17–62. 95. Riquer, HLC, 348. This is similar to the phenomenon that Dagenais observes with the fourteenth-century Libro de buen amor: “The larger or more numerous the places of indeterminacy and impasse, the larger the saving gloss” (The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the “Libro de buen amor” [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994], 6). 96. “[M]eravella és cosa estranya a veer e entendre e oir e membrar, car per la estranyedat se meravellava hom de alcuna cosa, que quant hom la ha acostumada a menbrar, entendre, oir e veer, no se’n meravella” (LM 8.115). Bonillo Hoyos’s discussion of Llull’s use of the marvel in the Libre de meravelles is instructive, taking account of the various traditions of marvel writing on which Llull could have drawn. Some of his observations are, however, very specific to the Libre de meravelles (and the passages of that text on which he concentrates), so they should not be applied to Llull’s writings more broadly (Literatura, 22–37). 97. In this way the tree of knowledge, in its graphic realizations, can be compared to the exploitations of anomaly and enigma that Anne-Marie Bouché identifies in Romanesque art, which serve to provoke viewers, to guide them through the “interpretive process,” and to “communicate complex, extended structures of meaning” (“Vox Imaginis: Anomaly and Enigma in Romanesque Art,” in Hamburger and Boché, eds., The Mind’s Eye, 306, 311). 98. The distinction between the two sorts of branches is not made clear. Branca seems to begin to be used for the branches of a tree only in the thirteenth century (GMIL, s.v. branca), and it is not clear how its semantic field is related to the classical ramus. The Catalan branques generally designates the main outgrowths of the trunk. However, the less frequent term rams does not correspond to lesser twigs but rather more or less overlaps branques, as it seems to do in medieval and modern Occitan. Certain Catalan dialects do reserve for the laer term the highest branches of the tree (Diccionari Català-Valencià-Balear, ed. Antoni M. Alcover, 10 vols. [Palma de Mallorca: Editorial Moll, 1993], s.v. ram), but this distinction does not correspond to the idea that Llull seems to be expressing of subdivision and proliferation, which implies that the rams branch off from the branques, just as the leaves will branch off from the rams (see Glossari General Lul·lià, ed. Miquel Colom Mateu, 5 vols. [Mallorca: Editorial Moll, 1983], 4:301). A passage in the Libre de contemplació, however, may clarify the usage here. The tree in autumn, Llull writes, “qui ha més de ses branques seques que verds, no és tan bell a veer com seria si totes ses branques e sos rams eren verds e plens de fulles e de flors,” but in spring “ell renovella e dóna bellea de si mateix als ulls corporals per raó dels rams e de les flors e dels fruits que met” (LC 23.104.22–23). The idea that the tree “puts on” its rams like its flowers and fruits implies a sprouting off of younger or lesser branches from the main branch and may be related to the annual trimming of trees for firewood, which has the result that whole new branches (rams) must grow every year from the main stems (branques) (Charles Faulhaber, private communication, ca.

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Notes to Pages 163–176

2006). Here, I shall follow Lohr’s lead and translate rami / rams as boughs—the term is regreably old-fashioned but allows us to avoid the diminutive connotations of twig, for which Llull would have had other Catalan and Latin terms. 99. See Bonner, SAS, 33. 100. Johnston, Spiritual Logic of Ramon Llull, 18. 101. In the past, it has been customary to refer to the first set of nine principles as absolute and the second as relative, a distinction that Llull never employed for the principles and against which Bonner argues in ALRL, 130–34. 102. Robert Pring-Mill, Estudis sobre Ramon Llull (1956–78) (Barcelona: Curial, 1991), 104; Yates, The Art of Memory, 179; Bonner, ALRL, 110–14. 103. Bonner does identify additional lists that appear at various points in the text (SAS, 27–30), but these are isolated instances that do not contribute to the unity of the entire encyclopedia. 104. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS clm. 10498, fol. 19r. 105. Vatican, Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, MS lat. 3468, fol. 38r. 106. Andrea Alciati published the first book of emblems at Augsburg in 1531 and issued a Parisian edition three years later; the first French book of emblems was the Théâtre des bons engins of G. de La Perrière, published in Lyon in 1536 and Paris in 1539. 107. Antoine Compagnon, La seconde main, ou le travail de la citation (Paris: Seuil, 1979), 259–60. 108. This arrangement recalls the famous illustration of the tree of the philosophy of love in a fourteenth-century Majorcan manuscript (Palma de Mallorca, Collegi de la Sapiència), where the branches are similarly labeled as different parts of the tree. 109. See Salvador Galmés’s edition for the Obres originals del Illuminat Doctor Mestre Ramon Lull, 14 vols. (Majorca, 1906–28), 11:xii. 110. See, e.g., Bonner, SAS, 33. 111. Hugh of Saint-Victor comments on the displacement of the object of vision in the mirror—that seeing in a mirror is to see only an image, never the thing itself—in his interpretation of Paul’s reference to the mirror, De sacramentis 1.9. For an overview of the reasons for which early theologians valorized the imprint, see Brigie Miriam Bedos-Rezak, “Replica: Images of Identity and the Identity of Images in Prescholastic France,” in Hamburger and Bouché, eds., The Mind’s Eye, 46–64, 51–55 (for BedosRezak, Hugh of Saint-Victor is a “pre-scholastic”). I pose the question here—to which specialists of Llull’s theological writing may be able to respond—of whether Llull ever made a comparable distinction and of how (if at all) he used the analogy of the seal in other texts. There has been some scholarship on Llull’s subtle use of the mirror in elaborating his theory of signification and his Christology. See esp. Jordi Gayà, “Significación y demostración en el Libre de contemplació de Ramon Llull,” in Domínguez et al., eds., Aristotelica et Lulliana, 477–99; and Robert D. Hughes, “Speculum, Similitude, and Signification: The Incarnation as Exemplary and Proportionate Sign in the Arts of Ramon Llull,” SL 45–46 (2005–6): 3–37. 112. For discussions of these trees, see Albert G. Hauf, “Sobre l’Albor exemplificalis,” in BW, 303–42; and Klaus Jacobi, “De arbore quaestionali,” in ibid., 343–59. 113. For Richard’s use of the book’s sensual qualities as seduction, see Solterer, “Letter Writing and Picture Reading: Medieval Textuality and the Bestiaire d’Amour,” Word and Image 5 (1989): 131–47, esp. 135. 114. Llull’s use of allegory has seemed to interest scholars the most. See, e.g., the

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discussion of allegory in the Libre de contemplació in Armand Llinarès, “Théorie et pratique de l’allégorie dans le Libre de contemplació,” ELL 15 (1971): 5–34; and, most recently, Josep Enric Rubio, “Un capítol en l’ús de l’al·legoria en Ramon Llull: Exegesi del capítol 354 del Llibre de contemplació,” SL 47 (2007): 5–27. 115. Johnston, ERRL, 57. 116. Rubio notes that, in the Libre de contemplació, Llull devotes less space to the presentation of the physical senses than he does to that of the spiritual senses (Les bases del pensament de Ramon Llull, 44), a subtle privileging that may help explain the strangeness of his presentation of the physical senses in the Libre de meravelles. 117. LC 29.169.1–3. On Llull’s use of the notion of sensual “figures,” see esp. Gayà, “Significación y demostración.” 118. On the visual representation of Jewish exegesis in the Bibles moralisées, see Michael Camille, “Visual Signs of the Sacred Page: Books in the Bible moralisée,” Word and Image 5 (1989): 111–30, 115; and Sarah Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the “Bible moralisée” (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999). The laer shows that the Bibles moralisées link Jewish “literalism” with such “secular” learning as Aristotelian thought, introduced to Parisian scholars by Maimonides (among others). The fact that the Bibles moralisées condemn both together for their carnality indicates that the danger perceived in Judaism lay, not in its difference from Christianity, but rather in those areas where the former “intersects with and spills over into” the laer (ibid., 75). Llull’s representation of Judaism is both similar to and different from this one: similar in that all forms of extreme literalism are rejected as carnality, different in that for Llull the Jew remains an interlocutor, rather than an Other onto whom Christian anxieties and conflicts could be displaced. 119. BA lines 12000–12026. 120. I owe this insight to Chana Kronfeld and Benjamin Liu (private communications, February 2008). 121. I would locate this visual elusiveness with relation to the graphic images that Herbert L. Kessler has studied, which seem to result from experimentation in the ways to “convert” viewers from physical to spiritual vision and contemplation (see Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000], and “Turning a Blind Eye: Medieval Art and the Dynamics of Contemplation,” in Hamburger and Bouché, eds., The Mind’s Eye, 413–39). As Kessler argues: “The tension between art’s basic araction and its higher aspirations was part of a fundamental spiritual bale, countered by various strategic responses. . . . [F]or pictures to succeed in opening the mind’s eye to the true vision, they had to subvert not only their own substance, but also their very appearance” (“Turning a Blind Eye,” 419, 435). 122. Gossouin [Gossuin] de Metz, L’image du monde 1.5 (L’image du monde de Maitre Gossouin: Rédaction en prose, ed. O. H. Prior [Lausanne: Imprimeries réunies, 1913], 74). 123. Adam Scotus aributes this effect to the Fall in De tripartito tabernaculo: “Ceciderat namque a seipsa, a societate angelorum, et a visione ipsius Dei, id est a libertate, a dignitate, a felicitate. . . . Nihil vero felicius quam Deum videre; quia haec est vita aeterna, ut cognoscamus Deum Patrem et quem ipse misit, Jesum Christum. Sed postquam ad concupiscendum interdictae arboris fructum exteriores oculos suos homo incautus aperuit, illos interiores, quibus Conditorem suum videre debuit, damnabiliter clausit” (PL 198, col. 700). Augustine speaks in Sermon 264 of the interior

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eye being blinded by sin, with the result that the incarnation was necessary for human beings once again, temporarily, to see God as they had done before: “Si esset jam oculus, qui videret In principio erat Verbum (Joan. I, 1), qui videret, qui teneret, qui amplecteretur, qui frueretur, non opus erat ut Verbum caro fieret et habitaret in nobis: sed quia ad illud tenendum et fruendum excaecatus erat oculus interior pulvere peccatorum, jam non erat unde intelligeretur Verbum” (PL 38, cols. 1216–17). See Kessler’s discussion of the implications of this interpretation for the graphic arts in “Turning a Blind Eye.” 124. This conclusion resonates with Kay’s recent study of the “complexity of one” in late medieval didactic texts, The Place of Thought. 125. Auerbach, “Figura,” 11–12. 126. On the proportions of the sixteen books, see Bonner, SAS, 31–32. 127. Pring-Mill has described this tree as operating a “transformation” of knowledge into “literature” (“Els recontaments de l’Arbre Exemplifical de Ramon Llull: La transmutacio de la ciencia en literatura,” in Actes des Tercer Colloqui Internacional de Llengua i Literatura Catalanes, ed. R. B. Tate and Alan Yates [Oxford: Dolphin, 1976], 311–23). Chapter 4 1. Jean de Meun is identified in his texts as maistre, a term that designated a clerk, an individual who had received an education in Latin and was to some degree tied to the church, although this tie could be most tenuous (clerks could, e.g., be employed as secretaries in secular administration). The precious lile that is known with any certainty concerning his life is summarized by Félix Lecoy in his edition (RR, 1:vi–x). For Jean’s Parisian, clerical context, particularly helpful is Alain Corbellari’s study of other clerical writers of the thirteenth century, La voix des clercs: Liérature et savoir universitaire autour des dits du XIIIe siècle, Publications romanes et françaises, 236 (Geneva: Droz, 2005). 2. Jean dedicated his translation of Vegetius’s De re militari (1284) to Jean de Brienne and his translation of Boethius’s De consolatione Philosophiae to Philippe le Bel; he also translated Gerald of Wales’s Topographica hibernica (the translation has been lost), Aelred of Rievaulx’s De amicitia spirituali (also lost), and, most famously, the leers of Abelard and Heloise. His translations have aracted less scholarly interest than has the Rose, but, for discussions of his work on the De consolatione, see Copeland, RHT, 133–49; and David Hult, “Poetry and Translation of Knowledge in Jean de Meun,” in Poetry, Knowledge and Community in Late Medieval France, ed. Rebecca Dixon and Finn E. Sinclair, Gallica 13 (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 19–41. 3. Although, unlike the narrator of the Roman de la Rose, the speaker in the Testament does not identify himself, the text is aributed to Jean in manuscripts and is likely his work. 4. The bibliography on this text is extensive. Guillaume de Lorris’s portion was long the focus of scholarly interest. However, in the last three or four decades, Jean’s continuation has been the object of a number of studies, with a particular emphasis on the speeches of Reson and Amors and on the Pygmalion episode. For a complete bibliography to 1992, see Heather M. Arden, The Roman de la Rose: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1993). Sarah Kay has published a critical guide, The Romance of the Rose (London: Grant & Cutler, 1995). In the last decade, innovative studies, representing diverse approaches, include Alastair J. Minnis, Magister Amoris: The Roman de la Rose

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and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Daniel HellerRoazen, Fortune’s Faces: The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of Contingency (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Seeing through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); Noah Guynn, Allegory and Sexual Ethics in the High Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Jessica Rosenfeld, Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry: Love Aer Aristotle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Sylvia Huot, Dreams of Lovers and Lies of Poets: Poetry, Knowledge, and Desire in the “Roman de la Rose” (Oxford: Legenda, 2010). 5. Though close textual analyses and studies of manuscript variants do seem to indicate that Guillaume’s romance really existed and circulated independantly of Jean’s (see David F. Hult, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: Readership and Authority in the First “Roman de la Rose” [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], esp. 10–55; and Daniel Poirion, “From Rhyme to Reason: Remarks on the Text of the Roman de la Rose,” in Rethinking the “Romance of the Rose”: Text, Image, Reception, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992], 67–77), Hult has suggested that the “incompleteness” of the first part of the romance may be a misreading preconditioned by Jean’s account of the composition of the text. 6. For the sources of the Roman de la Rose, the standard study is Ernest Langlois’s Origines et sources du Roman de la Rose (Paris: E. Thorin, 1891). In the notes to his more recent edition of the text, Félix Lecoy proposes some modifications to Langlois’s identification of sources. 7. For Jean’s engagement with various sources and discourses, see, among others, Langlois, Origines et sources; Gérard Paré, Les idées et les leres au XIIIe siècle: Le “Roman de la Rose,” Bibliothèque de la philosophie (Montréal: Université de Montréal, Publications de l’Institut d’études médiévales Albert-le-Grand, 1947); Winthrop Wetherbee, “The Literal and the Allegorical: Jean de Meun and the De planctu Naturae,” Mediaeval Studies 33 (1971): 264–91; Thomas D. Hill, “Narcissus, Pygmalion, and the Castration of Saturn: Two Mythographical Themes in the Roman de la Rose,” Studies in Philology 71 (1974): 404–26; Maureen Quilligan, “Words and Sex: The Language of Allegory in the De planctu Naturae, the Roman de la Rose, and Book III of The Faerie Queene,” Allegorica 2 (1977): 195–216; Nancy Freeman Regalado, “‘Des contraires choses’: La fonction poétique de la citation et des exempla dans le Roman de la Rose de Jean de Meun,” in “Intertextualités médiévales,” special issue, Liérature 41 (1981): 62–81; Minnis, Magister Amoris; Huot, Dreams of Lovers and Lies of Poets; and my “Critique and Complicity: Metapoetical Reflections on the Gendered Figures of Body and Text in the Roman de la Rose,” Exemplaria 21, no. 2 (2009): 129–60. 8. See my “Critique and Complicity.” That Jean de Meun used fiction to work through the complex problems of medieval literary theory was first suggested by Minnis in Magister Amoris. 9. The critical fiction has been defined as “a literary form that adopts the techniques and language found in one or more source texts to form a critical response and a satisfying fiction” by Henry Wessells in his post of May 6, 2011, on the new Web site “Critical Fiction,” hp: // criticalfiction.net / wordpress / ?p=15. The examples commonly alleged are mostly modern, but the term could be usefully applied to a number of sophisticated medieval texts. 10. Sylvia Huot observes that the “nota” marks in the margins of manuscripts,

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Notes to Pages 185–186

as well as a few longer glosses identifying the Rose’s allusions to other texts, suggest that some medieval readers appreciated the text for its “encyclopedic review of the medieval literary heritage” (“Medieval Readers of the Roman de la Rose: The Evidence of Marginal Notations,” Romance Philology 43 [1990]: 400–420, 404–5). She has elsewhere suggested that the Rose “could be compared to a vernacularized florilegium” (RRMR, 60). The romance had a broad popularity in Western Europe: the count of surviving manuscripts is now well above two hundred, a remarkable number for a vernacular text. (The most recent list of manuscripts is provided at the Roman de la Rose Digital Library, hp: // romandelarose.org.) Medieval versions survive in Dutch, English (by Chaucer and others), and Italian. For the way medieval readers understood the Rose, particularly useful is Huot’s RRMR. See also Badel, RRQ (but see the review by Charles Dahlberg in Speculum 56 [1981]: 844–47); John Fleming, Reason and the Lover (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); and J. Hill, The Medieval Debate on Jean de Meung’s “Roman de la Rose” (Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen, 1991). About a century aer Jean completed his continuation, the text came under fire in the first literary controversy to be conducted (for the most part) in the French language. See Eric Hicks, ed., Le débat sur le “Roman de la Rose,” Bibliothèque du XVe siècle, 43 (Paris: Champion, 1977). David F. Hult has recently published a very accessible translation of the debate texts by Christine de Pizan and her interlocutors, Debate of the Romance of the Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 11. Pierre Col, reply to treatises of Christine de Pizan and Jean Gerson (1402), in Hicks, ed., Le débat sur le “Roman de la Rose,” 89–112, 108 (quotation). On medieval appreciation of Jean’s verse, see Hult, “Poetry and the Translation of Knowledge,” 32. Hult remarks that, during the fieenth-century Querelle de la Rose, “Jean’s excellence as a writer and poet seems to be one of the few things that his detractors and supporters manage to agree upon” (ibid.). 12. Just as black-and-white photography became a marked form aer the advent of color. See Armstrong and Kay, KP, 2–3. 13. See, among others, Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 34–37, 109–11. As Agamben observes (ibid., 35), Occitan poeticians seem first to have made the distinction between syntactic and metrical units (the early fourteenth-century Toulousain poeticians prove perspicacious on this point; see [Guilhem Molinier], Las flors del gay saber, estier dichas las leys d’amors, ed. M. Gatien-Arnoult, 3 vols., Monumens de la liérature romane depuis le quatorzième siècle [Paris: Silvestre; Toulouse: Bon & Privat, 1841–43], 1:130). The definition of enjambment is due to the later Nicolò Tibino (Agamben, The End of the Poem, 35). Nevertheless, medieval theory of poetry oen lagged considerably behind practice (e.g., the Occitan ars poetriae date to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, while the lyric tradition stretches back to the beginning of the twelh). With Jean de Meun, then, we have a poet experimenting with practices that will be codified only later. 14. Hult, “Poetry and Translation,” 35. 15. Ibid., 109. 16. The earliest example that I have found is an 1843 article by J.-J. Ampère, who characterizes Nature’s speech as “a lile encyclopedia inserted by Jean de Meun in his allegorical poem.” See “Poésie du Moyen Âge: Le Roman de la Rose,” Revue des deux mondes, n.s., 13 (1843): 541–81, 468.

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17. Gaston Paris, Esquisse historique de la liérature française au Moyen Âge, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1922), 198. 18. Edmond Faral, “Le Roman de la Rose et la pensée française au XIIIe siècle,” Revue des deux mondes 96 (1926): 440–41. 19. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), 143, 154. 20. Bernard Ribémont, De natura rerum: Études sur les encyclopédies médiévales (Orléans: Paradigme, 1995), 36–37. 21. Kay has, in a similar vein, characterized the Rose as an “anti-encyclopedia,” but her reasons are more clear; its lack of a “retrieval system” renders it “useless” as an archive of knowledge (Sarah Kay, The Romance of the Rose, Critical Guides to French Texts [London: Grant & Cutler, 1995], 71). In more recent work, Armstrong and Kay dub the Rose the “crazy double” of an encyclopedia (KP, 74) but suggest a productive way to construe the relation between this text and the encyclopedic genre by classifying the Rose as “encyclopedic verse” (rather than a “verse encyclopedia”). Writers of encyclopedic verse, “rather than aspiring to know the world in a unified way, . . . instead record how our experiences of knowing it tend toward fragmentation and distortion. They take pieces from the encyclopedist’s map of knowledge and insert and variously frame them within other texts that are not themselves verse encyclopedias” (ibid., 106). Their argument is consonant with the one that I advance here about Jean’s continuation of the Roman de la Rose. 22. Alan M. F. Gunn, The Mirror of Love: A Reinterpretation of “The Romance of the Rose” (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1952), 128–29. 23. In a similar vein, Daniel Poirion (Le “Roman de la Rose” [Paris: Flammarion, 1974], 125) and Lee Paerson (“‘For the Wyves Love of Bathe’: Feminine Rhetoric and Poetic Resolution in the Roman de la Rose and the Canterbury Tales,” Speculum 58 [1983]: 656–95, 669–74) have observed the chiastic structure of Nature’s speech—as, indeed, of many of the other speeches in Jean’s portion of the Romance—and emphasized its significance as a principle of order (Poirion) and figure for the Rose itself and stylistic translation of erotic delay (Paerson). As the laer puts it: “Nature articulates the language of natural philosophy in the structures of erotic pursuit, providing a rhetorical synthesis of the poem’s disparate materials that implies a larger, cultural reconciliation” (673). The fact that this structure was not identified by earlier scholars demonstrates that it is not easily perceptible, especially in the context of misogynistic discourses about women’s aimless loquaciousness. Nevertheless, Huot has identified an analogous chiastic structure in the illustration of a Parisian manuscript of the 1330s, suggesting that some medieval readers “appreciated the concentric structure as an important aspect of Jean’s poetics” (RRMR, 320). 24. Wetherbee, “The Literal and the Allegorical,” 281. 25. Sylvia Huot, “Bodily Peril: Sexuality and the Subversion of Order in Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose,” Modern Language Review 95 (2000): 41–61, 54–55. 26. In this consideration of the conditions of possibility of knowledge itself, my interpretation of Nature’s speech is consonant with that of Sarah Kay in “Women’s Body of Knowledge: Epistemology and Misogyny in the Romance of the Rose,” in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 211–35, an article that initiated my reflections on this portion of the Rose. Although my work has since taken a different direction and Kay does not focus on the

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problems of localized organization (the order of the various creatures enumerated in this one speech) that will preoccupy me in the present chapter, her article is foundational for a discussion of Jean’s encyclopedism because she argues that “knowledge, its make-up, status, and how we come by it, is unmistakably a major motive force in this extraordinary poem” (212) and then goes on to show how various discourses are woven together, and undercut each other, in Nature’s speech. More generally, she demonstrates an internal conflict between upward and downward movement, between the material and the spiritual, in Jean’s continuation, which contributes substantially to the disordered impression that the text tends to make on readers. 27. Rosanna Brusegan has discussed the various lists and enumerations of creatures in Guillaume de Lorris’s part of the poem, placing them in relation to Bruneo Latini’s Tesoreo and concluding that they indicate “une volonté d’ordonner le réel, mais aussi de guider la pensée vers une meilleure compréhension de l’univers” (“L’énumération et les chiffres: Du Roman de la Rose au Tresoreo,” Liérature 130 [June 2003]: 48–67, 67). She does not, however, consider the proliferation of such lists in Jean de Meun’s continuation or make any more than glancing references to the encyclopedic tradition as context for this mode of description. 28. Gunn, Mirror of Love, 129. 29. Bernard Silvester, Cosmographia, Megacosmus 3 lines 233–34. The translation is from The Cosmographia of Bernardus Silvestris, trans. Winthrop Wetherbee, Records of Western Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973). Although the series of Alan of Lille still aributed distinct traits to each animal, it had begun to blur the boundaries between the human and the animal. See Balint’s perceptive explication in OC, 127–33. 30. Langlois, Origines et sources. 31. For the explanation of desire (on which, see also below), see Alan of Lille, DPN 9. For the theory of integument, see ibid., 6.121–27, 8.127–26. 32. The tradition of criticizing Nature’s transgressions may be traced back at least as far as Jean Gerson. See “Le traictié d’une vision faite contre le Ronmant de la Rose par le chancelier de Paris,” in Hicks, ed., Le débat sur le “Roman de la Rose,” 85. 33. Rosenfeld has recently identified this source (“Narcissus Aer Aristotle: Love and Ethics in Le Roman de la Rose,” NML 9 [2007]: 1–39, 26). A more distant source seems to be Boethius, De consolatione Philosophiae 2.5.85–89. 34. Here I must disagree with Jean-Charles Payen, who writes of Nature’s speech: “Nature rétablit Raison dans ses prérogatives. Les conflits s’abolissent, l’expérience acquiert un sens cohérent, la réalité redevient intelligible. Ce qui s’affirme est un rationalisme que ne se déduit pas de syllogismes abstraits; il a pour base le sensible et pour ciment l’évidence de la logique” (La Rose et l’utopie: Révolution sexuelle et communisme nostalgique chez Jean de Meung [Paris: Éditions sociales, 1976], 136). For the importance of sight and hearing, see the prologue to the Bestiaire d’Amour (discussed in chapter 1 above), where Richard identifies the eyes and ears as the two portals to the memory. 35. George Economou, The Goddess Natura in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 110. 36. Ibid., 110–11. 37. On the “singe” in its first appearance (RR line 16001), see Roger Dragonei, “Le ‘Singe de nature’ dans le Roman de la Rose,” in La musique et les leres: Études de liérature médiévale, Publications Romanes et Françaises, 171 (Geneva: Droz, 1986), 369–80,

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372–73. Dragonei does not discuss the second appearance of the monkey-artist (RR lines 17799–806). 38. Jean’s exploitation of the disordering trope has its precedent in the De planctu Naturae, which, in Balint’s estimation, “presents a labyrinth of figures, rhetorically exuberant and disturbing at the same time. Any one interpretation is condemned to inaccuracy and instability by the narrator’s deep uncertainty about what he sees,” and Alan creates “disorder out of the once-universal order that Boethius and the earlier twelh-century prosimetrum writers had relied on” (OC, 132, 134). Balint thus does not follow Wetherbee in his aempt to show how the De planctu “vindicates” poetry (according to the laer: “Alain blends metaphor and symbol in a ‘naturalistic’ mode in which moral and sacramental implications emerge directly from the dramatization of the psychological experience of fallen man” [Winthrop Wetherbee, “The Function of Poetry in the De planctu Naturae of Alain of Lille,” Traditio 25 (1969): 87–125, 125]). Balint further opposes Alan’s text to the Cosmographia, which she understands to show how the cosmos is “at the service of humanity” (OC, 133), although Linda Lomperis has argued that the creative exuberance of poetic language, its potential to “parody” cosmic order, undermines stability in Bernard’s text as well (there is “no single source of stability and meaning” [“From God’s Book to the Play of Text in the Cosmographia,” Medievalia et humanistica 16 (1988): 51–71, 53, 56]). 39. See Roger Dragonei, “Une métaphore du sens propre dans le Roman de la Rose,” in La musique et les leres, 381–97, 381. 40. Paul Ricoeur, La métaphore vive (Paris: Seuil, 1975), esp. 321. 41. Andreas Capellanus, De amore, in Andreas Capellanus on Love, ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh, Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance Editions (London: Duckworth, 1982), 1.1.1. 42. Perhaps the lile phrase par ardeur echoes feebly the obsessive cogitatio in the original definition, but, in any case, the coordination / simultaneity of vision and thought has been lost in translation. 43. A modus, as a boundary, also suggests a spatial reading, but more weakly. 44. Similarly, Wetherbee has argued that the Cosmographia and the De planctu Naturae effect “a radical shi of emphasis from cosmology to psychology” and that the laer demonstrates how language and the vision of Nature can be distorted by sexual desire (“The Function of Poetry in the De planctu Naturae of Alain of Lille,” 101–9). More recently, in a study of Jean’s use of a broad selection of earlier texts, Huot has described how the Rose deforms all discourses borrowed from elsewhere; thus, Jean “develops the poetic discourse of desire, pain and pleasure as something nebulous, produced almost as if by accident from the crosscurrents of other discourses” (Dreams of Lovers and Lies of Poets, 4). 45. Paré, e.g., calls it a “demolition” of the earlier text, “une composition systématiquement à ridiculiser les théories de l’amour courtois” (Les idées et les leres au XIIIe siècle, 13). 46. Dragonei, “Le ‘Singe de nature,’” 310. 47. Roger Dragonei, “Pygmalion ou les pièges de la fiction,” in La musique et les leres, 345–67, 351. 48. Regalado, “‘Des contraires choses,’” 72. 49. “Mais je reprans mon propos et dy que se le personnaige de Raison eust parlé a sage clerc et rassis, aucune chose fust. Mais non! Il parle a Fol Amoureux. Et ycy garda mal l’acteur les riegles de mon escolle (les riegles de rethorique), qui sont de regarder

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Notes to Pages 207–219

cil qui parle et a qui on parle, et pour quel temps on parle. Et n’est pas le deffault ycy seulement, car es autres lieux plusseurs il aribue a la personne qui parle ce qui ne le doit appartenir (come il introduit Nature parlant de paradis et des misteres de nostre foy, et Venus qui jure par la char Dieu)” (Gerson, “Le traictié d’une vision,” 84–85). For a general discussion of personification, see esp. James Paxson, The Poetics of Personification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 50. Curtius, EL, 159–62. 51. Paré, Les idées et les leres au XIIIe siècle, 330. 52. David F. Hult, “The Allegorical Fountain: Narcissus in the Roman de la Rose,” Romanic Review 72 (1981): 125–48, 143, 145. 53. For a slightly different interpretation of the unrepresentability of Nature, see Dragonei, “Le ‘Singe de nature,’” 156–57. 54. Pliny, NH bks. 34 (on statuary), 35 (on painting); Quintilian, Institutionis oratoriae 12.10.1–10. 55. Pliny is one of the rare classical writers whose possible presence among the sources of Jean’s continuation escaped the notice of the learned Langlois. 56. Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.243–97. Jean will famously retell the Pygmalion story just before the end of the romance (RR lines 20781–1164). 57. Kay has also observed that the “problems aached to reading the visual, and especially the visual arts, are . . . a recurring theme in J[ean] d[e] M[eun]; and one that can consistently be linked with the problem of reading poetry” (The Romance of the Rose, 77). 58. Foucault, OT, 38 / MC, 53. Introduction to Part III 1. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” in Other Inquisitions, 1937–1952, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 101–5, 103. 2. Foucault, OT, xvii / MC, 9. 3. Ibid., xviii / 9–10. 4. The fundamental essay is Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” included in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson, University of Texas Press Slavic Series, 1 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 259–422. 5. Martin Irvine has similarly used Bakhtin’s linguistic theory to beer articulate the relations between statements in the (Foucauldian) archive of Old English poetry anthologies, although Irvine is interested mainly in the dialogic relation between Latin and vernacular literary discourses (“Medieval Textuality and the Archaeology of Textual Culture,” in Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies, ed. Allen J. Frantzen [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991], 181–210, 187–88). 6. Michel Foucault, “Different Spaces” (1967), in EWF, 2:175–85, 178, 181–82 / “Des espaces autres,” in DE, 2:1571–81, 1574, 1577–78. On Foucault’s heterotopias, see Flynn, PMH, 97–98. 7. Foucault, “Different Spaces,” 182, 184 / “Des espaces autres,” 1578, 1580. 8. Ibid, 178–79 / 1575. 9. For the effects that their dependence on florilegia had on late medieval readers,

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see Jacqueline Hamesse, “The Scholastic Model of Reading,” in A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Amherst: University of Massachuses Press, 1999), 103–19. For complaints about the use of these texts and what those complaints indicated about changes in intellectual culture, see Blair, TMTK, 251–56. 10. For the example of the Rose, see Huot, RRMR 34–40; and Badel, RRQ, 142–44. 11. In aributing the genre of critical fiction to Llull as well as to Jean, I am making a slightly different claim for the function of narrative than the one that Lola Badia puts forth when she suggests calling literature (in the modern sense of the word) an ancilla artis for Llull (“Literature as an Ancilla artis: The Transformation of Science into Literature according to Robert Pring-Mill and Ramon Llull,” Hispanic Research Journal 10 [2009]: 18–28, 25). According to Badia’s argument, narrative is a vehicle or instrument for the diffusion of Llull’s Art. My position, which is compatible but assigns narrative a more prominent role, is that Llull used fiction to work through theoretical problems that could not, otherwise, be worked through at all (in this instance, the nature of the subject’s response to the encyclopedia). Chapter 5 1. For the classification, see Vincent of Beauvais, SN 20.1. 2. Cited from Isidore of Seville, ET 12.6.58. 3. a) eorum Douai] Nb9 Nb10 Nb12 Nb14 Nc4. Cited from Thomas of Cantimpré, DNR 9.35. 4. Cited from Pliny, NH 32.24.75, 32.18.50. I have been unable to locate the final tidbit about dog food in the Naturalis historia, but it is included in Isidore of Seville, ET 12.6.59. 5. Isidore of Seville, ET 12.6.58. 6. These distinctions are deferred to the following chapter, SN 20.60, which begins with a fuller paraphrase of the same passage in the Etymologiae. 7. For etymological practice in Latin antiquity and the early Middle Ages, M. E. Amsler’s Etymology and Grammatical Discourse in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science [Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1989]) is most useful; my summary here is largely based on Amsler’s work. See also Curtius, EL, 495–500; and, for a treatment of medieval practice, R. Howard Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 8. Here, I follow the account in Amsler, Etymology, 15–19, 54–55. 9. Isidore of Seville, ET 1.7.1. 10. For the conflict between the practitioners of the various disciplines in Roman antiquity, see Henri-Irenée Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, 4th ed. (Paris: Boccard, 1958), esp. 3–46; and Stanley F. Bonner, Education in Ancient Rome: From the Elder Cato to the Younger Pliny (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), esp. 34–75. 11. On Augustine’s critique and practice of etymology, see Amsler, Etymology, esp. 44–54, 100–108. On Isidore, see ibid., 133–72. 12. Richard W. Hunt, “The ‘Lost’ Preface to the Liber derivationum of Osbern of Gloucester,” in his The History of Grammar in the Middle Ages: Collected Papers, ed. G. L. Bursill-Hall (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1980), 151–66, 157.

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13. Suzanne Reynolds, Medieval Reading: Grammar, Rhetoric, and the Classical Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 81–87. 14. See chs. 8–14 of the prologue to the Speculum maius. Scholars have been speaking for some time now of a “critique of sources” in the scholastic period. For the codicological perspective, see esp. Richard H. Rouse, “L’évolution des aitudes envers l’autorité écrite: Le développement des instruments de travail au XIIIe siècle” (1976), in Culture et travail intellectuel dans l’occident médiéval: Bilan des “Colloques d’humanisme médiéval” (1960–1980), ed. Geneviève Hasenohr and Jean Longère (Paris: CNRS, 1981), 113–44. Mireille Chazan and Gilbert Dahan have edited an anthology of the most recent work, literary and historical: La méthode critique au Moyen Âge (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006). 15. On the commentary on Priscian by Peter Helias (about whom very lile is known, aside from the fact that he taught in Paris toward the middle of the twelh century), see esp. the essays of Richard Hunt collected in The History of Grammar in the Middle Ages. 16. Cited from Peter Helias, Summa super Priscianum, ed. Leo Reilly, vol. 1, ST, 113 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1993), “De voce,” lines 87–96, a commentary on Priscian, Institutionum grammaticarum 1.1.2. 17. With this new definition, Peter Helias redirected etymological research. See Olga Weijers, Dictionnaires et répertoires au Moyen Âge: Une étude de vocabulaire (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991), 75–76. 18. Trevor Morgan Murphy, Pliny the Elder’s “Natural History”: The Empire in the Encyclopedia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 212. 19. Pliny, NH 32.15.42. It is commonplace to cite Pliny’s Roman practicality and the utilitarian aspect of his compilation. See, e.g., Mary Beagon, Roman Nature: The Thought of Pliny the Elder (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 13. 20. See Pliny, NH 10.1–28, esp. the testimony of Cato, cited in 10.7 and interpreted in 10.8. I here follow the helpful discussion of Pliny’s approach to medicine and the medical profession in Beagon, Roman Nature, ch. 6. 21. For the imperialist character of the Naturalis historia, see Murphy, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History; and Sorcha Carey, Pliny’s Catalogue of Culture: Art and Empire in the Natural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). The laer discusses the importance of the Latin language at 34–36. 22. Vincent in fact conflates the two Plinys and aributes the Naturalis historia to the Younger (SH 10.67). He notes that he has already cited liberally from this text in the Speculum naturale and, therefore, includes in the Speculum historiale only a modest florilegium of selections from the epistles (which really were the work of Pliny the Younger). Isidore’s Soliloquies receive a slightly longer florilegium (SH 23.32–33). 23. For medieval writers’ reliance on various metonymic expressions for describing these texts, see Jacqueline Hamesse, “Le vocabulaire des florilèges médiévaux,” in Méthodes et instruments du travail intellectuel au Moyen Âge: Études sur le vocabulaire, ed. Olga Weijers, Études sur le vocabulaire intellectuel du Moyen Âge, 3 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1990), 209–30, 209–19. The titles are cited in Mary A. Rouse and Richard H. Rouse, “Florilegia of Patristic Texts,” in GLSTP, 165. Exceptions to such plural titles include the Speculum maius (which is, paradoxically, composed of three specula) and the earlier Gemma ecclesiastica [Jewel of the church] by Gerald of Wales (ca. 1146–ca. 1223), on which see Neil Hathaway, “Compilatio: From Plagiarism to Compiling,” Viator 20 (1989): 19–44, 43.

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24. SD 11.13–24. The Roman source is Vitruvius, De architectura (ca. 27–23 BCE). Stefan Schuler has given a nuanced and fascinating account of Vincent’s use of Vitruvius (and its significance in the larger late medieval context), showing that, despite the literary and intellectual necessity of citing from such an ancient text (because it was recommended by Hugh of Saint-Victor and, in any case, there were few alternatives), Vincent selected mainly passages that still had some theoretical value or practical applicability, thus creating a treatise on architecture that is at once old and new (the description of the Speculum maius given in the prologue [see chapter 1]). See “Pourquoi lire Vitruve au Moyen Âge? Un point de rencontre entre savoir antique et savoir médiéval chez Vincent de Beauvais,” in Science antique, science médiévale (autour d’Avranches 235): Actes du Colloque international (Mont-Saint-Michel, 4–7 septembre 1998), ed. L. Callebat and O. Desbordes (Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 2000), 319–42. Schuler’s essay is a model of the aentive contextual analysis that the Speculum maius requires. Of course, it is true that there are some moments when encyclopedists do intervene in their own words, and we have already seen one, when Vincent feels obliged to state that he follows the common interpretation of Genesis 1. But that case has in fact shown us how his citation of contradictory material undermines the coherence of the text. 25. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson, University of Texas Press Slavic Series, 1 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 276. 26. The degree to which painters thought about the text they were illustrating does seem to vary; some were simply following established iconographic programs (on which, see below) or the instructions of the person who had planned the volume. But there is evidence that others did reflect on the text; see, e.g., the illustration of a Parisian manuscript of the Roman de la Rose discussed in Huot, RRMR, ch. 8. 27. John of Garland, Parisiana poetria 1.514–23. On the significance of this passage for the way we should study medieval texts, see John Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the “Libro de buen amor” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 16. 28. For an overview of the mise en page of Latin verse, see Antoinee Novara, “Virgile ‘latin,’” in MEP, 147–53; Pascale Bourgain, “La poésie lyrique médiévale,” in ibid., 165–68; and M. B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Aldershot: Scolar, 1992). 29. See Bourgain, “La poésie lyrique médiévale,” 165–68. 30. For the difficulties that some meters may have posed, see ibid., 165. I am indebted to my colleague Diane Anderson for her private communications concerning the effects of Latin language pedagogy in the Middle Ages on readers’ ability to perceive hexameters even in a text that has not been set out line by line. 31. Michael McCormick, “Textes, images et iconoclasme dans le cadre des relations entre Byzance et l’Occident carolingien,” in Testo e immagine nell’alto medioevo, 15–21 aprile 1993, Seimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 41, 2 vols. (Spoleto: Presso la Sede del Centro, 1994), 1:95–158, 98–106. 32. Cited from Isidore of Seville, ET 1.39.1–2. 33. Cited from ibid., 1.38.1. 34. The exception is He65, which does not seem to have been made in the geographic region on which this study is focused (Voorbij suggests that the manuscript was copied in England in the first half of the fourteenth century [SHVB, 319]). Here, among

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the flores of the poets of the Augustan age (bk. 6), the verses of Ovid, but not those of Virgil or Horace, are laid out line by line. The surviving manuscript constitutes the first volume of what was originally a two-volume set. Since the second volume is now lost, we cannot know whether the verses of Prosper of Aquitaine, Hrabanus, or Hildebert received similar treatment. The fact that Ovid is singled out among the classical poets indicates to me that the verse disposition in this manuscript catered to an individual copyist’s or patron’s taste rather than deriving from some broader reflection on the difference between metrical verse and prose. Nevertheless, the copyist’s means of indicating a taste for Ovid depends on some acknowledgment of a material difference between the two kinds of text. 35. The Macer to whom Odo’s poem was aributed is Aemilius Macer, a contemporary of Virgil. He was a scholar and poet of all that is obscure and bizarre in the natural world and wrote a didactic poem on birds, the Ornithogonia, and another on the remedies for animal and snake bites, the Theriaca. A third poem, on plants, has oen been aributed to him, and it is for this reason that Odo’s poem was aached to Macer’s name. All of Macer’s texts have been lost, but a few brief lines from the Ornithogonia and the Theriaca have survived because they were cited by other classical or late antique writers. So vast was the net that Vincent cast through Latin literature that the Speculum naturale preserves many of these, by quoting passages from Pliny or Isidore quoting Macer, identified once as “Aemilius,” once as “Macer,” and once (erroneously) as “Licinius Macer” (16.49, on the swan; 20.26, on the chelydrus, a species of fetid water snake; and 17.71, on the murena, a kind of eel). 36. Books 10–15 in these three manuscripts. The importance of Vincent’s additions to the books on plants is discussed in Yolanda Ventura, “Quellen, Konzeption und Rezeption der Pflanzenbücher von Enzyklopädien des 13. Jahrhunderts: Zu De proprietatibus rerum, Buch XVI,” in Bartholomaeus Anglicus, “De proprietatibus rerum”: Texte latin et réception vernaculaire: Actes du colloque international, Münster, 9.–11.10.2003, ed. Baudouin Van den Abeele and Heinz Meyer (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 267–317, 298–99. 37. In this manuscript, only the pseudo-Macer citations in bks. 9–11 (bks. 10–12 in the manuscript) are treated as verse; the later citations are laid out as prose. Voorbij dates the manuscript between 1260 and 1310 (SHVB, 334), but Patricia Stirnemann believes, on the basis of the pen flourishing and painted initials, that it may date to the 1250s. This would mean that it was produced in Vincent’s lifetime and that it must be one of the earliest manuscripts of the revised Naturale. Stirnemann also suggests that its most likely place of manufacture was Paris (private communication, November 2004). I have found no indication of any owner of the manuscript before Richelieu acquired it and had it rebound. 38. This manuscript contains only bks. 1–11. Here, however, only two passages of pseudo-Macer’s text, both in bk. 11 (bk. 12 in this manuscript), are laid out as verse (in chs. 16 and 105, fols. 230r and 247r). In addition, the long citation of pseudo-Macer in ch. 29 is set out as a separate paragraph of prose, beginning with an enlarged red initial on the margin (fol. 232r). The numerous citations in the earlier books are not specially marked, nor are the several other citations in bk. 11. In bk. 10, we occasionally find the pseudo-Macer citations set off as a separate paragraph, as in ch. 148, fol. 223r. 39. This manuscript is now part of the Sorbonne’s collection and makes the first part of a complete tripartite Speculum maius (see above), but only the first of the two-

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volume text of the Naturale survives. The set may have come to the Sorbonne from the Collège Louis-le-Grand, if we are to believe the stamps. But Lusignan expresses doubts about this provenance, given the tendency that Charles Beaulieux observed for the Jesuits of Louis-le-Grand to try to “appropriate” manuscripts from other colleges placed in their keeping, including those of the Collège du Maître Gervais (Charles Beaulieux, Catalogue général des manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques de France, Université de Paris et Universités des Départements [Paris: Plon, Nourrit, 1918], preface, v). Lusignan points out that the testimony of Échard, who aributes the manuscript to the laer college, is compelling because he knew the college’s library in its original state (J. Quétif and J. Échard, Scriptores ordinis praedicatorum, vol. 1 [Paris: Ballard & Simard, 1719], 215; Lusignan, ed., PSM, 78n39). The evidence for the manuscript’s provenance before its integration into one or the other of these two libraries is equally problematic. A Guillaume, bishop of Coutances, has le his ex libris in a sixteenth-century hand in the Doctrinale (MS 53) on the front flyleaf. But no Guillaume is listed among the bishops of Coutances in either the fieenth or the sixteenth century by Conrad Eubel (Hierarchia catholica medii aevi, 3 vols. [Regensberg, 1901–13]), so this ex libris proves a dead end. Nor do we have any way of tracing the provenance of the manuscript before it came into the possession of the mysterious bishop. 40. Léopold Delisle identifies this manuscript as among those belonging to the cardinal (Le cabinet des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque impériale [puis nationale], 3 vols. [Paris, 1868–81], 1:495, 508). It is likely one of the three copies or volumes of the Naturale mentioned in the list of manuscripts that Colbert appropriated from the dilapidated library of the college in 1680 (see ibid., 1:500 [no. 12], 502 [no. 110], 50 [no. 286]). Voorbij dates the manuscript to the fourteenth century (SHVB, 333), but the carpet page decoration on fol. 1r of vol. 1 is clearly later, and it incorporates the arms of Pierre de Foix. Patricia Stirnemann suggests that the hand and the decoration are that of the mid-fieenthcentury (private communication, November 2004). 41. Here, as in the case of Nb14, the Macer texts are laid out as prose by one (or more) scribes and as verse by another, though in Nb4 the order is reversed from that of the earlier manuscript, and it is only in bks. 13 and 14 that we find the verse mise en page. Moreover, in the earlier books, the individual line breaks are frequently marked by red and blue paraph marks (e.g., fols. 170v and 171r [bk. 9, chs. 102 and 104]), used elsewhere in this manuscript only very rarely, for the beginning of new citations. 42. This is the only instance I know of in which all the Naturale has been copied into a single volume (though the end is now missing). Voorbij expresses uncertainty about the place of copy while suggesting France (SHVB, 333). The manuscript, made with a great deal of economy, lacks illustration or painting and contains only two pen-flourished initials. Therefore, the hand alone must be used to identify its date and place of copy. This task is complicated by the fact that there are multiple hands, which alternate throughout the manuscript. 43. I would need to see the remaining Naturale manuscripts before drawing any firm conclusions about how widespread this practice may have been. I have now seen fourteen of the eighteen surviving copies of the second and third versions of the Naturale that include this portion of the text (counting Nb7 and Nb12 as a single copy; see below). I have not seen the manuscripts in Escorial or Parma; nor have I seen Nb15, MS lat. 16172 of the BNF, of whose existence I only recently became aware, or Nb18 (Vatican, Oob. lat. 108). Six manuscripts (Nb3, Nb8, Nb7 / 12, Nb13, Nx7, and Nx14)

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Notes to Pages 239–240

give the full text of these books with a purely prose mise en page. Two more show a subtle privileging of the verse text: I have discussed Nx14 above; in Nx7, the divisions between the metrical verse lines are ostentatiously marked with red hash marks, unlike anything anywhere else in the manuscript. Thus, while the use of the verse mise en page in the Historiale is truly rare, at least in France and Belgium (five of the fiy-four manuscripts that I have seen, almost all produced in this region), in the Naturale it seems to have been as widespread as the prose mise en page (though the limited number of surviving manuscripts makes it impossible to draw any statistically valid conclusions). 44. Monique Paulmier-Foucart, private communication ( January 2005). 45. It should be noted that my survey has been limited, by necessity, mainly to manuscripts now located in France, Belgium, and the United States. Shorter research trips have also allowed me to consult the manuscripts located in London, Oxford, Cambridge, Munich, and Berlin. While these trips have allowed me to see almost all manuscripts of the Naturale and the Doctrinale, whose diffusion was limited mainly to France and Belgium, the Historiale had considerable diffusion in Germany and points east. It remains to be seen whether the mise en page in question, present in one of the few manuscripts of eastern provenance that I have been able to consult, was common or unusual these regions. 46. Unfortunately, these two manuscripts are incomplete and lack the flores of the classical poets in bk. 6, which are similarly introduced by comments on their metrical form. We therefore cannot know how the copyist chose to lay out these citations. 47. Voorbij dates it to the fourteenth century (SHVB, 305). It may be significant that this manuscript belongs to a different family from the other two and gives the final version of the text, meaning that we cannot conclude that the use of a verse mise en page in all these manuscripts is due to a single shared exemplar. (It must be noted, however, that the length of the metrical lines in this particular copy corresponds almost exactly to the width of the column, with the result that only the dab of red on the first leer of each verse, forming a red line down the le of each column, calls aention to the change in mise en page and no additional parchment is called for because of wasted space.) 48. The text has recently been reedited for the CCCM series by Michel Perrin (In honorem sanctae crucis, CCCM 100 [Turnhout: Brepols, 1997]), who had earlier published a French translation, Louanges de la sainte croix (Paris: Berg International; Amiens: Trois Cailloux, 1988); the laer includes color reproductions of a ninthcentury manuscript copied at Fulda and now held by the BM of Amiens. I have used Perrin’s Latin edition and cite it according to the system of reference that he has established (see Perrin, ed., In honorem sanctae crucis, x–xii). Probably the best introduction to the In honorem is provided in Michel Perrin, “Quelques réflexions sur le De laudibus sanctae crucis de Raban Maur: De la codicologie à la théologie en passant par la poétique,” Revue des études latines 67 (1989): 213–35. Michele Camillo Ferrari has provided an extended and very useful study of the text in Il “Liber sanctae crucis” di Rabano Mauro: Testo, immagine, contesto (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999). See also the chapter that Ulrich Ernst devotes to Hrabanus in Carmen figuratum: Geschichte des Figurengedichts von den antiken Ursprüngen bis zum Ausgang des Mielalters (Köln: Böhlau, 1991), 222–332. A study of the entire corpus of surviving manuscripts (more than eighty) can be found in Hans-Georg Müller, Hrabanus Maurus, “De laudibus sancta crucis,” Studien zur Überlieferung und

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Geistesgeschichte mit dem Faksimile-Textabdruck aus Codex Reg. Lat. 124 der vatikanischen Bibliothek (Ratingen: A. Henn, 1973), 29–111, although the reader should note that, in preparing his edition, Perrin found grounds for disagreement with some of Müller’s judgments and ultimately concluded that the interpretation of the manuscript tradition set out by K. Holter in Hrabanus Maurus, Liber de laudibus sanctae crucis: Kommentar, Kodikologische une kunsthistorische Einführung (Graz, 1973) was more likely. For a discussion of the diverse titles under which the text has circulated, see Perrin, ed., In honorem sanctae crucis, xxvi–xxix. 49. Paul Zumthor, “Carmina figurata,” in Langue, texte, énigme (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 25–35, 26. In this brief essay, Zumthor offers a perceptive discussion of the genre. For the carmen figuratum in the Carolingian period, see Giovanni Polara, “Parole ed immagine nei carmi figurati di età carolina,” in Testo e immagine nell’alto medioevo, 15–21 aprile 1993, 2 vols. (Spoleto: Presso la Sede del Centro, 1994), 1:245–73. For a diachronic survey of the genre from antiquity through the Middle Ages, see Massin, La lere et l’image: La figuration dans l’alphabet latin du huitième siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 155–244; and Ernst, Carmen figuratum. 50. On Hrabanus’s versification, see Perrin, ed., In honorem sanctae crucis, lxiv– lxxiii. 51. Hrabanus Maurus, In honorem A7 line 69. 52. Zumthor, “Carmina figurata,” 28. 53. Ibid., 33–34. For the concept of superposition, see also Perrin, “Quelques réflexions,” 219, 230, 235. 54. Hrabanus Maurus, In honorem, A7 lines 29–31. On Hrabanus’s use of the visual to move readers toward invisible truths, see Christian Heck, “Raban Maur, Bernard de Clairvaux, Bonaventure: Expression de l’espace et topographie spirituelle dans les images médiévales,” in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché (Princeton, NJ: Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, in association with the Princeton University Press, 2006), 112–32. 55. Dom Jean Leclercq, L’amour des leres et le désir de Dieu: Initiation aux auteurs monastiques du Moyen Âge, 3rd ed. (Paris: Cerf, 1990), 67, 72. 56. According to Perrin: “The time spent meditating, in the quest to understand the meaning—or rather, the superposition of meanings—should itself be considered a prayer” (“Quelques réflexions,” 219). 57. The Douai edition is inadequate for such detailed comparison, and I have instead used the manuscripts that elsewhere served as my controls (He73, He75, and He77) as well as Hd1 (the Arras manuscript) and Hd9, all of which offer a remarkably uniform text of this chapter. I have space here to report only the results of this comparison, rather than reproducing the process (which in any case the reader is likely to find tedious). 58. According to Vincent: “ex diversis actoribus hoc opus contextum est” (prologue ch. 3). 59. See, for Boethius, BNF MSS lat. 7181 (ninth century), lat. 15090 (tenth century), lat. 7183 (tenth or eleventh century), and lat. 6402 (eleventh century). For Martianus, see lat. 8669 (ninth century) and lat. 8670 and lat. 8671 (tenth century). 60. A good example is BNF MS lat. 15009, a thirteenth-century copy of the Cosmographia in which the first leer of each line of verse has been offset, positioned by the

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Notes to Pages 245–250

elaborate ruling. The BNF has a manuscript of the De planctu Naturae from the same century, lat. 3517, dated to 1274. Here the scribe has also aempted to distinguish some of the metrical forms. He has, e.g., slightly enlarged and elaborated the first leer of each strophe of the fourth poem (VII), which is Sapphic meter. 61. It is worth noting that, in one case where verse is set out line by line in the Speculum historiale, the citations from Hildebert’s De querimonia, the cited text is itself a prosimetrum, though not one that accords the kind of extensive treatment to the natural word that we find in the Cosmographia and the De planctu Naturae. 62. Jan Ziolkowski, “The Prosimetrum in the Classical Tradition,” in Prosimetrum: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Narrative in Prose and Verse, ed. Joseph Harris and Karl Reichl (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 45–65. 63. Gian Biaggio Conte, Latin Literature: A History, trans. Joseph B. Solodow, rev. Don Fowler and Glenn W. Most (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 217. 64. Peter Dronke, Verse with Prose from Petronius to Dante: The Art and Scope of the Mixed Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 5–6. See Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, esp. 26. 65. On this complaint, see Blair, TMTK, 251. 66. See Hrabanus Maurus, In honorem, ed. Perrin, xcii. 67. Alison Stones, “Prolegomena to a Corpus of Vincent of Beauvais Illustrations,” in VBIR, 301–44, 304. 68. Because, as frequently occurs, the prologue and table are counted as the first book in this manuscript, the book numbers run one behind those of the Douai edition that I use, and vol. 1 of this manuscript concludes with bk. “16,” vol. 2 beginning with bk. “17.” 69. Stones, “Prologemena,” 305, 312–14. 70. Now Oxford, Merton College, MS 271. See Michael Camille, “Bestiary or Biology? Aristotle’s Animals in Oxford, Merton College, MS 271,” in Aristotle’s Animals in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Carlos Steel, Guy Guldentops, and Pieter Beullens (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1999), 355–96. 71. Patricia Stirnemann, private communication, November 2004. 72. Alison Stones, “A Note on Some Re-Discovered Vincent of Beauvais Volumes,” VBN 26 (2001): 10–13, 10–11. The two volumes bear different sigla because they were long believed to belong to different sets. 73. Alison Stones, “A Note on the ‘Maître au menton fuyant,’” Corpus of Illuminated Manuscripts 11–12 (2002): 1247–71, 1248, and “A Note on Some Re-Discovered Vincent of Beauvais Volumes,” 11. On this manuscript and the Laon volume, see also Christel Meier, “Bilder der Wissenscha: Die Illustration des Speculum maius von Vinzenz von Beauvais im enzyklopädischen Kontext,” Frühmielalterlich studien 33 (1999): 252–86, 260–70, though this article was wrien before the connection of the Laon volume to the Paris Naturale was established. 74. I hesitate to identify this figure too closely with the author. It was widely known that Vincent was a Dominican friar (in manuscript rubrics he is generally identified as Frater Vincentius, and in author portraits is generally depicted tonsured and wearing the appropriate habit). The man in these manuscripts, on the other hand, is not dressed as a friar. Unfortunately, the first volume of both manuscripts having been lost, we cannot know whether they began with an author portrait, but the extremely generic quality of the teacher figure suggests that the maker of the manuscript saw no need

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to emphasize the text’s precise authorship throughout the manuscript. Vincent, who insisted on identifying himself as the text’s actor rather than its auctor, would probably have approved. 75. In the Laon-Paris copy, as in most Speculum maius manuscripts, the book number given in the manuscript runs one behind the Douai book number that I cite until bk. 21. Douai’s bks. 21 and 22 are combined into a single bk. 22 in the manuscript (this is also common practice for the Naturale), and thereaer the Douai and the manuscript book numbers coincide. 76. I shall henceforth refer to Nb7 / 12 simply as the Laon manuscript. 77. For this terminology, see Monique Paulmier-Foucart, “Une des tâches de l’encyclopédiste, intituler: Les titres des chapitres du Speculum naturale de Vincent de Beauvais,” in EMAC, 147–62. 78. Unfortunately, the BNF will not allow this volume (Nb12) to be photographed. Readers can judge the artist’s style from figs. 17 and 20, taken from Nb7, although the illustrations in Nb12 are more telling for the way this artist dealt with the problems of visual representation raised by the Naturale. 79. See, e.g., BNF MS lat. 12953 (a copy of the Parva naturalia made in Paris during the third quarter of the thirteenth century), fol. 232r, and lat. 6323A (also from the thirteenth century), fol. 181r. 80. Patricia Stirnemann, private communication, November 2004. 81. Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion, 1992), 22, 26. 82. Ibid., 42. 83. For particularly good examples, see Nb12 fols. 7r, 87r. 84. One may compare the women’s heads at the boom of the stem on fol. 135r of the Laon volume and the chimeras in the stems on fols. 7r and 87r of the Paris volume. 85. Mâle, AR, 51. 86. Ibid., 29. 87. “Dans quelle mesure les animaux qui décorent la cathédrale sont-ils symboliques? Voilà ce qu’il importe maintenant d’examiner. Question délicate, où les archéologues n’ont pas toujours su se défier de leur imagination . . . nous voici en présence de la faune et de la flore si riches de Reims, d’Amiens, de Rouen, et de Paris, et du monde mystérieux des gargouilles. Y chercherons-nous aussi des symboles? Quel livre nous en expliquera le sens? Quel texte nous guidera? Avouons-le: les livres ici ne nous apprennent plus rien; les textes et les monuments ne concordent plus” (ibid., 35, 46). For critiques of the iconographic approach that Mâle (usually) exemplifies, see, among others, Iconography at the Crossroads: Papers from the Colloquium Sponsored by the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, 23–24 March 1990, ed. Brendan Cassidy (Princeton, NJ: Index of Christian Art, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, 1993), 6–10; and Michael Camille, “Mouths and Meanings: Towards an Anti-Iconography of Medieval Art,” in ibid., 43–57, esp. 44, and The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xxvii. For Mâle’s significant role in bringing the Speculum maius back to the aention of scholars of all kinds, see Jean Schneider, “Une encyclopédie du XIIIe siècle: Le Speculum maius de Vincent de Beauvais” (1976), in Culture et travail intellectuel dans l’occident médiéval: Bilan des “Colloques d’humanisme médiéval” (1960–1980), ed. Geneviève Hasenohr and Jean Longère (Paris: CNRS, 1981), 187–96, although it should be noted

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Notes to Pages 258–264

that Mâle’s predecessor Adolphe Napoléon Didron was in fact the first to exploit the Speculum maius in an art historical study. 88. Unlike the Macer passages, this treatment of the snake-foot was also included in the first version of the Naturale, bk. 9 or 10, ch. 93, according to the lone surviving complete table of this version in Na1. The text of this passage, however, has not survived. 89. Cited from Thomas of Cantimpré, DNR 8.17. 90. a) dicitur Douai] Nb12 Nb14 Nc4.—b) magorum vel incantatorum Douai] Nb9 Nb10 Nb14 Nc4.—c) familiariter Douai] Nb9 Nb10 Nb12 Nb14 Nc4. Cited from Augustine, GL 11.2.4, 11.28.35, 11.29.37. Chapter 6 1. Foucault, AK, 55 / AdS, 74. 2. Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Paerns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Becke (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 280. It is remarkable how easily Iser’s comments about reading modern novels could be applied to reading the scholastic encyclopedia; see, e.g., the passages on ibid., 75, 120, 232–23. The discussion in the later Act of Reading of the function of “gaps” or “blanks” is also suggestive in this context; these blanks in the modern novel “leave open the connection between perspectives in the text, and so spur the reader into coordinating these perspectives—in other words, they induce the reader to perform basic operations within the text” (Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978], 169 [see also 182–83]). Yet Iser’s implied reader is ultimately not quite flexible enough for the argument that I would like to make about the subject evoked by scholastic encyclopedias, probably because the implied reader is something more substantial, stable, and predictable than simply the potential response to an invitation on the part of the text; it is in Iser’s practice, if not necessarily in his theory, a being whose outline and operations the critic can discern because they are determined by the text. I would like to insist on the plurality of possible outlines and operations of the encyclopedic subject, and my interpretation of critical fictions, depicting what Iser would call fictional readers, will ultimately prove inconclusive precisely because these scholastic encyclopedias are susceptible of so many different ways of reading. 3. In enumerating these oppositions, I am thinking of discussions of medieval reading, which have shown the “creative tension” between continuous and discontinuous, or complete and selective, reading (Sylvia Huot, “Medieval Readers of the Roman de la Rose: The Evidence of Marginal Notations,” Romance Philology 43 [1990]: 400–420, 402, 413). A few scholars have staged a similar conflict between the idea that medieval readers were “assimilated” into the text through spiritual (usually tropological) exegesis (Allen, EP, 289, 292) and the idea that the “rhetorical stance” of medieval writing presupposes an unlikeness that must be transformed, through persuasion, into likeness but in the meantime “makes the merger of text, reader, and world untenable” (John Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the “Libro de buen amor” [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994], 60). In my view, these alternatives are but two sides of the same coin, and the scholars’ contrasting emphasis is determined by the fact that Allen was writing against the New Critics, for whom poetry was an inviolate verbal construct, while Dagenais was opposing a vein of postmodernism

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(represented by Roland Barthes) that “dissolves” the subject into the texte (see ibid., esp. 9–10). Yet the alternatives of assimilation and resistance are both implicit, as we shall see, in the writing of Ramon Llull. 4. See Alastair J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Aitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London: Scholar, 1984); Michel Zink, La subjectivité liéraire: Autour du siècle de Saint Louis, Écriture (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1985); Sarah Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Sarah Spence, Texts and the Self in the Twelh Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Gerald A. Bond The Loving Subject: Desire, Eloquence, and Power in Romanesque France, Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). 5. Spence, Texts and the Self, 2. 6. Louis Althusser, Positions (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1976), 133–34. For a critique, see Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 65. Bond usefully discusses the possible applications of Althusserian ideology to medieval literature in The Loving Subject, esp. 12–13. 7. Bond, The Loving Subject, 13. Émile Benveniste argues that subjectivity can be expressed by the first- and second-person pronouns but not the third (“Subjectivity in Language,” in Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek, Miami Linguistics Series, 8 [Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971], 223–30; see also his “The Nature of Pronouns,” in ibid., 217–22). 8. The four modes are set out in Hugh of Saint-Victor, De arca Noe mystica 12, PL 176, col. 698; Vincent cites this passage in SN 29.27. It is worth noting that, in Vincent’s representation, Hugh’s reading works only because it is partial and occludes the final flight of the dove out of the ark, never to return, which inspires Noah to disembark. 9. A conflation of chs. 1–5 from Hugh, De arca Noe morali bk. 2, PL 176, cols. 635–39. 10. Robert Javelet, Image et ressemblance au XIIe siècle, de Saint Anselme à Alain de Lille, 2 vols. (Strasbourg: Université de Strasbourg, Faculté de théologie catholique, 1967), 1:150. 11. Ibid., 52. 12. Ibid., 59. 13. Cited from Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin, 1961), 8.3.8–4.9. 14. Nevertheless, the Speculum docrinale does include a discussion of the mechanical arts (bk. 11) and medicine (bks. 12–14), and, of course, the human person participates in history as a physical, material being. My point is that Vincent’s discussion of the human being not only does not limit itself to the material but also finds various means to privilege the intellectual and spiritual aspects. 15. Javelet, Image, 1:377. 16. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos sermo 1, PL 36, col. 1338. 17. De Lubac, EM, 2:569–70. 18. The mirror in medieval culture is a vast topic, favored by scholars in a number of disciplines. Among the work relevant to textual mirrors, I would cite particularly Ritamary Bradley, “Backgrounds of the Title Speculum in Medieval Literature,” Speculum 29 (1954): 100–115; James I. Wimsa, Allegory and Mirror: Tradition and Structure in Middle English Literature (New York: Pegasus, 1970); Edward Peter Nolan, Now through a Glass Darkly: Specular Images of Being and Knowing from Virgil to Chaucer (Ann Arbor:

388  Notes to Pages 272–278

University of Michigan Press, 1990); Einar Már Jónsson, Le miroir: Naissance d’un genre liéraire, Histoire (Paris: Belles leres, 1995); Fabienne Pomel, ed., Miroirs et jeux de miroirs dans la liérature médiévale (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2003); and Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Seeing through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). 19. Bradley, “Backgrounds,” 103, 110. 20. Einar Már Jónsson, “Le sens du titre speculum aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles et son utilisation par Vincent de Beauvais,” in VBIR, 11–32, 13, 16–17. 21. Hugh of Saint-Victor, Expositio in Regulam Beati Augustini 12, PL 176, col. 924. 22. See Jónsson, “Le sens du titre speculum,” 22–24. 23. Ibid., 19–20. 24. Bradley, “Backgrounds,” 112. 25. Jónsson, “Le sens du titre speculum,” 21. 26. Ibid., 21. 27. See Bradley, “Backgrounds”; and Jónsson, Le miroir. 28. See Jónsson, “Le sens du titre speculum.” 29. Jacques Le Goff, “Pourquoi le XIIIe siècle a-t-il été plus particulièrement un siècle d’encyclopédisme?” in EMAC, 27. 30. Jónsson, “Le sens du titre speculum,” 28. 31. a) respondent Douai] Nb9 Nb10 Nb12 Nb14 Nc4. 32. For a description of Thomas’s use of the quaestio disputata genre and other background on the De veritate, see the introductory material in Robert W. Mulligan’s translation, The Disputed Questions on Truth, 3 vols. (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1952–54); as well as M.-D. Chenu, Toward Understanding Saint Thomas, trans. A.-M. Landry and D. Hughes (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1964), 85–96. 33. a) om. Douai] Nb9 Nb10 Nb12 Nb14 Nc4. Cited from Thomas Aquinas, Quaestio disputata de veritate (Opera omnia 3:1–186), qu. 12, art. 6, corpus. 34. Vincent identifies this source by title alone at the beginning of SN 2.35. The treatise has been aributed to the Polish friar Witelo, the author of the Perspectiva but probably born ca. 1230 (hence too young to have authored the Memoriale), and more plausibly to the Parisian scholastic Adam Pulchrae Mulieris (about whom lile is known except that he was active in the first half of the thirteenth century). It has been edited by Clemens Baeumker: Witelo: Ein Philosoph und Naturforscher des XIII. Jahrhunderts (Munster: Aschendorff, 1908), 1–71. Thomas knew the Memoriale and refuted the claims that its author made for light. See Quaestiones quodlibetales 6.11.19. The metaphysics of light were given most prominent expression in Grosseteste’s De luce (ca. 1226). For a brief explanation, see James McEvoy, Robert Grossetest, Great Medieval Thinkers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 87–95. 35. a) suspicit Douai] Nb10 Nb11 Nb13 Nb14 Nb16. Cited from the Memoriale, ch. 10. 36. Cited from the Memoriale, ch. 11. 37. The parts of this work from which Vincent cites have circulated and been edited under the title of the Summa de creaturis. On Albert, see, among others, James A. Weisheipl, ed., Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, 1980, ST, 49 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1980). 38. Cited from Albert’s Summa de creaturis (in Opera omnia, ed. Auguste Borgnet, vols. 34–35 [Paris: Vivès, 1890–99]), 2.21.3.3.1–2, and the solutio to qu. 1.

Notes to Pages 279–285 

389

39. a) ut . . . superficie om. Douai] Nb10 Nb11 Nb13 Nb14 Nb16.—b) est Douai] partium erit Nb10 Nb11 Nb13 Nb14 Nb16. Cited from Albert, Summa de creaturis, part 2, quest. 21, art. 3, part. 3, quest. 4, and the corresponding solutio. 40. This passage and the transition from the Guillaume de Lorris to the Jean de Meun portions of the Rose have received a great deal of scholarly aention. For early treatments, see esp. Paul Zumthor, “De Guillaume de Lorris à Jean de Meun,” in Études de language et de liérature du Moyen Âge offertes à Félix Lecoy (Paris: Champion, 1973), 609–20, and “Récit et anti-récit: Le Roman de la Rose,” Medioevo Romanzo 1 (1974): 5–24. More recently, Kevin Brownlee (“Reflections in the Miroër aux Amoreux: The Inscribed Reader in Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose,” in Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes, ed. J. D. Lyons Jr. [Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982], 60–70) and David Hult (“Closed Quotations: The Speaking Voice in the Roman de la Rose,” in “Concepts of Closure,” ed. David Hult, special issue, Yale French Studies 67 [1984]: 248–69) discuss the odd textual dynamics of this two-author poem. 41. See David Hult, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: Readership and Authority in the First “Roman de la Rose” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 42. Hult, “Closed Quotations,” 268. 43. Benveniste, “Subjectivity in Language,” 223–30. See also Benveniste, “The Nature of Pronouns,” 217–22. 44. For the grammar of the pronouns in this passage, the explication offered by Eva Martin in “Away from Self-Authorship: Multiplying the ‘Author’ in Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose” (Modern Philology 96 [1998]: 1–15) is regreably misleading. Martin states that, “as a general rule, the Old French ‘il’ refers to a person other than the previous subject,” with the result that the il of line 10563 would refer to Guillaume (ibid., 5). On the contrary, the presence or absence of a subject pronoun in Old French could be determined by a number of factors, and chief among them were the precise nature of the clause and the presence or absence of another stressed element before the verb. Practice remained fluid enough that, in verse, the syllable count of the line could also determine the use or elision of the pronoun. For example, in RR line 10522, which Martin also cites, il clearly refers to the person (Guillaume) who is the subject of the previous clause, and the pronoun’s insertion is likely due to metrical necessity. As a result of the flexibility of the medieval language, it is the logic of the text that must govern the choice between two possible antecedents for a pronoun—and, in this particular passage, the logic is fuzzy indeed. So Martin and I do finally arrive at the same observation: that there is considerable confusion in this passage about the antecedents of the pronouns and that this confusion implicitly assimilates Jean into Guillaume, as both lover and narrator, thus multiplying the persons able to inhabit the first-person position. Nevertheless, our readings diverge again when drawing larger conclusions, for, unlike Martin, I understand the play of pronouns to have implications for our understanding of the second person in this passage as well as the first. From my perspective, then, the most important aspect of this passage is the way in which the subject is multiplied to accommodate a readerly as well as a narratorial subject, an idea that Martin seems to approach with her brief reference to the “public” in her conclusion but does not elaborate.

390



Notes to Pages 289–294

45. On this genre, see The Medieval Pastourelle, ed. and trans. William D. Paden, 2 vols., Garland Library of Medieval Literature, 34, Series A (New York: Garland, 1987). 46. [Guilhem Molinier], Las flors del gay saber, estier dichas las leys d’amors, ed. M. Gatien-Arnoult, 3 vols., Monumens de la liérature romane depuis le quatorzième siècle (Paris: Silvestre; Toulouse: Bon et Privat, 1841–43), 1:346. 47. Riquer has pointed out that the episode is a prose version of the pastourelle, indicated by the cited forms of address “Amigua” and “Sènyer,” but that it is a pastourelle “in a divine style” (HLC, 1:294). The episode has since become the most commentedon of the entire Libre de meravelles; scholars have tended to reiterate the connection to the pastourelle but also propose other generic interferences in Llull’s approach. See esp. Xavier Bonillo Hoyos, Literatura al “Llibre de meravelles” de Ramon Llull (Barcelona: Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, 2008), 68–74. 48. Although no pastorelas survive from William IX, Bond’s study of this early troubadour’s rhetorical power play affords a useful view of courtly lyric discourse (see The Loving Subject, 99–128). For Llull’s lay theological discourse, see Johnston, ERRL. 49. The two manuscripts of the Arbre de filosofia d’amor that Llull presented to the royal couple have not survived. Seven other Latin copies have survived from the Middle Ages (Fernando Domínguez Reboiras, “Works,” in Raimundus Lullus: An Introduction to His Life, Works, and Thought, ed. Alexander Fidora and Josep E. Rubio, CCCM 214, RLOL Supplementum Lullianum 2 [Turnhout: Brepols, 2008], 377–413, 174) and two in Catalan (Anthony Bonner, “Estadístiques sobre la recepció de l’obra de Ramon Llull,” SL 43 [2003]: 83–92). The French humanist Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples edited a Latin edition, printed by Jean Petit in Paris in 1516, but aer that the text appears to have fallen out of circulation, not reappearing until Ivo Salzinger undertook the Raimundi Lullii opera omnia, printing a new edition of the Latin text in Mainz in 1737. To my knowledge, the Latin version has not been printed since, but the Catalan version, as represented in fourteenth-century Catalonian or Majorcan manuscripts, was edited several times in the past century. Gret Schib’s edition (Arbre de filosofia d’amor, ENC Col·lecció A 117 [Barcelona: Fundació Jaume I, 1980]), from which I cite, is the most recent; the text is also included, with introduction and notes by Jordi Rubió, in OE, 2:9–84. Readers can find a full modern French translation in Sala-Molins’s anthology (CTPM, 203–346). E. Allison Peers has published an English translation of a portion of the text (see The Tree of Love [London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge; New York: Macmillan, 1926]). 50. See Peter Dronke, “Arbor caritatis,” in Intellectuals and Poets in Medieval Europe, Storia e leeratura, raccolta di studi e testi, 183 (Rome: Storia e leeratura, 1992), esp. 127–28. 51. Given the success of the Roman de la Rose among medieval readers, both courtly and clerical, and Llull’s interest in vernacular writing and frequent visits to Paris, his engagement with the romance should not require much additional justification. But traditionally Lullian scholars have hesitated to acknowledge his use of the Rose. Jordí Rubío, e.g., in his otherwise excellent introduction to the 1960 edition of the Arbre de filosofia d’amor, suggested that Llull need never even have read the Rose but could merely have heard about it secondhand from friends in a Paris besoed with the romance (OE, 2:17). This discomfort probably derived from an understanding of the Rose based on Alan M. F. Gunn’s interpretation (The Mirror of Love: A Reinterpretation of “The Romance of the Rose” [Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1952] was one of the few mono-

Notes to Pages 295–301



391

graphs dealing with the Roman de la Rose at any length that would have been available to a scholar of Rubío’s generation) and from the then widespread assumption that the romance was subject to unequivocal moral censure by medieval readers. (Like most of the Rose scholarship, the seminal studies of the medieval reception of the Rose by Badel [RRQ] and Huot [RRMR] postdate Rubío’s edition.) For decades, only Martí de Riquer seemed fully aware of how much the Arbre de filosofia d’amor owes to the Rose and dared to suggest that Llull’s use of the romance was “conscious and deliberate.” However, in keeping with the modest aims of his literary history project, Riquer identified the relation between the two texts without interpreting it, and no one has since undertaken to say more (HLC, 324–25). Ramon Sugranyes de Franch has recently reiterated Riquer’s position (“Raymond Lulle the Writer: The Novels,” in Raymond Lulle et le pays d’Oc, Cahiers de Fanjeux 22 [Toulouse: Privat, 1987], 77–101, 99), yet Sugranyes does not provide any further interpretation. Curiously, these scholars have tended to cite only Llull’s debt to the Rose’s style of personification allegory, not the Majorcan’s extensive engagement with Jean’s coy play on the death of the lover-author. It seems to me that it is rather the close parallels between the description of the death of the lover in the Arbre de filosofia d’amor and the Rose, as well as more elliptical references in the Libre de meravelles, that prove that Llull must have known Jean’s text well (perhaps because Llull’s friend Pierre de Limoges possessed a copy, but the evidence that Pierre had one is not conclusive [see Badel, RRQ, 57]). 52. BNF MS fr. 14966, cited in Badel, RRQ, 370. 53. I regret that I have not been able to see the manuscripts of the Catalan text; my description of rubrics and titles is based entirely on the editions. It would be very interesting to see whether copyists set this portion of the text off in any special way. 54. Lancelot 86.20–21, 88.1. 55. See Elspeth Kennedy, “The Knight as Reader of Arthurian Romance,” in Culture and the King: The Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend: Essays in Honor of Valerie M. Lagorio, ed. Martin B. Schichtman and James B. Carley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 70–90. 56. Lancelot 88.1. 57. Ibid. 88.3. The connection to the Roman de la Rose has been made by Charles Méla in La reine et le Graal: La conjointure dans les romans du Graal, de Chrétien de Troyes ou Livre de Lancelot (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 346–47. 58. For the connection between this narration of the death of the lover, the death that is a precondition for rebirth as a “new man,” and Llull’s aspirations to martyrdom, see Joan Garcia Font, “Llibre d’Arbre d’amor,” in “Ramon Llull al llindar del segle XXI,” special issue, Ars brevis, “numero extraordinari” (1998): 137–51, 141–43. 59. Amelia Van Vleck has called particular aention to this metaphor. See Memory and Re-Creation in Troubadour Lyric (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 193. 60. Alfred Pillet and Henry Carstens, Bibliographie der Troubadours, Schrien der Königsberger Gelehrten Gesellscha 3 (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1933), 364.38, lines 90–94. Peire Vidal, Poesi, ed. D’Arco Silvio Avalle, 2 vols. (Milan and Naples: Ficardo Ricciardi, 1960), 2:301. 61. Pillet and Carstens, Bibliographie der Troubadours, 389.10, lines 64–65. Raimbaut d’ Aurenga, The Life and Works of the Troubadour Raimbaut d’Orange, ed. and trans. Walter T. Paison (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1952), 80.

392



Notes to Pages 303–310

Aerword 1. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” in Other Inquisitions, 1937–1952, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 101–4, 104. 2. On the reader’s role and complex subject position in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciènces, des arts et des métiers, which began to be published in 1751, particularly useful is Fabienne-Sophie Chauderlot’s “Encyclopédismes d’hier et d’aujourd’hui: informations ou pensée? Une lecture de l’Encyclopédie à la Deleuze,” in Using the “Encyclopédie”: Ways of Knowing, Ways of Reading, ed. Daniel Brewer and Julie Candler Hayes (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2002), 37–62. 3. The term hypertext is a coinage of Theodor H. Nelson, who explicitly defines it as “nonsequential writing—a text that branches and allows choices to the reader” (Literary Machines [Swarthmore, PA, 1981], n.p. [preface]). Robert Coover provides a brief, thought-provoking discussion of the implications of hypertext for the writing and reading of literature in “The End of Books,” New York Review of Books, June 21, 1992. For a longer study by a critic steeped in literary theory, see George P. Landow’s Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 4. Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1999), 68–81, 74. 5. Ibid., 81. 6. Ibid., 68.

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Latini, Bruneo. Li livres dou tresor. Edited by Spurgeon Baldwin and Paul Barree. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 257. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2003. Llull, Ramon. Arbor scientiae. Edited by Pere Villalba Varneda. CCCM 180A–C. RLOL 24–26. Turnhout: Brepols, 2000. ———. Arbre de ciència. Edited by Tomàs Carreras i Artau, Joaquim Carreras i Artau, et al. In OE, 1:547–1046. Translation of prologue by Sala-Molins in CTPM, 130–35. ———. Arbre de filosofia d’amor. Edited by Gret Schib. ENC Col·lecció A 117. Barcelona: Fundació Jaume I, 1980. L’arbre de philosophie d’amour. Complete French translation by Sala-Molins in CTPM, 203–346. The Tree of Love. Partial English translation by E. Allison Peers. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge; New York: Macmillan, 1926. ———. L’arbre de philosophie d’amour, Le livre de l’ami et de l’aimé, et choix de textes philosophiques et mystiques. Translation, introduction, and notes by Louis Sala-Molins. Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1967. ———. Començaments de medicina. Edited by Lola Badia. In Començaments de medicina, Tractat d’astronomia, 1–120. NEORL, 5. Palma: Abadía de Montserrat, 2002. Principles of Medicine. Translated by Bonner in SWRL, 2:1107–1214. ———. Fèlix o el Libre de meravelles. In OSRL, 2:7–393. Palma de Mallorca: Editorial Moll, 1989. The Book of Marvels. Translation by Bonner in SWRL, 2:647–1105. ———. Liber principiorum medicinae. Edited by María Asunción Sánchez Manzano. In Quauor libri principiorum, 413–560. CCCM 185. RLOL 31. Turnhout: Brepols, 2006. ———. Libre de contemplació. Edited by Jordí Rubió, Antoni Sancho, Miquel Arrona, Llorenç Riber, et al. In OE, 2:85–1269. ———. Libre de meravelles. Edited by Salvador Galmés. 4 vols. ENC A 34, 38, 42, 46–47. Barcelona: Editorial Barcino, 1931–34. ———. Llibre del gentil e dels tres savis. Edited by Anthony Bonner. 2nd ed. NEORL, 2. Palma: Abadía de Montserrat, 2001. The Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men. Translation by Bonner in SWRL, 1:91–304. ———. Obres essencials de Ramon Llull. Edited by Miquel Batllori, Joaquim Carreras i Artau, Martí de Riquer, Jordi Rubió i Balaguer, et al. 2 vols. Biblioteca Perenne, 16, 17. Barcelona: Ariel, 1957, 1960. ———. Obres selectes de Ramon Llull (1232–1316). 2 vols. Edited by Anthony Bonner. Palma de Mallorca: Editorial Moll, 1989. ———. Selected Works of Ramon Llull. Translated by Anthony Bonner. 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. ———. Traduction française du “Libre de meravelles” de Ramon Llull. Prologue, bks. 4–6, and “De la fin du livre de merveilles.” Text of Bibl. nat. fr. 189. Edited by Gret Schib. Dissertation, Faculté de philosophie et d’histoire de l’Université de Bâle. Scha@ausen: Buchdruckerei Bolli, Böcherer AG Scha@ausen, 1969. Macrobius. Commentarii in somnium Scipionis. Edited by J. Willis. BSGR. Leipzig: Teubner, 1970. Commentary on the Dream of Scipio. Translation by William Harris Stahl. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966. Marcabru: A Critical Edition. Edited and translated by Simon Gaunt, Ruth Harvey, and Linda Paterson. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000. Martianus Capella. De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii. Edited by James Willis. BSGR. Leipzig: Teubner, 1983. The Marriage of Philology and Mercury. Translation by

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William Harris Stahl and Richard Johnson, with E. L. Burge. Records of Western Civilization. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Matfre Ermendgaud. Le breviari d’amor de Matfre Ermengaud. Edited by Peter Rickes. Vols. 2–3, London: Association internationale d’études occitanes, 1989, 1998; vol. 4, Turnhout: Brepols, 2004; vol. 5, Leiden: Brill, 1976. The Medieval Pastourelle. Edited and translated by William D. Paden. 2 vols. Garland Library of Medieval Literature, 34, Series A. New York: Garland, 1987. [Molinier, Guilhem]. Las flors del gay saber, estier dichas las leys d’amors. Edited by M. Gatien-Arnoult. 3 vols. Monumens de la liérature romane depuis le quatorzième siècle. Paris: Silvestre; Toulouse: Bon et Privat, 1841–43. [———]. Las leys d’amors. 4 vols. Edited by Joseph Anglade. Toulouse: Privat, 1919. [Odo of Meung] Macer Floridus. De viribus herbarum. Edited by Ludwig Choulant. Leipzig, 1832. Peire Vidal. Poesie. Edited by D’Arco Silvio Avalle. 2 vols. Milan and Naples: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1960. Peter Comestor. Historia scholastica. PL 198, cols. 1054–1722. Peter Helias. Summa super Priscianum. Edited by Leo Reilly. Vol. 1. ST, 113. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1993. Peter Lombard. Collectanea in epistulas Pauli. PL 191, cols. 1297–1696. ———. Sententiae in IV libris distinctae. Rome: Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1971–. The Sentences. Translated by Giulio Silano. 3 vols. Medieval Sources in Translation. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2007. Pliny the Elder. Naturalis historiae libri XXXVII. Edited by Ludwig von Jan and Karl Friedrich Theodor Mayhoff. Stugart: Teubner, 1967–70. Priscian. Institutionum grammaticarum volumen maius. Prisciani Caesariensis grammatici opera. Edited by Augustus Krehl. Vol. 1. Leipzig: Libraria Weidmannia, 1819. La queste del Saint Graal, roman du XIIIe siècle. Edited by Albert Pauphilet. CFMA 33. Paris: Champion 1923. Quintilian. Institutionis oratoriae libri duodecimi. Edited by M. Winterboom. Oxford Classical Texts. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991. Raimbaut d’Aurenga. The Life and Works of the Troubadour Raimbaut d’Orange. Edited and translated by Walter T. Paison. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1952. Rhetorica ad Herennium. Edited and translated by Harry Caplan. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Richard de Fournival. Le bestiaire d’amour et la response du bestiaire. Edited by Gabriel Biancioo. Champion Classiques—Moyen Âge, 27. Paris: Champion, 2009. Richard of Saint-Victor. Liber exceptionum. Edited by Jean Châtillon. Textes philosophiques du Moyen Âge, 5. Paris: Vrin, 1958. Seneca. Epistulae ad Lucilium. Edited by Oo Hense. Leipzig: Teubner, 1898. Thomas of Cantimpré. De naturis rerum. Edited by Helmut Boese. 1 vol. to date. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1973. Dictionaries Altfranzösisches Wörterbuch. Edited by Adolf Tobler and Erhard Lommatzsch. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1963. Diccionari Català-Valencià-Balear. Edited by Antoni M. Alcover. 10 vols. Palma de Mallorca: Editorial Moll, 1993.

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Glossari general lul·lià. Edited by Miquel Colom Mateu. 5 vols. Mallorca: Editorial Moll, 1983. Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis. Edited by Charles du Fresne du Cange. New edition by Léopold Favre. 10 vols. Niort: L. Favre, 1883–87. Oxford Latin Dictionary. Edited by P. G. W. Glare. Oxford: Clarendon, 1982. Thesaurus linguae latinae. 10 vols. to date. Leipzig: Teubner, 1900–. Selected Critical Sources Because of the excessive length to which a complete bibliography of this book would stretch, I limit the following list to scholarly works that are cited at several different points in this book, or are directly relevant to aspects of the central primary texts that I discuss, or have otherwise substantially shaped my thinking about this topic. For more localized bibliography, readers should consult the relevant notes. Aerts, W. J., E. R. Smits, and J. B. Voorbij, eds. Vincent of Beauvais and Alexander the Great: Studies on the “Speculum maius” and Its Translation into Medieval Vernaculars. Mediaevalia Groningana 7. Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1986. Agamben, Giorgio. The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics. Translated by Daniel HellerRoazen. Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. ———. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Translated by Ronald L. Martinez. THL 69. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Akbari, Suzanne Conklin. Seeing through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Albrecht, Eva. “‘Epilogus speculi historialis continens tractatum de ultimis temporibus’: A First Introduction to Vincent of Beauvais as Compiler of the Speculum maius.” VBN 20 (1995): 13–18. ———. “Excursus: Aristotle and Other Greek and Arabic Scientific Sources in Three Thirteenth-Century Latin Encyclopedias.” In Harvey, ed., Medieval Hebrew Encyclopedias, 58–70. ———. “The Organization of Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum maius and of Some Other Latin Encyclopedias.” In Harvey, ed., Medieval Hebrew Encyclopedias, 46–57, 71–74. ———. “Summary of PhD: ‘De ontstaansgeschiedenis en de compilatie van het Speculum naturale van Vincent van Beauvais (†1264)’ (The Genesis and Compilation of the Speculum naturale of Vincent of Beauvais).” VBN 34 (2009): 3–9. Alexander, J. J. G., and M. T. Gibson, eds. Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to Richard William Hunt. Oxford: Clarendon, 1976. Allen, Judson Boyce. The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages: A Decorum of Convenient Distinction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982. Allen, Peter L. “A Frame for the Text? History, Literary Theory, Subjectivity, and the Study of Medieval Literature.” Exemplaria 3 (1991): 1–25. Althusser, Louis. Positions. Paris: Éditions sociales, 1976. Amsler, M. E. Etymology and Grammatical Discourse in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1989. Armstrong, Adrian, and Sarah Kay. Knowing Poetry: Verse in Medieval France from the “Rose” to the Rhétoriqueurs. With the participation of Rebecca Dixon, Miranda

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Griffin, Sylvia Huot, Francesca Nicholson, and Finn Sinclair. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Armstrong, Tim J., ed. Michel Foucault, Philosopher. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992. Arnar, Anna Sigrídur. Encyclopedism from Pliny to Borges. Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 1990. Auerbach, Erich. “Figura” (1938). In Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays, 11–76. New York: Meridian, 1959. Badel, Pierre-Yves. Le “Roman de la Rose” au XIVe siècle: Étude de la réception de l’oeuvre. Geneva: Droz, 1980. Badia, Lola. “L’aportació de Ramon Llull a la literatura en llengua d’oc: Per un replantejament de les relacions Occitània-Catalunya a la baixa edat mitjana.” In Actes del vuitè col·loqui internacional de llengua i literatura catalanes, 12–17 de setembre de 1988, 261–95. Biblioteca “Abat Oliba,” 77. Montserrat: Associació Internacional de Llangua i Literatura Catalanes, Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 1989. ———. “The Arbor scientiae: A ‘New’ Encyclopedia in the Thirteenth-Century OccitanCatalan Cultural Context.” In BW, 1–19. ———. “La filosofia natural de Guillem de Conches en català.” Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 40 (1985–86): 137–69. ———. “Literature as an Ancilla artis: The Transformation of Science into Literature according to Robert Pring-Mill and Ramon Llull.” Hispanic Research Journal 10 (2009): 18–28. ———. Teoria i pràctica de la literatura en Ramon Llull. Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1992. Badia, Lola, and Anthony Bonner. Ramon Llull: Vida, pensamiento y obra literaria. Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1992. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson. University of Texas Press Slavic Series, 1. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Balint, Bridget K. Ordering Chaos: The Self and the Cosmos in Twelh-Century Latin Prosimetrum. Medieval and Renaissance Authors and Texts, 3. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill & Wang, 1988. ———. S / Z. Paris: Seuil, 1970. Bartle, Anne Clark. “Foucault’s Medievalism.” Mystics Quarterly 20, no. 1 (1994): 10–18. Balori, Miquel. Ramon Llull i el lul·lisme. Obra Completa, 2. València, 1993. Bauçà, Manuel. “El ejemplarismo como clave de la teología de la Ars Dei de Ramón Llull.” In Von der Suche nach Go: Helmut Riedlinger zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. Margot Schmidt and Fernando Domínguez Reboiras, 399–428. Mystik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Texte und Untersuchungen, Abteilung I: Christliche Mystik, 15. Stugart: Bad Cannsta, vol. 89, nos. 3–4 (1998). Becq, Annie, ed. L’encyclopédisme: Actes du Colloque de Caen, 12–16 janvier 1987. Paris: Éditions aux amateurs de livres / Klincksieck, 1991. Benveniste, Émile. Problèmes de linguistique générale. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Problems in General Linguistics. Translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek. Miami Linguistics Series, 8. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971. Berlioz, Jacques, and Marie-Anne Polo de Beaulieu. “Les recueils d’exempla et la diffusion de l’encyclopédisme médiéval.” In EMAC, 179–212.

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Binkley, Peter, ed. Pre-Modern Encyclopedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1–4 July 1996. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Bischoff, Bernard. Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Translated by Daibhm O. Cróinin and David Ganz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Bolduc, Michelle. The Medieval Poetics of Contraries. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. ———. “Naming Names: Matfre Ermengaud’s Use of Troubadour Quotations.” Tenso 22 (2007): 41–74. Bond, Gerald A. The Loving Subject: Desire, Eloquence, and Power in Romanesque France. Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Bonillo Hoyos, Xavier. “Els exemples del paradís i de l’infern del Llibre de meravelles de Ramon Llull.” SL 44 (2004): 53–78. ———. Literatura al “Llibre de meravelles” de Ramon Llull. Barcelona: Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, 2008. Bonner, Anthony. The Art and Logic of Ramon Llull: A User’s Guide. Leiden: Brill, 2007. ———. “L’art lulliana com a autoritat alternativa.” SL 33 (1993 for 1994): 15–32. ———. “The background to the Desconhort, Tree of Science, and Apostrophe.” In Religion, Text, and Society in Medieval Spain and Northern Europe: Essays in Honor of J. N. Hillgarth, ed. Thomas E. Burman, Mark D. Meyerson, and Leah Shopkow, 122–33. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2002. ———. “Estadístiques sobre la recepció de l’obra de Ramon Llull.” SL 43 (2003): 83–92. ———. “Notes de bibliografia i cronologia lul·lianes.” ELL 12 (1980): 71–86. ———. “The Philosophy of Ramon Llull: A Survey of Recent Literature.” Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévales / Forschungen zur Theologie und Philosophie des Mittelalters 68, no. 1 (2001): 170–77. ———. “The Structure of the Arbor scientiae.” In BW, 20–34. Boüard, Michel de. “Encyclopédies médiévales: Sur la ‘connaisance de la nature du monde’ au Moyen Âge.” Revue des questions historiques 112 (1930): 358–404. Bouffartigue, Jean, and Françoise Mélonio, eds. “L’entreprise encyclopédique.” Special issue, Liérales 21 (1997). Boutaric, E. “Vincent de Beauvais et la connaissance de l’antiquité classique au treizième siècle.” Revue des questions historiques 17 (1875): 5–57. Bradley, Ritamary. “Backgrounds of the Title Speculum in Medieval Literature.” Speculum 29 (1954): 100–115. Brown, Mary Frances. “Contained Dissonance: The Speculum maius and Medieval Literary Practice.” VBN 31 (2006): 3–8. ———. “Critique and Complicity: Metapoetical Reflections on the Gendered Figures of Body and Text in the Roman de la Rose.” Exemplaria 21, no. 2 (2009): 129–60. See also Franklin-Brown, Mary. Brownlee, Kevin. “Reflections in the Miroër aux Amoreux: The Inscribed Reader in Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose.” In Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes, ed. J. D. Lyons Jr., 60–70. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982. Brownlee, Kevin, and Sylvia Huot, eds. Rethinking the “Romance of the Rose”: Text, Image, Reception. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992.

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Brownlee, Marina S., Kevin Brownlee, and Stephen G. Nichols, eds. The New Medievalism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Brun, Laurent, and Maia Cavagna. “Pour une édition du Miroir historial de Jean de Vignay.” Romania 124 (2006): 378–428. Brusegan, Rosanna. “L’énumération et les chiffres: Du Roman de la Rose au Tresoreo.” Liérature 130 (June 2003): 48–67. Büchler, J. L., and C. G. Dümge. Archiv der Gesellscha für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde. Vol. 8. Hanover, 1843. Burdon, Christopher. “The Margin Is the Message: Commentary’s Displacement of Canon.” Literature and Theology 13 (1999): 222–34. Burke, Peter. Varieties of Cultural History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. Burne, Charles. “The Coherence of the Arabic-Latin Translation Program in Toledo in the Twelh Century.” Science in Context 14 (2001): 249–88. ———. The Introduction of Arabic Learning into England. The Panizzi Lectures, 1996. London: British Library, 1997. ———. “Vincent of Beauvais, Michael Scot, and the ‘New Aristotle.’” In LCVB, 189–213. Cabré, Lluís, Marcel Ortín, and Josep Pujol. “‘Conèixer e haver moralitats bones’: L’ús de la literatura a l’Arbre exemplifical de Ramon Llull.” ELL 28 (1988): 139–67. Cahn, Walter. “Représentation de la parole.” Connaissance des arts, November 1982, 82–89. Callataÿ, G. de, and Baudouin Van den Abeele, eds. Une lumière venue d’ailleurs: Héritages et ouvertures dans les encyclopédies d’Orient et d’Occident au Moyen-Âge: Actes du colloque de Louvain-la-Neuve, 19–21 mai 2005. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008. Camille, Michael. “The Book of Signs: Writing and Visual Difference in Gothic Manuscript Illumination.” Word and Image 1 (1985): 133–48. ———. Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art. London: Reaktion, 1992. ———. “Seeing and Reading: Some Visual Implications of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy.” Art History 8 (1985): 26–49. ———. “Visual Signs of the Sacred Page: Books in the Bible moralisée.” Word and Image 5 (1989): 111–30. Carreras i Artau, Tomàs. “L’esperit cavalleresc en la producció lulliana.” La nostra terra, 1934, 319–21. ———. “L’obra i el pensament de R. Llull.” In OE, 1:55–68. Carreras i Artau, T., and J. Carreras i Artau. Historia de la filosofía española: Filosofía cristiana de los siglos XIII al XV. Vol. 2. Madrid: Real Academia de ciencias exactas, físicas y naturales, 1943. Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. ———. The Cra of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Cavallo, Guglielmo, and Roger Chartier, eds. A History of Reading in the West. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Amherst: University of Massachuses Press, 1999. Cerquiglini, Bernard. Éloge de la variante: Histoire critique de la philologie. Paris: Seuil, 1989. Cerquiglini, Jacqueline. “Histoire, image: Accord et discord des sens à la fin du Moyen Âge.” Liérature 74 (1989): 110–26. Chazan, Mireille, and Gilbert Dahan, eds. La méthode critique au Moyen Âge. Turnhout: Brepols, 2006.

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Chenu, M.-D. “Involucrum, Le mythe selon les théologiens médiévaux.” AHDL 30 (1955): 75–79. ———. Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelh Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West. Translated by Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Lile. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. ———. Toward Understanding Saint Thomas. Translated by A.-M. Landry and D. Hughes. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1964. Codoñer, Carmen. “De l’antiquité au Moyen Âge: Isidore de Séville.” In Becq, ed., L’encyclopédisme, 19–35. ———. “‘Origines’ o ‘Etymologiae.’” Helmantica 45 (1994): 511–27. Colish, Marcia L. The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968. ———. Studies in Scholasticism. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Collison, Robert. Encyclopedias: Their History throughout the Ages. New York: Hafner, 1966. Colomer, Eusebio. “La actitud compleja y ambivalente de Ramon Llull ante el judaísmo y el islamismo.” In Constantes y fragmentos del pensamiento luliano, ed. F. Domínguez and J. de Salas, 77–90. Beihee zur Iberoromania, 12. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996. ———. “Las artes liberales en la concepcion cientifica y pedagogica de Ramon Llull.” In Arts liberaux et philosophie au Moyen Âge: Actes du quatrieme Congrès international de philosophie médiévale, 683–90. Montréal: Institut d’études médiévales; Paris: J. Vrin, 1969. ———. “El ascenso a Dios en le pensamiento de R. L.” In “Die Metaphysik in Mielalter,” special issue, Miscellania Medievalia 2 (1963): 582–88. Colomi Ferra, G. “Ramon Llull y las origenes de la literatura catalana.” ELL 13 (1969): 133–52; 14 (1970): 163–80; 15 (1971): 55–66, 175–95. Compagnon, Antoine. La seconde main, ou le travail de la citation. Paris: Seuil, 1979. Copeland, Rita. Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Copeland, Rita, and Stephen Melville. “Allegory and Allegoresis, Rhetoric and Hermeneutics.” Exemplaria 3 (1991): 159–87. Corbellari, Alain. La voix des clercs: Liérature et savoir universitaire autour des dits du XIIIe siècle. Publications romanes et françaises 236. Geneva: Droz, 2005. Culler, Jonathan. “Literary History, Allegory, and Semiology.” New Literary History 7, no. 2 (1976): 259–70. Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Bollingen Series 36. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Dagenais, John. The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the “Libro de buen amor.” Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Dahan, Gilbert. “Encyclopédies et exégèse de la Bible aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles.” In Ribémont, ed., “Vulgariser la science,” 19–40. ———. L’exégèse chrétienne de la Bible en Occident médiéval, XIIe–XIVe siècle. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1999. Dällenbach, Lucien. Le récit spéculaire, essai sur la mise en abyme. Paris: Seuil, 1977. d’Alverny, Marie-Thérèse. “Translations and Translators.” In Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelh Century, ed. R. L. Benson and G. Constable, 421–62. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.

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Daunou, M. “Vincent de Beauvais, auteur du Speculum majus terminé en 1256.” Histoire liéraire de la France 18 (1835): 449–519. Davidson, Arnold I., ed. Foucault and His Interlocutors. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. de Hamel, Christopher. Glossed Books of the Bible and the Origins of the Paris Booktrade. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1984. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Translated by Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Delisle, Léopold. Le cabinet des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque impériale [puis nationale]. 3 vols. Paris, 1868–81. ———. Notice sur les manuscrits du “Liber Floridus” de Lambert, Chanoine de Saint-Omer. Publications de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-leres. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale / Klincksieck, 1906. ———. “Traités divers sur les propriétés des choses.” Histoire liéraire de la France 30 (1888): 334–88, 615–16. de Lubac, Henri. Exégèse médiévale: Les quatre sens de l’Ecriture. 4 vols. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1959. ———. La postérité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore. 2 vols. Paris: Lethielleux, 1979. Derolez, Albert. The Autograph Manuscript of the “Liber Floridus”: A Key to the Encyclopedia of Lambert of Saint-Omer. Corpus Christianorum Autographa Medii Aevi, 4. Turnhout: Brepols, 1998. ———, ed. “Liber Floridus” Colloquium: Papers Read at the International Meeting Held in the University Library Ghent on 3–5 September 1967. Ghent: E. Story-Scientia, 1973. ———. The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books: From the Twelh to the Early Sixteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. de Smet, J.-M. “La mentalité religieuse du chanoine Lambert (résumé).” In Derolez, ed., “Liber Floridus” Colloquium, 11–12. Destrez, Jean, and M.-D. Chenu. “Exemplaria universitaires des XIIIe et XIVe siècles.” Scriptorium 7 (1953): 68–80. Dierse, Ulrich. Enzyklopädie: Zur Geschichte eines philosophischen und Wissenschastheoretischen Begriffs. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1977. Dixon, Rebecca, and Finn E. Sinclair, eds. Poetry, Knowledge and Community in Late Medieval France. With Adrian Armstrong, Sylvia Huot, and Sarah Kay. Gallica 13. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008. Dod, Bernard G. “Aristoteles latinus.” In Kretzmann, Kenny, and Pinborg, eds., The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, 45–79. Domínguez Reboiras, Fernando. “Una lectura del Llibre de meravelles como ars praedicandi.” Caplletra 43 (2007): 131–60. ———. “Raimundo Lulio y el ideal mendicante: Afinidades y divergencias.” In Domínguez et al., eds., Aristotelica et Lulliana, 377–413. ———. “Works.” In Fidora and Rubio, eds., Raimundus Lullus, 125–242. Domínguez Reboiras, Fernando, and Jordi Gayà. “Life.” In Fidora and Rubio, eds., Raimundus Lullus, 3–124. Domínguez Reboiras, Fernando, Ruedi Imbach, Theodor Pindl-Büchel, and Peter Walter, eds. Aristotelica et Lulliana: Magistro doctissimo Charles H. Lohr septuagesimum annum feliciter agenti dedicata. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1995. Domínguez Reboiras, Fernando, Pere Villalba Varneda, and Peter Walter, eds.

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Van den Abeele, Baudouin. “Le De animalibus d’Aristote dans le monde latin: Modalités de sa réception médiévale.” Frühmielalterliche Studien 33 (1999): 287–318. ———. “Simbolismo sui margini: Le moralizzazioni del De proprietatibus rerum di Bartolomeo Anglico.” In Simbolismo animale e leeratura, ed. Dora Faraci, 159–83. Rome: Vecchiarelli, 2003. ———. “Vincent de Beauvais naturaliste: Les sources des livres d’animaux du Speculum naturale.” In LCVB, 127–51. Van den Abeele, Baudouin, and Heinz Meyer, eds. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, “De proprietatibus rerum”: Texte latin et réception vernaculaire: Actes du colloque international, Münster, 9.–11.10.2003. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. Van Steenberghen, Fernand. “L’organisation des études au Moyen Âge et ses répercussions sur le mouvement philosophique.” Revue philosophique de Louvain 52 (1954): 572–92. ———. The Philosophical Movement in the Thirteenth Century. Edinburgh: Nelson, 1955. Van Vleck, Amelia. Memory and Re-Creation in Troubadour Lyric. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991. Varvaro, Alberto. “Note su Ramon Llull narratore.” Annali Instituto Universitario Orientale, Napoli, Sezione Romanza 34, no. 1 1 (January 1992): 199–207. Ventura, Iolanda. “On Philosophical Encyclopedism in the Fourteenth Century: The Catena aurea entium of Henry of Herford.” In Callataÿ and Van de Abeele, eds., Une lumière venue d’ailleurs, 199–245. ———. “Quellen, Konzeption und Rezeption der Pflanzenbücher von Enzyklopädien des 13. Jahrhunderts: Zu De proprietatibus rerum, Buch XVI.” In Van den Abeele and Meyer, eds., Bartholomaeus Anglicus, “De proprietatibus rerum”: Texte latin et réception vernaculaire, 267–317. Veyne, Paul. “Foucault Revolutionizes History” (1971). Translated by Catherine Porter. In Davidson, ed., Foucault and His Interlocutors, 146–82. Vollmann, Benedikt Konrad. “La vitalità delle enciclopedie di scienza naturale: Isidoro di Siviglia, Tommaso di Cantimpré, e le redazioni del cosiddeo ‘Thommaso III.’” In EMAC, 135–45. Voorbij, Hans. “Les mises à jour de la matière dominicaine dans le Speculum historiale.” In LCVB, 153–68. ———. “Purpose and Audience: Perspectives on the Thirteenth-Century Encyclopedias of Alexander Neckham, Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Thomas of Cantimpré, and Vincent of Beauvais.” In Harvey, ed., Medieval Hebrew Encyclopedias, 31–45. ———. “The Speculum historiale: Some Aspects of Its Genesis and Manuscript Tradition.” In Aerts, Smits, and Voorbij, eds., Vincent of Beauvais and Alexander the Great, 11–55. ———. Het “Speculum historiale” van Vincent van Beauvais, een studie van zijn ontstaansgeschiedenis. Groningen: Rijksuniversiteit, 1991. ———. “La version Klosterneuburg et la version Douai du Speculum historiale: Manifestations de l’évolution du texte.” In VBIR, 111–40. Walstra, G. J. J. “Thomas de Cantimpré, De naturis rerum: État de la question.” Vivarium 5 (1967): 151. Weijers, Olga [as Olga Weyers]. “L’appellation des disciplines dans les classifications des sciences au XIIe et XIIIe siècles.” Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi 46–47 (1986–87): 39–64.

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INDEX OF N AMES AN D TITLES

0

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations or tables. Texts whose authors are known are indexed under the authors’ names. Apelles, 210–11 Apocalypse. See Revelation (biblical book) Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 23, 68, 78–79, 95, 388n34; commentary on Boethius’s De Trinitate, 344n114; commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sententiae, 68, 340n81; Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, 275–76; Summa contra gentiles, 357n7; Summa theologica, 69–70, 82. See also in the General Index Thomism Aristobulus of Paneas, 114, 115 Aristotle, 5, 24, 37, 50–52, 56, 61, 75, 198, 209–10, 226, 277, 306; causes, theory of, 50–51, 73; chain of being, 51; commentaries on, 50, 51–52, 62, 78–79; De anima, 50, 252; De animalibus, 50, 52, 249; disciplines, paradigm of, attributed to, 75–80, 76, 80; empiricism of, 50–51, 229; Metaphysics, 50, 51, 78, 344n114; Physics, 50; Poetics, 9–10; Posterior Analytics, 50, 78, 344n114; works translated into Latin, 50, 51–52, 344n114. See also in the General Index Aristotelianism (general)

Abelard, 370n2 Adam Scotus, 112, 369n123 Aelred of Rievaulx: De amicitia spirituali, 370n2; Speculum caritatis, 273 Agamben, Giorgio, 185, 372n13 Akbari, Suzanne Conklin, 325n57 Alan of Lille, De planctu Naturae, 272, 342n93, 374n29, 375n44, 384n60; and prosimetrum genre, 70–72; and Roman de la Rose, 189, 191–93, 196, 203–4, 206, 209, 375n38; and Speculum maius, comparison to, 245–47 Albert the Great, Saint, 8, 23, 62, 65, 78–79, 277–80, 322n40, 344n114 Albrecht, Eva, xvii, xxii, 97, 348n10, 350n30 Alciati, Andrea, 368n106 Aldrovandi, Ulisse, 91 Alexander of Hales, 72 Algus, 198, 209–10 Allen, Judson Boyce, 9–10, 339n72, 386n3 Althusser, Louis, 266 Ampère, J.-J., 372n16 Andreas Capellanus, De amore, 204–5 Anselm, 114 423

424

 Index of Names and Titles

Armstrong, Adrian, 20, 185, 360n31, 360n33, 373n21 Arnar, Anna Sigrídur, 69–70 Arnau de Vilanova, 134, 135 Arnaut Daniel, 366n86 Auerbach, Erich, 45, 338n60 Augustine, Saint, 24, 48, 49, 51, 63, 114, 226; and encyclopedias, 46–47, 62, 106–8, 222; hermeneutics of, 45, 46–47, 56, 140–41, 154; semiotics of, 37, 46–48, 48, 63, 81, 143, 208, 228. See also in the General Index Augustinianism Augustine, Saint, works of —Confessions, xxi, 57, 106–8, 123, 264, 269–70 —De doctrina christiana, 45, 97, 106–8, 154; on disciplines, 73; on exegesis, 46–47, 56–57, 59, 140–41 —De Genesi ad lieram, 115–17, 121–22, 123–24, 258–60, 276, 280, 352n54 —Enarrationes in Psalmos, 121, 124, 272 —Sermones de tempore, 369n123 —Speculum, 273 Averroes, 24, 52; commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics, 10; great commentary on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, 50. See also in the General Index Averroism Avicenna, 52, 78, 224, 225 Bacon, Roger, 24, 52, 78–79, 322n40, 344n114 Badia, Lola, 356n4, 359nn20–21, 360n25, 361n35, 366n90, 377n11 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 71, 216, 232, 245–47, 342n92, 376n5 Balint, Bridget K., 72, 341n90, 375n38 Barthes, Roland, 307, 308, 387n3 Bartholomeus Anglicus, 24 Bartholomeus Anglicus, works of —De proprietatibus rerum, 27, 179, 270; as compilation, 65; contents of, 80; glosses on, 53, 337n51; organization of, 81, 100, 105, 191, 192; reception of, 61, 82, 96, 348n7, 354n84; sources of, 306; title of, 9, 71 Basil, Saint, 114 Beaulieux, Charles, 381n39 Bec, Pierre, 360n28 Bede, the Venerable, 116

Bellère, Balthazar, xx Benveniste, Émile, 266, 284, 387n7 Bernard Silvester, 335n35 Bernard Silvester, works of —commentary on Macrobius, 49 —Cosmographia, 246, 342n93, 375n38, 375n44; and integument, 49–50, 52; and prosimetrum genre, 70–71; and Roman de la Rose, 189, 191–93, 206, 209; and Speculum maius, comparison to, 245–47, 383n60 Bernart de Ventadorn, 366n86 Bible: analogy to the world, 48, 56; authority of, 15, 73; commentary on, 24, 37, 45, 46–48, 56–63; contradiction in, 69; and encyclopedias, 46–47, 59–63, 106–11, 113–14, 122–23, 351n38; illustration of, 249; as mirror, 271–72; as narrative, 123; parables in, 89; study of (see in the General Index disciplines, medieval paradigms of); Vulgate translation, xvi, 14. See also Bible moralisée; Glossa ordinaria; Vincent of Beauvais: Bible, use of; and individual books of the Bible under author and title Bible moralisée, 39–41, 40, 44, 59, 62–63, 137, 177, 178, 369n118, plate 2 Blair, Ann, 316n9, 321n26, 347n4, 354n85 Boccaccio, Decameron, 70, 219 Bodel, Jean, 290 Boese, Helmut, 80 Boethius, 56, 78; commentary on Porphyry, 75; De consolatione Philosophiae, 70, 184, 245, 370n2, 374n33, 383n59; De Trinitate, 73, 75, 78, 344n114 Bonaventure, Saint, 8, 24, 53; Collatio xix in Hexameron, 73, 80, 342n97; commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sententiae, 66, 67, 340n80; De reductione artium ad theologiam, 79; Lignum vitae, 150–51, 161, 361n36 Bond, Gerald, 265–66 Bonillo Hoyos, Xavier, 356n4, 367n96 Bonner, Anthony, 34–35, 142, 143, 359n21, 363n54, 368n101, 368n103 Borges, Jorge Luis, Ficciones, 215–16, 303, 309–10 Bornstein, George, 316n7 Boüard, Michel de, 336n45, 337n52

Index of Names and Titles  425

Bouché, Anne-Marie, 367n97 Bradley, Ritamary, 272, 273 Bruneo Latini, works of —Tesoreo, 374n27 —Tresor, 27, 249; organization of, 79–80, 82, 191, 192; on prose, 134, 135; title of, 9 Brusegan, Rosanna, 374n27 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc de, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulaire, 90–92 Burdon, Christopher, 62 Buridan, John, 62 Burne, Charles, 318n11, 321n32, 336n36 Calcidius, translation of Plato’s Timaeus, 49, 56 Camille, Michael, 249, 254–55 Carmina Burana, 234 Carruthers, Mary, 42, 227, 363n54 Cassiodorus, Institutiones saecularium lierarum, 73 Cerverí de Girona, 366n90 Charlemagne, 5 Chartier, Roger, 19 Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, 70, 219; The Legend of Good Women, 348n7 Cicero: De inventione, 120; De oratore, 120–21; Somnium Scipionis, 49, 59–60 Clement of Alexandria, 115 Col, Pierre, 185, 372n11 Compagnon, Antoine, 169, 227 Conte, Gian Biaggio, 245 Copeland, Rita, 62, 97, 121, 227, 352n51 Cordoñer, Carmen, 59, 60 Croll, Oswald, Tractatus de signaturis internis rerum, 85–86, 88, 345n133 Dagenais, John, 25, 367n95, 386n3 Dahan, Gilbert, 61 d’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 305 Daniel (biblical book), 14, 108–9, 140–41 Dante: Commedia, 27, 342n94, 348n7; Vita nuova, 342n94 De intelligentiis, 276–77, 388n34 Deleuze, Giles, 17–18, 19, 21, 22–23 Delisle, Léopold, 381n40 De ortu scientiarum (aributed to alFārābī), 78 Derolez, Albert, 339n73

Diderot, Denis, 137 Didron, Adolphe Napoléon, 386n87 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 325n53 Domenech, Jaume, 348n7 Domínguez Reboiras, Fernando, 355n1 Dragonei, Roger, 200, 205–6, 374n37 Dronke, Peter, 245–47, 294, 342n93, 361n36 Duchenne, Marie-Christine, 97 Ecclesiasticus (biblical book), 102–3, 114–15, 352n54 Échard, J., 381n39 Economou, George, 197 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1, 3, 7, 218, 308, 309 Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonnée des sciènces, des arts et des métiers, 137, 305 Esmeijer, Anna, 361n38 Euclid, 198, 209–10 Eusebius, 46 Evans, Michael, 81, 361n36 Exodus (biblical book), 56, 102 Fārābī, al-: De scientiis, 78; De ortu scientiarum (aributed to), 78 Faral, Edmond, 186 Fleming, John, xv Florarium, 231 Florilegium Angelicum, 319n18 Florilegium Duacense, 340n76 Florilegium Gallicum, 319n18 Flynn, Thomas R., 18, 326n60, 326n62 Foix, Pierre de, 381n40 Foucault, Michel, 17, 19, 20, 26; archaeological method, 17–26, 29–31, 83–92, 222, 325n57, 346n137; The Archaeology of Knowledge, 7, 21, 22, 29–30, 89, 90, 92, 263–64, 326n66; archive, notion of, 12, 18, 23, 29–31, 35, 37, 83–84, 92, 329n5; author function, concept of, 25, 328n80; and compilation, understanding of, 90–92; “Different Spaces,” 216–17; discourse, notion of, 335n33, 346n147; discursive and nondiscursive, relation of, 22–23; enunciative field, notion of, 30, 37, 329n3; on heterotopias, 216–18; historical method of, 18–19, 324n53, 326n62; The History

426



Index of Names and Titles

Foucault, Michel (continued) of Sexuality, 22–23, 325n57, 346n147; order, understanding of, 93; The Order of Things, 17, 20, 21, 22, 38, 83–92, 93, 213, 215–16, 345n129, 345n133, 345n137, 346nn139–40, 346n143, 346n1; power, understanding of, in later work, 22–23; “prose of the world”; resemblance, theory of, 84–88; signature, interpretation of, 85–86; sources, choice and interpretation of, 18–19, 20, 87–92; statement, notion of, 30, 31, 37, 89–90, 329n2, 376n5; “This Is Not a Pipe,” 21; translations of, xvi; on verbal and visual, relation of, 21–22, 232–33; “What Is an Author?,” 25 Frye, Northrop, 10, 245 Fulgentius, Mythologia, 76 Fumagalli, Maria Teresa, 359n20 Galileo Galilei, 87 Gaufredi, Raymond (general of Franciscan order), 357n7, 364n64 Gayà, Jordi, 355n1 Genesis (biblical book), 61, 106, 108; creation, narrative of, 40, 61, 97, 101–4, 106, 107, 108, 111, 112, 113–19, 121–25, 192, 226, 250–51, 276, 352n50; Fall, narrative of, 61, 97, 106, 119, 179, 248, 258–61, 369n123; flood, narrative of, 267–68, 280, 387n8 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria nova, 70, 188, 200–201, 203 Gerald of Wales: Gemma ecclesiastica, 378n23; Topographica hibernica, 370n2 Gerard of Cremona, translation of alFārābī’s De scientiis, 78 Gerson, Jean, 206, 374n32, 375n49 Gillespie, Alexandra, 328n81 Glossa ordinaria, 57–59, 58, 62, 73 Goldstein, Jan, 18 Gossuin de Metz, Image du monde, 9, 27, 133, 134, 178 Greetham, David, 328n81 Gregory I (pope), 116 Grosseteste, Robert, 8, 78–79, 322n40, 344n114, 388n34 Guenée, Bernard, 64, 341n88 Guilhem IX of Aquitaine, 70

Guilhem Molinier, Las flors del gai saber / Leys d’amors, 289, 325n57, 365n78 Guillaume de Lorris, Roman de la Rose, 184, 202–3, 205–6, 207, 213, 281–85, 297, 371n5, 389n44. See also Jean de Meun, works of: Roman de la Rose Gundissalinus, Dominicus: De divisione scientiarum, 78, 322n37; translations from Arabic, 78 Gunn, Alan M. F., 187, 189, 390n51 Hamburger, Jeffrey, 361n38 Hamesse, Jacqueline, 320n18 Hathaway, Neil, 64 Hautfuney, Jean, 99–100, 354n84 Helinand of Froidmont, Chronicon, 106, 117 Heloise, 370n2 Hermann the German, on Aristotle’s Poetics, 10 Hildebert of Lavardin, 240, 384n61 Hillgarth, J. N., 355n1, 364n64 Hirsch-Reich, Beatrice, 150 Honorius Augustodunensis, Speculum vel imago mundi, 101–6, 115, 193, 273 Horace, 236 Hrabanus Maurus, 47; De universo, 47–48, 52, 53; In honorem sancte crucis, 235, 237, 240–45, 241, 243, 247, 248, 263, 383n56 Hugh of Saint-Cher, Prior of Dominican Province of France, 347n2 Hugh of Saint-Victor, 42, 116 Hugh of Saint-Victor, works of —De arca Noe morali, 363n54 —De arca Noe mystica, 264, 267–68, 280, 387n8 —De sacramentis, 368n111 —Didascalicon: and disciplines, paradigm of, 75–78, 77; and exegesis, 112; and reading, 42, 350n17; on world as book, 45–46, 48, 54, 56. See also Vincent of Beauvais: and Hugh of Saint-Victor; and in the General Index Victorine school —Expositio in Regulam Beati Augustini, 329 Hult, David, 185, 282, 283–84, 360n31, 371n5, 372n11

Index of Names and Titles  427

Hunt, Richard, 226 Huot, Syvia, xv, 187, 328n82, 371n10, 373n23, 375n44 Huppert, George, 87, 345n137 Hutcheon, Linda, 18 Illich, Ivan, 320n19 Irvine, Martin, 30, 325n57, 376n5 Isaiah (biblical book), 48 Iser, Wolfgang, 263–64, 386n2 Isidore of Seville, 231 Isidore of Seville, works of —Etymologiae sive origines rerum, 26, 52, 73, 334nn28–29; adaptation of encyclopedic genre in, 60, 100, 350n21; on argumentum, 120; as compilation, 64; contents of, 60; on enigma, 154; etymological practice in, 47, 222, 225–26, 227–29, 231; exegetical function of, 60, 62; on fabula, 120; on frog, 224–25; on grammar, 120; on historia, 112–13, 120; on narratio, 120; organization of, 80, 101, 105, 191; on prose and verse, 234–35; sources, use of, 50. See also under Vincent of Beauvais James of Majorca, 355n1 Jauss, Hans Robert, 10, 16, 324n48 Javelet, Robert, 268–69 Jean de Brienne, Count of Eu, 183, 370n2 Jean de Meun, 11, 15, 26, 183, 370n1; and Ramon Llull, comparison to, 185; translation, practice of, 183–84, 370n2 Jean de Meun, works of —Roman de la Rose, 11, 12, 70, 183–84, 348n7, 375nn44–45, 376nn55–57, 377n11; Amor’s speech in, 281–86, 294; and authorship, issues of, 25, 184, 281; citational practice in, 185; compilation, pastiche of, 184, 306; contraires choses, principle of, 187–88; and encyclopedism, 185–214, 219, 372n16, 373n21; fountains in, 208–9, 211; hermeneutics of, 93–94; manuscripts of, xv, 329n82; mirrors in, 208–9, 214, 265, 280–81, 286–87, 309; Nature’s speech in, 188–214, 281–82, 286–87, 300, 304, 373n23, 373n26, 374n32, 374n34; order in, 93–94, 186–214,

373n23, 373n26, 374n27; phoenix in, 300; and prosimetra, 189–93, 196, 203–4, 206, 209, 342n94; reception of, 82, 215, 219, 294–95, 371n10, 391n51; Reason’s speech in, 204–5, 375n42; and Speculum maius, comparison to, 97, 192–93, 219, 304; subject position in, 219–20, 265, 281–87, 301, 308, 389n44; title, alternate, for, 208, 280–81, 286; verse form, use of, 20, 184–85, 360n33, 372n13 —Testament, 183, 370n3 Jean de Vignay, 348n7, 349n14 Jeanne de Bourgogne (queen of France), 348n7 Jeanne de Navarre (queen of France), 131–32, 293, 294 Jerome, Saint, 14, 46, 66–67, 116 Joachim of Fiore, 24, 146; Figurae, 136, 146, 147–50, 148, 149, 153, 361n36, 363n56; Liber concordie, 146–47; and Ramon Llull, comparison to, 161, 163, 170, 171–72 John, Saint (evangelist), Gospel of, 102–3 John of Garland, 233 Johnston, Mark D., 131, 164, 358n12 Jónsson, Einar Már, 273, 274 Kay, Sarah, 20, 185, 265, 327n70, 359n25, 360n31, 360n33, 370n124, 373n21, 373n26, 376n57 Kennedy, Elspeth, 356n4 Kepler, Johannes, 87 Kessler, Herbert L., 369n121 Khwārizmī, Abū ʿAbdallāh Muh.ammad ibn Mūsā al- (“Algus”), 198, 209–10 Kilwardby, Robert, De ortu scientiarum, 78–79, 322n37 König, Eberhard, xv Kuhn, Alfred, xv Kuhn, Thomas S., 335n33 Ladner, Gerhart B., 361n36 Lambert of Saint-Omer, Liber floridus, iv, 38–39, 44, 137, 153, 339n73; arbor bona, arbor mala, 136, 137–41, 138, 139, 150, 161, 170, 171–72, 361n36, 362n40; lily among thorns, 82; lion page of, ii, iv, 38, 59, 64, 81–82, 92; manuscript transmis-

428 

Index of Names and Titles

Lambert of Saint-Omer (continued) sion of, 38, 331n10, 361n39; Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, page on, 140–41, 362n44; “Palm of the Church,” 140 Lancelot en prose (Arthurian Vulgate cycle), 296–98, 356n5 Lang, Berel, 16–17 Langlois, Ernest, 192, 376n55 La Perrière, G. de, Théâtre des bons engins, 368n106 La Ramée, Pierre de, 359n19 Lefèvre d’Étaples, Jacques, 367n94, 390n49 Le Goff, Jacques, 9, 96, 273–74, 351n38 Le Myésier, Thomas, 358n16, 362n49 Leupin, Alexandre, 157, 366n91 Lewis, C. S., 186 Leys d’amors, 289 Libera, Alain de, 318n11 Liber deflorationum, 231, 340n76 Lipton, Sarah, 369n118 Livre de Sidrac le philosophe, 356n4, 360n33 Llull, Ramon, 11, 24, 26, 53, 129–30, 355n1, 363n55, 377n11; and Aristotelianism, 131; Art of Finding Truth, 45, 130–32, 142, 143, 144, 160, 161–62, 164, 293, 356n4, 363n54; and Bonaventure, 161; citational practice of, 132–33, 288–93, 295–98, 359n24; and compilation, reaction to, 135; dignities in, 164, 362n46; and encyclopedism, 132, 219; evangelism of, 130, 157, 178; exegetical practice of, 175–77; exemplarity, in the thought of, 164; and figure, notion and use of, 38–48, 132, 135–37, 141–46, 175–81, 333n21; and France, 131–32, 390n51; and graphic figures, use of, 141–46; and interreligious dialogue, 130–31, 132, 133, 143, 157, 178, 357n7, 357n9, 369n118; and Jean de Meun, Roman de la Rose, 185, 293–95, 299–300; and Joachim of Fiore, 150, 161, 163, 170, 171–72, 363n56; and Lambert of Saint-Omer, Liber floridus, 137, 161, 170, 171–72, 362n39; languages, study of, 129–30; and Latin, use of, 130, 133; logic, reformulation of, 130; lyric tradition, relation to, 129,

133, 154, 288–92, 300–301; and Matfre Ermengaud, Breviari d’amor, 158, 161, 162, 163, 166, 167, 170; and memory, 143–44; narrative form, use of, 130; and Platonism, 131; principles in, 164, 368n101; prose, use of, 20, 133, 134–35, 180–81; obscurity in, 137, 157, 158–60, 166–67, 170–79, 366n90; reception of, 132; and religious orders, 130, 150, 356n7, 361n39, 364n64; rhetoric, reformulation of, 130; and Richard de Fournival, Bestiaire d’amour, 39, 43–44, 175; romance, use of, 129–30, 134–35, 159, 288–89, 293–98, 299–300, 356nn4–5, 390n51; translations of, 131, 293–94, 329n1 (ch. 1), 358n14; tree figures of, 141–46, 145, 160–75, 168, 174, 178–79, plate 3, plate 5; verse, use of, 129; virtues, reformulation of, 141–42, 164, 362n46 Llull, Ramon, works of —Arbor scientiae / Arbre de ciència, 11, 12, 132, 368n111; form of, 135; hermeneutics of, 93–94, 135–37; hierarchy in, 94; illustrations of, 136, 167, 168, 173–75, 174, plate 5; manuscripts of, xv, 167, 173–75, 358n18, plate 5; organization of, 82, 93–94, 135–37, 160–66, 163, 170–73, 304, 305; printed editions of, 167–70, 168, 173–75, 174, 179–80, 358n19; reception of, 82, 176, 215; and Speculum maius, comparison to, 162, 179, 359n21; trees in, 136, 160–75, 163, 168, 174, 361n36, 367nn97–98, 370n127, plate 5; versions of, 132, 135, 358n18, 361n35 —Arbre de filosophia d’amor, 11, 12, 131–32, 219–20, 265, 293–98, 361n36, 368n108, 390n49, 390n51 —Començaments de medicina, 136, 144–46, 145, 152, 160, 167, 171, 362n53 —Desconhort, 355n1 —Libre de contemplació, 132, 158–60, 366n94 —Libre del gentil et dels tres savis, 358n14; style of, 157–58, 160; trees of, 136, 141–44, 160, 167, 171, 362n50, plate 3 —Libre del orde de cavallería, 296 —Libre de meravelles, 11, 12, 25, 33, 132,

Index of Names and Titles  429

163, 178, 298, 329n1 (ch. 1), 356nn4–5; French translation of, 131, 329n1 (ch. 1); Libre de plasent visió, description in, 33–35, 36–37, 38, 41, 44–45, 46, 48, 53, 55, 63, 92, 132, 136–37, 175, 178–79, 296, 298–99, 308, 330n3; and marvel, 160, 181, 367n96; obscurity of, 159–60; pastourelle episode of, 289–92, 390n47; and Queste del Saint Graal, 130, 134–35, 159; and Speculum maius, comparison to, 97; structure of, 130; subject position in, 219–20, 265, 289–93, 298–301, 308, 387n3, 391n51 —Libre d’Evast e d’Aloma et de Blanquerna, 159 —Vita beati Raymundi Lulli, 355n1, 355n3, 356n7 Lochrie, Karma, 325n54 Lohr, Charles, 339n65, 368n98 Lombard, Peter, Sententiae, 61, 67–68 Lomperis, Linda, 375n38 Louis IX, Saint (king of France), 95, 347n3 Lubac, Henri de, 112–13, 272, 338n60 Lucretius, De rerum natura, 71 Lusignan, Serge, xix–xx, 97, 111, 320n18, 350n21, 354n84, 381n39 Lyotard, Jean-François, 316n9, 325n55 Macer, Aemilius, 380n35 Macer Floridus. See Odo of Meung Macrobius, commentary on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, 49, 56, 59–60, 71 Maerlant, Jacob van, 348n7 Maimonides, 369n118 Maître au menton fuyant, 250–53, 251, 253, 254, 256 Mâle, Émile, 2, 257–58, 385n87 Manipulus florum, 231 Marcabru, 154, 366nn83–84, 366n86 Marguerite (queen of France), 347n3 Martí, Ramon, Pugio fidei, 357n7 Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, 70, 73, 184, 245, 342n91, 383n59; commentary on, 335n35 Martin, Eva, 389n44 Matfre Ermengaud, Breviari d’amor, 27, 151, 364n67, 366n89; exegesis in, 155–57, 177–78; form of, 134, 151; and Ramon Llull, comparison to, 158, 161,

162, 163, 166, 167, 170, 359n25; and obscurity, 154–57, 366n86; reception of, 151, 364n66; tree figure in, 136, 151–56, 361n36, 365n77, plate 4 Mahew, Saint (evangelist), Gospel of, 124 Mayo, Penelope C., 140, 141, 362n40, 362n44 McCormick, Michael, 234 McGinn, Bernard, 363n56 Meier, Christel, 323n45 Memoriale rerum difficilium, 276–77, 388n34 Meyer, Heinz, 323n45 Minnis, Alastair, 15, 64, 70, 219, 265, 318n10, 321n22, 341n88 Murphy, Trevor, 229 Myron, 210–11 Nelson, Theodor H., 392n3 Nicholas of Paris, 342n100 Nichols, Stephen, 327n70 Nigel of Longchamps, Speculum stultorum, 273 Numbers (biblical book), story of Balaam’s ass, 259–60 Ockham, William of, 8, 62 Odo of Meung, De viribus herbarum, 235, 236, 238, 239, 380n35, 380nn37–38, 381n41 Olsen, B. Munk, 319n18 Origen, 46, 115 Ovid, 45, 211, 235, 236, 321n27, 380n34 Ovi, George, Jr., 79 Panofsky, Erwin, 21 Pappas, Ted, 3 Paré, Gérard, 375n45 Paris, Gaston, 186 Parkes, Malcolm, 15, 42, 64, 70, 219, 341n88 Parrhasios, 210–11 Paterson, Linda, 154 Paerson, Lee, 325n55, 373n23 Paul, Saint, 37, 81; Epistle to the Romans, 45; First Epistle to the Corinthians, 46, 103–4, 140, 154, 172, 208, 274–75; Second Epistle to the Corinthians, 271–72

430 

Index of Names and Titles

Paulmier–Foucart, Monique, xix, 52, 53, 97, 98, 99–100, 104, 110–11, 239, 323n45, 337n52, 340n77, 347n2, 350n21, 351n40, 354n85 Payen, Jean-Charles, 374n34 Pedro IV (king of Aragon), 348n7 Peire de Corbian, Thezaur, 133 Peire Vidal, 300–301 Perrin, Michel, 383n56 Peter, Saint (apostle), Second Epistle of, 103–4 Peter Comestor, Historia scholastica, 112, 113, 352n50 Peter Helias, 227–28, 229, 378n15 Petit, Jean, 390n49 Philippe IV (“Philippe le Bel”; king of France), 131–32, 183, 293, 294, 370n2 Philo of Alexandria, 114, 115 Physiologus, 39, 223 Pierre of Limoges, 358n16, 391n51 Pillehoe, Jean, 358n16 Placides et Timeo, 360n33 Plato, 5, 56, 198, 209–10; commentaries on, 49; Cratylus, 226; Timaeus, 49; translation of, 49. See also in the General Index Platonism Pliny the Elder, Naturalis historia, 8, 9, 26, 46, 47, 50, 52, 60, 61, 263, 306, 376n55, 378n19; on art, 210–11; as compilation, 11, 64, 71; empiricism of, 222, 229–30; on frog, 224–25, 229–30; and Latin language, 222, 230 Pliny the Younger, 378n22 Poirion, Daniel, 373n23 Polykleitos, 210–11 Porphyry, 75 Posa, Pere, 358n19 Poster, Mark, 328n80 Pring-Mill, Robert, 323n46, 370n127 Priscian, Institutiones grammaticae, 41, 227, 229 Prosper of Aquitaine, 240 Psalms (biblical book), 121, 124 Pseudo-Dionysus, 81 Ptolemy, 198, 209–10 Pygmalion, 198, 209–11, 213, 300, 376n56 Queste del Saint Graal (Arthurian Vulate cycle), 130, 135, 159, 296, 356n5

Quintilian, 8, 44, 45, 226, 227; Institutio oratoria, 46, 47, 120–21, 210–11, 321n33 Rabanus Maurus. See Hrabanus Maurus Rabelais, François, 9 Raimbaut d’Aurenga, 300–301 Rainini, Marco, 363n56 Ralph of Longchamp, 322n37 Ramon de Penyafort (master-general of Dominican order), 357n7 Raoul (abbot of Royaumont), 347nn2–3 Raymond, Eric Steven, 2, Reeves, Majorie, 147, 150 Regalado, Nancy Freeman, 206 Revelation (biblical book), 48, 61, 102, 104, 106, 108, 109, 124–25 Reynolds, Suzanne, 226–27 Rhetorica ad Herennium, 120 Ribémont, Bernard, 16, 186, 323n47, 324n48 Richard de Fournival, 74, 343n102, 343n104, 358n16; Bestiaire d’amour, 39, 43–44, 175, 374n34; Biblionomia, 74–75, 343n102 Richard of Saint-Victor, Liber exceptionum, 101 Rickes, Peter T., 364n66 Ricoeur, Paul, 125–26, 201, 266 Riquer, Martí de, 300, 356n4, 390n47, 391n51 Rosemann, Philipp W., 19, 87, 341n85 Rouse, Richard, 64 Roy, Bruno, 52 Rubió, Jordí, 135, 296, 390n51 Rubio, Josep, 359n24, 369n116 Ruiz, Josep Maria, 355n1, 359n24 Ruiz, Juan, Libro de buen amor, 367n95 Rusch, Adulf, xx–xxi, xxii Rust, Martha, 42–43 Saenger, Paul, 42 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 38 Schmidt-Chazan, Mireille, 117 Schuler, Stefan, 379n24 Scot, Michael, 80 Sco, A. B., 318n10 Seneca, 228, 271, 340n76 Sentmenat, Pere de, 357n7 Sicard, Patrice, 363n54

Index of Names and Titles 

Sidrac le philosophe, Livre de, 356n4, 360n33 Siger of Brabant, 23–24 Smith, Barry, 339n66 Soler, Albert, 355n1, 359n24 Song of Solomon, 68 Speculum morale (aributed to Vincent of Beauvais), 98, 128, 349n15 Speculum virginum, 272, 273 Spence, Sarah, 265, 266 Spiegel, Gabrielle M., 321n32 Spinola, Perceval, 357n7 Stirnemann, Patricia, 380n37, 381n40 Stock, Brian, 15, 23, 24, 219 Stones, Alison, 248–49, 250, 362n50 Southern, Richard, 317n10 Sugranyes de Franch, Ramon, 391n51 Theophrastus, 50 Thomas of Cantimpré, 24 Thomas of Cantimpré, works of —De naturis rerum, 27, 179, 224, 258, 270, 306, 319n18, 345n122; as compilation, 65; glosses on, 337n51; organization of, 80–81, 82, 105, 191, 192; title of, 71 Tibino, Nicolò, 372n13 Tuve, Rosemond, xv Ullman, B. L., xx–xxi, 347n4 Van den Abeele, Baudouin, 323n45 Varro, Marcus Terentius: Antiquitates rerum humanarum et divinarum libri, 8, 46, 47, 334n28; De lingua latina, 46; Disciplinarum libri IX, 8, 334n28 Vegetius, De re militari, 370n2 Veyne, Paul, 19 Villalba Varneda, Pere, 361n35 Villiers, Gilbert de, 358n16 Vincent of Beauvais, 11, 24, 26, 27, 64, 95–96, 347n1; and Albert the Great, use of, 65, 277–80, 287; and Aquinas, use of, 65, 275–76; Aristotelianism of, 53–55, 274, 328n79, 337n52; aribution of authorship to, 68; and Augustine, use of, 65, 106–8, 110, 112, 114–17, 118, 123–25, 264, 270, 276, 288; Bible, use of, 14, 61, 66, 73, 102–4, 106–11, 112, 113–25, 123, 271–72, 276,

431

350n30, 352n50; and De ortu scientiarum aributed to al-Fārābī, use of, 78, 80; and figure, use of, 54, 55–56; and Helinand of Froidmont, use of, 106, 117; and history, conception of, 111, 112–23; and Honorius Augustodunensis, use of, 101–6; and Hrabanus Maurus, use of, 235, 240, 244–45, 247, 248; and Hugh of Saint-Victor, use of, 42, 54, 65, 99, 101, 105, 116, 264, 387n8; and Isidore of Seville, use of, 100–101, 110, 112–13, 224–25, 227–29, 231, 232, 234–35, 350nn21–22, 378n22; and Odo of Meung, use of, 235; and Peter Comestor, use of, 112, 113, 352n50; Platonism of, 53–55, 328n79; and Pliny the Elder, use of, 224–25, 230–31, 378n22; and Thomas of Cantimpré, use of, 224, 258; and Vitruvius, use of, 232 Vincent of Beauvais, works of —Libellus apologeticus, 35–36, 54–56; on authorities, hierarchy of, 66, 80, 266; on authorship, 66, 267; on citation, 66; on compilation, 63–68; on contemplation, 54–55, 287–88; on contradiction, 66–67, 266; criticisms, response to, 35–37, 331n6; on curiositas, vice of, 55, 338v54; editions of, xix–xx; on multitude of books, 64–65, 340n76; on organization, 61, 98–101, 106–10, 119, 123; purpose, explanation of, 61; speculare, speculum, specula, pun on, 264, 271–72, 288 —Speculum doctrinale, 98; on architecture, 232, 379n24; on argumentum, 120; contents of, 106, 387n14; on fabula, 120; on historia, 112–13, 120–21, 122; on language, 222, 227–29; manuscripts consulted, xviii, xx; on narratio, 120–21; organization of, 80, 101; on poetry, 120, 122, 223, 235; on prose, 235; on reading too much, 271, 288; reception of, 127; relation of other specula to, 106, 118, 119; on study, of the useless kind, 228 —Speculum historiale, 98, 237, 241; and Bible, comparison to, 109–10, 117; illustration of, 248–49; literary

432

 Index of Names and Titles

Vincent of Beauvais, works of —Speculum historiale (continued) florilegia in, 117, 223, 235–36, 239–40, 244–45; manuscripts consulted, xviii– xix, xx; organization of, 111; reception of, 127; relation of other specula to, 104–5, 106, 111, 116, 118–19; sources of, 117; tables for, 99–100; translation of, 249, 348n7, 349n14, 354n84 —Speculum maius, 11, 12; alphabetical order in, 98–99, 113; and Arbor scientiae, comparison to, 162, 179, 359n21; and book, notions of, 25; chapter titles in, 100; citational practice in, 66, 110, 133, 227, 331n6, 360n26; classification of (genre), 69, 271–80; as commentary on Bible, 61, 62, 113–14, 339n66; compilation of, 95–96, 97–98, 128, 218, 221–32, 235, 244, 247, 328n79, 340n77, 347nn1–2, 383n58; complete sets of, 127; contradictions in, 66–67, 222, 224–25, 230–32; Douai edition of, xx–xxii, 128, 354n85; editions of (general), xv, xx–xxii, 128, 354n85; finding devices in, 99–100, 354n84; heterogeneity of, 218, 222, 231, 232–33, 306–7; importance of, 96–97; illustration of, 223, 247–61; indices in, 99–100; length of, 96, 347n4; and Libre de meravelles, comparison to, 97, 126; manuscripts consulted, xvii– xxii, 382n45, 383n57; manuscript sigla of, xvii–xix, 348n10; manuscript transmission of (general), 25, 126–8, 347n5; mise en page of, 223, 235–47, 237, 238, 241, 379n34, 380nn37–38, 381n41, 381n43, 382nn45–47, 384n61; and narrative, 97, 304; organization of, 61, 80, 82, 93–94, 95–128, 304, 305; prose and verse in, 20, 235–40; prosimetrum, comparison to, 245–47; reception of, 96, 126–28, 215, 219, 235–61, 348n7, 353nn80–83, 354nn84–85; and Roman de la Rose, comparison to, 97, 126, 192–93; rubrication of, in manuscripts, 68; Rusch edition of, xxi, xxii; subject position in, 55–56, 264–65, 266–71,

274, 276–80, 287–88, 301; and Summa theologica, comparison to, 69–70; symbolism in, 53–55, 88; tables in, 99–100, 113, 349n16; textual criticism, challenges for, xvi–xxii; title, understandings of, 9, 10, 46, 222, 271–80, 378n23; transmission of, 82, 96, 126–28; versions of, 97–98, 101–2, 104–5, 349nn13–14 —Speculum morale (aributed to Vincent of Beauvais), 98, 128, 349n15 —Speculum naturale, 54, 238; contents of different versions of, 98; distribution of books and chapters in different versions of, xxii; on draconopes, 258–60; etymology in, 100, 222, 223–24, 229; on frogs, 223–25; hermeneutics, discussion of, in, 54, 88, 267–70, 337n52; illustration of, 249–61, 251, 252, 253, 256, 257, 384n74; on light, 276–77; manuscripts consulted, xvii–xviii, xx, 381n43; on mirrors, 264–65, 274–80; and modes for the description of the world, 101–5, 350n30; organization of, 106, 107, 111, 113–19, 191, 192–93; on plants, 223; poetry in, 235–39; on psychology, 96, 100, 105, 270, 351n35; reception of, 127; relation of other specula to, 104–5, 106, 111, 118–19; on the soul, 250–56 Virgil, 45, 234, 235, 236 Vitruvius, 232, 379n24 Vollmann, Benedikt, 345n122 von den Brincken, Anna–Dorothee, xix–xx, Voorbij, Hans, xvii, xxii, 97, 347n4, 348n10, 354n85, 379n34, 380n37, 381n40, 381n42, 382n47 Weisheipl, James, 78–79 Wenzel, Siegfried, 327n70 Wetherbee, Winthrop, 15, 187, 335n35, 342n93, 375n38, 375n44 White, Hayden, 25 Wikipedia, 1–4, 7, 12, 305–10, 315n2 William of Auvergne (bishop of Paris), 347n2 William of Conches, 49

Index of Names and Titles  433

William of Saint-Thierry, Speculum fidei, 273 Wisdom (biblical book), 103–4 Woesthuis, Marinus, 117 Wolff, Francis, 1722 edition of the Libre del gentil et dels tres savis, 142

Yates, Frances, 143, 359n19 Zeuxis, 210–11 Zink, Michel, 265 Ziolkowski, Jan, 245 Zumthor, Paul, 242

INDEX OF M AN U SCRIPTS

0

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. 505 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale, Nb4), 239, 381n41 Brussels, Bibliothèque royale II.941 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale, Hd5), 127, 353n82 II.1396 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale, Hde1), 353n81 118 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale, He9), 382n47 9152 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale, Na1), 98, 349n12 18465 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale, Na2), 98, 349n12

Aberdeen, University Library 24 (bestiary), plate 1 Amiens, Bibliothèque municipale 223 (Hrabanus Maurus, In honorem sancte crucis), 243 Arras, Médiathèque municipale 566 vol. 1 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale, Nb2), 236, 238, 239 566 vol. 2 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale, Hd1), 240, 241, 382n46 Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz lat. fol. 76 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale, Nc1), 239, 380n38 lat. fol. 491 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale, Hcb1), 240 Boulogne-sur-Mer, Bibliothèque des Annonciades 132 and 133 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale, Hd4), 240, 382n46 Brugge, Stadsbibliotheek 504 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale, Nb3), 381n43

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 39 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale, Nx7), 381n43 Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale 48 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale, Nc2), 353n81 568 and 569 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale, Ha3), xix, 353n81

435

436

 Index of Manuscripts

Escurial, Biblioteca Real de San Lorenzo S.I.3 (Matfre Ermengaud, Breviari d’amor), 365n74 Ghent, Rijksuniversiteit 92 (Lambert of Saint-Omer, Liber floridus), ii, iv, 38, 59, 64, 81–82, 92, 136, 137–41, 138, 139, 150, 161 Laon, Bibliothèque municipale 426 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale, Nb7), xvii, 250, 252, 257, 381n43, 384n74 London, British Library Add. 15583 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale, Nb8), xvii, 127, 353n82, 381n43 Add. 16428 (Ramon Llull, Libre de meravelles), 34, 330n2 Add. 25441 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale, Hd6), 353n81 Royal 19.C.1 (Matfre Ermengaud, Breviari d’amor), 365n74 Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana D. 535 inf. (Ramon Llull, Arbre de ciència), 173–75, plate 5 Minneapolis, Bakken Museum Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale, Nb8, xvii, 127, 353n82, 381n43 Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, James Ford Bell Library 1280 f. VI vols. 1 and 2 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale, Hd5), 127, 237, 353n82 Mons, Bibliothèque universitaire 32 / 362 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum doctrinale, Do5), 127, 353n82 Montpellier, Bibliothèque de l’École de médecine 189 (Bartholomeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum), 354n84 190 (Bartholomeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum), 354n84 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek clm 10498 (Ramon Llull, Arbor scientiae), 167

Oxford, Bodleian Library Auct. E. inf. 7 (Pentateuch with Glossa ordinaria), 58 Bodley 287 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale, He65), 379n34 Laud misc. 515 (Bernard Silvester, Cosmographia), 246 Oxford, Corpus Christi College 247 (Ramon Llull, Començaments de medicina), 145, 146 255A (Joachim of Fiore, Figurae), 147–50, 148, 149 Oxford, Exeter College 15 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale, Nx14), 239, 381n42, 381n43 Oxford, Merton College 271 (Aristotle, De animalibus), 249 Palma de Mallorca, Collegi de la Sapiència Ramon Llull, Arbre de filosofia d’amor, 368n108 Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal 696 (Bartholomeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum), 354n84 Paris, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne 52 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale, Nb16), 127, 239, 353– 54n82, 380n39 53 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum doctrinale, Do10), 127, 353–54n82, 380n39 54, 55, 56, 57 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale, He83), 127, 353n82, 380n39 Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine 1551, 1552 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale, He72), 354n84 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France esp. 353 (Matfre Ermengaud, Breviari d’amor, Catalan translation), 152, plate 4 fr. 858 (Matfre Ermengaud, Breviari d’amor), 365n74 fr. 22543 (Chansonnier d’Urfé), 366n83 fr. 22933 (Ramon Llull, Libre del

Index of Manuscripts 

gentil, French translation), 142–43, 358n14, 362n50, plate 3 lat. 3517 (Alan of Lille, De planctu Naturae), 384n60 lat. 6402 (Boethius, De consolatione Philosophiae), 383n59 lat. 6428A vols. 1–2 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale, Nb10), xxi–xxii, 239, 381n40 lat. 6428C (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale, Nb12), xvii, 250, 253–57, 381n43, 384n74 lat. 7181 (Boethius, De consolatione Philosophiae), 383n59 lat. 7183 (Boethius, De consolatione Philosophiae), 383n59 lat. 8669 (Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii), 383n59 lat. 8670 (Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii), 383n59 lat. 8671 (Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii), 383n59 lat. 13702 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum maius, Rm1), 98, 349n11 lat. 14387 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale, Nb13), 381n43 lat. 15009 (Bernard Silvester, Cosmographia), 383n60 lat. 15090 (Boethius, De consolatione Philosophiae), 383n59 lat. 15450 (Thomas Le Myésier, Electorium magnum, with Ramon Llull,

437

Libre del gentil e dels tres savis), 142, 362n49, 362n49 lat. 16167 and 16168 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale, Nb14), xxii, 236, 380n37 lat. 18275 (Fulgentius, Mythologiae), 76 Troyes, Médiathèque municipale 170 vol. 1 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale, Heac1), 248, 354n84 170 vol. 2 (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale, He92), 248, 354n84 270 (Jean Hautfuney, Alphabetical index to the Speculum historiale), 354n84 979 (Bartholomeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum), 354n84 Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana lat. 3468 (Ramon Llull, Arbor scientiae), 167 lat. 4861 (Joachim of Fiore, Liber concordie), 147 Vellereille-les-Brayeux, Abbey of BonneEspérance Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale, Nb19, 250–53, 251, 253, 256, 384n74 Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek 2554 (Bible moralisée), 40, 63, plate 2

GEN ERAL IN DEX

0

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations or tables. 336nn44–45, 369n118; in Renaissance, 87. See also under individual authors in the Index of Names and Titles arithmetic (discipline). See disciplines, medieval paradigms of; quadrivium astronomy, 14, 62. See also disciplines, medieval paradigms of; quadrivium Augustinianism, 24, 37, 51, 53, 79, 249, 317n10, 327n78. See also under individual authors in the Index of Names and Titles author and authorship, 25, 66–70, 328n80, 329n82 authority, 66–68, 231, 316n2; hierarchy of, 15, 66 Averroism, 23, 24

aconitum (genus), 85–86, 345n133 alchemy, 14 allegory, 38, 47–48, 51, 52–53, 94, 154, 169, 179, 184; in exegesis of Scripture, 59, 73, 112, 115, 123–35, 177, 338n60; of history, 49. See also integument; personification allegory; Scripture, four senses of alphabetical order, use of, 98–100, 113, 304 Amiens, 74, 248 amplificatio, 189 anagogy. See Scripture, four senses of Arabic language, 130 archaeology, Foucauldian, 17–26, 29–31, 83–92, 222, 325n57; and exegetical sources, 89–90 architecture, 334n28; comparison to encyclopedism, 2, 6, 257; in encyclopedia, 232 archive, Foucauldian notion of, 12, 18, 23, 29–31, 35, 37, 83–84, 92, 217, 329n5 argumentum (rhetorical term), 44, 120 Aristotelianism (general), 5, 15, 23–24, 51–53, 54, 72–73, 79, 95, 176, 184, 196, 206, 249, 317n10, 327n78, 328n79,

Barcelona, 169, 358n19 Beauvais, Dominican house at, 347nn1–2 bestiary (genre), 38–39, 249, plate 1 Béziers, 151 book: analogy to the universe, 48, 54, 86– 87, 188, 214, 304, 338n53; codex, form of, 136, 150, 171–72, 304–5; collecting, 127; production of, manuscript, 5, 41, 82–83, 127, 233, 249; production of, 439

440



book (continued) print, 128, 132, 354n85 (see also print: early modern editions of medieval texts); representations of, 35, 330n5; trade, commercial, 5, 82–83, 127 book (term), senses of, 25, 328n81 calligram (genre), 21 calligraphy. See script Cambron, Cistercian monastery at, 127 canons regular, 5 Carmelite house, Paris, 354n84 carmen figuratum, 223, 240–45, 243, 247, 248 Carthusian order, 130; Chartreuse de Vauvert (Paris), 131, 357n7, 362n39 Catalan language, 45, 131, 133–35, 293, 318n15 catalogue poem. See series (genre) Catalonia, 133, 151, 355n2 chain of being, great, 51 chanson de geste, 5 Cistercian order, 5, 24, 95, 127, 347n2, 354n84 citation (practice, general), 7, 15, 26, 37, 64, 67–68, 69, 71, 90–92, 288, 306–7, 308. See also in the Index of Names and Titles under Jean de Meun, works of: Roman de la Rose; Llull, Ramon; Vincent of Beauvais, works of: Speculum maius Cîteaux, Cistercian monastery of, 353n81 Clairvaux, Cistercian monastery of, 248, 354n84 codex. See under book commentary (genre, general), 8, 56, 97, 339n66; and encyclopedic genre, contrast to, 69; and summa, contrast to, 69. See also individual authors in the Index of Names and Titles commentary (practice), 15, 37, 49–50, 56–63, 97, 113–14, 122–24, 317n10, 323n41, 352n51; and innovation, 62, 339n70; Muslim, on Greek texts, 5, 51–52. See also exegesis; hermeneutics commentator (term), medieval definition of, 66 compilatio (term), sense of, 64

General Index

compilation (practice, general), 6–8, 11, 12, 15, 37, 53, 63–72, 83, 128, 230–32, 341n88; and authorship, 25; and heterogeneity, 7–8, 11, 12, 63–64, 247. See also in the Index of Names and Titles under Foucault, Michel; Jean de Meun, works of: Roman de la Rose; Llull, Ramon; Vincent of Beauvais, works of: Speculum maius compiler (term), medieval definition of, 66 concordance (genre), 349n16 contradiction, 11, 69, 341n83. See also in the Index of Names and Titles under Vincent of Beauvais, works of: Libellus apologeticus copyist (term), medieval definition of, 66 cosmology, 71–72, 80, 131 courts, secular, 5–6, 24, 110, 131–32 creation (biblical account of), 40, 61, 97, 101–4, 106, 107, 108, 111, 112, 113–19, 121–25, 226, 236, 250–51, 276 descriptio. See ekphrasis desire (erotic), 94, 193, 203–6, 375n44 diagram, use of in scholastic thought, 81–82, 141–46, 145, 169, 363n54, plate 3 dialectic. See logic (discipline); disciplines, medieval paradigms of dialogism, Bakhtinian notion of, 71, 232 didascalicon (genre), 68–69, 78 Dijon, Dominican house of, 61 discipline (term), medieval sense of, 13 disciplines, medieval paradigms of, 13–14, 37, 73–79, 76, 77, 131, 305, 322n37, 323n41 discourse: Foucauldian notion of, 7, 12, 18, 22–23, 30, 90, 92, 216; multiplicity of, in encyclopedias, 217, 218, 222–23, 225, 229, 236, 247, 258, 261, 263, 267–68, 291, 304, 306–7; multiplicity of, in the Middle Ages (general), 31, 37, 63, 158, 184, 232, 234 disputation (scholastic practice), 63, 244, 317n10 distinctio (genre), 339n72 Dominican order, 5, 23, 95, 130, 347nn1–2, 357n7, 364n64 draconopes, 258–60, 386n88

General Index

economics. See disciplines, medieval paradigms of education, medieval, 4–5 ekphrasis, 35, 151–52, 155, 189, 206 elements, four, 81 emblem, 169, 368n106 empiricism: of Aristotle, 50–51; in encyclopedias, 60–61, 222; of scholastics, 52, 63, 322n40; in scientific writing, 14–15 enarratio (term), senses of, 97, 121–22, 353n70 encyclopedia (general): and commentary, 46–47, 59–63, 106–11, 122–23; contents of, 96–97; and didactic tradition, 364n67; and didascalicon, 68–69, 78; finding devices in, 99–100; and history, 80, 96, 98, 99, 101, 111, 248–49; and lyric, 94, 292; organization of, 80–83, 125–26, 128; and prosimetrum, 68–69, 70–72, 94, 341n91; and romance, 33, 94, 292; and summa, 68–70, 72, 94; titles of, 9, 231. See also encyclopedism; florilegium; and individual titles in the Index of Names and Titles encyclopedia (term): definitions of, 3–4, 9; etymology of, 8–9, 305, 321nn25–26; term applied to florilegia, 9, 321n26 encyclopedic genre, 9–11, 16–18, 19, 68–72, 94, 132; and commentary genre, contrast to, 69 encyclopedism, 10; in antiquity, 9, 46; diagonal, 94; in early Middle Ages, 47–48, 60; horizontal, 94, 179; in late antiquity, 46–47, 56, 59–60; and literature, 15–17, 181, 323nn45–47; in modern period, 1–3, 304–5; in postmodern period, 1–4, 305–10; in scholastic period (general), 2, 6–8, 15–17, 24–25, 33–37, 48, 52–56, 59, 61–72, 79–83, 128, 215–18, 247, 304–10; vertical, 94, 179–80. See also individual names in the Index of Names and Titles England, 41, 379n34 enigma (trope), 154, 161, 169, 172, 175, 181 enunciative field, Foucauldian notion of, 30, 37, 329n3



441

ethics, 5, 14, 61. See also disciplines, medieval paradigms of etymology (practice), 47, 222, 225–29, 230 exegesis, 12, 37, 63, 97, 120, 136, 155–57, 338n65, 341n83; and archaeological method, 89–90; and encyclopedias, 46–47, 59–63, 106–11, 228, 230; and historiography, 101; Joachimite, 146– 50; and rhetoric, 97, 121, 136, 180, 181, 184. See also commentary; exegetical figure; Scripture, four senses of exegetical figure, 136–57, 138, 139, 143–54 exemplum, 130, 173, 180–81 fable. See fabula fabula, 49, 91, 125, 335n35; definition of, 120 Fall, the (biblical account of), 61, 97, 106, 119, 179, 248, 258–61, 369n123 fiction, 8, 11, 16, 121, 126, 219, 220; in Arbre de filosofia d’amor, 11; critical, 11, 184, 219, 265, 280, 371n9, 377n11; and integumentum, 49–50; in Libre de meravelles, 11, 161, 265, 280; and literature, 13; philosophical, 215–16, 309–10; in Roman de la Rose, 11, 184, 208–9, 265, 280, 282–83 figurative interpretation, 123–25, 258–60. See also allegory; Scripture, four senses of; spiritual interpretation; tropological interpretation figure (term): exegetical term, 59, 179, 338n60; as graphic figure, 38–41, 81–82; as leer, 41–42; as mise en page, 42–43; and pagan myth, 49–50, 51; as script, 74; and semiotics, Augustinian, 45–46, 48, 51; senses and use in the Middle Ages, 33–34, 37–38, 83, 89, 179–80; as trope, 45, 180, 188, 206; as visible form, 51, 180. See also exegetical figure; resemblance; trope, rhetorical; and in the Index of Names and Titles Llull, Ramon: figure, notion and use of; Vincent of Beauvais: and figure, use of florilegium (general), 248, 319n18; aribution of authorship to, 68; creation and use of, 6–7; criticisms of, 64;

442



florilegium (general) (continued) encyclopedic, 37, 66, 69, 72, 78, 94, 216–17, 219, 223, 245–47 (see also encyclopedia; encyclopedism); renaming as encyclopedias, 9; titles of, 231. See also names of individual compilers in the Index of Names and Titles florilegium (term), 6, 319nn17–18, 321n27 France, 27, 41, 127, 131–32, 134, 236, 239, 240, 250, 294 Franciscan order, 5, 23, 24, 130, 150, 356n7, 364n64; Spiritual Franciscans, 24, 150, 364n64 French language, 5–6, 131, 133–34, 135, 293, 318n15 frog, 222, 223–25, 229, 230 Genoa, 357n7, 358n15 genre: application to medieval encyclopedias, 10, 16–17, 94, 324n48; and mise en page, 42; notions of, medieval and modern, 9–11, 321n30. See also encyclopedic genre geography, 118 geometry (discipline). See disciplines, medieval paradigms of; quadrivium glossa. See commentary; exegesis; hermeneutics gra (trope of), 140, 147, 153, 170–71, 173, 365nn77–78 grammar (discipline), 7, 14, 53, 121, 226, 227, 229. See also disciplines, medieval paradigms of; trivium headings, running, development of, 73 Hebrew language, 130, 178 herbology, 14 hermeneutics, 12, 37, 56, 73, 86, 132, 136, 154, 180, 181; and archaeological method, 89–90. See also under individual titles in the Index of Names and Titles heterogeneity, 7–8, 21, 72, 87, 90–92, 215–18, 222, 231, 232–33, 263 heteroglossia, 216, 232 heterotopia, 7–8, 12, 18, 216–18, 232, 263 hexameron, 107, 113–19, 304 hierarchical division: of PseudoDionysus, 81; scholastic practice of,

General Index

72–79. See also in the Index of Names and Titles under Llull, Ramon, works of: Arbor scientiae historia (term): etymology of, medieval, 112–13; rhetorical, 120–25; senses in the Middle Ages, 33–34, 43, 48, 97, 112–13, 121, 333n18, 352n47. See also literal interpretation; Scripture, four senses of historiography, medieval, 97, 106, 126, 133, 134, 341n88 history, 6, 62; in encyclopedias, 80, 96, 98, 99, 101, 111, 248–49; Joachimite, 146–50; and narrative, 123; theological, 80, 101, 111–20; Victorine practice of, 101. See also in the Index of Names and Titles under Vincent of Beauvais humanism: medieval, 64, 234, 317n10; Renaissance, 4, 8–9, 83, 128, 132, 169 hypertext, 304–5, 308, 392n3 Iberian Peninsula, 50, 78 illumination, doctrine of, 51 illumination, manuscript. See painting, manuscript (general) illustration, manuscript. See painting, manuscript (general) index: development of, 73, 349n16; use in encyclopedias, 99–100, 349n16 insects, 195–96 integument, 49–50, 54, 71–72, 208 interreligious dialogue, 24, 357n7. See also in the Index of Names and Titles under Llull, Ramon invention (rhetorical), 62, 97, 121, 136, 211, 213, 136 Jewish thought, 24, 130–31, 132, 177, 369n118 knowledge: discursive nature of, 7–8, 13–18, 52; sense of, 316n9, 329n2 Languedoc, 5, 151, 154 Latin language, 6, 13, 44, 45, 53, 131, 133, 178, 230, 293 law, 6, 74, 80. See also disciplines, medieval paradigms of liberal arts, 60, 61, 73–74, 75, 96, 127; in

General Index

encyclopedias, 98, 100, 105, 106. See also disciplines, medieval paradigms of libraries (general), 5, 6, 30, 37, 41, 217, 307; of university, 5 light, 115, 123, 264–65, 276–78 lion, ii, iv, 38, 59, 64, 81–82, 92, 249 list, in encyclopedias, 80–81, 99–100, 113, 165–66, 170, 189–94, 196, 205–6, 209–13, 374n27 literal interpretation, 94, 111–25, 176–77, 258–60, 304. See also Scripture, four senses of literature, late medieval (general), 5–6, 7–8, 16, 377n11; and disciplines in Middle Ages, 14, 323n42; and encyclopedism, 15–17, 323nn45–47; and philosophy, 16–17; and science, 13–16, 341n88 literature (term), definitions and etymology of, 13, 321n33 liera (term), definitions and etymology of, 13, 112–13, 352nn47–48 logic (discipline), 5, 7, 72, 130, 176, 317n10, 341n83. See also disciplines, medieval paradigms of; trivium love, medieval definitions of, 203–6 Low Countries, 41, 127 Lyon, 167, 168, 173, 174, 358n19, 368n106 lyric (genre), 6, 94, 129, 133, 137, 151, 154, 184, 203–6, 213, 282. See also pastourelle; troubadours magic, 78, 345n137 Majorca, 129–30, 132, 296, 357n7, 358nn14–15, 363n55 marvel, 160, 181, 367n96 material philology, 327n70 material sources, 19–22, 326n66; acoustic nature of, 20, 134; visual nature of, 21–22, 222–23, 232–61 mathematics, 56, 62. See also disciplines, medieval paradigms of mechanical arts, 77, 96, 106, 387n14. See also disciplines, medieval paradigms of medicine, 62, 74, 144, 145, 152, 224, 229–30, 270, 334n28, 387n14. See also disciplines, medieval paradigms of memory, medieval practice of, 39, 42, 143–44, 167, 254, 363n54



443

mendicant orders (general), 5, 24, 95, 183. See also Dominican order; Franciscan order metaphor, 7, 45, 47, 93–94, 144–46, 159, 200–201, 214, 304. See also figure (term) metaphysics, 5, 61, 62, 309. See also disciplines, medieval paradigms of miniatures. See painting, manuscript (general) mirror (genre), 46, 132, 188, 214, 217, 266, 272–74, 304, 310. See also in the Index of Names and Titles under Jean de Meun, works of: Roman de la Rose; Vincent of Beauvais, works of: Speculum naturale mirror (object), 132, 154, 171–72, 175, 177, 214, 217, 271–72, 310, 368n111. See also in the Index of Names and Titles under Jean de Meun, works of: Roman de la Rose; Vincent of Beauvais, works of: Speculum naturale mise en abyme, 265, 299 mise en page (general), 21, 42–43, 57–59, 58, 233–34, 240–47, 306, 383n60. See also in the Index of Names and Titles under Vincent of Beauvais, works of: Speculum maius monastic orders (general), 5, 95. See also Carthusian order; Cistercian order monkey, 197–99 Montpellier, 152, 363n55 moral interpretation. See Scripture, four senses of; tropological interpretation music (discipline). See disciplines, medieval paradigms of; quadrivium Muslim thought, 5, 24, 51–52, 62, 78, 130–31, 132, 142, 306, 318n11 myth, 45, 49–50, 71–72 narratio (term), senses of, 97, 120–23, 125, 353n70 narrative, 44, 45, 120–23, 125–26, 377n11; exegesis of, in Middle Ages, 49–50, 59; form for encyclopedias, 7, 44, 93–94, 97, 125–26, 128, 130, 186 (see also in the Index of Names and Titles under Vincent of Beauvais, works of: Speculum maius); and history, 123

444



natural history: Aristotelian, 50–51, 52, 63, 176, 184, 222, 229–30; in encyclopedias, 52–54, 61, 62, 80, 88, 96, 98; medieval (general), 52, 56, 61, 101, 127; of Renaissance, 90–92 Neoplatonism. See Platonism New Philology, 327n70 new poetry, 70, 157, 159–60, 161, 366n91 novelty, trope of. See new poetry object of knowledge (general), 7–8, 14–15, 17, 19, 46–49, 59–61, 71, 84–88, 141, 176–80, 223, 232, 265–66, 288, 308, 310 obscurity, 137, 154–60, 161, 166–67, 169, 170–79 Occitan language, 129, 133–34, 135, 153, 178, 318n15, 356n5 oeuvre, notion of, 25, 329n82 open source soware, its reconfiguration of encyclopedism, 1–4, 306 oral traditions, their adaptation to writing, 5–6, 13 order and organization, 7, 12, 37, 72–83, 93–94, 97, 303–5, 309–10. See also under individual titles in the Index of Names and Titles ordinatio, 73, 79 Oxford, 51, 79 painting, manuscript (general), 38–41, 43, 249, 252, 379n26. See also under individual texts in the Index of Names and Titles Palma de Majorca, 130 parable, 33–34, 89, 124–25, 130, 159, 180 paradigm, 335n33 Paris, 23, 39, 51, 61, 79, 127, 131, 183, 347n1, 357n7, 363n55, 378n15; books, early modern, printed in, 367n94, 368n106, 390n49; manuscripts made in, 40, 58, 236, 239, 248, 249, 358n14, 373n23, 379n26, 380n37, plate 2, plate 3; texts wrien in, 33, 132, 293; University of, 23, 127, 131, 275, 277, 131, 183, 337n49, 354n84, 358n16. See also Saint-Jacques, Dominican house of parish clergy, 4, 5 paronomasia, 134, 199

General Index

pastourelle, 289–93, 390n47 pedagogy, medieval, 57, 61 personification allegory, 180, 184, 185, 206–9, 375n49. See also prosopopoeia philosophy (general), 6, 16–17, 62. See also disciplines, medieval paradigms of philosophy (term), medieval definition of, 13–14, 74, 343n103. See also disciplines, medieval paradigms of phoenix, 300–301 physical sciences, 5, 56, 61, 72, 101; innovation in, 62. See also disciplines, medieval paradigms of physics. See physical sciences plants, 223, 236, 239 Platonism (general), 5, 15, 23–24, 49–50, 51, 52, 60, 71, 78–79, 184, 274, 328n79. See also under individual authors in the Index of Names and Titles poetics (medieval), 14, 53, 70, 157, 322n37 poetry, 16, 181; function and properties of, 71–72, 94; and literature, 13; and science, 17–18; study of, 53; types of, 120. See also disciplines, medieval paradigms of; verse political philosophy. See disciplines, medieval paradigms of postmodern thought (general), 13, 17–19, 90, 325n55, 386n3. See also in the Index of Names and Titles Foucault, Michel practical disciplines. See disciplines, medieval paradigms of predication, 5, 62, 81, 89, 97, 331n7, 345n122 print, early modern editions of medieval texts, xx–xxi, 128, 132, 167–70, 168, 173, 174, 179–80, 247, 354n85, 358n19, 367n94, 368n106, 390n49 prose (form), 20; encyclopedias, use in, 20, 133–35, 151, 155, 360n33; and literature, 13; rhymed, 135, 180–81; vernacular, use in, 133–35, 185, 360n28, 360n31. See also mise en page (general); prosimetrum (form) prose (term): definitions and etymology of, 234–35; Foucault’s use of, 20 prosimetrum (form), 37, 68–69, 70–72, 94, 125, 128, 189, 223, 245–47, 246, 248,

General Index

341n91, 342nn92–94, 383n60. See also under individual authors in the Index of Names and Titles prosopopoeia, 180, 189, 199–200 proverb, 180–81 psychology, medieval, 71, 96, 100, 105, 270, 351n35 pun. See paronomasia quadrivium, 73, 74, 75, 210, 334n28. See also disciplines, medieval paradigms of quaestio (genre and pedagogical practice), 8, 61, 63, 65, 69, 244, 317n10, 341n83 rational philosophy. See disciplines, medieval paradigms of reader, notion of, 25 reading, medieval, 25, 99, 218–19, 231, 267, 329n82, 386n3; monastic vs. scholastic, 244, 320n19; silent vs. aloud, 43–44 reason, 36, 51, 72, 100, 131, 195–97, 199, 204, 259–60, 267–68, 271 redemption, 97, 104, 248, 261 Renaissance, 4, 8–9, 83–92 reproduction, sexual and otherwise, 189–91, 193, 300 reptiles, 223, 256, 256–57 resemblance, 84–88, 268–69 rhetoric (discipline), 7, 12, 14, 42, 45, 53, 130, 134, 226–27, 337n49; and encyclopedias, 35, 44, 97, 93–94, 122, 128, 200, 206, 304; and exegesis, 62, 97, 121, 136, 180, 181, 184; manuals of, 120–21, 125. See also figure (term): as trope; disciplines, medieval paradigms of; trivium; trope, rhetorical; and under the names of individual tropes rhyme. See prose (form): rhymed; verse romance (genre), 5–6, 33, 94, 126, 133–35, 184, 321n30, 356nn4–5 Romance languages, 5–6, 133–35, 234, 318n15 Roman Empire, 106, 117 Rome, 132, 161 Royaumont, Cistercian monastery of, 347nn1–3, 353n81



445

Saint-Jacques, Dominican house of, Paris, 347nn1–2, 349n16 Saint-Omer. See in the Index of Names and Titles Lambert of Saint-Omer satire, 184 scholasticism (general): duration of, 6; and encyclopedism, 6–8, 33–92; historical context of, 4–6; modern understandings of, 8, 70, 317n10; in Renaissance, 87; textual practices of, 8, 33–92 schools, cathedral, 4–5, 57 science (term), definition and etymology of, 13–14, 316n9. See also disciplines, medieval paradigms of scribe. See copyist (term) script, 41–42, 74; Gothic, 41; as painting, 43–44 scriptoria, monastic, 5, 41, 127 Scripture. See in the Index of Names and Titles Bible; and individual books of the Bible under author and title Scripture, four senses of, 73, 112–13, 175–76. See also spiritual interpretation seal, wax (trope of), 171–73, 175, 368n111 semiotics, 11, 37, 45, 56, 63, 73, 86, 143, 177, 228 senses, physical, 39, 44, 45, 51, 176–78, 196, 229, 254–55, 263, 274–75, 369n116, 374n34 sensus (level of meaning), 61, 117 sentence collection (genre), 67, 68 sententia (level of meaning), 61, 117 series (genre), 189–92, 194, 196, 209–13, 374n29 sermon. See predication serpents, 256–57, 258–60 Sicily, 50 signature, Renaissance notion of, 85–86 snake-foot, 258–60, 386n88 Sorbonne. See Paris: University of soul, 100, 250–56, 253, 270 speculative disciplines. See disciplines, medieval paradigms of spiritual interpretation, 130, 179, 307, 386n3. See also figurative interpretation; Scripture, four senses of

446

 General Index

Spirituals. See under Franciscan order statement, Foucauldian notion of, 30, 31, 37, 89–90, 222, 248, 329n2, 376n5 status, three (Joachimite historical paradigm), 146–50, 148, 149 subject (knowing), 7–8, 12, 26, 85, 105, 218–20, 263–301, 307–8, 310, 316n9, 328n80, 377n11, 386n2 summa (genre), 8, 37, 63, 65, 68–70, 72, 94 symbol, 169. See also figurative interpretation; figure (term); semiotics table of contents, in encyclopedias, 99–100 taxatio list, Paris, 61 textual communities, 23–25, 218–19, 328n79 textual criticism, xvi–xvii, xix–xxii, 326n66 theology (general), 5, 61, 95, 131; and Aristotelian learning, 5; in encyclopedias, 80, 95, 100; and history, 80, 101, 111–20. See also disciplines, medieval paradigms of theoretical disciplines. See disciplines, medieval paradigms of Thomism, 8, 341n85 time, conceptions of, 111, 114–19, 121–22, 125–26 Toledo, 78, 336n36 Tournai, Abbaye de Saint-Martin, 353n81 translation: from Arabic to Latin, 15, 51–52, 78, 336n36; of Aristotle, 50, 51–52; of encyclopedias, 27, 249, 348n7, 349n14; from Greek to Latin, 15, 39, 51–52, 230, 344n114; from Latin to vernacular, 5–6, 27, 133, 183–84, 204–5, 249, 293, 354n84; of Plato, 49; among vernaculars, 131, 293–94, 329n1 (ch. 1), 358n14, 356n5, 372n10 tree figure (general), 136–54. See also individual authors in the Index of Names and Titles trivium, 7, 73, 74, 96–97, 210, 229, 334n28. See also disciplines, medieval paradigms of

trope, rhetorical, 53, 172, 188, 200–206, 213, 227, 375n38. See also under the names of individual tropes tropological interpretation, 89, 94, 264, 265, 267–68, 272, 274, 280, 386n3. See also Scripture, four senses of troubadours, 94, 129, 134, 137, 151, 154–57, 234, 300–301, 321n30, 342n94, 355n2, 356n4, 360n28, 366nn83–84, 366n86, 366n89. See also lyric (genre); pastourelle typology, 59. See also allegory; Scripture, four senses of universities (general), 5, 61 Vauvert, Chartreuse de (Paris), 131, 357n7, 362n39 vermin, 191–92 vernacular languages, 5–6, 13, 44 verse (form), 20, 360n31, 372n13; encyclopedias, use in, 133–35, 151, 153, 184–85. See also carmen figuratum; prosimetrum (form); mise en page (general); and in the Index of Names and Titles under Jean de Meun, works of: Roman de la Rose verse (term), definitions and etymology of, 234–35 vices, 105. See also virtues Victorine school, 52, 80, 101, 119. See also in the Index of Names and Titles Hugh of Saint-Victor; Richard of SaintVictor virtues, 98, 100, 127; trees of (general), 137–43, 153, 362n40, 362n44. See also in the Index of Names and Titles Lambert of Saint-Omer; Llull, Ramon, works of: Libre del gentil et dels tres savis visual arts (general), 367n97, 369n121, 376n57. See also architecture; painting, manuscript (general); woodcut visual exegesis, 136, 137, 361n38. See also exegetical figure woodcut, 167–69, 168, 173, 174, 179–80