Abandoned Women: Rewriting the Classics in Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer

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Abandoned Women

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Abandoned Women

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Rewriting the Classics in Dante, Boccaccio, & Chaucer

Suzanne C. Hagedorn

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

Ann Arbor

Fur meine Groj3mutter ~

Anna Seifried Hagedorn

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mit Liebe und Herzlichem Dank.

Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2004 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America @ Printed on acid, free paper 2007

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

A ClP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging, in, Publication Data Hagedorn, Suzanne C., 1968Abandoned women: rewriting the classics in Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer / Suzanne C. Hagedorn. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Based on the author's dissertation (Cornell University). ISBN 0'472'11349,6 (alk. paper) I. Literature, Medieval-Roman influences. 2. Women in literature. 3. Boccaccio, Giovanni, 1313-1375-Characters-Women. 4· Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321-Characters-Women. 5. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400-Characters-Women. 6. Ovid, 43 B.C.-17 or 18 A.D.-Characters-Women. 7. Ovid, 43 B.C.-I7 or 18 A.D.-Influence. 8. Ovid, 43 B.C.-17 or 18 A.D. Heroides. L Title. 2003 PN682.W6 H34 809'93352042-dC2I 2003011962

Ora mi avvedevo che non di rado i libri parlano di libri, ovvero e come si parlassero fra loro. Ana luce di questa riflessione, la bib .. lioteca mi parve ancora pili inquietante. Era dunque il luogo di un lungo e secolare sussurro, di un dialogo impercettibile tra pergamena e pergamena, una cos a viva, un ricettacolo di potenze non dominabili da una mente umana, tesoro di segreti emanati da tante menti e sopravvissuti aHa morte di coloro che Ii avevano prodotti, 0 se ne erano fatti tramite. -Umberto Eco, Il Nome della Rosa

Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books; it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of along, centuries ..old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors. -trans. William Weaver

Acknow ledgtnents

his book has been written in the course of a long intellectual journey, and, naturally, I have incurred many debts along the way. In its earli . . est form, a dissertation at Cornell University, it benefited from the insights and criticisms of my committee members: Thomas D. Hill, Marilyn Migiel, and last but certainly not least, my chairman, Winthrop Wetherbee. My decision to explore this topic in the first place owes a great deal both to Pete Wetherbee, whose intertextual approach to Chaucer and classical erudition has stimulated and influenced my own thinking in graduate school and beyond, and to Marilyn Migiel, who encouraged my interests in I talian and feminist studies. Of course, my journey as a medievalist began even earlier; I decided to pursue this field partly as a result of the inspiring medievalists with whom I studied at Princeton. In particular, John Fleming got me excited about Chaucer's classicism, and Robert Hollander taught such a memorable Dante course that I decided to go to Florence and study Italian there. I appreciate their abiding interest in my scholarly efforts, and especially thank Robert Hollander for offering his comments on chapter 2 and answering several bibliographical queries about Boccaccio. Since embarking on my teaching career, first at the University of Ari . . zona and now at the College of William and Mary, I have been grateful for the generosity and enthusiasm of various colleagues at both institutions in

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

offering advice and responses to my work. At Arizona, I would especially thank Alan Bernstein, who generously read and commented on chapter 2. At William and Mary, I have appreciated the sense of community among medievalists stimulated by the Program in Medieval and Renaissance Studies and its chair, George Greenia. In particular, Peter Wiggins has been a tremendously helpful interlocutor about the relationship between classical and Italian texts and their English reception. Monica and Adam Potkay have provided many hours of stimulating conversation, insightful commentary, and moral support. Finally, I am grateful to two Chairs of the Department of English, Terry Meyers and Christopher MacGowan, for making the department a welcoming and supportive environment in which to pursue my research. In the course of writing this book, I have needed many items that are not available in regular library collections. I therefore thank the Reference and Interlibrary Loan staffs at Olin Library, the University of Arizona Library, and Swem Library for their patience and skill in tracking down and providing me with books, microfilms, and articles from obscure peri . . odicals. Likewise, I am grateful to the staff of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Cornell University for their help in accessing materials housed in the Dante and Petrarch collections, and to the staffs of the British Library, Cambridge University Library, the Bodleian Library, the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, and the Biblioteca Laurenziana for access to annotated Ovid manuscripts in their collections. A project like this could not succeed without financial assistance; I would like to thank the Mellon Foundation for its considerable support, both monetary and moral, throughout my graduate school years and the Rotary Foundation for funding my studies at the Universita degli Studi di Firenze. For two summer grants that enabled me to explore the commen . . tary tradition on Ovid and its afterlife in medieval Latin poetry, I thank the College of William and Mary. As the manuscript neared completion, a number of scholars, both known and unknown, contributed their time, expertise, and comments. At the University of Michigan Press, I am grateful for the patient assis . . tance of my editor, Chris Collins, and the perspicacious (but sadly, anony . . mous) readers of the manuscript, which has certainly improved as a result of their interventions. For thoughtful responses to earlier stages of the manuscript, I thank Marilynn Desmond, Warren Ginsberg, Tom Still . . inger, and Karla Taylor. Naturally, all errors and omissions remain my responsibility. I regret that Prof. Ginsberg's own book, Chancer's Italian

Acknowledgments

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Tradition appeared too late for me to take account of it in my own work on Chaucer, Dante, and Boccaccio. Chapter 2 appeared in an earlier form as "A Statian Model for Dante's Ulysses" in Dante Studies 105 (1997); I thank the editor, Christopher Kleinhenz, for permission to reprint it in a modified form. Finally, I thank the members of my family for their loving encourage . . ment of my academic career. Without the support of my parents, Arthur and Janet Hagedorn, and my brother Tom, I simply would not have had the strength and determination to complete this project. In that spirit, I dedicate this book to one of my most important role models: my grand . . mother, Anna Seifried Hagedorn, in honor of her courage in coming to America alone at the age of eighteen to learn a new language and begin a new life. Over the years, her dedication, perseverance, and unwavering faith have inspired me as I have faced my own very different set of chal . . lenges. Danke, Nana.

Contents

Introduction

Abandoned Women and Medieval Tradition

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ONE

Ovid's Heroides and the Latin Middle Ages

TWO

Statius's Achilleid and Dante's Canto of Ulysses Fraud, Rhetoric, and Abandoned Women 47

THREE

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Boccaccio's Teseo, Chaucer's Theseus

Duplicity and Desire 75 F0 U R

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Abandoned Women and the Dynamics of Reader Response Boccaccio's Amorosa Visione and Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde

Re . .gendering Abandonment 130 SIX

Chaucer's Heroides

The Legend of Good Women 159 Afterword

The Metamorphoses of Ovid's Heroines 187 Appendix

"Deidamia Achilli," ed. Stohlmann 193 Bibliography 197 Index

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Introduction Abandoned Women and Medieval Tradition

n one of the more evocative moments of his Confessions, the adult Augustine recalls his schoolboy crush on Dido: forced to memorize poetry about "the wanderings of some fellow called Aeneas" in his North African grammar school, the young Aurelius Augustinus found himself shedding tears for the tragic queen of Carthage. In his eloquent autobiog .. raphy, the older (and wiser) Augustine, bishop of Hippo, sternly chastises himself for this youthful folly-rather than weeping for Dido, he says, he should have been weeping for himself, since at that very moment he was in danger of losing eternal life for not loving God: "et haec non flebam, et flebam Didonem 'extinctam ferroque extrema secutam'" (Conf. 1.13: "And I was not weeping for this, but weeping for Dido, who 'sought with a sword an end to her woe''').! But even though the Christian bishop has tried to exorcise the pagan fiction that once gripped him so powerfully, he cannot excise it from his memory. Dido still haunts him. In fact, echoes of Virgil's Aeneid linger in Augustine's own farewell to Dido, as his words

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I. Citations of the Confessions come from S. Aureli Augustini, Confessionum !ibn XIII, ed. Martinus Skutella (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1969).

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ABANDONED WOMEN

reinscribe Aeneas's address to the shade of Dido in the underworld: "infe .. lix Dido, verus mihi nuntius ergo / venerat exstinctam ferroque extrema secutam"2 (Aen. 6.456-57: "Unhappy Dido! then what I heard was truethat you were no more, and had sought with a sword an end to your woe"). But after Aeneas greets her thus in the Fields of Mourning, Dido's ghost not only refuses to answer, she refuses even to look at him. She turns away, fleeing from the man who once forsook her as he tearfully watches her dis .. appear into the shadows. In Carthage, Dido had wept for Aeneas when he abandoned her, but in Hades, they reverse roles: Aeneas now weeps for Dido as she leaves him behind to seek her husband, Sychaeus, among the shades. Paradoxically, Augustine's allusive description of his schoolboy tears over Virgil's Dido associates him with both the abandoned queen and her abandoner, Aeneas. On the one hand, he links Dido's death with the pos .. sibility of his own spiritual suicide. On the other, the allusion that closes the passage associates Augustine's tears with those Aeneas sheds over the woman he had left behind by order of the Olympian gods. Since Augustine significantly deploys this Virgilian allusion at a moment when he firmly repudiates pagan literature in favor of Christian truth, Dido may be under .. stood allegorically as a figure for the Virgilian text that Augustine himself must leave behind as he pursues his Christian destiny. Like the Aeneid's wayfaring hero, Augustine revisits the ghosts of his own past, recalling where he has been in order to further his own redemptive spiritual journey. The poignant Virgilian verses that the older Augustine invokes even as he denounces his youthful tears for the dead Dido reveal that he understands not only what he has gained, but what he has lost. Indeed, Augustine's most vivid memories of his schoolboy study of the Aeneid center on loss: his fragmentary account of the Aeneid in the Con . . fessions mentions the burning of Troy, the shade of Creusa, and most importantly, the tragic love affair between Aeneas and Dido narrated in the poem's first four books. In Augustine's reading of Virgil's epic, the events of book 4 overshadow the rest of the poem; despite its title, the Aeneid becomes the story of Dido. Such a reading of the Aeneid emphasizes the personal toll that the glorious founding of the Roman Empire exacts

2. Quotations from the Aeneid are from The Aeneid of Virgil, ed. R. D. Williams, don: Macmillan, 1972).

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Introduction

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from individuals) This interpretation of Virgil's epic stresses its pathos and takes as its starting point the Virgilian narrator's evocative and empa . . thetic descriptions of characters who are lost, left behind, or abandoned as Aeneas makes his way on his fated journey to Italy-among them Creusa, Polydorus, Andromache, Helenus, Palinarus, and, of course, Dido. Nor does Augustine stand alone among ancient and medieval readers of the Aeneid in his emphasis on the epic's tragic romance rather than its martial glory; Ovid before him had highlighted this aspect of the Aeneid by telling Virgil's story from the forsaken Dido's vantage point in Heroides 7. And nearly a millennium after Augustine shed tears for Dido, Geoffrey Chaucer's House of Fame dramatizes an emotional reading of Virgil's epic from a distinctly Ovidian point of view. Chaucer's House of Fame begins by evoking a moving scene of reading familiar to a medieval audience steeped in Virgil's Aeneid. In book I of Virgil's epic, Aeneas stands in the temple Dido has built to Venus in Carthage, gazes at the images depicting the Trojan War, and weeps: "ani . . mum pictura pascit inani / multa gemens, largoque umectat flumine vul . . tum" (Aen. I.464-65: "His soul feeds on mere pictures; he sighs deeply and a wide stream of tears wets his face"). Likewise, in book I of the House of Fame, the narrator "Geffrey" dreams that he stands in the temple of Venus, viewing images taken from Virgil's Aeneid. While Geffrey does not literally weep, Chaucer clearly shows his intense emotional involvement with the pictures he sees in the temple. Like the young Augustine, Geffrey takes far more interest in reliving the fall of Dido than in remembering the fall of Troy or in following the fated progress of Aeneas's journey to Rome. A simple line count of the space allotted to various episodes in the poems reveals the overall pattern: the narrator condenses the first three books of the Aeneid into about ninety octosyllabic lines recounting the sack of Troy, Aeneas's flight from the burning city, and the hero's landing at Carthage (HF 1.143-238). But when Geffrey reaches book 4, his breakneck gallop through Virgil's epic slows down; he becomes so involved with Dido's story that it takes him nearly two hundred lines to narrate the events of this book of the Aeneid 3. Cf. the interpretations of the "private voice" in the Aeneid set forth by classicists including Adam Parry, R. D. Williams, and R. O. A. M. Lyne as well as the "Harvard School" of Virgil crit~ ics, who develop the interpretation articulated by M. C. J. Putnam. For a discussion of this trend in twentieth century scholarship, see S. J. Harrison, "Some Views of the Aeneid in the Twentieth Century," in Oxford Readings in Vergil's Aeneid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 199°),5-10.

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alone (HF 1.239-432). Once Dido commits suicide, the narrator's interest in the story apparently dies with her; Geffrey's precis of the last eight books of the Aeneid takes a mere thirty~five lines (HF 1.432-67). Geffrey's retelling of Aeneid 4 stands out not only for its length but also for its intense emotional involvement with Dido. When, after hearing the story of his wanderings, Dido decides to make Aeneas "hyr lyf, hir love, hir lust, hir lord" (HF 1.258), the sympathetic narrator suddenly interjects a sermon on the falsity of appearances, exclaiming, Allas! what harm doth apparence, Whan hit is fals in existence! For he to hir a tray tour was; Wherfore she slow hirself, allas! Loa, how a woman doth amys To love hym that unknowyen ys! For, be Cryste, 10, thus yt fareth: "Hyt is not al gold that glareth."

After such moralistic observations on the perfidy of men in general and Aeneas in particular, Geffrey's imaginative sympathy with Dido only con~ tinues to deepen as he relates his bereft heroine's lamentations. As Christopher Baswell observes, once Geffrey's sentimental pity is aroused and his emotional involvement increases, the artifice of dependence on some ancient source com~ pletely crumbles, and Geffrey's narrative again moves from ecphrasis to the report of a speech directly overheard. s Likewise, Marilynn Desmond's reading of the House of Fame emphasizes the breakdown of the ekphrastic fiction that frames Geffrey's recounting of the Troy story. In discussing this portion of the text, she notes how Gef~ frey's slip into direct discourse affects the reader's own response to the nar~ rative:

4. All Chaucer quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are from the texts printed in The River, side Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). 5. Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995),233.

Introduction

5

We momentarily lose sight of the ekphrasis since Geffrey's perceptions and reactions dramatically intervene between us and the pictorial text he is viewing: his own account emphasizes that he is no longer attempting to narrate the story on the wall but has begun to seriously distort the picture as a result of the associative responses to the visual textuality encoded in the ekphrasis. 6 Of course, Geffrey is not the first medieval literary voyager to experience such striking auditory responses to the visual images he encounters on his journey. As she analyzes this section of the House of Fame, Karla Taylor draws attention to the relationship between the scenes Geffrey describes and the synesthetic images of humility that Dante the pilgrim encounters on the terrace of pride in the Purgatorio. 7 Moreover, Geffrey's disregard for his ekphrastic frame and flight into imaginative response make him strongly resemble yet another Dantesque pilgrim on an allegorical journey: to wit, Giovanni Boccaccio's narrator in the Amorosa Visione. Gazing at portraits of forsaken women prompts both Boccaccio's and Chaucer's first .. person narrators to imagine the sorrowful voices of these bereft figures and to view classical myths from their viewpoints. 8 But when Dido finally speaks her imagined lament in Boccaccio's Amorosa Visione and Chaucer's House of Fame, the tone of her eroticized elegy derives not from Virgil, who originated the story of the Carthaginean queen's tragic love affair, but from Ovid, whom medieval writers widely regarded as the classical expert par excellence on love and its discontents. As she reflects on Aeneas's opportunism, the Dido conjured up by Gef.. frey's imagination in the House of Fame sounds forlorn rather than furi .. ous-Ovidian rather than Virgilian. The heroine soliloquizes: "Allas," quod she, "what me ys woo! AlIas, is every man thus trewe, That every yer wolde have a newe, Yfhit so longe tyme dure, Or elles three, peraventure? 6. Marilynn Desmond, Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval Aeneid (Minneapo~ lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 144-45. 7. Karla Taylor, Chaucer Reads "The Divine Comedy" (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 22-23· 8. See the discussion of the Amorosa Visione and its emotionally involved narrator in chap~ ter 4.

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ABANDONED WOMEN

As thus: of oon he walde have fame In magnyfyinge of hys name; Another for frendshippe, seyth he; And yet ther shal the thridde be That shal be take for delyt, Loa, or for synguler profit." In suche wordes gan to pleyne Dydo of hir grete peyne, As me mette redelyNon other auctour alegge I.

In the closing lines of this passage, Chaucer's Geffrey claims no source for Dido's lament other than his own dream, but as Sheila Delany (along with Baswell and Desmond) notes, the narrator actually relies on Ovid's Epistle of Dido in Heroides 7 for his "romance" view of Dido here and elsewhere. 9 In Geffrey's Ovidian retelling of the Aeneid, Dido talks far more than the poem's putative hero; in fact, Aeneas never gets a speech at all, let alone one of more than fifty lines like Dido's. Overcome with sympathy for his heroine, Geffrey continues relating Dido's despair for another forty . . five lines, concluding her speech with a plaintive lament for her lost fame:

o wel . . awey that I was born! For thorgh yow is my name lorn, And aIle myn actes red and songe Over al thys lond, on every tonge. wikke Fame!-for ther nys Nothing so swift, la, as she is! 0, soth ys, every thing ys wyst, Though hit be kevered with the myst. Eke, though I myghte duren ever, That I have don rekever I never, That I ne shal be seyd, alIas, Yshamed be thourgh Eneas, And that I shal thus juged be: "Loa, ryght as she hath don, now she

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9. See Sheila Delany, Chaucer's House of Fame: The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism, 2d ed. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, I994), 48-57; Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, 235; Desmond, Reading Dido, I 48-49.

Introduction

7

W 01 doo eft . . sones, hardely"Thus seyth the peple prively.

(HF I.345-60) Of course, Dido's self.. conscious meditation on her subsequent fame is highly prescient: her "actes" will not only be "red and songe" by her own people, but by generations who come after her, including Geffrey himself. And of course, this concern with the vicissitudes of "fama" shows Chaucer's awareness of his Virgilian matter, since it clearly evokes the famous passage from Aeneid 4 in which Fame travels swiftly through Libya, spreading the news of Dido's love affair with Aeneas. 1o Despite the fears that Dido expresses about her reputation, sympathetic readers like Geffrey will judge her far less harshly than she condemns herself in these lines. After interpolating Dido's imagined la~ents, Geffrey returns to the plot of the Aeneid, albeit briefly. He tersely describes Dido's death, recom . . mending that the reader who wishes to know more Rede Virgile in Eneydos Or the Epistle of Ovyde, What that she wrot or that she dyde; And nere hyt to longe to endyte, By God, I wolde hyt here write.

Despite his claim in these lines that he has no room to include Ovid's epis . . tIe in his narrative, Geffrey's stated concern about excessive length does not prompt him to resume tracing Aeneas's wanderings at this point. Instead, he pauses for another fifty lines or so to meditate on various sto .. ries of trusting women abandoned by traitorous men, citing the examples of Phyllis and Demophoon, Briseis and Achilles, Oenone and Paris, Hyp .. sipyle and Jason, Medea and Jason, Deianira and Hercules, and Ariadne and Theseus. What prompts the narrator to insert this digressive catalog right in the middle of his summary of the Aeneid? Perhaps we could con .. jecture that immediately after referring his readers to the "Epistle of Ovyde," Chaucer's Geffrey took a break in order to reread Ovid himself, for all of the tales of abandoned women he recounts come straight from 10. See Aeneid 4.173--97. Ralph Hexter, "Sidonian Dido," in Innovations of Antiquity, ed. Ralph Hexter and Daniel Selden (New York: Routledge, 1992),341-42, discusses this passage of the Aeneid and its implications for understanding the multiple meanings of Dido.

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ABANDONED WOMEN

Ovid's Heroides, the series of Latin verse epistles in which Ovid imagines how epic heroes might look were they viewed through the eyes (and words) of the suffering women they have left behind-Dido, Phyllis, Bri .. seis, Oenone, Hypsipyle, and Ariadne, among others. For Geffrey, then, the major point of the Aeneid lies in its portrayal of Dido's tragedy: Dido's lament rather than Aeneas's journey stands at the narrative center of the events pictured in the table of brass he views in the temple of Venus. The key to understanding "Geffrey's Aeneid" lies in what the narrator says he omits: the "Epistle of Ovyde," Ovid's imaginative account of the events of Aeneid 4 from Dido's point of view in Heroides 7. Reflecting on Dido's story (not to mention reading Ovid's version of it) leads Geffrey directly to other stories of abandonment and loss, distracting him (and his reader) from the triumphal conclusion of his hero's voyage. In Chaucer's House of Fame, Geffrey finds that he cannot simply sing of "arms and a man"; rather, his poem focuses on the pathetic plight of an abandoned woman that in turn leads him to meditate on male perfidy rather than heroic pietas. In the end, Dido's fame overshadows Aeneas's in the poetic House of Fame that Geoffrey Chaucer built and that Chaucer's Geffrey encounters in the course of the narrative. Like Chaucer's Geffrey and the young Augustine in whose footsteps he follows, generations of readers have "wept for Dido," metaphorically, if not literally. But why? In his eloquent and wide--ranging comparative study Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition, Lawrence Lipking suggests that Dido's poetic power lies in her passion, understood in the Latin sense as both suffering and emotion: Dido's suffering lingers in the mind long after Aeneas's plotting and piety have faded. The stubborn inertia of abandoned and desolate pas .. sion, however ineffectual, however opposed to action, can acquire a power of its own. I I The shade of Dido thus haunts readers of the Aeneid even as she haunts Aeneas himself. And, like Augustine and Chaucer, many of those readers have gone on to reinscribe her powerful story in their own writings. Indeed, within the last decade alone, three important books that address major medieval and Renaissance rewritings of Virgil's story of Dido and Aeneas-Christopher Baswell's Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the I ! . Lawrence Lipking, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989),3-4.

Introduction

9

Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer, Marilynn Desmond's Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval Aeneid, and John Watkins's The Specter of Dido: Spenser and Virgilian Epic-have examined the perennial fascination of Dido. Moreover, the three books themselves attest to the phenomenon. 12 While the specific details of Dido's story of loss and abandonment are unique, she does not stand alone in her plight, as the catalog conjured up by Chaucer's Geffrey serves to indicate. Mutatis mutandis, her narrative resembles that of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other women in litera .. ture-not to mention in real life. I3 As Lipking points out, such stories recur with some frequency in most literatures of the world: "Indeed," he writes, "in some cultures the role of women in literature has been virtually identified with abandonment."I4 In the case of abandoned women, Lip .. king argues, victimization and powerlessness paradoxically become the key to poetic power. By their very nature, abandoned women are subversive figures, for they call into question not only the integrity of individual heroes, but the necessity for heroic action-and even action-itself.Is In the final chapter of his book, titled "Aristotle's Sister: A Poetics of Aban .. donment," Lipking argues that the sense of pain and loss that abandoned women pour out in their laments offers a challenge to traditional social structures, values, and even poetic genres that enshrine and celebrate male dominance and male exploits. I6 The voice of the abandoned women, left behind and left out, calls attention to the darker side of these social and poetic traditions, just as Virgil's story of Dido casts a shadow on the mar .. tial exploits of his hero Aeneas. Published in 1988, Lipking's Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition remains a pathbreaking work, assembling and deftly analyzing an enor.. 12. See Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England; Desmond, Reading Dido. The latter work discusses medieval Latin, English, and French versions of Aeneid 4. John Watkins, The Specter of Dido: Spenser and Virgilian EPic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), reads Spenser's recastings of the Aeneas and Dido story as an allegory for the poet's confrontation with literary genres that threaten the ascendancy of the epic. 13. Like Lipking, I do not consider the difficulties of abandoned women to be a purely textual phenomenon. Following Lipking's appropriation of Auerbach's concept of "figura" to remind us that abandoned women have an extratextual as well as intertextual reality, I will generally refer to "figures" of abandoned women. 14. Lipking, Abandoned Women, xvi, xv. IS. See Lipking, Abandoned Women, 3, on how the passive suffering described in the laments of abandoned women challenge the principle of action that undergirds the Aristotelian concept of poetry. 16. Lipking, Abandoned Women, 209-28.

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ABANDONED WOMEN

mous variety of poetic inscriptions of female abandonment by authors both male and female. Lipking's interpretive field is breathtakingly large; he ranges from laconic and evocative Chinese poems to Sappho's renowned Second Ode and its translations through the centuries by Ca .. tullus and others to the Tale of Genji, Gaspara Stampa's sonnets, Pope's Eloisa, Byron's Donna Julia, Pushkin's Tatiana, Wordsworth's Laodamia, and the poetry of modern women including Emily Dickinson, H.D., Anna Akmatova, Marina Tsvetayeva, Sylvia Plath, and Adrienne Rich. While Lipking does invoke Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Heroides in his catalog of images of abandonment and mentions Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Boccaccio's Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta at various points in his book, he has comparatively little to say about the influence of these and other Latin authors on the transmission of the figure of the forsaken woman during the Middle Ages, especially as compared to his magisterial and compelling analyses of poems both more ancient (such as Sappho's Second Ode) and more modern, such as Pope's Eloisa to Abelard and Byron's Don Juan. But if we seek to understand the importance of the figure of the abandoned woman in the European literary tradition, it is essential to give the same sort of critical attention to the way canonical classical authors like Virgil, Ovid, and Statius portrayed the relicta, as well as considering how major vernacular writers of the Middle Ages like Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer transformed the figure of the forsaken women into what we might dub a "poetics of plaintiveness." Any medievalist studying representations of abandoned women in the Middle Ages should take as her starting point Virgil's Dido, the most important example of this literary type for medieval readers. Nevertheless, since skilled interpreters such as Baswell and Desmond have presented rich and rewarding interpretations of a variety of medieval texts and com .. mentaries relating to the Aeneid, this path requires no further tracing here. 17 Instead, I will follow in the footsteps of Chaucer's Geffrey, who uses the story of Dido as a reason to pause and meditate upon the stories of other abandoned women celebrated in classical myth and story, especially those recounted by Ovid in his Heroides. This study focuses specifically on the retellings and revisions of classical myths of abandoned women by Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer, three late .. medieval vernacular writers who were careful readers and revisers of Virgil, Ovid, and Statius, as well as other classical auctores. Their elabo .. 17. In chapter 6, however, I shall revisit Dido's story.

Introduction

I I

rately intertextual fictions dominate the literary landscapes of medieval England and Italy, influencing generations of readers and writers. In differ .. ent ways, each of these writers is considered a literary father figure in his own vernacular; moreover, as "Dead White European Males" all three have sometimes been targets in the "culture wars" over the teaching of canonical literature in university curricula. Nevertheless, despite their reputation in some critical circles as cultural icons of a "phallogocentric" literary tradition that systematically repressed women, these three men of the Middle Ages took women's stories very seriously indeed. In some sense, each of these male poets constituted and constructed his own poetic identity through his encounters with women as real and as fictive audi .. ences-Dante through Beatrice; Boccaccio through Fiammetta and the group of sympathetic ladies he addresses in the Decameron; and Chaucer through the imagined female audience of Troilus and Criseyde, the sympa .. thetic yet critical Alceste of the Legend of Good Women, and of course, the Wife of Bath as the fictive audience member who transforms her experi .. ence of the Knight's Tale into an authoritative narrative that privileges female autonomy. Yet certainly, one of the most important ways that each of these writers engage women and their concerns is by imagining female lives and creat .. ing female voices through their poetic craft. Though Ovid may have been best known to medieval audiences in his ironic role as the praeceptor amoris, he taught these three male writers far more than how to woo and win a lover. Indeed, by assuming the poetic personae of the famous hero .. ines of classical history and mythology in the Heroides, in what Lynn Enterline (following Elizabeth Harvey) views as "transvestite ventrilo .. quism," Ovid had cleared the way for Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer to understand the crucial importance of women's voices and viewpoints for a fuller and more accurate account of past mythic and literary history.I8 In essence, the process of reading, reimagining, and reinscribing Ovid's Heroides in their own vernacular fictions teaches Dante, Boccaccio, and 18. For the image of transvestite ventriloquism, see Elizabeth D. Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (London: Routledge, 1990), 1-14. Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 20-2 I, discusses Elizabeth Harvey's work on Ovid's "vocal cross~dressing" in relation to Renais~ sance texts. As she notes, "Ovid's penchant for ventriloquizing female voices occupies a crucial, if mysterious, place in the Metamorphoses as a whole" (3). "Over and over," Enterline argues, "Ovid tries to speak as if he were a woman, to find a convincing 'voice' for female suffering. He contin~ ually speaks 'beside' himself in his poetry, a trademark displacement of voice with which Shake~ speare in particular was fascinated" (I I).

12

ABANDONED WOMEN

Chaucer how to write from a revisionist perspective-how to recast and reconsider epic history and mythology from women's viewpoints. Of course, some critics inclined to judge medieval culture by modern . . day standards of behavior may consider this argument, that Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer consistently engaged women's voices, to be a recuperative step backward, a sort of apology for a patriarchal medieval literary tradi . . tion that deflects charges of sexism from major canonical writers.19 But in my view, it makes little sense to impose modern . . day ideological categories on long . . dead writers; I prefer to attempt to read these writers in the con . . text of their own historical moment, examining their use and transforma . . tion of the classical narratives in their own texts. In short, it is possible for a twenty . . first . . century feminist to view Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer as important precursors who articulated a coherent vision of women in his . . tory. While their visions of women and their roles may not measure up to modern . . day social standards for equitable treatment, Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer nevertheless present powerful and sympathetic views of women. Dante, in particular, makes it abundantly clear that he believes the eternal salvation of his soul came about only due to the timely inter . . vention of his beloved Beatrice, who saw his suffering and sent him Virgil to guide him on an otherworldly journey that climaxes in Dante's reunion with her.20 While this critical project has been inspired by the general feminist goal of studying the ways in which women have been represented in the literary art of the past, it is not grounded in the work of any single feminist theorist. In fact, my own meanderings among the byways of recent post . . modernist writings on gender theory lead me to concur with the incisive words of T oril Moi: I find poststructuralist work on sex and gender to be obscure, theoreti . . cist, plagued by internal contradictions, mired in unnecessary philo . . sophical and theoretical elaborations, and dependent on the 1960s sex/gender distinction for political effect. As for the positive objectives that the poststructuralists wish to achieve, Simone de Beauvoir 19. In contrast, see Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), for an account of Chaucer's gender ideology that expresses extreme skepticism over the attempts of modem critics to construct a "proto,feminist" Chaucer. 20. See the discussion of Dante's reunion with Beatrice in his Purgatorio at the end of chap, ter 2.

I ntroduction

13

achieved them first, and with considerably greater philosophical ele . . gance, clarity, and wit.21 Toward the end of her book, Moi includes a series of essays discussing specific literary works, prefacing them with an introduction that mentions how she has rediscovered "what a pleasure it is to work on literary texts."22 And I agree wholeheartedly with Moi about the "pleasure of the text," to borrow her Barthean phrase. My own critical practice is skeptical of the presuppositions about the philosophy of language and the failure of signs to signify articulated by proponents of poststructuralist theories of Ian . . guage and sexuality, most prominent among them Derrida and Lacan. While Lynn Enterline and Yopie Prins find these forms of postmodernist theory useful as an ideological framework for their compelling close read . . ings of Renaissance and Victorian recastings of Ovidian myths about rape and the image of Sappho, I retain my skepticism of Derridean discursive practices, particularly given the powerful critique of the poststructuralist position on signification by semioticians and philosophers of language such as Umberto Eco and John Searle. 23 Rather than the poststructuralist critical framework of Derrida and Lacan adopted by Enterline and Prins, this interpretive project builds upon the theories of language and literary culture articulated by a different set of continental theorists, namely, semioticians like Umberto Eco, reader . . response critics such as Wolfgang Iser, and reception theorists like Hans Robert Jauss. 24 Broadly speaking, these critics work out of a tradition of structuralist and semiotic theories of language premised upon certain basic presuppositions about the significance of language, literary and oth. . erwise {notwithstanding the problems that human beings have in using 21. T oril Moi, What Is a Woman?: And Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 58-59· 22. Moi, What Is a Woman? 399. 23. See the contentious critiques of Derrida in John Searle, "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida," Glyph 1 (1977): 198-208, and "The World Turned Upside Down," New York Review of Books, October 27, 1983, 74-79. For Eco's contributions to this debate, see Umberto Eco, I Limiti dell'Interpretazione (Milan: Bompiani, 1990), as well as the discussion among Umberto Eco, Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler, and Christine Brook Rose in Umberto Eco et al., Interpretation and Overinterpretation, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 199 2 ). 24. In addition to the works of Eco mentioned in the previous note, see Umberto Eco, Lector in Fabula (Milan: Bompiani, 1979); Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), and Iser, The Act of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); and Hans Robert Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis: University of Min, nesota Press, 1982).

14

ABANDONED WOMEN

signs to signify) shared by medieval sign theorists like Augustine as well as medieval writers like Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer. Moreover, these particular modern theorists all seek to understand the ways in which struc . . tures of intertextual allusions work and how readers (and their horizons of expectations) are constructed within individual texts and the rhetorical traditions whence such traditions spring, theoretical projects directly rele . . vant to my own critical concerns. Regardless of the direction these theorists offer, my own critical prac .. tice begins by reading particular poetic texts. The present inquiry starts with the particular "intertexts" that specific medieval writers read and reinterpreted as they created their own poetic visions. Teasing out the web of intertextual allusions that connects medieval writers to their literary predecessors leads to a better understanding of the ways that medieval writers transformed and revised the classical past. In particular, I attempt to articulate the various ways in which major medieval writers understood and reinscribed the portrait of the elegiac relicta in their vernacular works. Given this focus on the continuing dialogue that writers carryon with their literary predecessors, the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin are extremely valuable for their construction of a "dialogic poetics" that sees writers as engaging in an active and ongoing literary conversation with their poetic predecessors. 25 The chapters that follow present close readings of major and minor vernacular works by Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer that explore the classical figures of abandoned women adapted from Virgil, Ovid, and Sta . . tius. In Dante's Inferno; Boccaccio's Teseida, Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, and Amorosa Visione; and Chaucer's Knight's Tale, Troilus and Criseyde, and Legend of Good Women, stories of abandoned women some . . times take center stage, but more often lurk in the wings of other narra . . tive dramas to enrich and complicate them. For instance, allusions to abandoned women may call up the "past histories" of protagonists and influence a reader's response to their actions. They may require readers to negotiate between conflicting versions of mythical and classical history. Furthermore, they can provide subplots to, and alternative perspectives on, the main narrative. Abandoned woman tend to be represented in literature as unstable and complex; consequently, when Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer incorporate 25. For the relevance of Bakhtin's ideas, see chapter I as well as the thorough presentation of Bakhtin on language and literature in Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, I990).

Introduction

15

classical stories of abandoned women, this poetic figure cannot be assigned a single fixed meaning. As Lipking significantly reminds us, the word aban . . doned is itself ambiguous, meaning both "forsaken or cast off' and "unre . . strained or shameless"-the abandoned woman is "both physically deserted by a lover and spiritually outside the law."26 And in proposing a new "poetics of abandonment" Lipking argues that these figures of forlorn women also stand outside the "laws" of Aristotelian poetics. Abandoned women resist closure, much as their laments and complaints protest against the scripts that their lovers have unilaterally imposed upon their passionate entanglements. 27 Thus, in considering how these three late . . medieval writers rethink, recast, and rewrite classical figures of abandoned women, any impulse to limit the polysemous potential of these figures in the texts they inhabit should be resisted. In particular, the opinions of medieval commentators on the relevant episodes in Virgil, Ovid, and Statius ought not to be adduced as if they spoke for Dante, Boccaccio, or Chaucer. While the tra . . dition of commentary on the Dido episode in the Aeneid or on Ovid's Heroides can provide valuable insights into the cultural formation of medieval writers, to assume that these writers simply accepted and adopted the views of the commentators wholesale credits them with little capacity for critical intelligence or poetic sensibility. As Winthrop Wetherbee has fruitfully argued with respect to Chaucer, Having been shown to our profit the importance of commentary, gloss, and mythographical compendium in accounting for medieval notions about classical poetry, we tend to substitute such tools for the texts of the poets themselves, forgetting that these texts were read as well as annotated .... There is a risk, however, of confusing the categories and purposes of teachers and glossators with those of poets .... It is finally the texts themselves, "the forme of olde clerkis speeche," that meant the most to Chaucer, as to Dante. 28 And, one might add, to Boccaccio as welL Although I touch on aspects of the tradition of medieval commentary, the aim here is to describe cultural contexts rather than prescribe interpretations. Modem critics assume at 26. Lipking, Abandoned Women, xvii. 27. Lipking, Abandoned Women, 3. 28. Winthrop Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on "Troilus and Criseyde" (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 10.

16

ABANDONED WOMEN

their own peril that all medieval poets considered an abandoned woman's love as stultus (foolish) simply because some scholastic commentary said they should. 29 Just as Ovid chose to portray a plaintive Dido whose beseeching tone toward Aeneas differs dramatically from that of the furi; ous queen who curses her former lover at the end of Aeneid 4, a medieval poet may have chosen to approach classical characters from different per; spectives than those adopted by readers in preceding generations. And just as Lipking argues that Pushkin read Byron who read De Stael who read Pope who read Ovid, Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer were also enrolled in the "School of Abandonment" founded by Ovid himself, who taught these poets how to create a revisionary poetics that imagined forsaken female voices. Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer were subtle, complex, and highly educated poets: their representations of abandoned women should be read as the fruit of their own reading and meditation on the Latin classics, not as a recasting of an established commentary tradition in poetic form. Virgil's Dido was the model par excellence for medieval writers seeking examples of abandoned women in classical texts. Nevertheless, Ovid's Heroides, with its bevy of lamenting ladies, became the locus classicus for medieval writers seeking to portray abandoned women. At this point, a bit more background on Ovid's influential collection may be in order: Ovid's anthology of fictional verse epistles traditionally goes by the appellation Heroides, a word that simply means "heroines," even though some of its fictive letter writers are actually male.3° In fact, the collection consists of two distinct parts: a series of epistles by legendary or historical women addressed to men, and a series of epistles by men addressed to women that alternate with the women's replies, comprising the correspondence between Paris and Helen, Leander and Hero, and Acontius and Cydippe. 29. An example of this critical approach is seen in Mary Edwards, "A Study of Six Characters in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women with Reference to Medieval Scholia on Ovid's Heroides," B.Litt. thesis, Oxford University, 1970. Though this study has much of value to say about the commentary tradition, it tends to equate Chaucer's views of Ovidian women with those of the commentators. 30. R. ]. Tarrant, "Heroides," in Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics, ed. L. D. Reynolds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 268, states that the title Heroides is ancient, since Priscian attests to it, but not necessarily Ovid's. Ovid referred to the text simply as "epistula" in his statement on it in the Ars amatoria, and the titles given in the manuscripts vary between Liber epistularum and Liber heroidum. Although the Latin word heroides could be construed as a patronymic meaning "the daughters of heroes," Palmer argues in his edition that if Heroides is taken as the title of Ovid's work, it should be translated as "The Heroines." See Arthur Palmer, ed., Heroides (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), xi. Whether the title is Ovidian or not, I have cho~ sen to refer to Ovid's epistolary collection by its traditional appellation.

Introduction

I

7

Classical scholars tend to assign the first part of the Heroides to the early period of Ovid's career; those who do not deny Ovid's authorship of the so .. called double epistles tend to assign them to a later period)! General statements about "the Heroides" in the chapters that follow should be taken as referring only to the first part of Ovid's work, for it is here that the poet chooses to represent abandoned women and here that his successors in literary endeavor most consistently derive their poetic inspiration. Not all of the letter .. writing heroines in the first part of the Heroides fit comfortably into the category of "abandoned women." As Lipking defines the phrase and as it is employed here, an abandoned woman is "physically deserted by a lover and spiritually outside the law."3 2 A few of Ovid's plaintive women can be considered abandoned only in the latter sense, though the overwhelming majority fit the stricter definition: Penelope and Laodamia have been left behind by husbands who have gone off to the Trojan War, perhaps never to return. (In the case of Penelope and Lao .. damia, Ovid takes full advantage of the dramatic ironies of the heroines' different situations. While readers of the Heroides know that the Odysseus of the Iliad and Odyssey returns to his lamenting wife, they also know that Laodamia's husband Protesilaus was the very first Greek warrior killed in the Trojan War.) Similarly, the heroines Phyllis, Oenone, Hypsipyle, Dido, Deianira, Ariadne, Medea, and Sappho have all been forsaken by husbands or lovers; Briseis and Hermione are both separated from their lovers through the fortunes of war. While Ovid makes abandonment by a beloved the major theme of his collection, other motifs also run through this first set of epistles. One group of letters has more to do with the psychology of incest and the family romance than with forsaken lovers)3 For instance, Phaedra writes to Hip .. polytus in the hope of seducing her resisting stepson; Canace writes a sui .. cide note to her brother Macareus, her partner in incestuous love; Hyper .. mnestra writes a formal explanation and plea for aid to her husband 31. For arguments against Ovidian authorship of the "double epistles," see Palmer, ed., Hero~

ides, 436-37. Scholars who have affirmed Ovid's authorship of the epistles, but assigned them to a date later in the poet's career, include Louis Purser, introduction to Palmer, ed., Heroides, xxxii; Hermann Frankel, Ovid: A Poet between Two Worlds (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1945),48; Harold Jacobson, Ovid's "Heroides" (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni~ versity Press, 1974), ix; and W. S. Anderson, "The 'Heroides,'" in Ovid, ed. J. W. Binns (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973),68. 32. Lipking, Abandoned Women, xvii. 33. For a consideration of the importance of incest as a literary theme in Ovid and the medieval poets who imitated him, see Elizabeth Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Literary Imagi~ nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 78-91.

I8

ABANDONED WOMEN

Lynceus, the cousin whom she regards more as her brother than as her spouse.3 4 These three women might be considered "abandoned," but only in the second sense of the word as "lascivious" rather than its primary meaning. Since their situations are quite different from those of the other twelve heroines, these figures will not appear in the discussions of Ovid's abandoned women that follow. Since Ovid's Heroides is the locus classicus for medieval writers seeking figures of abandoned women for literary inspiration or imitation, chapter I focuses on the critical and commentary traditions associated with this work. A survey of modem critical approaches to the Heroides forms a pre . . lude to a consideration of Ovid's text as his medieval readers would have encountered it, thickly encrusted with layers of glosses and moralizing commentaries that provide prescriptive-if sometimes contradictoryinterpretations of these narratives. After briefly examining how a few medieval Latin writers made use of the Heroides, the discussion concludes with a close reading of an anonymous eleventh . . century poet's Ovidian epistle from Deidamia to Achilles based on Ovid's Heroides and Statius's Achilleid. The poet's playful conflation of Ovidian tone and Statian plot shows an awareness of the moralizing medieval commentary tradition on the Heroides as well as an understanding of the Ovidian genealogy of Sta . . tius's Achilleid. The epistle's sharp focus on Deidamia's feelings, moreover, provides a compelling counterpart to Dante's allusive rereadings of the Achilleid and the Heroides in his Inferno, which are taken up in the chapter that follows. After an initial excursus into the Nachleben of Ovid's Heroides during the Latin Middle Ages, I embark on the main interpretive project, a series of thematically related studies that consider the ways in which Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer translated and transformed classical stories of abandoned women in their vernacular narratives. The chapters on Dante's Ulysses and the different versions of Theseus presented in the works of Boccaccio and Chaucer concentrate on the allusive presence of aban . . doned women in texts that center on male heroes. These marginal female figures function much as they do in Ovid's Heroides: they make the reader reexamine the values of the male . . oriented epic world and question the human cost of "heroic" action. In these texts, Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer employ figures of abandoned women to expose the darker side of epic adventure and to express their disapproval of heroic forgetfulness. 34. Jacobson, Ovid's "Heroides," 125-29, points out that pietas rather than amor informs Hypermnestra's decision to defy her father's order that she kill her cousin~husband.

I ntroduction

19

More specifically, chapter 2 reads Dante's Inferno 26 in light of its allu . . sion to Statius's Achilleid, a fragmentary epic poem that describes Achilles' seduction of Deidamia and his subsequent abandonment of her at the per. . suasion of the rhetorically gifted Ulysses. After examining how Deidamia, the abandoned woman in the background narrative, relates to Penelope, the abandoned woman in the foreground, I argue that this "back story" exposes Ulysses' heroic rhetoric as empty and duplicitous. Like the Latin epistle "Deidamia Achilli" discussed in chapter I, Dante's poem alludes to Ovidian and Statian abandoned women, thereby calling a hero's values into question, though this time the smooth . . tongued Ulysses rather than amorous Achilles becomes the target of the poet's ironic gaze. Chapter 3 explains how the story of Ariadne's abandonment hovers in the background of both Boccaccio's Teseida and Chaucer's Knight's Tale. In the Teseida, Boccaccio's concerns about Teseo's past history as a seducer of women intrude upon the margins of the text in the form of the author's own glosses; he suppresses his hero's troublesome past by doctor . . ing the traditional chronology of Theseus's career as represented in Sta . . tius's Thebaid and Ovid's Heroides. In contrast, Chaucer's abbreviated retelling of the Teseida in the Knight's Tale openly mentions Theseus's exploits with the Minotaur, and in so doing, Chaucer invokes the alterna . . tive history for Theseus sketched in two of his other works, The House of Fame and The Legend of Good Woman-a Theseus who persuades Ariadne and Phaedra to help him, and who concludes his Cretan adventure by abandoning Ariadne. Theseus proves to be in the company of another man in his mistreatment of women; Chaucer complements Theseus's "doubleness" by constructing a parallel past history for Arcite in the frag . . mentary poem Anelida and Arcite, a fiction of the poet's own invention that tells of the Theban knight's abandonment of the queen of Armenia. Here, Chaucer's creation of a "genealogy of abandonment" recalls Ovid's own father . . son pairing of the perfidious Theseus and his unreliable son Demophoon, who leave behind both Ariadne and Phyllis in the course of the Heroides. Rather than functioning as allusive figures in the background of other stories, abandoned women become the main focus of narrative attention in two works that Giovanni Boccaccio composed after the Teseida. These poems, the Amorosa Visione and Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, have received surprisingly little scholarly attention, even when considered only among Boccaccio's opere minore. Chapter 4 analyzes the Italian poet's exploration of the tension between the moralizing and affective responses

20

ABANDONED WOMEN

that abandoned women evoke in their readers-conflicting reactions that evoke the bifurcated views of the earlier medieval commentators on the Heroides discussed in chapter I. In both of these works, Boccaccio's sym .. pathetic portrayals of abandoned women vouch for his imaginative engagement with the Heroides; his interest in female points of view in these works suggests that the Teseida's ambiguous portrait of Teseo emerges from Boccaccio's awareness of how Ariadne, Ipolyta, or Emilia might have viewed the Athenian hero and his exploits. The closing chapters consider Geoffrey Chaucer's engagement with the Heroides in two classicizing poems in which abandonment emerges as a major theme. Chapter 5 considers Chaucer's use of the Heroides in Troilus and Criseyde, a poem that allusively links both hero and heroine with Ovid's plaintive women. Like several of the letters in Ovid's Heroides, Troilus and Criseyde places the epic events of the Trojan War in the back.. ground of a disastrous love affair. Nevertheless, Chaucer's Ovidian tech .. nique comes with a gender difference: although Criseyde's literary geneal .. ogy links her to Ovid's Briseis, the putative "author" of Heroides 3, the abandoned Troilus most fully assimilates the behavior and epistolary style of Briseis and other forsaken Ovidian heroines, for his speeches and writ .. ings in the latter half of the poem are punctuated with allusions to Ovid's

Heroides. Chapter 6 considers Chaucer's experiment with another ironic reading of a catalog of abandoned women. In The Legend of Good Women, Chaucer, like Ovid, incorporates a play of stylistic registers and modes of discourse as he narrates classical stories about abandoned women. The narrator's display of linguistic variety offers a challenge to the narrow con .. vent ions of the courtly aesthetic imposed on the narrator by his inscribed reader, the God of Love, who inhabits the sort of discourse .. world that Bakhtin termed "monologic" in contrast to Chaucer's more "novelistic" or "dialogic" poetics. Revisiting the discussion of Chaucer's Dido begun in this introduction, this chapter concludes with a discussion of the Legend of Dido. Here we see how Chaucer juxtaposes Ovidian and Virgilian views of the most famous abandoned woman of the classical canon in order to cre .. ate a novelistic form of discourse that challenges his earlier courtly cre .. ations and leads toward the dialogic poetics of his late masterpiece, the

Canterbury Tales.

~

One

~

Ovid's Heroides and the Latin Middle Ages

s Ovid himself was not too humble to point out, he did something new in the Heroides. In the Ars amatoria, Ovid's narrator commends poetry as an appropriate pursuit for a lover and even includes a reference to some of his own works, including the Heroides, as appropriate reading material: "Vel tibi composita cantetur Epistola voce: / Ignotum hoc ali is HIe novavit opus" (3.345-46: "or read some letter with a practiced voice; he first invented this form, unknown to others"). I Ovid's hitherto unknown art is that of giving words to famous women, imagining how tra . . ditional mythology might look if retold from their vantage points. Nearly two thousand years after Ovid wrote the Heroides, it may be difficult to appreciate his work as innovative when it has been enshrined as a classic. Ovid's achievement can perhaps best be appreciated by analogies with much more recent works: what Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guilden . . stern Are Dead does to Hamlet, what John Gardner's Grendel does to Beowulf, and what Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea does to Jane Eyre, Ovid

A

I. The text and translation of the Ars amatoria come from the Loeb Classical Library edition, Ovid, The Art of Love and Other Poems, trans. J. H. Mozley (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 19 2 9).

21

22

ABANDONED WOMEN

does to traditional Greek and Roman mythology.2 He turns the old tales inside out and shows how they look to those characters who are tradition .. ally denied speech, who are little more than pawns in a game controlled by others. Ovid's subversive art challenges the primacy of epic and mytholog .. ical discourse, pointing out the individual stories that they leave out. As Harold Jacobson writes in his thoughtful study of these poems, the Heroides make the individual all . . important, the seemingly insignificant individual who is obscured by the dazzling glare of massive events and great principles. But when the validity, indeed, the very reality of these events is made contingent on the per .. spective of the individual, we can understand that it is with the indi .. vidual that significance really rests. Historically, this view takes on extra importance when we place the Heroides against the backdrop of Augustus and Vergil's Aeneid, a world in which the individual is a mere sacrificial lamb on the altar of community and principle) As Jacobson's comments indicate, the formal innovation of the Heroides makes a serious political and philosophical point-one that, he further argues, put Ovid distinctly at odds with the official values of the Augustan regime. Ever since the Augustan Age, Ovid's innovative Heroides has been perennially read, but not perennially appreciated. Modern critics of the Heroides have mainly been troubled by its admixture of styles-the con . . trast between pathetic lamentation and seemingly incongruous wit. As L. P. Wilkinson pithily observes, "The heroines are not too miserable to make puns."4 To Wilkinson, who views the Heroides as a direct descendent of the rhetorical school .. exercise of the ethopoeia (characterization), the poems are primarily attempts to score debating points; their chief delights lie in the display of ingenious tricks, quotable aphorisms, and verbal con .. ceits. When Ovid's heroines seem to express any genuine feelings or pathos, it is only because "the poet forgets himself and his audience."5 Wilkinson's interpretation of the Heroides considers the poet's wit and his 2. The controversy over The Wind Done Gone, a novel that reimagines and rewrites Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, shows that the revisionary impulse of Ovid is alive and well in the twenty~first century-though modern laws regarding intellectual property may well interfere with such literary experimentation. 3· Jacobson, Ovid's "Heroides, " 354. 4. L. P. Wilkinson, Ovid Recalled (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955),98. 5· Wilkinson, Ovid Recalled, 99.

Ovid's Heroides and the Latin Middle Ages

23

verbal dexterity the redeeming features of the poems, which he otherwise views as an undistinguished mass of all,too . . familiar complaints. For him, the single Heroides (I-XV) are a uniform plum pudding with a fair admixture of glittering rings and sixpences. The first slice is appetising enough, but each further slice becomes colder and less digestible, until the only incentive for going on is the prospect of coming across an occasional ring or sixpence. 6 Wilkinson thus sees the primary virtue of the Heroides in their comic and parodic elements. Taking this rhetorical view a step further, Eleanor Win . . sor concludes that the poems are sheer parody: "The letters of the Heroides are mock . . declamations so conducted as to ridicule the formalities of decla . . mation and render than absurd."7 While Wilkinson's and Winsor's views take due account of Ovid's wit in the Heroides, they brush aside his pathos as accidental or simply ignore it. On the other hand, a more traditional view of the Heroides holds that Ovid's wit is precisely what mars his epistles-the value of these poems lie in naturalistic depictions of the ebb and flow of the passions of their hero . . ines. John Dryden's preface to English translations of the Heroides by vari . . ous poets lodges this complaint against Ovid: I will confess that the copiousness of his Wit was such, that he often writ too pointedly for his Subject, and made his persons speak more Eloquently than the Violence of their Passion would admit: so that he is frequently witty out of season: leaving the Imitation of Nature, and the cooler dictates of his Judgment, for the false applause of Fancy.8 Writing nearly three hundred years after Dryden, Jacobson similarly values Ovid's poems for their explorations of the psychology of love and their interest in the subjective nature of reality. Jacobson reads the poems as a 6. Wilkinson, Ovid Recalled, 106. 7. Eleanor Jane Winsor, "A Study in the Sources and Rhetoric of Chaucer's Legend of Good Women," Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1963, 360. See Jacobson, Ovid's "Heroides," 325-30, for arguments against these "rhetorical" views of Ovid's poetry. 8. The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg Jr. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956), I: I 10. For a discussion of this and other aspects of Dryden's Ovidian criticism and translations, see David Hopkins, "Dryden and Ovid's 'Wit out of season,'" in Ovid Renewed, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer~ sity Press, 1988), 167-90.

24

ABANDONED WOMEN

series of painstaking psychological portraits of their subjects, and for him, as for Dryden, Ovid can be "witty out of season." In cataloging Ovid's shortcomings, he writes, The wit and humor that now and then are present in the Heroides degenerate at times into little else than cleverness .... Many of Ovid's faults, both in the Heroides and elsewhere, reside in that very instinct which is at the same time responsible for much excellence in his poetry, namely, his close attention to language .... But when points of the language take precedence over points of sense, when plays on words prove no more than a substitute for substance, then his failure is manifest. 9 For both Dryden and Jacobson, Ovid's inappropriate WIttICIsms occur when he either forgets himself in his playing with language or when he becomes more interested in his audience's appreciation of his wit than in his subject matter. Whatever the explanation, these critics agree that such lapses are disturbing flaws that blunt the emotional impact of the poems. In contrast to both of these positions, which hold that Ovid acciden~ tally breaches poetic decorum as he mingles witty and pathetic registers, Florence Verducci's study of the Heroides sees this admixture as key to Ovid's rhetorical strategy. For her, Ovid's wit functions as an alienation device that calls the reader back from sentimental involvement with silly heroines: The rule of Ovid's Heroides is the rule of indecorum, of wit in concep~ tion no less than in language, a wit which is not his heroine's own but the token of the poet's creative presence in the poem. Its dispassionate, intellectual, emotionally anaesthetizing presence is a constant reminder of how far we, in our sympathy for a heroine, have departed from the traditional view of her situation, and it is a constant goad to the dissociation of emotional appreciation from formal articulation. 10 While Verducci's own readings of the Heroides do acknowledge the pathetic register of Ovid's text as deliberate rather than accidental, she takes a highly skeptical view of it. Verducci sees Ovid's pathos as what his 9. Jacobson, Ovid's "Heroides, " 8. Florence Verducci, Ovid's Toyshop of the Heart (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 32. 10.

Ovid's Heroides and the Latin Middle Ages

25

"authorial" wit warns the reader against. V erducci' s formalist approach to Ovid thus ends up reading his poems as parodies; the main problem with her analysis lies in its privileging of Ovid's wit as authorial and its brusque dismissal of Ovid's pathetic register-its unfailingly ironic view of any emotional involvement with Ovid's plaintive women as foolish sympathy with the histrionic inhabitants of "Ovid's toys hop of the heart."11 More recently, Marina Brownlee has used the writings of Bakhtin to navigate between the Scylla of Ovid's wit and the Charybdis of his pathos. Instead of viewing either extreme as a flaw, she considers them examples of the different forms of discourse that Ovid interweaves in his text. She sees the Heroides as illustrating Bakhtin's ideas about novelistic discourse, pointing out that Ovid's playing of various rhetorical styles and stylistic registers against one another destabilizes ideological systems and the con . . ventions of the epic in a way that Bakhtin views as characteristic of the novel. 12 Bakhtin's conception of the novel may require some explanation: for him, the "novel" as a genre has less to do with conventional periodization than with discursive strategies, so that even a verse work written during the Middle Ages (e.g., Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival) may be classified as a novel in Bakhtinian terms.13 The interplay between differ . . ent varieties of discourse distinguishes the novel from other genres: The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (some . . times even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized. The internal stratification of any single national language into social dialects, characteristic group behavior, profes . . sional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious languages, languages of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions, languages that serve the specific socio . . political purposes of the day ... this internal stratification present in every language at any given moment of its historical existence is the indispensable prerequisite for the novel as a genre. 14 I I. Both the quotation (and Verducci's title) allude to Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock. 12. Marina Scordilis Brownlee, The Severed Word: Ovid's Heroides and the Novela Sentimental (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 199°),27. 13. For a reading of Wolfram's work through the lens of Bakhtin's ideas about discourse, see Arthur Groos, Romancing the Grail: Genre, Science, and Quest in Wolfram's Parzival (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995). 14. M. M. Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 262~63.

26

ABANDONED WOMEN

An author's orchestration of this multiplicity of discourses separates the novel from other literary genres (such as epic and lyric) that valorize a unified narrative discourse that excludes such linguistic variety. Bakhtin claims this sort of intersection of discourses as the special terri, tory of the novel but acknowledges that in the centuries before the novel existed "we find a rich word of diverse forms that transmit, mimic, and rep, resent from various vantage points another's world, another's speech and language," a phenomenon that he calls heteroglossia or polyglossia. IS Within a Bakhtinian framework, Ovid's heteroglossic Heroides may be understood as pointing out the one,sidedness of traditional epic and tragic views of the heroines he portrays. In contrast to Verducci's reading of the Heroides, Brownlee's Bakhtin, ian interpretation does not privilege Ovid's wit as authorial and ascribe pathos to his foolish heroines (or their foolish readers). Her reading of Ovid sees his pathos as a part of a discursive variety that tends to point out the inability of monologic, "straightforward" poetic genres to include the whole range of human experience. Rather than mocking individual hero, ines, as Verducci argues, Brownlee sees Ovid as calling generic conven, tions into question-especially those of the epic. Brownlee's dialogic approach to Ovid's complex work recognizes the validity and importance of both of Ovid's stylistic registers, rather than throwing out those portions of his work that do not agree with a particular reader's preference for either wit or pathos. While this understanding of Ovid's poetics as a constant dialogue between conflicting discourses underlies my work on the Heroides as a whole, I shall be exploring its implications most explicitly in my chap, ter on Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, a work that exhibits similarly troubling tonal variations. As this brief survey suggests, modern interpreters react in a variety of different ways to Ovid's lamenting letter,writers. Of course, Dante, Boc, caccio, and Chaucer had a rather different set of interpretations to respond to, for they would have likely read Ovid's Heroides in manuscripts provided with a preliminary "accessus" that provided introductions to the work as a whole, as well as extensive marginal and interlinear glosses. In considering how these poets approached their reading of the Heroides, several ques, tions spring to mind: what did the Heroides look like to medieval readers? How were these texts commented on (and, presumably, taught) in medieval schools? What influence did the Heroides and their medieval IS. Bakhtin, "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse," in The Dialogic Imagination, 50.

Ovid's Heroides and the Latin Middle Ages

27

commentaries exert on Latin writing in the Middle Ages? Lastly, what ver . . nacular translations, if any, would have been available to Dante, Boccac . . cio, and Chaucer as they approached the task of transforming Ovid's Latin verses into their native tongues? Taking up the first question, Ralph Hexter points out that reading the Heroides was a rather different experience in the Middle Ages than it is today-and not simply because medieval readers encountered Ovid's epis . . tIes in unique manuscript environments rather than in standard printed editions. I6 While the single letters from heroines and the "paired epistles" formed a single book, as they do now, the collection was one letter shorter: Epistle 15, the letter of Sappho to Phaon, was transmitted separately. I 7 Moreover, Epistle 16, the letter of Paris to Helen, was missing verses 39 to 144, and Epistle 2 I, the letter of Cydippe to Acontius, ended at verse 14. 18 Besides these facts of manuscript transmission, a medieval reader's impres'" sion of the Heroides would have been greatly influenced by the poetic sources available for comparative study. While readings of the Heroides by modern classical scholars regularly compare Penelope's letter to the Odyssey, Briseis's to the Iliad, Phaedra's and Medea's to Euripides' dramas, Hypsipyle's to Apollonius of Rhodes's Argonautica, Ariadne's to Catullus 64, and Dido's to the Aeneid, all but the last of Ovid's source texts would have been unavailable to most medieval European readers of the Heroides, who did not know Greek and lacked the poems of Catullus. I9 Thus, aspects of the poems that certain modern readers consider parodic when read against their sources would very probably not have appeared so to medieval readers. 20 Nevertheless, while they lacked Ovid's poetic sources, medieval readers generally did have access to various versions of the clas . . sical myths and stories that Ovid drew on, either through mythographic compilations, translations, or versions of these stories by later writers. As Hexter's extensive work with them demonstrates, commentaries on the Heroides also provided medieval readers with this mythological back. . 16. See Ralph Hexter, Ovid and Medieval Schooling: Studies in Medieval School Commentaries on Ovid's Ars amatoria, Epistulae ex Ponto, and Epistulae Heroidum (Munich: Arbeo~Gesellschaft, 1986), 14I. 17. This fact, along with features of the letter itself, has led to a controversy among modern classicists as to whether it is by Ovid at all. Most recent critics of the Heroides do ascribe Heroides 15 to Ovid himself. 18. Hexter, Ovid and Medieval Schooling, 141. 19. For instance, see the comparative readings of the Heroides in Jacobson, Ovid's "Heroides," and Verducci, Ovid's Toyshop. 20. For instance, Verducci, Ovid's T oyshop, sees Heroides 3 as a parody of the Briseis episode in the Iliad and Heroides 10 as a travesty of Catullus 64.

28

ABANDONED WOMEN

ground necessary for a basic understanding of the situations of Ovid's indi .. vidual heroines. 2I Besides giving medieval readers necessary background information, the commentaries on and accessus to the Heroides also provided them with a general interpretive framework in which to place the individual poems. 22 Contemporary readers, accustomed to assuming the autonomy of imagina" tive literature and the lightheartedness of Ovid's amatory poetry, may be surprised to learn that in the Middle Ages the Heroides was interpreted as a didactic work. As E. K. Rand writes, "Medieval thinkers were quick to see that beneath Ovid's persiflage runs a vein of sobriety and moral acute .. ness," and therefore, Ovid's poems-even his amatory ones-were inter .. preted under the rubric of "Ovidius Ethicus."23 As Warren Ginsberg argues, this tradition clearly manifests itself in the medieval commentary tradition on the Ars amatoria. 24 In the case of the Heroides, Ovid was seen as distinguishing between bad and good sorts of love, in order to reprove the former and recommend the latter. A stanza from a twelfth .. century poem about Ovid and his works concisely sums up this general approach to the Heroides: Actoris intentio restat, condemnare Amores illicitos fatuos culpare Et recte feruentium mentes commendare: Utilitas nostra sit ius tum pignus amare. 25

[The intention of the author rests in condemning illicit loves, blaming the foolish, and in commending those whose minds are rightly inflamed; the use .. fulness for us is to love legitimate contracts.]

2 I. Hexter, Ovid and Medieval Schooling, I 7 I -204, analyzes the mythological information pre~ sented in one commentary on the Heroides. 22. For general discussions of the medieval accessus and commentary tradition see Edwin Quain, "The Medieval Accessus Ad Auctores," Traditio 3 (I945): 214-64; A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 2d ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988); and Judson Boyce Allen, The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, I982 ). 23. E. K. Rand, Ovid and His Influence (New York: Longmans, 1928), 131. 24. Warren Ginsberg, "Ovid ius ethicus? Ovid and the Medieval Commentary Tradition," in Desiring Discourse, ed. James J. Paxson and Cynthia A. Gravless (Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1998),62-71. 25. Hermann Hagen, Carmina medii aevi maximam partem inedita (Bern, 1877),207-9. Cf. F. J. E. Raby, A History of Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, I957),2:21+

Ovid's Heroides and the Latin Middle Ages

29

The basic "condemnare/commendare" interpretive schema described in these verses undergirds the more extensive prose commentaries used in medieval schools. As one twelfth .. century commentator writes in an acces .. sus to the Heroides: intentio sua est legitimum commendare conubium vel amorem, et secundum hoc triplici modo tractat de ipso amore, scilicet de legitimo, de illicito et stulto, de legitimo per Penelopen, de illicito per Canacen, de stulto per Phillidem. Sed has duas partes, scilicet stulti et illiciti, non causa ipsarum, verum gratia illius tercii commendandi interserit, et sic commendando legitimum, stultum et illicitum reprehend it. Eth .. icae subiacet quia bonorum morum est instructor, malorum vero exstir .. pator. Finalis causa talis est, ut visa utili tate quae ex legitimo procedit et infortuniis quae ex stulto et illicito solent prosequi, hune utrumque fugiamus et soli casto adhereamus. 26

[His intention is to commend legitimate marriage or love, and accordingly he considers three types of love, namely legitimate love, illicit love, and foolish love: legitimate love through Penelope, illicit love through Canace, and fool .. ish love through Phyllis. But the latter two types, namely foolish and illicit love, he includes not on their own account, but rather that the third should be commended, and thus commending the legitimate, he reprimands the fool .. ish and illicit. The work relates to ethics because it is the instructor of good morals, but the uprooter of bad ones. The final cause is the following: that having seen the advantage that proceeds from legitimate love and the misfor.. tunes that usually follow from foolish love, we will flee these two and only devote ourselves to chaste love .]27 Here, Ovid the praeceptor amoris becomes Ovid the instructor bonorum morum-the jocular instructor of love has, perhaps to the surprise of some modern readers, metamorphosed into a sober tutor of morals. The tripar .. tite division of love made in this accessus appears in other medieval intro .. ductions to the Heroides, though some commentators distinguish only between "eastus" and "incestus" love, that is, chaste and unchaste. 28 Hex .. 26. R. B. C. Huygens, Accessus ad auctores, Bernard d'Utrecht, Conrad d'Hirsau "Dialogus super Auctores" (Leiden: Brill, 197°),3°. 27. Also translated in A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott, eds., Medieval Literary Theory and Criti~ cism, c. 1100-C. 1375: The Commentary Tradition, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 20-21.

28. Hexter, Ovid and Medieval Schooling, 157.

30

ABANDONED WOMEN

ter expresses some surprise at this particular commentator's explication of the "finalis causa" of Ovid's epistles, for the fates of the "legitimate" lovers of the Heroides are not as edifying as the commentator implies. Moreover, Hexter wonders about the "we" who are supposed to embrace only chaste love, given that the readers of this commentary would have presumably been clerics in orders or ordained and bound by a vow of celibacy.29 Nev-ertheless, a later accessus even more strongly sets forth the view that Ovid's Heroides are a how--to manual for love: Utilitas est duplex scilicet communis et propria. Propria utilitas huius libri est quia cognito hoc libro cognoscemus dominas vel arnicas nos . . tras et cognatas caste amare; utilitas communis est duplex scilicit pulcritudo cognoscimus que sit in hoc libro et pulcritudo vocabulorum. 30

[I ts usefulness is double, that is, common and personal. The personal use . . fulness of this book is that when we have understood it, we can understand how to love ladies or our mistresses or our kinswomen chastely. The common usefulness is double, that is, we recognize the beauty of this book and its words.] Here, the commentator sees the Heroides as a compendium of female psy . . chology; in contrast to the previous accessus, this writer more explicitly describes the objects of the "chaste love" in which his reader ought to engage-"dominas vel amicas nostras et cognatas" [ladies or our mistresses or our kinswomen]. Moreover, in recognizing the "beauty" of the book and of its words, this commentator shows himself to be of a more literary bent than some of his predecessors. As the two commentaries quoted above demonstrate, Ovid's Heroides was viewed as having practical as well as theoretical implications. Indeed, the most extensive twelfth . . century accessus to the Heroides also adds that Ovid intended to provide his readers with model love letters, as well as listing "giving pleasure" among the work's general intentions:

29. Hexter, Ovid and Medieval Schooling, 158. 30. For a slightly different text and translation, see Allen, Ethical Poetic, 28. For the text, I have relied upon Mauro Donnini, "L' 'Accessus Ovidii Epistularum' del Cod. Asis. Bibl. civ. 302," Giornale Italiano di Filologia, n.s. 10 (1979): 129. Donnini edits this text and assigns the manu~ script to the fifteenth century.

Ovid's Heroides and the Latin Middle Ages

3I

Aliter, intentio sua est, cum in preceptis de arte amatoria non ostendit quo modo aliquis per epistolas sollicitaretur, illud huic exequitur.... Sciendum quoque est quod cum in toto libro hanc et supradictas habeat intentiones, preterea duas habet in hoc libro, unam generalem et ali am specialem; generalem delectare et communiter prodesse, spe .. cialem habent intentionem, sicut in singulis epistolis, aut laudando castem amorem ... aut vituperando incestum amorum)!

[Since in the precepts concerning the art of love he does not show how some . . one is wooed by epistles, it is his intention that this be fulfilled here. . . . Let it be known that while he has this and the above . . mentioned intentions in the entire book, beyond those he has two intentions in this book, one general and the other special, the general intention being to delight and to be for the com . . mon good. The special intention, as expressed in individual epistles, is to commend chaste love . . . or to condemn unchaste love.] Although this commentator strongly insists that Ovid constructs a moral framework in the Heroides, his suggestion that the epistles might be used as model love .. letters and his notion that Ovid also aims to delight make the modern reader suspect that he realized that reading the Ars amatoria or the Heroides might well teach something other than strictly ethical behavior. In fact, some commentators do read the Heroides as an instructional manual in the art of love . . letter writing. One medieval manuscript dating from the thirteenth or fourteenth century includes a biographical account of Ovid claiming that the poet was in love with the empress Livia. Besides writing the Amores in her honor, it adds, "Propter amorem illius fecit lib rum epistolarum, ut possent iuuenes doceri. Quomodo de bent scribere amicis suis et e converso" [Because of his love for her he wrote the book of epistles (i.e., the Heroides) in order that they might teach young people how they should write their friends and vice .. versa].3 2 Similarly, a thir .. teenth .. century commentator writes that the Heroides, in effect, provides a manual for dealing with a love affair gone wrong: "Vel utilitas est si quan .. doque contigerit nos a puellis nostris destitui hoc opus exemplar habeamus quomodo eas ad amorem nostrum revocemus vel e contrario" [The utility 31. Huygens, Accessus ad auctores, 32. 32. From Ms. Vat. Lat. I479, printed in B. Nogara, "Di alcune vite e commenti medioevali di Ovidio," in Miscellanea Ceriani: Raccolta di scritti originali per onorare la memoria di M.r Antonio Maria Ceriani, prefetto della Biblioteca Ambrosiana (Milan: Hoepli, I9IO), 426.

32

ABANDONED WOMEN

(of this book) is that if it should happen that we are deserted by our girl, friends, we have an example in this work of how we can recall them to our love and vice . . versa].3 3 In this interpretation, the amorous rhetoric of abandoned women becomes a handbook for edification and education of abandoned men. 34 If the medieval access us consistently read the Heroides as a moral work, the application of that moral message to the epistles that follow tends to be less consistent. When commentators actually try to apply their black, and,white moral scheme to the gray situations of individual heroines, they sometimes encounter difficulties, as seen in the preface to Heroides 2 that Luca Rosa cites from a manuscript dating from the thirteenth century. In the epistle, the abandoned Phyllis writes to Demophoon, whom she weI, corned to her land and her bed. Though she repeatedly claims that Demophoon has promised to marry her, this presumed engagement is not good enough for the commentator, who clearly states, "cum maritum non haberet ipsum adamavit et inlegitime cum eo concubuit" [Since she did not have a husband, she fell in love with him and lay with him illegiti, mately].3 5 He concludes his introduction with the standard moralization of the text, but at the last minute seems to change his mind: Inter omnia est in hac (epistola) exemplum. reprehend ere mulieres turpiter vitiis adherentes sicut phillides. Vel commendare Phillidem de castitate habita erga de( mophoonte) quod illum solum dilexit cui promiserat. quapropter ortatur ilIum ut fidem sibi promissam servet commemorando sua beneficia et etiam iuramenta dicens 0 demophon. 36

[Among other things, there is an exemplum in this epistle: to chastise women who, like Phyllis, shamefully follow vices. Or to commend Phyllis for her fidelity to Demophoon because she loved him alone to whom she had promised herself. On account of which she exhorts him to maintain the promise he had made her, remembering her kindnesses and their oaths, say . . ing, "0 Demophoon."} 33. From Cod. Paris. 7994, printed in Fausto Ghisalberti, "Medieval Biographies of Ovid,"

Journal of the Warburg and Cortauld Institutes 9 (1946 ): 45-46. 34. In Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Troilus unwittingly uses the Heroides in precisely this manner. 35. Luca Rosa, "Su alcuni commenti inediti alle opere di Ovidio," Annali della Facolra di lettere e filosofia (Universita di Napoli) 5 (1955): 214-15, prints this commentary from Ms. Vaticanus Barbarinus Lat. 26. 36. Rosa, "Su alcuni commenti inediti," 215.

Ovid's Heroides and the Latin Middle Ages

33

As Rosa observes, the moral notions of the commentator seem to have gotten confused along the way: his final statements juxtapose the common moralization, which judges Phyllis as justifiably punished for having lost her virginity to a man whom she had not lawfully wed, with a more gener .. ous, "romantic" moral that excuses the sin of love in a woman who remained faithful unto death)7 Clearly, in this particular instance, the commentator seems to have more personal sympathy with Phyllis's plight than his moralizing framework would permit)8 Another thirteenth .. century commentary on this epistle, which omits any moralization, seems to take Phyllis's claims about her marriage to Demophoon seriously, for it renders the sentence we have seen in the other commentary with one very significant change: "que cum maritum non haberet eum adamavit et ille cum ea legitime [sic] concubuit unde maximum malum illi continget" [Since she did not have a husband, she fell in love with him, and he lay with her legitimately, whence the great .. est evil befell her])9 In general, medieval commentators tend to hold that Phyllis was not married to Demophoon and treat her as an example of stul. . tus amor-foolish love. 40 However, as these two examples show, the com .. mentators themselves can be confused by the ambiguity of Heroides 2. The commentators' difficulties with Heroides 2, and especially the will .. ful denial of the conventional moralitas in the Vatican commentary dis .. cussed above, reinforce the suspicion that Ovid's Heroides might be open to "misreading" by readers more involved with the poems' passionate sur.. face than in the conventional moralitas their schoolmasters insisted on finding in them. Indeed, the twelfth .. century Benedictine Conrad of Hir.. sau was well aware of such dangers. In his dialogue on various classical authors, the German monk makes it clear that he generally finds the study 37. Rosa, "Su alcuni commenti inediti," 2I6. 38. Chapter 4 discusses a similar conflict between a moralizing schema and the affective pull of individual women's laments staged in Boccaccio's Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta and Amorosa

Visione. 39. Rosa "Su alcuni commenti inediti," 216, quoting Ms. Parisinus 5I37. 40. See the accessus in Huygens, Accessus ad auctores, 30 and 3 I, which both specifically name

Phyllis as the example of this kind of love, as well as the verse argumentum affixed to this epistle cited in Heinrich Sedlmayer, "Prolegomena Critica ad Heroides Ovidianus," (Ph.D. diss., Uni, versity of Vienna, I878): 96, 98; which says that Ovid reprimands Phyllis "quia stulte amat." D. E. H. Alton, "Ovid in the Medieval Schoolroom," Hermathena 95 (I96I): 70-7 I , publishes a thir, teenth,century accessus to the Heroides that cites both Phyllis and Oenone as examples of stultus amor. adding, "stulticia enim est amare hospites sicut phillis, unde illud: Certus in hospitibus non est amor" [For it is foolish to love guests as Phyllis did, whence the saying, "In guests there is no certain love"].

34

ABANDONED WOMEN

of Ovid like looking for gold in a dung heap ("aurum in stercore"), and he warns readers away from the Heroides in particular: "quis eum de amore croccitantem, in diversis epistolis turpiter evagantem, si sanum sapiat, tol . . eret" [Who in his right mind could stand him cooing about love (and) behaving shamefully in various epistles?].4 1 For Conrad, the Heroides had more of dung than gold about them, and he clearly felt that all those love stories might have ill effects on young Christian minds, no matter how thoroughly they were moralized. Despite Conrad's reservations, the reading of the Heroides flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries-the period that Ludwig Traube dubbed the aetas Ovidiana-if the presence of the text in library catalogs and in surviving medieval school anthologies (the libri manuales) provides an accurate indication of its popularity among medieval readers.4 2 Accord . . ing to figures compiled by James McGregor, the Heroides occurs among the Ovidian works most frequently listed in medieval library catalogs of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and in the thirteenth, it appears in cata . . logs as often as the Metamorphoses. Likewise, the presence of the Heroides in libri manuales, the anthologies of Latin texts taught in medieval schools, peaks in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. 43 Such statistics do not nee . . essarily mean much taken all by themselves, but they underscore the point that throughout Europe in the Middle Ages, Ovid's works in general (and the Heroides in particular) were available to be read and studied, and in fact functioned as a sort of McGuffey's Reader of medieval Europe. In medieval schools, students were encouraged to write stylistic imitations of the classical authors. Such school exercises in turn led to more creative redeployments of Ovidian ideas, as medieval Latin poets-especially those in the "Goliardic" tradition-used Ovid's poetry as a model for their own amatory verse. 44 As was mentioned above, some medieval commentators viewed Ovid's Heroides as a guide to art of letter writing, and in the eleventh and twelfth century, various writers put this theory put into practice. Baudri of Bour . . gueil, his correspondent Constance, and the far more famous Heloise, to name just a few examples, all incorporated the words and spirit of Ovid's 41. Conrad of Hirsau, Dialogus Super Auctores, in Huygens, Accessus ad auctores, 114. 42. On the "aetas Ovidiana" see Ludwig Traube, Vorlesungen und Abhandlungen, vol. 2, Ein . . leitung in die lateinische Philologie des Mittelalters (Munich: Beck, 1911), 113. 43. James McGregor, "Ovid at School: From the Ninth to the Fifteenth Century," Classical Folia 3 2 (1978): 50-51. 44. Wilkinson, Ovid Recalled, 378-81.

Ovid's Heroides and the Latin Middle Ages

35

heroines into their own epistolary exchanges. Although his works are con . . sidered rather obscure today, the eleventh . . century abbot Baudri of Bour . . gueil occupies a prominent place among the "Ovidian" poets of the Latin Middle Ages. 45 A manuscript now in the Vatican Library preserves 255 of his poems, which are full of homage to Ovid's amatory poetry.46 Baudri's interest in the Heroides manifested itself in the imitation Ovidian epistles between Helen and Paris that he composed, as well as in his own verse cor . . respondence. The epistolary exchange between Baudri and a young nun named Constance, in fact, takes its flirtatious tone from Ovid's epistle of Paris to Helen. 47 While Baudri's epistle to Constance sounds more like the letters of male lovers in the second part of the Heroides, Constance's reply contains allusions that link her rhetorical strategies with those abandoned heroines whose letters appear in the first part of Ovid's collection. 48 As Peter Dronke persuasively argues, Constance exploits the emotional range of the Heroides in her epistle: "The Heroides could suggest many ways of handling changes of mood, of expressing warmth and of taunting the man with coldness or neglect, flashes of blithe longing and stretches of being forlom."49 Constance Wright, moreover, sees in the young nun's let .. ter a mingling of Christian erotic discourse from the Song of Songs with the plaintive rhetoric of the Heroides as "Constance assumes the persona of both one of the abandoned heroines of Ovid's Heroides, mourning for her beloved, and of the religious languishing for the presence of Christ."5 0 In neither of these epistles do the moralistic commentaries on the Heroides 45. For an overview of Baudri's life and works, see Raby, Secular Latin Poetry, 1:337-48; and Gerald Bond, "locus amoris: The Poetry of Baudri of Bourgueil and the Formation of the Ovidian Subculture," Traditio 42 (1986): 143-19, revised as chapter 2 in The Loving Subject: Desire, Elo~ quence, and Power in Romanesque France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 4 2 - 69. 46. Baudri's works are edited in Karlheinz Hilbert, ed., Baldricus Burgulianus Carmina (Heidel~ berg: Carl Winter Universitatsverlag, 1979)' 47. On the Paris--Helen epistles, see Gerald Bond, "Composing Yourself: Ovid's Heroides, Bau-dri of Bourgueil, and the Problem of Persona," Mediaevalia 13 (1987): 89-93; on his exchange with Constance, see Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984),84-91; Bond, "Composing Yourself," 97-103; and Constance S. Wright, "Vehementer Amo: The Amorous Verse Epistles of Baudry of Bourgueil and Constance of Angers," in The Influence of the Classical World on Medieval Literature, Architecture, Music, and Cul~ ture: A Collection of Interdisciplinary Studies, ed. Fidel Fjardo--Acosta (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 154-66. 48. See Dronke, Women Writers, 87-90, for the allusions to Ariadne, Laodamia, and Pene-lope. 49. Dronke, Women Writers, 88. 50. Wright, "Vehementer Amo," 66.

36

ABANDONED WOMEN

appear to exert any particular influence; as Bond notes elsewhere about Baudri's other verse epistles, his use of the Heroides shows a "Humanistic" spirit rather than the influence of the moralizing commentary tradition of the schools. 51 For these two medieval writers, then, Ovid's Heroides did not so much function as a handbook of moral instruction, but provided rhetorical models of "quo modo aliquis per epistolas sollicitaretur" [how someone is wooed by letters]. Likewise, Ovid's Heroides also served as a potent subtext in the much more famous epistolary exchange between the ill .. fated lovers Abelard and Heloise during the twelfth century, six centuries before Alexander Pope would enshrine the lament of the medieval nun in his own Heroides .. style epistle, Eloisa to Abelard. 52 Peter Dronke argues that the historical Heloise "writes her own Heroides," adding that her first two letters to Abelard express a heroine's affective statesvehement longing, the grief of abandonment, loving admiration and reproach of Abelard, even resentment of God, who has severed Abelard from her-a range wider and deeper than in the Epistles of Ovid.53 In examining the rhetoric of Heloise's epistles, Dronke and other scholars note numerous echoes of Ovidian amatory discourse. 54 Linda Kauffman, moreover, suggests general resemblances between Heloise's epistles and those of Ovid's Hypsipyle and Ariadne. 55 More specifically, Dronke argues that Heloise's first two epistles to Abelard contain subtle echoes of Briseis's abject complaint to Achilles in Heroides 3. Like Briseis, Heloise has been made to serve a new master against her will, when she would prefer to remain in amorous servitude to her original lord and master, Abelard. 56 While some medi~val commentaries condemn Briseis for foolishly loving the man who killed her family, others suggest that she should be com .. Bond, "locus amoris," 160. On Pope's influential epistle, see Lipking, Abandoned Women, 145-52. Dronke, Women Writers, 107. See Dronke, Women Writers, 115,118,119; Linda Kauffman, Discourses of Desire: Gender Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 69-70; Phyllis R. Brown and John C. Peiffer, II "Heloise, Dialectic, and the Heroides," in Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a Twelfth--Century Woman, ed. Bonnie Wheeler (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 143-60 . 55· Kauffman, Discourses of Desire, 70. 56. Dronke, Women Writers, 126-27. 51. 52. 53. 54.

Ovid's Heroides and the Latin Middle Ages

37

mended for her steadfastness in loving Achilles even after she has become Agamemnon's captive. 57 Likewise, medieval and modern readers have viewed Heloise's own story and letters in contradictory ways: should the Heloise of the letters be considered a fool and a hypocrite for persisting in loving the earthly husband who has contributed to her undoing instead of turning to her heavenly master, God? Or should she be celebrated as an example of amorous (and marital) fidelity? While D. W. Robertson argues for the former interpretation, he acknowledges that the latter, "romantic" notion of Heloise has been far more influential, inspiring the literary imag .. ination of succeeding generations. 58 Like the mythical Ovidian heroines whose rhetoric she appropriates, Heloise's personal story of frustrated pas .. sion would become a subject for scholarly dissection and disagreement, especially after it took on a literary life of its own. As this account of their verse correspondence suggests, Baudri, Con .. stance, and Heloise all assimilate the rhetoric of Ovid's lamenting hero .. ines into literary epistles that formed part of ongoing personal exchanges. In doing so, these medieval writers thus made use of Ovid's female literary personae to construct their own epistolary identities. But Ovid's Heroides also inspired imitations that are structurally more similar to their sources-poems set in the mythological past that were never read (or heard) by their intended addressee~59 For example, a little .. known poem by that most prolific of medieval writers, "Anonymous," shows an inspired rewriter of Ovid crafting his own Heroides .. style epistle from Deidamia to Achilles. Although the poet takes Statius's Achilleid as his source for details of the love story, his handling of this material shows how deeply he has assimilated the mood and tone of the Heroides, a model that Statius's poem itself invokes. The "Deidamia Achilli" author has noticed the generic affinities between the elegiac discourses that Ovid and Statius employ, and has turned Statius's Deidamia into a full .. fledged Ovidian 57. For the typically negative view of Briseis, see Oxford Canon Lat. Class I; and Hexter, Ovid and Medieval Schooling 179. For a more positive view of Briseis, see Vat. Lat. 2732, where Briseis is "lauded for legitimate love" and Oxford, Balliol270.D.12 and Cambridge, Trinity College R. 318, where the "intention of the author is to commend her for her chastity." 58. For instance, compare the moralizing reading of Heloise and her epistles found in D. W. Robertson, Abelard and Heloise (New York: Dial Press, 1972), 119-35, with Dronke's more affec~ tive, sympathetic interpretation in Women Writers. 59. For instance, the Virgilian/Ovidian Dido inspired at least two anonymous medieval Latin poets to compose their own lamentations in the heroine's voice. See the analyses in Baswell, Vir~ gil in Medieval England, 187-89; and Peter Dronke, "Dido's Lament: From Medieval Latin Lyric to Chaucer," in Kontinuitiit und Wandel: Lateinische Poesie von Naevius bis Baudelaire, ed. U.]. Stache, W. Maaz, and F. Wagner (Hildesheim: Weidmann, 1986),364-90.

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ABANDONED WOMEN

heroine-complete with an unanswered letter. And this anonymous poet was not the only medieval reader to read Statius's Achilleid through the lens of the Heroides; Dante Alighieri also drew a similar parallel between Statius's Deidamia and Ovid's Penelope (see chap. 2). The poem, "Deidamia Achilli," consists of some 130 lines in elegiac couplets; it is preserved complete in one manuscript (now in Paris) and in fragmentary form in two others at Oxford and Stockholm. Though the text of this letter was first published in 1879, it has received almost no scholarly attention. In a 1973 festschrift, however, Jtirgen Stohlmann pro .. vides an excellent introduction, critical edition, and commentary, dating the text to the eleventh .. century aetas Ovidiana, and situating it in the milieu of French Ovidian poets working during this period, including Bau .. dri of Bourgueil, Marbod of Rennes, Fulcois of Beauvais, and Guibert of Nogent. 60 As Stohlmann's extensive annotations to his edition indicate, the poem is practically an Ovidian cento; Deidamia's letter overflows with turns of phrase plundered from the Heroides as she laments Achilles' absence, upbraids him for his involvement with the captive Briseis, and begs him to return to her. While Baudri of Bourgueil's Ovidian imitations rework material already found in the Heroides, such as the letters of Helen and Paris, the anony .. mous author of this epistle takes a more inventive approach. In writing his Heroides imitation, this poet not only mimics Ovid's style, but follows Ovid's technique of reinscribing (perhaps even one might even say reform .. ing) the work of earlier authors by filling in the gaps left in their stories. Ovid's Heroides constantly remind his audience of alternate perspectives and voices-generally female ones-missing from epic and tragic litera .. ture; likewise, the "Deidamia Achilli" author creates a female voice and a perspective that subtly challenges and corrects the conclusion of the Achilleid, which focuses on Achilles and his quest for martial glory at the expense of the domestic sphere. Moreover, the author also playfully "cor.. rects" Ovid's Heroides themselves for only telling part of a story. In the Heroides, Ovid had retold the legend of Jason from the viewpoint of two women he has abandoned: his wife Hypsipyle and her successor, the bar .. barian Medea. This pair of epistles may well have suggested to the writer that something was missing from the Heroides, for Ovid only imagines the 60. Jiirgen Stohlmann, "'Deidamia Achilli.' Eine Ovid~Imitation aus dem II. Jahrhundert," in Literatur und Sprache im Europiiischen Mittelalter: Festschrift fur Karl Langosch zum 70. Geburts tag , ed. Alf Onnerfors et al. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1973), 195-231. Since this poem is not widely known, Stohlmann's text is provided as an appendix to the book.

Ovid's Heroides and the Latin Middle Ages

39

voice of Achilles' barbarian mistress Briseis, but not the feelings of his wronged and waiting wife, Deidamia, whom Ovid had only briefly men .. tioned in his Ars amatoria. The anonymous author of "Deidamia Achilli" thus responds to this perceived Ovidian omission by writing his own epis .. tIe; in effect, he imagines what Ovid might have written had he lived long enough to read Statius's Achilleid. Modern classicists may consider Statius's Achilleid a rather obscure text, but during the Middle Ages, this fragmentary epic attained a wide circula .. tion in anthologies used to teach students grammar (the libri manuales) and thus, this text reached the same audience of beginning Latin students as Ovid's Heroides. 61 The surviving portion of Statius's poem tells the story of young Achilles' sojourn on the island of Scyros, where his mother Thetis conceals him among the daughters of King Lycomedes in order to prevent him from fighting and losing his life in the Trojan War. Achilles lives for some years dressed as a girl, and takes advantage of this situation to engage in a love affair with Lycomedes' most beautiful daughter, Deidamia, who secretly bears his son. Achilles' masculine identity remains concealed until Odysseus and Diomedes, prompted by the seer Calchas, arrive on Scyros looking for the hero. They tempt him to reveal his true identity by talking of war and by putting a shield and sword among the more domestic gifts they have brought for Lycomedes' real daughters. Once Achilles chooses the weaponry over more conventionally "feminine" presents, his true gen .. der and his relationship to Deidamia become known to all. As a result, he marries Deidamia, spends a single night with her, and the next day, sails off to the Trojan War with Odysseus and Diomedes, never to return again. Clearly, Statius's own gestures toward the Heroides helped prompt the anonymous poet's decision to rework this Statian materia into the forma of an Ovidian epistle. 62 In the Achilleid, Deidamia remains almost completely silent: the single speech she makes occurs on her wedding night with

61. For a more complete discussion of the fortuna of Statius's Achilleid in the Middle Ages, see the sources cited in chapter 2, note 9. 62. See the excellent treatment of these similarities in G. Rosati's "Momenti e forme della for~ tuna antica di Ovidio: L'Achilleide di Stazio," in Ovidius redivivus: Von Ovid zu Dante, ed. Michelangelo Picone and Bernhard Zimmerman (Stuttgart: M. and P. Verlage fur Wissenschaft und Forschung, 1994), 43-62. Though I encountered Rosati's article after my own analysis was written, his discussion in the section titled "Le Heroides e Deidamia nel ruolo di relicta," 44-54, parallels some of my own conclusions about the Ovidian echoes in Statius's text. Rosati also points out interesting parallels between Deidamia's speeches and the epistle of Laodamia to her husband Protesilaus, the first Greek warrior killed in the Trojan War.

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ABANDONED WOMEN

Achilles as she attempts to dissuade him from leaving her behind. 63 In the first section of this twenty .. five .. line speech, Deidamia laments the neces .. sity for Achilles' departure. Changing tack briefly, she orders him to go off to war. Then, hesitating, she imagines Achilles moving on to other amorous entanglements, including one with Helen of Troy, while she is mocked by Achilles' new household: "ast egomet primae puerilis fabula culpae / narrabor famulis aut dissimulata latebo" (Achill. 1.947-48: "But I shall be talked of to your serving women, the story of a young man's first fault, or disowned, I shall be forgotten").6 4 Deidamia's rapidly shifting rhetoric in this speech sounds very much as if she has prepared one of the Heroides for oral delivery: her concerns about Achilles, especially her fear that he will mock her before other women, strongly recall those of Penelope for Ulysses in the first of Ovid's Heroides: haec ego dum stulte metuo, quae vestra libido est esse peregrina captus amore potes. forsitan et narres, quam sit tibi rustica coniunx quae tan tum lanas non sinat esse rudes. fallar, et hoc crimen tenues vanescat in auras neve, revertendi liber, abesse velis!

(Her. 1.75-80)65 [While I foolishly worry about things like these, you may be captive to a stranger's love-I know you men. Perhaps you even tell how rustic a wife you have-one fit only to work the wool. I pray I am mistaken, and that my charge is slight as the breeze that blows, and that you are not free to return and choose to stay away.] 63· See Achilleid 1.93 I-55. 64. All quotations from the Achilleid are cited from the texts in J. H. Mozley, trans., Statius, voL 2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928). In his edition, O. A. W. Dilke comments on 1.947: "Mozley renders 'henchmen' (famulus); but the sense is rather that Achilles will tell stories of Deidamia to the Trojan women who become his slaves (famulae)"-and presumably, I would add, his concubines. Meheust renders this line "ces femmes de venues tes servantes" and com, ments, "Ce sont les T royennes qui seront devenues les famulae d' Achille; parmi elles, Briseis, la captive a laquelle Achille ne renoncera pas sans peine." Certainly, in the medieval tradition, Achilles was known for his amorous exploits among the Trojan women, and presumably for this reason, Dante chooses to place him with the lustful in Inferno 5. On this line see the commentary in Statius, Achilleide, ed. Jean Meheust (Paris: Societe d'Edition "Les Belles Lettres," 1971), and Statius, Achilleid, ed. O. A. W. Dilke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954). 65. Texts from the Heroides are cited from those printed in the Loeb edition of Ovid, Heroides and Amores, 2d ed., trans. Grant Showerman, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977).

Ovid's Heroides and the Latin Middle Ages

41

Likewise, in the final lines of her speech, Deidamia evokes the threat of her husband living in amorous captivity. She begs Achilles: "hoc solum, pariat ne quid tibi barbara coniunx, / ne qua det indignos Thetidi captiva nepotes" (Achill. 1.954-55: "Grant this one request, that no barbarian wife should bear you a child, that no captive woman should give unworthy grandsons to Thetis"). Here, Deidamia's words brim with dramatic irony: Statius (and his audience) are only too aware of the story of Achilles' rela .. tionship with the captured princess Briseis, the incident that sets the Iliad in motion, and of Ovid's Heroides 3, in which that same "barbara coniunx" will herself lament Achilles' faithlessness. In the final lines of book I of the Achilleid, Achilles makes this pro forma promise to Deidamia, as the nar .. rator laconically comments: "inrita ventosae rapiebant verba procellae" (Achill. 1.960: "The fickle breezes swept away his empty words"). Ironi .. cally, in the next book of the Achilleid, Achilles himself will be swept away by the winds, never to return again. In his fictional letter , the poet of "Deidamia Achilli" imagines the story four years later, when Deidamia's prophetic fears have been realized: apparently, she has already been hearing rumors about Achilles and Bri .. seis. Appropriately enough, the letter contains many reminders of the winds, sea, and ship that took both Achilles and his empty promises away, as the poet picks up various motifs from Statius and develops them further. In lines 89-90, Deidamia sadly articulates the Statian association of the fickle lover and the wind. She exclaims: "0 levis, Aeacida, plus multo fronde caduca / Plusque levis vento plusque tumente freto!" [0 grandson of Aeacus, you are much lighter than falling branches and more mobile than the wind, more fickle than the swelling sea]. Recalling Achilles' departure in line I I, she envisions his "felicia vela" [auspicious sails], but revises her impression in the following line, "Sed non et nobis prospera vela satis" [But they were not fortunate sails for me]. Continuing his echoes of the sailing motif, the poet has Deidamia twice refer to herself as a sinking ship, a poignant reminder of the departure scene in Statius's Achilleid, where Deidamia mentally sets sail with her husband: "coniunx oculisque in car .. basa fix is / ibat et ipsa freto, et puppem iam sola videbat" (Achill. 2.25-26: "His wife, with her eyes fixed on the canvas sailed upon the sea herself, for she alone saw the vessel"). In lines 53-54 of Deidamia's epistle, her metaphorical ship has run into trouble: she comments, "et venti mi deseruere secundi / Iamque bibunt medio naufraga vela freto" [The winds from behind have abandoned me, and now the shipwrecked sails drink in the middle of the sea]. Close to the end of the poem, the poet again

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ABANDONED WOMEN

invokes the ship metaphor, as Deidamia laments in lines 123-24, "Mutato subitis cedit ratis aequore ventis, / Hoc nisi succurras, victa subibit aquas" [The ship gives way when the sea is changed by sudden winds; there, unless you help, the vanquished ship will go under the waters]. In this way, the poet expands and develops Statius's hints into a recurring motif that expresses Deidamia's woe and provides an objective correlative to the alteration in Achilles' affections. Even some of the most unlikely lines of "Deidamia Achilli" can be traced to the poet's strategy of developing Statius's imagery to indicate the passage of time and of love. In lines 5 I-52, Deidamia denounces Achilles for his faithlessness, using a metaphor that may well bring a smile to read .. ers: "At si vera fides, tractabile pectus haberes / Nec raperet tauram bos aliena meum" [But if your faith were true, you would have a yielding heart, and a foreign cow would not take away my bull]. Odd as they may seem, these lines evoke the very simile Statius used to describe Achilles' first sight of and desire for Deidamia in the Achilleid: ut pater armenti quondam ductorque fururus, cui nondum totu peraguntur cornua gyro, cum sociam pastus niveo candore iuvencam aspicit, ardescunt animi primusque per ora spumat amor, spectant hilares obstantque magistri.

(Achill. 1.313-17) [As when he who will soon be the father and the leader of a herd, whose horns have not yet come full circle, perceives the comrade of his pasture, a heifer of snowy whiteness, his spirit takes fire, and he foams at the mouth with his first passion; the herdsmen, glad at heart, watch him and obstruct him.] Now that "heifer" has been replaced by a "foreign cow," even as the "pater armenti quondam ductorque futurus" has now grown into a fully adult bull with other interests-much to Deidamia's dismay. Moreover, the poet reinforces his Statian allusion with another Ovidian echo: in Heroides 5, as Oenone laments the faithlessness of Paris, she reflects on Cassandra's ear .. lier warning to her: "Graia iuvenca venit, quae te patriamque domumque / perdat! io prohibe! Graia iuvenca venit!" (5.117-18: "A Greek heifer comes to ruin you, your homeland, and your house! Ho, keep her far! A Greek heifer comes!"). The anonymous poet's deliberate echo of Cassan ..

Ovid's Heroides and the Latin Middle Ages

43

dra's mad and rather comic description of the usurping Helen in "Dei .. damia Achilli" illustrates the poet's assimilation of Ovid's witty excesses, as he captures that combination of pathos and levity that so perplexes (and so interests) critics of the Heroides. Although some of the motifs and expressions in "Deidamia Achilli" clearly flow from Statius's Achilleid, its tone and verbal texture remains dis .. tinctly Ovidian, as Stohlmann's extensive catalog of parallel lines from other letters from the Heroides reveals. In fact, one might say that among the ideas embodied in this Ovidian cento is the reiterative nature of aban .. donment, as the grieving Deidamia experiences approximately the same situation in nearly the same words as the women who have gone before her. 66 In particular, the poet invites comparisons to two of Ovid's Heroides: the epistle of Briseis, the woman whom Deidamia feels has taken her husband captive, and the epistle of Penelope, the wife of the man who took Deidamia's husband away from Scyros. In the opening lines of the letter, Deidamia begs her absent husband to wri te to her: Legitimam nuptam si dici fas sit amicam Haec tibi casta suo mittit arnica viro. Si legis, Aecide, mittentis verba puellae, Perlege missa tibi! Mitta legenda michi, Mitte legenda tuo cara cum coniuge nato! Mittere vel noli verba, sed ipse venit ("Deidamia Achilli," 1-6)

[If it be proper for a lawful wife to be called a mistress, a chaste mistress sends this to you, her master . If, descendent of Aeacus, you read these words of your mistress's sending, read well the words that have been sent to you! Send me something to read! Send words to your son and your dear wife! Or, do not send words, but come yourself!] In these lines, the poet echoes and artfully expands upon Penelope's open.. ing plea to Ulysses: "Haec tua Penelope lento tibi mittet, Ulixe; / nil mihi rescribas attinet: ipse veni" (Her. I. I -2: "Your Penelope sends these words to you, tardy Ulysses; do not write back to me-come yourself!"). At the 66. See Kauffman, Discourses of Desire, 42, for a discussion of the repetitive structure of desire, seduction, and abandonment in Ovid's Heroides.

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ABANDONED WOMEN

same time, her meditation on whether she should properly called "amica" or "legitima nupta" deftly recalls the opening of Briseis's letter, as she debates whether its is proper for her, a slave, to complain of Achilles: "Si mihi pauca queri de te dominoque viroque / fas est, de domino pauca viroque querar" {Her. 3.5-6: "If it is right to complain a little about you, my master and beloved, I shall complain a little"}. Moreover, the poem's first line, with its juxtaposition of the idea of a "legitima nupta" {a legiti . . mate wife} with an "arnica" {mistress} prefigures the denunciation of Bri . . seis that will take up the second part of the poem, as Deidamia sees that her own husband has become entangled in precisely the situation that Penelope had feared in Heroides I: he has actually become captive to a "stranger's love." As she laments in lines 81-82, "Tu nunc captiva frueris plus captus arnica / Et iacet in viduo Deidamia thoro" [You, more captured than she, delight in your captive mistress / and Deidamia lies in a widowed bed]. Like Penelope, who tells Ulysses that she lies in a "viduo ... lecto" {Her. 1.81: "widowed bed"}, Deidamia experiences the "viduo thoro" of abandonment. Still, in Deidamia's case, the phrase rings all too tragically true: unlike Ulysses, who brought him to the Trojan War, Achilles never will return safely home, and his wife will be left in a "widowed bed." In interweaving Statian motifs and Ovidian style, "Deidamia Achilli" serves as a meditation on the claims of a "legitima nupta" versus the "bar . . bara arnica," as Briseis is described in the poem's closing lines. Moreover, its implied comparison of Deidamia with the chaste and faithful Penelope promotes her cause against that of Ovid's Briseis. "Deidamia Achilli" thus functions as a corrective counterpart to the viewpoint of the "arnica" pro . . vided in the Heroides, as the poet subversively challenges Ovid's Heroides 3, much as Ovid had challenged previous authors. Finally, the poet's focus on the importance of wedded bliss over extracurricular arnor provides an interesting literary counterpart to the medieval commentaries on the Hero~ ides that emphasize the importance of "castus amor"-chaste marital love. The scholastic commentaries' schematic interpretation of the dazzling rhetoric of the Heroides sound hopelessly flat . . footed in comparison to the work of the eleventh . . century "Deidamia Achilli" author, who couches his much wittier commentary on Ovid's Heroides in the form of a poem that sometimes even seems to be trying to out . . Ovid Ovid. {Here, verses such as 77-78 spring to mind: "Cum michi sis primae, non soli, iunctus, Achille / Soli, non primo, sum tibi iuncta viro" ["While you, Achilles, have been joined to me first, but not only, I am joined to you as my only, not first, husband!"].} Nevertheless, beneath the delightful verbal play in this

Ovid's Heroides and the Latin Middle Ages

45

poem, which clearly demonstrates the poet's sustained study and sophisti .. cated command of classical literature, there lurks a more serious message about the value of fidelity and marriage. In this case, the moralizing schoolmaster's theme can be distinctly heard beneath the more baroque embellishments of this accomplished eleventh .. century classicist's inter .. textual fugue. The verse epistles of Baudri, Constance, Heloise, and the anonymous author of "Deidamia Achilli" convincingly demonstrate that Ovid's Hero . . ides provoked a variety of creative responses during the Latin Middle Ages that should be of great interest in their own right as well as for an under .. standing of how later poets approached these poems in their vernacular compositions. Nevertheless, a comprehensive history of the reception and transformation of Ovid's Heroides in the Latin literature of the Middle Ages still remains to be written. Even a survey would be far beyond the scope of this chapter. Nevertheless, I hope that this prolegomena to any future reception history of the Heroides in the Latin Middle Ages has demonstrated two things: first, that Ovid's epistolary collection was the object of careful study and imitation by medieval Latin writers and second, that the creative interpretive responses of medieval poets to Ovid's oeuvre could look vastly different from the flat .. footed didactic schema set forth in the schoolmasters' commentaries. Before turning from the transformations of the Heroides in Latin litera .. ture to the imaginative translations in the vernacular poetry of Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer that will occupy the next few chapters, I should like to pause briefly to consider one more potential intermediate step: namely, more literal translations of the Heroides into medieval vernacu .. lars. While Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer were all able Latinists and would not have needed translations to read the Heroides, they may have used them in their research, and perhaps just as important, their audiences may have read them. No Italian translation of the Heroides would have been available to Dante; the first vernacularization of Ovid's epistles, a translation usually attributed to Filippo Ceffi, appeared about 1325, four years after Dante's death. 67 Nevertheless, the poet might have known an 67. For a discussion of Ceffi and a survey of vernacular translations of the Heroides in Italy, see Egidio Bellorini, Note sulle traduzioni italiane delle "Eroidi" d'Ovidio anteriori al Rinascimento (Turin: Loescher, 1900). According to a note in Maurizio Perugi, "Chiose gallo,romanze aile 'Eroidi': Un manuale per la formazione letteraria del Boccaccio," Studi di Filologia ltaliana 47 (1989): 104, Mas, simo Zaggia is preparing a critical edition of the fourteenth, century Italian translations of the Heroides under the auspices of the Accademia La Crusca. To the best of my knowledge, that edi--

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ABANDONED WOMEN

Old French prose translation of the Heroides that probably dates from the middle to late thirteenth century. 68 Although it was unavailable to Dante, Boccaccio easily could have seen a manuscript of Ceffi's translation, which is preserved in numerous manu . . scripts. Besides Ceffi's, Boccaccio could have known the Old French trans . . lation mentioned above either directly or indirectly.69 In addition, Egidio Bellorini's survey lists several partial translations in manuscripts that may have been extant during Boccaccio's lifetime. Like Boccaccio, Chaucer may have used Filippo Ceffi's translation of the Heroides; Sanford Meech has cited various passages that may attest to Chaucer's familiarity with it.7 0 Moreover, Chaucer could have encountered a later translation in ottava rima attributed to Domenico da Monticello. However, scholars do not know precisely when Domenico wrote his translation; the earliest extant manuscript is dated 1416, well after Chaucer's death)I Therefore, in the chapters that follow, I shall generally assume that the poets were working directly from Ovid's text, though in the case of Boccaccio and Chaucer I may refer to a passage from Ceffi's translation that seems to explain a departure from an Ovidian model.

tion has not yet appeared, and until it does, the most recent edition of the translation attributed to Ceffi is Giuseppe Bernadoni, ed., Epistole Eroiche di Ovidio Nasone Volgarizzate nel Buon Secolo della Lingua (Milan, 1842). 68. See Leopold Constans, "Une traduction fran