Poetry and Philosophy in the Middle Ages: A Festschrift for Peter Dronke

POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES

MITTELLATEINISGHE STUDIEN UND TEXTE HERAUSGEGEBEN VON

PAUL GERHARD SCHMIDT

BAND XXIX

POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES A FESTSCHRIFT FOR PETER DRONKE

EDITED BY

JOHN MARENBON

BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON • KOLN 2001

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Poetry and philosophy in the middle ages / ed. by John Marenbon. Leiden ; Boston ; Koln : Brill, 2000 (Mittellateinische Studien und Texte ; Bd. 29) ISBN 90-04-11964-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is also available

ISSN 0076-9754 ISBN 9004119647 © Copyright 2001 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy itemsfor internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910 DanversMA01923,USA. Fees are subject to change. PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS

CONTENTS List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Preface Peter Dronke and Medieval Latin at Cambridge John Marenbon An Annotated List of Works by Peter Dronke bearing on the Relation between Poetry and Philosophy in the Middle Ages John Marenbon Uodalscalc-Studien IV: Mikrokosmos und Makrokosmos bei Uodalscalc von St. Ulrich und Afra (1124—um 1150) (Augsburg, Archiv des Bistums 78, fol. 72 r ) Walter Berschin Learned Knowledge of Arabic Poetry, Rhymed Prose, and Didactic Verse from Petrus Alfonsi to Petrarch Charles Burnett Alcuin, Carmen ix and Hrabanus, Ad Bonosum: a Teacher and his Pupil write Consolation Mary Garrison Cratylus Mediaevalis—Ontology and Polysemy in Medieval Platonism (to ca. 1200) Stephen Gersh Some Quantitative Poems Attributed to Columbanus of Bobbio Michael W. Herren Msifortinus: le disciple qui corrige le maitre

Edouard Jeauneau II Liber viginti quattuor philosophorum nei poemi medievali: il Roman de la Rose, il Granum sinapis, la Divina Commedia Paolo Lucentini Peter Abelard and the Poets David Luscombe

vii viii ix

1

7

19

29

63

79

99

113

131 155

VI

CONTENTS

God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages Barbara Newman Amor transformat amantem in amatum. Bernhard von Waging an Nicolaus Cusanus iiber die Vision einer reformunwilligen Nonne Paul Gerhardt Schmidt Illustrated Manuscripts of Petrarch's De Remediis Utriusque Fortunae J.B. Trapp Dichter und Philosophen—zwei zankende Geschwister Benedikt Konrad Vollmann Leda and the Swan: the Unbearable Matter of Bliss Marina Warner Originality in Medieval Latin Literature Hayo Westra The Highest Form of Compliment: Imitatio in Medieval Latin Culture Jan ^iolkowski Jean de Meun and the Castration of Saturn Jill Mann On the Text and Interpretation of Abelard's Planctus Giovanni Orlandi Una Scheda Per Ildegarde Di Bingen Claudia Leonardi Dante's Averroism John Marenbon

173

197

217 251 263 281

293 309 327 343 349

List of Contributors

375

Indices Index of Names and Places Peter Dronke and his Writings Index of Manuscripts

379 390 391

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece: Peter Dronke, c. 1971 Plate 1: (for Berschin, 'Uodalscalc'):

MS Augsburg, Archiv des Bistums, 78, f. 72r

Plate 2: (for Trapp, 'Illustrated Manuscripts'): 'Petrarch' writing De remediis utriusquefartunae. Initial to Jean Daudin's French translation, MS Paris, Bibliotheque de 1'Arsenal, 2860, f. 5v, XVXVI century. Plate 3: (for Trapp, 'Illustrated Manuscripts'): Jean Pichore, Fortune and her wheel, with Prosperite, Joye, Esperaunce, Crainte and Douleur. Frontispiece to anon. French translation of De remediis utriusque fortunae, MS Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale,fr. 225,f.l,c. 1503. Plate 4: (for Warner, 'Leda'): C. Bos, Leda and the Swan (London, British Library)

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

CCCM CCSL CSEL MGH PG PL

Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio Mediaevalis Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum Monumenta Germaniae Historica J-"P- Migne, Patrologia Graeca J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Latina

PREFACE

About three years ago, it struck me that no one had yet planned a volume to commemorate Peter Dronke's retirement from his Cambridge chair in 2001. On reflection, this general oversight did not seem at all surprising. Nothing in Peter Dronke's appearance, or manner, or pattern of work suggests a person who has nearly reached the retiring age. He seems to be at full flight, in the middle of a remarkably productive career: is not a commemorative volume for him premature? I put this question to myself, but I thought that it was still appropriate to honour Peter on his retirement with a rather special sort of Festschrift: a book which would not attempt to cover all of his many areas of interest in medieval literature, but concentrate on a particular theme related in a close way to his Cambridge teaching.

X

PREFACE

The theme chosen was the relationship between poetry and philosophy in the Middle Ages. To many, the Middle Ages seem a time when this relationship was very distant: they think, on the one hand, of philosophers such as Aquinas, Duns Scotus and Ockham, whose manner of writing is technical and dry, with little care for literary effect; and on the other hand, of the famous vernacular poets whose world was apparently that of the court rather the university. A look at almost any part of Dronke's work shows up the narrowness of such an attitude. The Middle Ages abound, not only in poetphilosophers (such as Eriugena and Abelard) and philosopher-poets (such as Dante), but also in writing which lies on the indistinct borderland between philosophical and poetic reflection, such as Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae, Bernardus Silvestris' Cosmographia and many of the writings of Hildegard of Bingen and Alan of Lille. It is to works such as these that Dronke has returned again and again (see the annotated list of his writings on the relationship between poetry and philosophy, below, pp. 7-17), and they have been at the centre of the varied and wide-ranging Medieval Latin courses he has taught in Cambridge for over thirty years. For this reason, the topic seemed especially appropriate for a Festschrift designed to commemorate Peter Dronke's activity as a teacher and scholar at Cambridge. Contributors were therefore asked to make this aspect of Dronke's work their guiding point in choosing a subject, taking the topic of the relationship between medieval philosophy and poetry in a broad sense, so as to include in its range the work of philosopher-poets, and poet-philosophers, poetry with learned, philosophical and quasi-philosophical elements and philosophical reflection on medieval poetry. Had I sollicited essays from all of Peter's many academic friends and admirers across the world, this collection would have run into a number of volumes. Instead, I restricted the project mainly to those who had a special Cambridge connection with Peter, as his pupils or colleagues here, now or in the past, or as frequent visitors to the town, and those whose work fitted especially well with the theme of the volume. Perhaps the many friends and colleagues of Peter's who were not involved in this volume will take the opportunity it leaves them to compile another Festschrift for him, at a later occasion, linked to a different aspect of his work.

PREFACE

XI

I should like to express my great gratitude to Peter's wife, Ursula, for help and encouragement with this volume, especially in providing biographical details and in supplying the happy photograph for the frontispiece. I should also like warmly to thank Loes Schouten for the intelligence, care and patience which she has shown throughout preparing this volume. Trinity College, Cambridge, June 2000

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PETER DRONKE AND MEDIEVAL LATIN AT CAMBRIDGE John Marenbon

Peter Dronke was born in Cologne in 1934. His father, himself a judge, belonged to a very distinguished legal family. His mother was a well-known actress. His father's uncompromising opposition to Nazism and his mother's Jewish ancestry made Germany unsafe for them, and in 1939 the Dronkes settled in New Zealand. It was here, in Wellington, that Peter Dronke went to school and then university. He gained his BA in 1953, and his MA the next year. In 1955, as recipient of a New Zealand travelling scholarship, he returned to Europe, taking up a place at Magdalen College, Oxford, as a student of English. Before he continued his Oxford career as a research fellow at Merton College, Dronke spent the academic year 1957 8 on an Italian government scholarship studying in Rome (and the scholarship was renewed for two long study visits in 1959). Besides reading manuscripts in the Vatican Library, Dronke met and talked frequently to Bruno Nardi, the great scholar of Dante and medieval philosophy. This friendship would continue until Nardi's death in 1968 and be one of the shaping influences on Dronke's work as a medievalist.l Although Dronke's interests were already centred on Medieval Latin literature and its many links with the vernacular, there seemed little possibility that he would be able to devote himself to this subject in a university teaching career—at least not in England. There were not here the Chairs in Medieval Latin which had been instituted in a number of continental universities, and Dronke might have expected to have had to content himself with a job teaching medieval English at one of the Oxford colleges. But, in the academic year 1960-61, Cambridge University advertised a lectureship in Medieval Latin. Dronke applied. Weeks went by without any news, and Dronke imagined that he was not even going to be called to 1

[References to writings by P.D. are to the numbers in the List given in the 'Annotated List' (below, pp. 7-17]. See 58, Introduction.

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JOHN MARENBON

interview. As it turned out, however, he was given the post and so, in October 1961, he began his 40-year Cambridge teaching career. 1961 was also the year of his marriage to Ursula Brown, a fellow medievalist who would be Reader in Old Norse at Oxford University. Dronke became a Fellow of Clare Hall (a newly founded college, for graduates, visiting scholars and resident fellows) in 1964, but— as is the case for most Cambridge University teachers outside the popular undergraduate subjects—his principal attachment was to his faculty (Modern and Medieval Languages) and rather than to a college. The University recognized Dronke's growing academic eminence by the award of a personal Readership in 1979 and a personal Chair, in Medieval Latin Literature, in 1989. (These positions were given to him, it should be added, at a time when, unlike now, there was not a general policy of making such promotions where appropriate; they were made only in cases of very exceptional merit.) Outside the University, too, Dronke has been widely recognized: he became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1984 and has been made a corresponding Fellow of various academies abroad including, most recently (1999), the Medieval Academy of America. Through the years he has travelled very widely as invited speaker at conferences, guest lecturer and visiting professor. So, for example, in 1975 (a busy year of travels even by his standards!) he gave invited lectures at the Universities of Iceland, Oslo, Bergen, Calcutta and Wellington; other years found him lecturing or speaking in Munich, Poitiers, Gottingen, Boston, Glasgow, Barcelona, Rome, Perugia, Canberra, New York, Goteborg, Florence and Toronto. Nearer home, he was Visiting Professor of Medieval Studies at Westfield College, University of London, from 1982-86. In lectures and conferences in France, Germany, Spain and Italy, Dronke would delight his colleagues by an ability to give papers and ask and answer questions both in the language of the host country and, in most cases, the language of whoever else was delivering a paper or asking a question. Although not someone who would seek out administrative tasks by choice, Dronke was co-organizer of an International conference on Hildegard of Bingen at the Warburg Institute, London in 1995,2 and of the very large Third International Medieval Latin Congress, which took place in Cambridge in September 1998.3 2

3

See 56. The proceedings are forthcoming, under the editorship of Michael Herren.

PETER DRONKE AND MEDIEVAL LATIN AT CAMBRIDGE

5

Near the beginning of his Inaugural Lecture, as Professor at Cambridge, Dronke comments that, when he arrived at Cambridge, Medieval Latin 'had already begun to be cultivated' by Frederick Raby and Frederick Brittain. But he goes on to observe that 'Raby came to medieval Latin poetry from history, Brittain from Romance languages. A formation in medieval Latin literature, such as a number of Continental universities could offer, was unknown at the Cambridge—or the England—of their youth.'4 These remarks are perhaps a little self-effacingly over-generous to his predecessors, for the achievement of making Medieval Latin into a fully-fledged, specialized, professionally-taught subject within Cambridge is almost entirely Dronke's own. 'A formation in medieval Latin literature' a la Dronke is something very special indeed—it might more accurately be called 'a formation through medieval Latin in medieval literature and thought'. It is not easy to generalize about the contents of Dronke's teaching. Dronke is at the very opposite extreme from those lecturers who are all too happy, having established a syllabus, to return year after year to their yellowing lecture notes. Each year, the set-texts—a large variety—have changed, partly to reflect the different areas of Dronke's own interests, so that his lectures have always communicated the excitement of a scholar engaged in new and exciting researches. Some of his teaching has been devoted to the more obviously literary Medieval Latin texts—poems from the Cambridge Songs and the Carmina Burana, the plays of Hrotsvitha, the poetry of Walter of Chatillon and Peter of Blois, Waltharius and Ruodlieb. But what has especially characterized his conception of Medieval Latin is the high proportion of philosophical and semi-philosophical texts he has taught—texts in the borderland region between medieval philosophy and poetry to which the present volume is devoted. Augustine's Confessiones and Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae have been mainstays of his syllabuses; they have also often featured Eriugena's Penphyseon, Abelard's Historia calamitatum, the Abelard-Heloise letters, Bernardus Silvestris' Cosmographia, works by Hildegard of Bingen and Alan of Lille, and have included writing by Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia.

4

44, p. 2 = Intellectuals [cf. Abbreviations, below, p. 7], p. 220.

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JOHN MARENBON

To follow Dronke's courses, as I did as an undergraduate in 1975-6, was suddenly to be transported from the nursery atmosphere of most medieval lectures (one of the few exceptions were the Insular Latin courses taught by Dronke's friend and colleague, Michael Lapidge) to a grown-up world of medieval scholarship. The works which figured merely as names or references in the footnotes of the standard guides to medieval literature, and as asides in most lectures, ceased to be obscure, venerable and dull background presences: they were brought vividly to life by teaching which, through its excitement and commitment, encouraged students to meet the high demands it made. Dronke paid his pupils the enormous compliment of assuming that they shared both his driving interest in medieval thought and writing and, at least to some extent, his linguistic abilities. One was expected to read widely and carefully, studying primary works in Latin and in a range of the medieval vernaculars, and consulting secondary works in the major modern European languages. One was also expected to be able to exercise independent literary and historical judgement, and to be able to think for oneself. It is hard to imagine an attitude to teaching so much at odds with the standardized and mediocre norm which anti-intellectual governments and their bureaucrats, with the connivance of many in academe, are now trying to establish; or so firmly in line with the pedagogic traditions of which Cambridge should take pride, and so well devised to stimulate and form life-long medievalists. Despite the length of his teaching career, Dronke's manner of teaching has not become dulled or depersonalized. I asked his most recent research student, Stephen D'Evelyn (an American working on the lyrics of Hildegard of Bingen), to record his impression of Dronke's lectures and supervisions:— I first met Professor Dronke when I attended his lectures on 'The Woman's Voice in Late Antique and Early Christian Texts'. He stood in front of the class, perhaps with some notes, but what was amazing is how he just talked to us about literature, not so much as students but as people, and his earnestness was somehow at the same time easy-going. He passed around books—often his own books—to show us important articles or pictures of manuscripts. He has always made his students aware of controversies and current issues in medieval scholarship, and given us a sense of what can be done and what needs doing. A few weeks later, as I was beginning to get my research project off the ground, I ran into Professor Dronke at the University Library.

PETER DRONKE AND MEDIEVAL LATIN AT CAMBRIDGE

3

I was wearing a t-shirt with a design of Celtic interlace on the front, and the first thing Professor Dronke said was, 'What a wonderful t-shirt!' As my research has continued to develop, he has helped me focus on the growing-tips of ideas. When I have met with Professor Dronke at his home to discuss my work, often as we are talking he will take a book from a shelf in his study or living-room and show me a passage that answers my question or leads me to a better question. Professor Dronke's warmth and openness are inspiring, and his understanding and articulation of understanding raise the level of inquiry from appearance to the union of the art and the essence of things.

The retirement of a figure such as Peter Dronke is always a sadness for the institution where he or she has taught for many years. In Dronke's case, there is a double reason for sadness. His faculty seems set not to refill his post. Medieval Latin will cease to be a proper subject in the University, represented by someone teaching, supervising research and championing the interests of the discipline. Just as in the bad old days, students will no longer be able to receive 'a formation in medieval Latin literature'. There is one view of Medieval Latin according to which this turn of events, although unwelcome, is nothing out of order. According to this view, Medieval Latin is just another, minor language (indeed, the official place of Medieval Latin in the MML Faculty, in the strangely named 'Department of Other Languages', alongside Dutch, Modern Greek and Hungarian, seems to support the idea). Proponents of this view consider that, since Medieval Latin has now become less popular than the medieval vernaculars, because few language students have studied Latin at school, it should give up its place in the University. Few readers of the present volume will have much sympathy for such a view. Besides, even a glance at Peter Dronke's work as a scholar and a teacher shows why the view is misguided. Reading his books and articles and, even more, studying with him, is to learn about writing and ideas which were central to medieval literature, thought and imagination. He has shown how Medieval Latin literature—in the very broad sense he has given it—is the key to understanding the world of medieval ideas. The present volume is a small tribute to him. Peter Dronke's many friends and admirers in universities throughout the world would pay him an even greater tribute could they persuade his own university that the intellectual legacy he leaves should not be lightly abandoned.

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AN ANNOTATED LIST OF WORKS BY PETER DRONKE BEARING ON THE RELATION BETWEEN POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES John Marenbon

This list is designed to provide a guide to Peter Dronke's work in the area on which these commemorative essays specially concentrate. Readers will, indeed, notice that many of the works listed below are cited and discussed in the essays which follow. The items catalogued here represent rather less than half of all Dronke's academic writings. Apart from his widely-used The Medieval Lyric^ most of what is not listed will be found in the four collections of his articles (see below, Abbreviations). The criteria for inclusion in the list below have been deliberately lax: I have tried to include all Dronke's writings, not just on Dante (even where their main point is not especially philosophical), but also on Hildegard of Bingen, since Dronke is very keen to illustrate her philosophical background, and her writing is always poetic, if not formally verse. I have also included the few pieces which Dronke has written on purely philosophical matters, since his interest in imagery and literary form is never far away. The brief annotations are intended to comment on the relevance of each item to the central theme of poetry and its relation to philosophy, and so they give a very partial glimpse of the contents of some of Dronke's books.

Abbreviations Medieval Poet P. Dronke, The Medieval Poet and his World, Rome, 1984, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Studi e Testi 164 Intellectuals P. Dronke,, Intellectuals and Poets in Medieval Europe, Rome, 1992, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Studi e Testi 183

1

Originally published London, 1968; the latest (3rd, revised and enlarged) edition is published Cambridge, 1996.

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Inspiration

P. Dronke, Sources of Inspiration. Studies in Literary Transformations, 400-1500, Rome, 1997, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Studi e Testi 196 Latin and Vernacular Poets P. Dronke, Latin and Vernacular Poets of the Middle Ages, Aldershot and Brookfield, Vermont, 1991 MA Medium Aevum MJ Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch SM Studi Medievali, 3a serie 1. Review of TTie Parlement of Foules, ed. D. Brewer, Notes and Queries 206 (1961), 475-76 [Criticizes Brewer for failing to recognize that Venus is portrayed as Venus caelestis, following the tradition of Apuleius, Martianus Capella, Remigius of Auxerre and Alan of Lille.] 2. Review of Nicolai Treveti Expositio Herculis Furentis, ed. V. Ussani, MA 30 (1961), 191-95 [Includes discussion of the letter to Can Grande della Scala, often attributed to Dante.] 3. Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric, 2 vols, Oxford, 1965-6—2nd ed., with revisions and additions, 2 vols, Oxford, 1968 [Chapter 2, 'The Background of Ideas' (I, pp. 57-97) is a very wide-ranging discussion of the intellectual background to what P.D. calls 'the courtly experience': it considers mystic writers, Hildegard of Bingen, Arab and Latin Aristotelians on the intellect (including Albert the Great and Siger of Brabant), William of Conches, Augustine, Origen and Dante.] 4. 'L'amor che move il sole e I'altre stelle', SM 6 (1965), 389-422 = Medieval Poet, pp. 439-75 [Traces the history of two conceptions of love behind this and the preceding lines of the Paradiso: a Boethian conception of love as an outgoing force, and an Aristotelian one of love as a final cause, which moves other things by their desire for it.] 5. Review of C. Leonardi, / codici di Mariano Capella, MA 35 (1965), 50 52

PETER DRONKE'S WRITINGS

9

6. 'Chaucer and Boethius' De Musicd, Notes and Queries 211 (1966), 92-93 = Inspiration, pp. 157-59 (with an added note) [On the irony of Chaucer's reference to De musica in the Nun's Priest's Tale (B4484)] 7. 'Boethius, Alanus and Dante', Romanische Forschungen 78 (1966), 119-25 = Medieval Poet, pp. 431-38 [Background to Dante's letargo at Paradiso XXXIII, 1. 94; cf. 51] 8. Review of Alain de Lille. Textes inedits, ed. M.-T. d'Alverny, New Blackfriars 47 (1966) 613-14 9. Review of P. Courcelle, La Consolation de Philosophic dans la tradition litteraire, Speculum 44 (1969), 123-8 - reprinted with revisions in Boethius, ed. M. Fuhrman and J. Gruber, Darmstadt, 1984, pp. 436-43 [Argues for Boethius' direct use of Plato.] 10. 'The Composition of Hildegard of Bingen's Symphonic?, Sacris Erudin 19 (1969-70), 381-93 [Comparison of manuscripts of the Symphonia] 11. 'Dante's Earthly Paradise. Towards an Interpretation of Purgatorio XXVIIF, Romanische Forschungen 82 (1970), 467-87 = Medieval Poet, pp. 387-405 [Discusses the background to Dante's idea of an earthly paradise and argues against a solely allegorical interpretation of Matelda.] 12. 'New Approaches to the School of Chartres', Anuario de Estudios Medievales 6 (1969 [1971]), 117-40 = Intellectuals, pp. 15-40 (with a new postscript) [Defence of the importance of twelfth-century Chartrian thinkers, especially Thierry of Chartres and William of Conches—a reply to Sir Richard Southern] 13. Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages. New Departures in Poetry 1000-1150, Oxford, 1970 - Spanish translation (La individualidad poetica en la Edad Media], Madrid, 1981

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- 2nd (English) ed, enlarged, London, 1986, Westfield Publications in Medieval Studies 1 [Chapter 4, pp. 14-49, is a detailed discussion of Peter Abelard's planctus.] 14. 'The Lament ofjephtha's Daughter. Themes, Traditions, Originality [written with M. Alexiou], SM 12 (1971), 819-63 = Medieval Poet, pp. 345-88 [Section III discusses Peter Abelard's planctus for Jephthah's daughter] 15. 'Tradition and Innovation in Medieval Western Colour-Imagery', Eranos Jahrbuch 41 (1972), 51-107 = Medieval Poet, pp. 55-103 [Includes discussion of Pseudo-Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa and, especially, Hildegard of Bingen.] 16. 'Medieval Rhetoric' in Literature and Western Civilisation II, ed. D. Daiches and A. Thorlby, London, 1973, pp. 315-45 = Medieval Poet, pp. 7-38 [A study of medieval aesthetic theories, including discussion of Augustine, Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova and DanteJ 17. Fabula, Explorations into the Uses of Myth in Medieval Platonism, Leiden/Cologne, 1974 (Mittellateinische Studien und Texte 9) [Discusses William of Conches' theory of metaphor and interpretation as put forward in his commentary on Macrobius, and the way in which images and fables are used by a variety of medieval of medieval writers, including Abelard, Hildegard of Bingen, Bernardus Silvestris and Alan of Lille.] 18. 'Chaucer and the Medieval Latin Poets' [with a section by J. Mann] in Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. D. Brewer, London, 1974, pp. 154-83

[Includes discussion of Chaucer's use of Bernard Silvestris' Cosmographia, Alan of Lille's work and Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova.] 19. 'William of Conches's Commentary on Martianus Capella' in Melanges E.-R. Labande. Etudes de civilisation medievale, Poitiers, 1974, pp. 223-35

PETER DRONKE'S WRITINGS

11

- reprinted in revised form in 17, Appendix, pp. 166-83 [Identifies a commentary on Martianus Capella in MS Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale, Conv. Soppr., 1.1.28 as being influenced by a lost commentary on this work by William of Conches.] 20. 'Eine Theorie iiber Fabula und Imago im zwolften Jahrhundert' in Verbum et Signum. Festschrift Friedrich Ohly, II, Munich, 1975, pp. 161-76 [Deals more briefly with the material by William of Conches discussed in 17, Chapter 1.] 21. 'Francesca and Helo'ise', Comparative Literature 26 (1975), 113—35 = Medieval Poet, pp. 359-85 [Argues that Jean de Meun's presentation of Heloise in the Roman de la Rose played a part in how Dante chose to present Francesca in Inferno V.] 22. 'Orizzonte che rischiari. Notes towards the Interpretation of Paradiso XIV, Romance Philology 29 (1975-76), 1-19 = Medieval Poet, pp. 407-30 [Dante's sympathy towards the ideas of two thinkers, Joachim of Fiore and Siger of Brabant, who many thought were heretics during their lifetime; their influence on the images he uses in this canto.] 23. Abelard and Heloise in Medieval Testimonies., Glasgow, 1976 = Intellectuals, pp. 247-94 [A survey and critical discussion of medieval accounts of Abelard and Heloise; provides evidence for the authenticity of the Historia Calamitatum and the personal letters.] 24. 'Theologia veluti quaedam poetria. Quelques observations sur la fonction des images poetiques chez Jean Scot' in Jean Scot Erigene et rhistoire de la philosophic, Paris, 1977, pp. 243-52 = Medieval Poet, pp. 39-53 [On how, through imagery such as that of shadows, Eriugena's 'theological and poetic intentions are united in a striking way'.] 25. Edition of Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, Leiden, 1978 [Based on MS Oxford, Bodleian Laud misc. 515, controlled

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against 7 other manuscripts. Includes long introduction, a detailed abstract, textual and explanatory notes, and indices.] 26. Review of Peter Abelard's Hymnarius Paraclitensis, ed. J. Szoverffy, MJ 13 (1978), 308-11 [Important critical comments and suggestions for improvements] 27. 'The Procession in Dante's Purgatorio\ Deutsches Dante Jahrbuch 53/54 (1978/79), 18-45 = Latin and Vernacular Poets, Item XIII - reprinted with abridgements in Cambridge Readings in Dante's Comedy, ed. K. Foster and P. Boyde, Cambridge, 1981, pp. 114-37 [Argues that the procession in Purgatorio XXIX should not be interpreted in terms of fixed allegorical equivalences: 'images take on a life of their own in the contexture of Dante's vision.'] 28. 'Heloise's Problemata and Letters. Some Questions of Form and Content' in Petrus Abaelardus, ed. R. Thomas, Trier, 1980 (Trierer Theologische Studien 38) = Intellectuals, pp. 295-322 [Argues for authenticity of Heloise's letters to Abelard on stylistic grounds, considers the personal elements in the Problemata Heloissae and places Heloise within a tradition of medieval women who cultivate a conscientia which is 'a developed inner cognizance'.] 29. 'Bernard Silvestris, Natura and Personification', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 43 (1980), 53—73 — intellectuals, pp. 41—61 [How Bernard's personification of Natura should be regarded; includes extended discussion of relationship between Bernard's goddesses and Eriugena's theophanies.] 30. 'Arbor Caritatis'1 in Medieval Studies for J. A. W. Bennett, ed. P. Heyworth, Oxford, 1981 = Intellectuals, pp. 103-41 [Wide-ranging survey of tradition of symbolic trees (as represented most famously in Middle English by Langland's Tree of Charity), including discussion of Hildegard of Bingen (an extract from the Scivias is edited in an appendix) and Ramon Llull] 31. 'Problemata Hildegardiana', MJ 16 (1981), 97-131 = Intellectuals, pp. 143-91 [On the text and sources of Hildegard's Scivias, and on unpublished writing by Hildegard in MS Berlin, Lat. Qu. 674]

PETER DRONKE'S WRITINGS

13

32. 'Abaelardiana' [with sections by J. Benton and E. Pellegrin], Archives d'histoire doctrinak et litteraire du Moyen Age 49 (1982), 273-91 [Edits poems—edited already in part in 23—linked to the story of Abelard and Heloise in MS Orleans, Bibliotheque Municipale 284 (238).] 33. Review of Guillaume de Conches. Glosae in luvenalem, ed. B. Wilson, MA 52 (1983), 146-9 34. Women Writers of the Middle Ages. A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua (f 203) to Marguerite Porete (f 1310), Cambridge, 1984 - Italian translation (Donne e cultura nel Medioevo}, Milan, 1986 - Spanish translation (Escritoras de la Edad Media), Barcelona, 1995 [Chapter 5, pp. 107-43, studies Heloise's writing and thought, with especial attention to her third letter (on female monasticism) and the Problemata. There is further defence (cf. 23 and 28) of the authenticity of the personal letters and of Heloise's genuine authorship of her third letter. Chapter 6, pp. 144-201, is about Hildegard of Bingen.] 35. 'Bernardo Silvestre' in Enciclopedia Virgiliana I, Rome, 1985, pp. 497-500 [On the commentary on Aeneid, Books 1-6, which P.D. attributes (with some reservations) to Bernard.] 36. 'Integumenta Virgilii' in Lectures medievales de Virgile, Rome, 1985 (Collection de 1'Ecole Francaise de Rome 80), pp. 313-29 = Intellectuals, pp. 63-78 [Twelfth-century philosophical interpretations of the Aeneid, especially by William of Conches and Abelard] 37. 'La creazione degli animali' in L'Uomo di fronte al mondo animale nell'alto medioevo, Spoleto, 1985 (Settimani di studio del centre italiano di studi sull'alto medioevo 31), pp. 809-48 = Intellectuals, pp. 193-217 [Contains a lengthy discussion of Eriugena, Periphyseon III.] 38. Dante and Medieval Latin Traditions, Cambridge, 1986 - Italian translation (Dante e le tradizioni latine medioevali}, Bologna, 1990

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JOHN MARENBON

[Among other things, this book studies medieval aesthetics in order to vindicate the historical accuracy of a reading of the Commedia which is flexible and imaginative, rather than rigidly allegorical; disputes attribution to Dante of letter to Can Grande; and discusses Dante's presentation of Boethius and Siger of Brabant (pp. 96-102).] 39. A History of Twelfth Century Western Philosophy, Cambridge, 1988 (editor) [Chapters by 16 contributors, including P.D., on all aspects of twelfth-century philosophy; the chapter most concerned with linking poetry and philosophy is that by W. Wetherbee, 'Philosophy, Cosmology and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance'] 40. 'Thierry of Chartres' in 39, pp. 358-85 [Argues that 'Thierry's originality lay in combining an extreme Platonism . . . with a far-reaching naturalism.'] 41. Biobibliographies, in 39, pp. 443-57 [Brief accounts and bibliographies of the main twelfth-century thinkers] 42. 'L'Apocalisse negli ultimi canti del Purgatorio' in Dante e la Bibbia, ed. G. Barblan, Florence, 1988, pp. 81-94 = Inspiration, pp. 117-30 [On Dante's use of the Apocalypse of St John in the Purgatorio, including discussion of Dante's relation to Boethius and Alan of Lille, and to Richard of St Victor and Joachim of Fiore] 43. 'Symbolism and Structure in Paradiso XXX', Romance Philology 43 (1989), 29-48 = Latin and Vernacular Poets, Item XIV [Discusses relation of Dante to Boethius and Alan of Lille, especially with regard to 'paradoxes of divine presence'.] 44. Hermes and the Sibylls. Continuations and Creations, Inaugural Lecture, Cambridge, 1990 = Intellectuals, pp. 219-44 [Concentrates especially on the importance of Hermes and the Sibylls to twelfth-century thinkers such as Abelard and Alan of Lille, and on the twelfth-century pseudo-hermetic Liber XXIV philosophorum.]

PETER DRONKE'S WRITINGS

15

45. 'Eriugena's Earthly Paradise' in Begnff und Metapher. Sprachform des Denkens bei Eriugena, ed. W. Beierwaltes, Heidelberg, 1990 (Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Ahandlungen 1990), pp. 213-29 [Discusses Eriugena's attitude to non-literal biblical interpretation and to metaphor; considers his discussion of paradise and suggests possible relationships to Bernard Silvestris' Cosmographia and Gottfried of Strassburg's Tristan.] 46. 'Las cidades sinbolicas de Hildegarda de Bingen' in La simbolica do espafo, ed. Y. Centeno and L. de Freitas, Lisbon, 1991, pp. 29-42 - expanded, English version: 'The Symbolic Cities of Hildegard of Bingen', The Journal of Medieval Latin 1 (1991), 168-83 47. 'Platonic-Christian Allegories the Homilies of Hildegard of Bingen' on From Athens to Chartres. Neoplatonism & Medieval Thought. Studies in Honour of Edouard Jeauneau, ed. H. Westra, Leiden/New York/ Cologne, 1992, pp. 381-96 = Inspiration, pp. 61-81 [On the allegories in Hildegard's Expositio Evangeliorum, and the background to their language and ideas—especially those influenced by the Christian Platonic tradition of Origen and Ambrose] 48. 'Heloise, Abelard, and Some Recent Discussions' in Intellectuals, pp. 323—42 (not previously published) [Critique of arguments, especially those of Hubert Silvestre, purporting to show that the Abelard—Heloise correspondence is not authentic; discussion of Janson's investigation into cursus in the correspondence—P.D. argues that a study of cursus does not point to a single author for the whole collection] 49. Verse with Prose: from Petronius to Dante. The Art and Scope of the Mixed Form, Cambridge, Mass./London, 1994 [Among the prosimetra discussed are Martianus Capella's De nuptiis, Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae, Methodius' Symposium and Dante's Vita Nuova] 50. Nine Medieval Latin Plays, Cambridge, 1994 (Cambridge Medieval Latin Classics 1) [Includes, pp. 147-84, Hildegard of Bingen's Ordo uirtutum, which

16

JOHN MARENBON

is edited, translated in parallel, and provided with an introduction and brief explanatory notes.] 51. 'The Conclusion of Dante's Commedia', Italian Studies (1994), 21-39 = Inspiration, pp. 131—55 [Close reading of Paradiso 33; includes detailed discussion of relation of Dante's writing here to Boethius and to Alan of Lille, as well as to Virgil; cf. 7] 52. 'Medieval Sibyls: their Character and their Auctoritas', SM 36 (1995), 581-65 [Medieval discussions of Sibylls and versions of Sibylline prophecies] 53. Edition of Hildegard of Bingen, Liber divinorum operum, (with A. Derolez), Turnhout, 1996 (CCCM 120) [Critical edition, including appartus of sources and an extensive, discursive introduction] 54. Dante's Second Love. The Originality and Contexts of the Convivio, Leeds, 1997 (The Society for Italian Studies, Occasional Papers 2) [Studies both the Neoplatonic (the Liber de causis, the Hermetic Asclepius and Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae) and Aristotelian (Albert the Great, Aquinas, Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia) context of the Convivio; argues against the views according to which, in the fourth book of the Convivio, or in the Commedia, Dante turns against what he now considers to have been his excessive devotion to philosophy.] 55. 'Sibylla-Hildegardis: Hildegard von Bingen und die Rolle der Sibyle' in Hildegard von Bingen, Prophetin durch die ^eiten, ed. E. Forster (Freiburg/Basel/Vienna, 1997), pp. 109-18 56. Hildegard of Bingen. The Context of her Thought and Art, ed. (with C. Burnett), London, 1998 (Warburg Institute Colloquia 4) [Proceedings of a major conference on Hildegard, which bring together the papers of 12 contributors; see 59 for P.D.'s own contribution.] 57. Growth of Literature: the Sea and the God of the Sea, Cambridge, 1998 (H. M. Chadwick Memorial Lectures 8) (with U. Dronke)

PETER DRONKE'S WRITINGS

17

[Contains a long discussion of the interpretation and background of Eriugena's unusual use of sea imagery at Periphyseon I, 743C744A] 58. Etienne Gilson's Letters to Bruno Nardi, Florence, 1998 (SISMEL Carte e Carteggi 1) [Edition of twelve letters which Gilson wrote to Nardi between 1937 and 1961, in which Gilson shows his admiration for Nardi's work and discusses the question of Dante's Averroism; P.D. also provides an introduction which is a both vivid and affectionate memoir of his own conversations with Nardi, and a sketch of Nardi's outlook and achievement.] 59. 'The Allegorical World-Picture of Hildegard of Bingen. Revaluations and New Problems' in 56, pp. 1—16 [Analyses the workings of some of Hildegard's allegories and explores her relation to learned sources.] 60. 'Hildegard's Inventions. Aspects of her Language and Imagery' in Hildegard von Bingen in ihrem historischen Umfeld, ed. A. Haverkamp, Mainz, 2000, pp. 299-320 [On Hildegard's invented words and the view of the universe they suggest]

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UODALSCALC-STUDIEN IV: MIKROKOSMOS UND MAKROKOSMOS BEI UODALSCALC VON ST. ULRICH UND AFRA (1124-UM 1150) (AUGSBURG, ARCHIV DES BISTUMS 78, FOL. 72R) Walter Berschin

Eine der Faszinationen des abendlandischen XII. Jahrhunderts besteht in der Fiille der Gestalten, Menschenbilder und Weltentwiirfe. Sie sind oft gegensatzlicher Natur und gewifj auch verschiedener Statur. Der Abt Uodalscalc von St. Ulrich und Afra (1124—um 1150) gehort nicht zu den ganz GroBen seiner Epoche;1 aber er ist mit seiner vielseitigen Begabung so etwas wie ein Uorno universale gewesen und hat als erster der Reichsabtei mit den Grabern der romischen Martyrin Afra und des ottonischen Bischofs Ulrich zu einer kiinstlerischen Ausstrahlung verholfen. Seine sichtbarsten Werke waren fur mehrere Jahrhunderte die Bildprogramme der Wandmalereien, Fastentiicher und Wandteppiche, mit denen er den romanischen Klosterkomplex geschmuckt hatte.2 Spatestens am Ende des XV. Jahrhunderts, als die spatgotische Hallenkirche aufgerichtet wurde, die heute noch zusammen mit Dom und Rathaus das Stadtbild von Augsburg dominiert, und als auch die Klosterbauten erneuert wurden, sind diese Kunstwerke verschwunden. Die Geschichtsschreiber des Klosters3 haben sich bemiiht, wenigstens die Texte, mit denen der Abt Kirche und Kloster versehen hat, festzuhalten. Auf einem bislang nicht publizierten Blatt des 1 W. Berschin, Uodalscalc-Studien I (= Uodalscalcs Vita S. Kuonradi im hagiographischen Hausbuch der Abtei St. Ulrich und Afra), Freiburger Dio'zesan-Archiv 95, (1975), pp. 82-106. Id., Uodalscalc-Studien II (= Historia S. Kuonradi), ibid., pp. 107—128. Id., Uodalscalc-Studien III: Historia S. Uodalrici, in Tradition und Wertung, (Festschrift Franz Brunholzl) (Sigmaringen 1989), pp. 155-164. Eine vorlaufige Zusammenfassung ist erschienen in Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters. Verfasserlexikon X 1999, col. 109-113. 2 C. Lehmann-Brockhaus, Schriftquellen zur Kunstgeschichte des 11. und 12. Jahrhunderts jur Deutschland, Lothringen und Italien (Berlin 1938), Personenregister s.v. Udalscalcus, bes. nr. 2575sqq. U. Kuder, Das Fastentuch des Abtes Udalscalc mit Ulrichs- und Afraszenen, in pinxit/sculpsit/fecit, (Festschrift Bruno Bushart) (Berlin 1994), pp. 9-23. 3 Allen voran der Friihhumanist Sigismund Meisterlin (f um 1497), cf. P. Joachimsohn, Die humanistische Geschichtsschreibung in Deutschland I, (Bonn 1895), p. 126sqq.

20

WALTER BERSCHIN

Catalogus abbatum monasterii S. Udalrici et Afrae Augustensis* von Wilhelm Wittwer (1449-1512) ist ausnahmsweise nicht nur ein Text Uodalscalcs, sondern auch das dazugehorige Bildprogramm skizzenhaft iiberliefert. Es handelt sich um fol. 72 der Handschrift5 Augsburg, Archiv des Bistums 78. Die entsprechende Partie des Papiercodex wurde von dem Monch Wilhelm Wittwer6 im Jahr 1494 geschrieben;7 die Schrift des hier zu diskutierenden Blattes 72 stammt aber nicht von seiner Hand.8 Wittwer war sich wohl bewuBt, daB seine schwere gotische Bastarda-Schrift9 nicht geeignet war, das filigrane Bild der UodalscalcKomposition wiederzugeben und hat deshalb einen Schreiber mit zierlicherer Hand gebeten, diese Arbeit fur sein Buch zu leisten.10 Die Bildelemente auf dem 21,8 X 15,5 cm messenden Papierblatt sind zwei vertikal angeordnete Kreisfiguren, eine groBere und eine kleinere. Vier Tondi mit Kopfprofilen blasender Winde sind beschriftet11: Oriens Septentrio

Meridies Occidens

4 Ed. A. Steichele, Archiv fur die Geschichte des Bisthums Augsburg 3 (1860), p. 15-437. Unser Blatt 72 ist aus der Edition ausgenommen. Es ist kurz erwahnt bei N. Biihler, Die Schriftsteller und Schreiber des Benediktinerstiftes St. Ulrich und Afra in Augsburg wdhrend des Mittelalters, Diss. Miinchen (gedruckt Borna-Leipzig 1916), p. 21, n. 2. 5 Alte Signaturen St. Ulrich und Afra E 78; olim 8 b 3. Ausfuhrlich beschrieben und paraphrasiert von dem letzten Bibliothekar der Abtei St. Ulrich und Afra P. Braun, Notitia Historico-Literaria de codicibus manuscriptis in bibliotheca Liberi ac Imperialis Monasterii ad SS. Udalricum et A/ram III (Augsburg 1793), pp. 1-34; kurz notiert bei B. Kraft, Die Handschriften der Bischoflichen Ordinariatsbibliothek in Augsburg, (Augsburg 1934), p. 92. 6 Uber diesen schreibfreudigen Monch zuletzt N. Horberg, Libri Sanctae Afrae (Gottingen 1983), p. 173 sqq. 7 Die Datierung der einzelnen Partien des Catalogus auf die Jahre 1493 bis 1497 ergibt sich aus den aktuellen Jahreszahlen, die Wittwer immer wieder eingestreut hat, z.B. ed. Steichele, pp. 45 und 62. Ubersichtliche Darstellung der Zeitverhaltnisse bei P. Joachimsohn, %wr stddtischen und klosterlichen Geschichtschreibung Augsburgs im ftinfzehnten Jahrhundert (Bonn 1894), p. 35. 8 Das Blatt ist nicht nachtraglich eingefiigt, sondern gehort von Anfang an zum Codex. Dr. Rolf Schmidt in Augsburg hat den Sachverhalt nochmals gepriift: unser fol. 72 ist das vierte Blatt der alten Lage d. 9 Eine Abbildung der Schrift Wilhelm Wittwers findet sich (unerkannt) bei A. M. Albareda, L'abat Oliba, jundador de Montserrat, (Montserrat, 2. Auflage 1972), tab. 11 (= Augsburg, Staats- und Stadtbibliothek 4°218, fol. 5r). 10 Ich mochte die Vermutung auBern, daB dieser Schreiber identisch ist mit demjenigen, der in gotischer Minuskel die Vita S. Uodalrici in Augsburg, Staats- und Stadtbibliothek 4°218, fol. 16r~51r, imjahr 1494 geschrieben hat, cf. W. B./A. Hase, Gerhard von Augsburg, Vita S. Uodalrici (Heidelberg 1993), pp. 41-43. 1 ' Statt Septentrio schreibt der hier und an anderen Stellen sorglose Kopist Septembtrio.

MIKROKOSMOS UND MAKROKOSMOS BEI UODALSCALC

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Augsburg, Archiv des Bistums Ms. 78, fol. 72r, geschrieben und gezeichnet nach einer Vorlage aus dem XII. Jahrhundert a. 1494 von einem Monch von St. Ulrich und Afra fur die Abtchronik von Wilhelm Wittwer. Papier, originale GroBe 21,8 x 15,5 cm. VerofFentlicht mit freundlicher Genehmigung des Archivs.

22

WALTER BERSGHIN

Sie machen klar, dafi der obere groBe Kreis den maior mundus der Welt darstellt, der untere den minor mundus des Menschen. Ein hexametrisches Tetrastichon iiber die zwolf Winde steht an der Spitze der Tafel12: Sunt Subsolanus, Vultumus et Eurus ab ortu, Circinus occasum, ^ephirus et Favonius affiant., Atque die medio Notus extant et Affricus, Auster, Proveniunt Aquilo, Boreas et Chorus ab alto.

Von den vier Windfiguren gehen jeweils drei Halbverse aus, die die einzelnen Winde charakterisieren. Die von den Ostwinden und den Nordwinden (linker Bildrand) gesprochenen Verse sind jeweils ein Hemiepes; die den Westwinden und den Siidwinden (rechter Bildrand) in den Mund gelegten stellen jeweils eine zweite Hexameterhalfte (nach der Penthemimeres) dar. Versuchsweise sei aus diesen Elementen ein hexametrisches Hexastichon hergestellt, wobei der als Sprecher fungierende Wind jeweils iiber der Zeile erscheint13: Subsolanus

Chorus

Flans nubes gigno.

Crebro fulmina iacto.

Eurus

Zephirus ,

Sub te, Phebe, tono.

Tellurem floribus orno.

Vulturnus

Favonius

Omnia desicco.

Sufflando

nubila pando.

Circius

Affricus

De me grando venit.

De me quoque terra calescit.

Boreas

Auster

Frigora conficio.

Pluvias cum flamine mitto.

Aquilo

Notus

Constringo nubes.

Magnos educo calores.

Bei den Ostwinden steht unter den Halbversen Inconuptio: Exaltare super celos

12 GroB- und Kleinschreibung sowie u/v sind hier und an den folgenden Stellen ausgeglichen. Die Merkverse sind (etwas abweichend) gedruckt bei S. de Renzi, Collectio Salernitana I, (Neapel 1852), p. 446. 13 In der Handschrift steht vers. 4 (der Edition) grande statt grando, zu vers. 6 Nothus (wie fast regelmaBig im Mittelalter) statt Notus. Wenn die Quelle dieser (von Uodalscalc verfaBten?) Wind-Charakteristiken Isidor, De natura rerum c. 37 (ed. J. Fontaine, Bordeaux 1960, p. 295sqq.) ist, dann miissen die Beischriften von Subsolanus und Eurus gegeneinander ausgetauscht werden.

MIKROKOSMOS UND MAKROKOSMOS BEI UODALSGALC

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iiber den Westwinden Anima: Simul rapiemur unter den Siidwinden Inmortalitas: Sic semper cum domino erimus iiber den Nordwinden Corpus: Renovabis faciem terre. Die Inschrift im groBen Kreisrund lautet14: Ordine celorum pensate gradus animorum. Qui thronus auctoris pro sorte parantur amoris. Hier wird, wenn wir die Stelle recht verstehen, die von Isidor v. Sevilla, De natura rerum, vertretene Himmelsvorstellung paraphrasiert: Es gibt mehrere Himmel oder Himmelszonen. In den oberen Himmeln hat Gott den «Kraften der geistlichen Geschopfe» ihren Platz angewiesen.15 Die oberste Zone des groBen Kreisbildes ist als Supremum celum bezeichnet und in dem ihn begrenzenden Halbkreisbogen interpretiert als Intellectuals celum interioris oculi. Er gehort zur Sphaera dei.}6 Unter ihr verlauft die waagrechte Linie des dritten Himmels mit der Inschrift Tertium celum corporee corrupcionis expoliacio et sancte trinitatis confessio. Der zweite Himmel ist der Durchmesser des groBen Kreises: Secundum celum virtutum consummacio et dei dilectio. 14 tronus statt thronus in der Hs.—Ubersetzungsversuch: «Erkennt in der Ordnung der Himmelszonen die Stufen der Geisteskrafte. Sie werden eingerichtet als Thron des Schopfers nach der Rangordnung der Liebe». 13 in eo virtutes spiritualium creaturarum constituit, Isidor, De natura rerum c. 13, ed. J. Fontaine, p. 225. 16 Hs. Spera. Unter Spera dei ist in einem anderen Bildprogramm des Uodalscalc eine Majestas domini, wie es scheint, zu verstehen: Hie pingatur spera dei, ed. A. Steichele, p. 104.

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WALTER BERSGHIN

Der erste Himmel schneidet waagrecht die untere Kreishalfte: Primum celum creatoris agnicio et proximi dikctio. Darunter erscheint der sichtbare Himmel bezeichnet als Aqueum celum duppliciter irriguum.17

Aus dieser Zone gelangt man mit Hilfe der sieben Gaben des Geistes (cf. Is 11,2sq.) senkrecht nach oben bis in den zweiten Himmel: Diametws septiformis spiritus, und in den dritten Himmel, wenn dazukommt et fidei temarius.™

Konzentrisch steht im groBen Himmelskreis ein kleinerer mit dem Inschriftenband: ^pdiacus duodecim apostolorum discursus. Igneum celum amoris intimi.19

In Form eines X laufen die Linien der Tag- und Nachtgleiche durch den maior mundus. Auch sie sind theologisch befrachtet: Solsticialis lima dux divine descensionis et ascensionis porta. Equinoctialis linea veteris et novi testamenti concordia.

Zwischen innerem und auBerem Weltenkreis bewegen sich sechs Planeten20: lupiter sive Pheton Saturnus alias Phenon Mars alias Pyrion Mercurius sive Stilbon Hesperus sive Vespertinus Phiriona alias Luna 17 Hs. irrigui. Die Vorstellung geht auf die biblische Schopfungsgeschichte zuriick: divisitque aquas, quae erant sub firmamento, ab his, quae erant super firmamentum (Gn 1, 7). Ambrosius, Hexaemeron II 2, 4sqq. diskutiert, wie man das verstehen konne. 18 Cf. Beda, Commentarii in pentateuchum Deut. c. 21, PL 91, 389: Ternario autem numero fides ostenditur. 19 Hs. interimi. Cf. Gregor d. GroBe, Homilia in evangelia XXX 5, ed. R. Etaix, (Turnhout 1999), p. 261: In dexter a ergo dei lex ignea est, quia electi. . . amoris intimi facibus inardescunt. 20 Quelle scheint hier Isidor v. Sevilla, Etymologiae III 71,20sq., zu sein. Statt Stilbon steht in der Hs. Stelbon, statt Phenon (Phaenon) plerion, statt Pyrion daphirion, statt Hesperus zoerius.

MIKROKOSMOS UND MAKROKOSMOS BEI UODALSCALC

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Die Sonne steht im Mittelpunkt und bildet mit Phetonia (?) und Phoebus ein Dreieck im Zentrum der Himmelswelt: Sol

Phetonia

Phoebus

Dazu gehort das hexametrische Planetengedicht links unten auf dem Blatt21: Octo sunt spere, quas sic poteris retinere: Luna stat in primo Mercuriusque secundo, Ac Venus in terno, Sol lucet orbe quaterno, Mars nitet in quinto, sed lupiter ordine sexto, Satumus celo septimo deftngitur alto, Octavo celo tibi stellas esse revelo.

Das Kreisbild des minor mundus tragt im Rahmen die auf Isidors von Sevilla De natura rerum22 verweisende Inschrift Rota nativitatis humane."23 Die acht lanzettfbrmigen Speichen des Rades Felder sind beschriftet: Naturak peccatum^ Personals peccatum Voluntarium peccatum Personalis voluntas Despoliacio nature Propago peccatrix Naturalis egestas Naturalis voluptas

21

Es handelt sich hier um eine (von Uodalscalc?) in leoninische Hexameter gebrachte Fassung von Isidor, De natura rerum c. 23, ed. J. Fontaine, pp. 257sqq. Vier Handschriften mit demselben Initium nennt H. Walther, Initia carminum ac versuum medii aevi posterioris latinorum (Gottingen 1959, Erganzungsband 1969), nr. 13136. Alle diese (Basel A. XI. 67. fol. 183v-184r, saec. XV, Braunschweig 151, fol. 144V, saec. XV, Frankfurt Earth. 136, fol. 365V, saec. XV, und Wien 1365, fol. 83V, saec. XIII) haben aber einen von Uodalscalc abweichenden Text: Octo sunt spere, quas sic poteris retinere:/Celum stellatum, Saturnus, lupiter et Mars,/Sol, Venus; has sequitur Mercurius, ultima Luna. 22 Fur das Buch, das sieben Kreisbilder (rotae) enthalt, ist seit dem VIII. Jahrhundert der Beiname Liber rotarum belegt. 23 Hs. natiuitates. 24 Uber den Unterschied von naturak peccatum und personals peccatum Odo v. Tournai (Cambrai), De peccato originali II, PL 160, 1085.

26

WALTER BERSCHIN

AuBen 1st das Rad begleitet von den Begriffen Natura Homo Masculus et

Persona Homo Femina

Diese Figur wird erlautert durch die folgenden rechts unten fortlaufend geschriebenen Hexameter, deren Verse 1—5 und 8 leoninisch gereimt sind. Vers 6 und 7 reimen untereinander und zwar sowohl in der Penthemimeres als auch am Ende (versus collaterales)23: Non duo sunt unum, licet efficiant sibi mum: Est homo nature proprium, persona sed Ade; Sed quia naturam persona tenet sibi iunctam, Max ut Adam peccat, hominis generate cruentat, 5 Damnat et infantes nature damna luentes. Sic persona ruit, quod agit perversa voluntas, Sed natura luit, quod agit virtutis egestas. Him homo nee surget, relevans deus hunc nisi purget. Der Mensch kann sich also aus diesem Kreislauf von ererbter («natiirlicher») und personlicher Schuld nur erheben, wenn Gott ihn reinigt und emportragt. Deshalb gehen der groBe Kreis und der kleine nicht ineinander iiber, sind nicht verzahnt, ja beriihren sich nicht einmal, weil ein Abstand bleibt zwischen Gotteswelt und Mensch. Er ist an den Stellen, wo die beiden Rader einander nahekommen, noch betont durch die Worte Sepulchrum corrupcionis

Fovea peccati.

Anders als seine um eine Generation jiingere Zeitgenossin Hildegard von Bingen, sieht Uodalscalc maior mundus und minor mundus nicht in eins; es ist bei ihm nicht so, daB es nur eines sehenden Auges bedarf, um den Kosmos im Menschen, den Menschen im Kosmos und den menschgewordenen Gott in beiden zu erblicken. Makrokosmos und Mikrokosmos im Weltbild Uodalscalcs getrennte Kreise. Am rechten Rand liest man die Sphragis des Kiinstlers Illam figuram composuit Uodalscalcus inclitus huius monasterii abbas quartus decimus,

25 Die Reimtechnik laBt sich mit der von Uodalscalc in De Eginone et Herimanno angewandten vergleichen, MGH Scriptores XII, p. 447sq.; cf. W. Meyer, Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur mittellateinischen Rythmik I, (Berlin 1905), p. 96.

MIKROKOSMOS UND MAKROKOSMOS BEI UODALSCALG

27

die auf Uodalscalc selbst zuriickgehen kann.26 Inwieweit das Werk als originell gelten darf und wie es sich in die Geschichte des philosophischen Nachdenkens liber das groBe Thema von Mikrokosmos und Makrokosmos einordnet, das wird noch vergleichender Arbeit bedlirfen. Hier ging es darum, den Entwurf bekanntzumachen und eine erste Sichtung der Form, des Inhalts und der Quellen zu versuchen. Niemandem kann dieser Versuch passender gewidmet werden als Peter Dronke, dem wir neben vielen erhellenden Studien zum Hohen Mittelalter die unentbehrliche History of Twelfth Century Western Philosophy verdanken.

26

Uodalscalc hat seine Arbeiten gern «signiert», cf. Uodalscalc-Studien I, p. 90 mit tab. 2.

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LEARNED KNOWLEDGE OF ARABIC POETRY, RHYMED PROSE, AND DIDACTIC VERSE FROM PETRUS ALFONSI TO PETRARCH1 Charles Burnett

'Est etiam' iuxta cuiusdam sapientis proverbium 'melior veritas, etsi difficulter adepta, quam error facile obvians'

Much has been written about the place of Arabic poetry in the literary history of Western Europe. Debate has focused in particular on the poetic genres of the zqjal and muwashshah which flourished in the Iberian peninsula, and the kharja, written in the vernacular or 'Low variety' of discourse, which served as an envoi to the muwashshah.;2 Peter Dronke has made valuable contributions to this debate.3 It is not my aim to carry this discussion further, or to become involved in the question of what effects Arabic poetry may have had on the development of Medieval European poetry in general.4 Rather, this article seeks to draw attention to the not insignificant number of Arabic texts of poetry (shi'r), rhymed prose (sqjc], and didactic verse that were known directly to Latin scholars in the Middle Ages, and to see what they made of these texts. 1 I am very grateful for the help of Frank Bezner, Roger Boase, Julia Bray, Luc Deitz, Michael Evans, Geert Jan van Gelder, Pat Harvey, Dag Nikolaus Hasse, Paul Kunitzsch, Derek Latham, Barry Taylor, Jo Trapp, Jane Whetnall, Fritz Zimmermann and Irene Zwiep. The opening motto comes from Hugo of Santalla's Liber Aristotilis (a translation of a non-extant Arabic astrological text, probably Masha'allah's Alkitdb al-murdi), II 17, 14, ed. D. Pingree and C. Burnett (London 1997), p. 29. 2 See The Kharjas: A Critical Bibliography, ed. R. Hitchcock (London 1977), with Supplement no. 1 by R. Hitchcock and C. Lopez-Morillas (London 1996), and D. Hanlon, 'A Sociolinguistic View of haz.1 in the Andalusian Arabic muwashshah'', Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 60 (1997) 35-46. 3 E.g., Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric (2 vols, Oxford 1968), I, pp. 26-32, 'Nuevas observaciones sobre las jaryas Mozarabes', El Crotalon 1 (1984) 99-114, The Medieval Lyric, 3rd ed. (London 1996), ch. 3, and 'Latin Songs in the Carmina Burana: Profane Love and Satire' (forthcoming, concerning the similarity of a quotation within the poem 'Veris dulcis in tempore' to a kharja). 4 On this question, see M. R. Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History:

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Hermann the German's Latin Anthology of Arabic Poetry

One of the most interesting revelations in recent years is the 'Latin anthology of Arabic poetry' that William Boggess extracted from Hermann the German's translation of Averroes's Middle Commentary on Aristotle's Poetics., known as the Poetria Aristotelis, made in Toledo in 1256.5 Averroes had replaced Aristotle's examples from Greek poetry with sixty-eight passages from Arabic poets. These included pre-Islamic poets (the 'Jahiliyya' poets, e.g., Ibn Zuhayr, Imru'u '1Qays and an-Nabigha), Umayyad poets (e.g., Dhu'r-Rumma, Qays al-Majnun b. cAmir and Layla al-Akhyaliyya), and 'Abbasid poets (e.g., al-Mutanabbf, who is the poet cited most frequently). Hermann omitted a few examples and made some substitutions, but in twentynine cases he translated the Arabic poetry into Latin prose, and in a further fourteen cases he attempted a poetic translation. Boggess observes that the prose renderings of the Arabic poetic fragments show the same verbum de verbo style as the rest of Hermann's translation, but that the poetic renderings are considerably freer, especially in their 'liberal paraphrasing, inversion of word order and broad expansion'.6 One fragment is translated into a hexameter: nonne vides mortem? nulli scio parcere mortem.7

For the other translations Hermann provides rhymed lines with a varying number of syllables. One may take, as an example, his translation of a passage from a poem by Imru'u '1-Qays: . . . ut quod posuit de hoc in carmine suo Imrulkaysi poeta in colluctatione duorum amantium: Estuavi ad utendum ea more fluctuantis aque, dum maritum senseram obdormisse;

A Forgotten Heritage (Philadelphia 1987), and R. Boase, 'Arabic Influences on European Love-Poetry', in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. S. K. Jayyusi (Leiden 1992), pp. 456-82. 3 W. F. Boggess, 'Hermannus Alemannus' Latin Anthology of Arabic Poetry', Journal of the American Oriental Society 88 (1968) 657-70. The text is edited in De arte poetica . . . accedunt Expositio media Avenois sive 'Poetria' Hermanno Alemanno interprete et specimina translations Petri Leonii, ed. L. Minio-Paluello, Aristoteles Latinus, XXXIII (2nd edition, Brussels and Paris 1968), pp. 41-74. 6 Boggess, 'Hermanns Alemannus' Latin Anthology', p. 669. 7 Ibid., p. 668; Poetria Aristotelis, ed. Minio-Paluello, p. 69. Arabic: Id ard 'l-mawta yasbiqu 'l-mawta shay'un ('I do not see anything that can forestall death').

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at ilia, cum susurrio recalcitrans, me, inquit, velles interisse non advertens vigiles nondum decubuisse? cui ergo: vexor incendio quod vellem extinxisse.8 The most intricate rhyme scheme is used in his translation of another fragment from Imru'u '1-Qays:9 . . . dixerunt quidam de poemate Omrilkaisi quasi reprehendendo ipsum cum dixit: ac si non ascendissem unquam causa solacii equum, aut non tenuissem puellam ornatam monilibus mecum; et ac si numquam dolium plenum vini meracissimi salutassem, et equos post multos recursus iterum ad cursum non incitassem.

I Boggess compares some of these renderings with examples found in Medieval Latin poetry.10 He admits, however, that only the rhymeschemes, and not the metre, can be compared. In fact, closer examples can be found in the Latin rhymed prose that would have been familiar to Hermann from the writings of Anselm of Canterbury, Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter the Venerable, Peter Abelard, and the rhymed offices of his own day.11 The Arabs too used rhymed prose (saj'}

in contexts that will be discussed below, but rhyme was also

the most conspicuous element (for Latin readers) of Arabic poetry.

8 Poetria Aristotelis, ed. Minio-Paluello, p. 62. C. H. L. Bodenham, 'Petrarch and the Poetry of the Arabs', Romanische Forschungen 94 (1982) 167-78 (see p. 175), points out what may be a felicitous translation by Hermann: 'estuavi' not only suggests a strong emotion (as in the opening of the Archpoet's 'Estuavi intrinsecus'), but also the 'seething' of the high tide. 9 Poetria Aristotelis, ed. Minio-Paluello, p. 70. 10 In the last example, Boggess compares the rhyme scheme to that of Eberhardus Alemannus' Laborintus: 'Hermannus Alemannus' Latin Anthology', p. 668. 11 Rhyme was one of the rhetorical figures (colons rhetorid) discussed by Antique and Medieval Latin writers; cf. Bede, De schematis et tropis sacrae scripturae, PL 90.178 = Rhetores Latini minores, ed. C. Halm (Leipzig 1863), p. 610: 'homoeoteleuton, similis terminatio dicitur figura quoties media et postrema versus sive sententiae [i.e., in a verse or a prose context] simili syllaba finiuntur'; cf. E. Norden, Die antike Kunstprosa, 2 vols (Berlin 1918) pp. 760-3, 866-79. See also J. Martin, 'Classicism and Style in Latin Literature', in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. R. L. Benson and G. Constable (Oxford 1982), pp. 537-68 (pp. 541-3 discuss the rhetorical 'epistolary prose' of Peter the Venerable); for Abelard see D. R. Hewlett, 'Some Criteria for Editing Abelard', Archwum Latinitatis MediiAevi5\ (1992-3) 195-202; for rhymed offices see A. Hughes, Medieval Music: The Sixth Liberal Art (Toronto 1974; index s.v. 'rhymed office').

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these are what are known amongst the Arabs as 'cords' (asbdb} and 'pegs' (awtad}^ and among the Greeks as 'syllables' and 'feet'; 3 then the Investigation concerning the lengths of the verses and hemistichs and by how many letters and syllables (maqtac) each verse (bayt) is completed in each metre; 4 then it distinguishes the perfect metres from the deficient and which metres are more comely and beautiful and more enjoyable to listen to. 5 The second part is the consideration of the ends of the verses in each metre: whether they end with them [i.e. the Arabs] in a single way or in several ways, and which of them is complete, which superabundant, which diminished, and which ends with one letter alone kept throughout the whole poem (shi'r), and which of them with more than one letter kept in the poem (qasidd), and how many is the greatest number of letters that can form the ends of the verses with them.17 6 Then it teaches, in the case of those which have more than one letter, whether it is allowable or not for some letters to be substituted with others equal to them in time of articulation (of these it is allowable for them to exchange them with letters equal in time). 7 The third part Investigates which expressions that are unsuitable for use in non-poetic discourse (qawl) are (to be) regarded as suitable for use in poetry.

In Gerard of Cremona's literal translation this passage appears as follows:18 1 Et scientie quidem canonum versuum secundum modum qui convenit scientie lingue tres sunt partes, quarum una comprehendit pondera usitata in versibus eorum, simplicia sint pondera sive composita, 2 deinde comprehendit compositionem lltterarum almuagemati (in the margin: id est alfabet) ex unaquaque specie quarum pervenit unumquodque ponderum eorum et sunt que dicuntur apud Arabes cause et radices, et apud Grecos cesure et pedes. 3 Deinde inquirit de quantitatibus versuum et imnorum et ex quantis litteris et cesuris completur metrum in unoquoque pondere; 4 deinde discernit pondera completa a diminutls et que pondera sunt pulcriora et meliora et delectabiliora ad audiendum.

16 Cf. W. Wright, A Grammar of the Arabic Language, 2 vols (3rd ed., Cambridge 1964), II, p. 358: 'The constituent parts of a foot are called sabab consisting of two letters . . . and watid consisting of three letters.' The awtdd form the invariable metrical core of the different feet and metres, while the asbdb are variable 'stuffing'; see D. Kouloughli in G. Bohas, J.-P. Guillaume and D. Kouloughli, The Arabic Linguistic Tradition (London and New York 1990), ch. 7 ('Metrics'). 17 I.e., according to the poetic conventions of the Arabs. 18 Gonzalez Palencia's edition, Catdlogo de las ciencias, pp. 126-7, has been checked against the manuscript he uses: Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, lat. 9335, fol. 144rb~va.

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these are what are known amongst the Arabs as 'cords' (asbab} and 'pegs' (awtdd}^ and among the Greeks as 'syllables' and 'feet'; 3 then the Investigation concerning the lengths of the verses and hemistichs and by how many letters and syllables (maqtac) each verse (bqyt) is completed in each metre; 4 then it distinguishes the perfect metres from the deficient and which metres are more comely and beautiful and more enjoyable to listen to. 5 The second part is the consideration of the ends of the verses in each metre: whether they end with them [i.e. the Arabs] in a single way or in several ways, and which of them is complete, which superabundant, which diminished, and which ends with one letter alone kept throughout the whole poem (shi'r), and which of them with more than one letter kept in the poem (qasida), and how many is the greatest number of letters that can form the ends of the verses with them.17 6 Then it teaches, in the case of those which have more than one letter, whether it is allowable or not for some letters to be substituted with others equal to them in time of articulation (of these it is allowable for them to exchange them with letters equal in time). 7 The third part Investigates which expressions that are unsuitable for use in non-poetic discourse (qawl] are (to be) regarded as suitable for use in poetry.

In Gerard of Cremona's literal translation this passage appears as follows:18 1 Et scientie quidem canonum versuum secundum modum qui convenit scientie lingue tres sunt partes, quarum una comprehendit pondera usitata in versibus eorum, simplicia sint pondera sive composita, 2 deinde comprehendit compositionem litterarum almuagemati (in the margin: id est alfabet) ex unaquaque specie quarum pervenit unumquodque ponderum eorum et sunt que dicuntur apud Arabes cause et radices, et apud Grecos cesure et pedes. 3 Deinde inquirit de quantitatibus versuum et imnorum et ex quantis litteris et cesuris completur metrum in unoquoque pondere; 4 deinde discernit pondera completa a diminutls et que pondera sunt pulcriora et meliora et delectabiliora ad audiendum.

16 Cf. W. Wright, A Grammar of the Arabic Language, 2 vols (3rd ed., Cambridge 1964), II, p. 358: 'The constituent parts of a foot are called sabab consisting of two letters . . . and watid consisting of three letters.' The awtad form the invariable metrical core of the different feet and metres, while the asbab are variable 'stuffing'; see D. Kouloughli in G. Bohas, J.-P. Guillaume and D. Kouloughli, The Arabic Linguistic Tradition (London and New York 1990), ch. 7 ('Metrics'). 17 I.e., according to the poetic conventions of the Arabs. 18 Gonzalez Palencia's edition, Catalogo de las ciencias, pp. 126-7, has been checked against the manuscript he uses: Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, lat. 9335, fol. 144rb—va.

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5 Et pars quidem secunda est aspectus in finibus versuum in unoquoque pondere19 quis eorum sit secundum modum unum et qui eorum sint secundum modos plures. Et de istis quis sit completus, et quis additus et quis diminutus, et qui fines serventur (in the margin: id est, una littera in finibus omnium versuum cum una et eadem littera in versibus omnibus), et qui eorum cum litteris pluribus una in imnis et quot plures littere sunt que sunt fines versuum apud eos; 6 deinde docet de illis qui sunt cum litteris pluribus, an liceat ut permutentur de loco quarumdam litterarum alie equales eis in tempore quo proferuntur, aut non. Et declarat in istis quarum litterarum est via ut serventur eedem in imno toto et de quibus earum licet ut permutentur cum litteris equalibus eis in tempore. 7 Et pars quidem tertia inquirit de eo quod est conveniens ut utatur in versibus ex dictionibus apud eos, de illis quibus non est conveniens uti in oratione que non est versus. On the whole this is a good translation. But it is doubtful whether Gerard's readers would have realised that 'pondera' meant 'metres' rather than 'weights', and that 'cesure' meant 'syllables' rather than 'caesuras' in the modern sense.20 It may have been because of its unintelligibility to a Latin audience that the archdeacon Dominicus Gundissalinus, Gerard's colleague in Toledo cathedral, considerably abbreviated and modified the same passage in his own version of the Enumeration of the sciences, writing merely:21 Scientia vero regularum ad versificandum docet quae syllaba longa, quae brevis, postea de pedibus et cesuris. Deinde (+ de) variis generibus metrorum. Varietatem autem metrorum facit numerus, vel (et) diversitas pedum, et appellatur a nomine pedis vel inventoris (et appellantur vel a nomine pedis vel a nomine inventoris). Unfortunately, al-Farabl did not provide any examples of poetry to illustrate the points made in his text. It is to the poetry itself that we may now turn. 19 The abbreviation for 'scilicet' (which has no equivalent in the Arabic) has been added above the line, perhaps indicating that the translator intended to add an explanation of the technical meaning of 'pondus' here. 20 The use of the word 'cesura' for '(long) syllable', however, also occurs in J. C. Scaliger, Poetices libri septem, ed. L. Deitz (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1994-), I, p. 439, n. 9 and p. 511, n. 64. 21 Gonzalez Palencia, Catdlogo de las ciencias, p. 90. The variant readings of Gundissalinus's De scientiis (ed. M. Alonso Alonso, Madrid-Granada 1954), which is virtually the same at this point, are given in italics. The last phrase is obviously a substitution from Gundissalinus's knowledge of Latin prosody in which the metre is named from the foot (e.g., 'iambic') or the inventor (e.g., 'Sapphic'); cf. Isidore,

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Petms Alfonsi and Adelard of Bath

Nearly one hundred and fifty years before Hermann made his 'Latin anthology of Arabic poetry' another scholar had produced Latin versions of several verses of presumed Arabic origin. This was Petrus Alfonsi, who was baptised in Huesca on June 29th, 1106, having previously been a Jewish scholar brought up in the environment of Arabic learning.22 After his conversion he composed a very popular collection of proverbs and admonitions, fables, verses, and bird and animal parables, based on Hebrew and Arabic material, which he called 'the education of the clerk' (Disciplina clericalis). He included amongst this material ten citations of 'versus' or of the work of a 'versificator', and two further citations of lines of poetry without attribution.23 In his description of the subject-matter of Disciplina clericalis he appears to be saying that the verses are Arabic,24 and in the first citation (no. 1 below) he indicates that the 'versificator' is an Arab (the subsequent citations give no indication of the identity of the poet). Etymologiae, ed. W. Lindsay (Oxford 1911), 1.39.5: 'Metra vel a pedibus nuncupata . . . vel ab inventoribus . . .'. 22 See C. Burnett, 'The Works of Petrus Alfonsi: Questions of Authenticity', Medium Mvum 66 (1997) 42~79. 23 For these citations, and an English translation, see Appendix below. In addition, poets feature in two of the exempla in the Disciplina clericalis: nos. Ill and IV. 24 'Libellum compegi, (1) partim ex proverbiis philosophorum et suis castigationibus, (2) partim ex proverbiis et castigationibus Arabicis et fabulis et versibus, (3) partim ex animalium et volucrum similitudinibus': Disciplina clericalis, ed. A. Hilka and W. Soderhjelm (Helsinki 1911), p. 2:2~5. The problem is whether 'Arabicis' goes with all the nouns of the second division, or only with those that precede it. Barry Taylor argues, convincingly in my view, that it applies to all the nouns: 'Wisdom Forms in the Disciplina clericalis of Petrus Alfonsi', La Coronica 22 (1993-4) 24-40 (see p. 25). Beyond the hints in Taylor's article, the nature and sources of the poetry in the Disciplina clericalis have not been explored, as far as I am aware, which contrasts to the situation concerning Petrus's exempla and proverbs on which there is an extensive literature: e.g. H. Schwarzbaum, 'International Folklore Motifs in Petrus Alphonsi's Disciplina clericalis', Sefarad 21 (1961) 267-99, 22 (1962) 17-59 and 321-44, 23 (1963) 54-73, E. Hermes, Petrus Alfonsi, Die Kunst, vemunftig & leben (Disciplina Clericalis) (Zurich 1970) (English translation, The Disciplina Clericalis of Petrus Alfonsi, transl. P. Quarrie, London-Henley 1977), P. Kunitzsch, review of Hermes's book, in ^eitschrift der Deutschen morgenldndischen Gesellschaft 121 (1971) 370-4, O. Spies, 'Arabische Stoffe in der Disciplina Clericalis', Rheinisches Jahrbuch fur Volkskunde 21 (1973) 170-99, U. Marzolph, Arabia ridens. Die humoristische Kurzprosa der Jriihen arab. Literatur im internationalen Traditionsgeflecht, 2 vols (Frankfurt 1992), articles in Estudios sobre Pedro Alfonso de Huesca, ed. M.-J. Lacarra (Huesca 1996), and F. Raddle, 'In der Alhambra der GroBen Vernunft: zum Werk des Petrus Alfonsi', in Ex nobili philologorum officio: Festschrift fur Heinrich Bihler, ed. D. Briesemeister et al. (Berlin 1998), pp. 47-60.

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It is plausible, then, to suppose that all the verses that Petrus refers to are from Arabic sources.25 This assumption would seem to be confirmed by the fact that verse no. 5 is clearly a version of a poem by al-Muctamid ibn cAbbad, the poet-king of Seville (1039-95).26 This poem has not been transmitted in any Arabic anthology, but is an isolated item in a Hebrew text of the thirteenth century, where it is written in Hebrew characters to illustrate the source of the preceding item, which is a translation of the same poem into the Hebrew language made by Meir Abulafia (1170-1244).27 There is other evidence that Petrus used Arabic texts written in Hebrew script.28 His knowledge of this poem, therefore, might indicate that it had become popular amongst Jewish readers already within a few years of al-Muctamid's death. Other poems quoted by Petrus are reminiscent of al-Muctamid's work,29 and it is possible that poems by the king of Seville had a wider distribution in the Iberian peninsula than the extant Arabic anthologies suggest.

25 Taylor, 'Wisdom Forms', p. 26, considers that the citations in verse form must be from unidentified Latin sources, but it is difficult to separate the verse and prose citations of the 'versificator' in terms of either contents or context. Petrus's versification is in general rudimentary and sometimes faulty. Only the single full-length poem (Appendix no. 12) could possibly be regarded as of a different origin from the rest. 26 The identification was made by T. A. Perry in The Moral Proverbs of Santob de Carrion: Jewish Wisdom in Christian Spain (Princeton 1987), pp. 79-80, and repeated in Taylor, 'Wisdom Forms', p. 25 and n. 8. 27 Haim Schirmann has published both Abulafia's translation and the opening of al-Muctamid's poem in Ha-shira ha-'ivrit bi-Sefarad u-v-Provens, 2 vols (Jerusalem 1955-6) II, p. 274, n. 336. Schirmann claims this is the earliest proof of an Arabic poem being translated into Hebrew. The fact that this is 'an isolated curiosity' is stated in R. P. Scheindlin, Form and Structure in the Poetry of al-Muctamid ibn 'Abbad (Leiden 1974), pp. 29-30. Perry, The Moral Proverbs, p. 80, argues that Abulafia's translation of al-Muctamid's poem is the form in which Santob de Carrion (fl. 1355—60) knew the poem. 28 For Petrus's reading of the Apologia of Pseudo-Kind! in Judaeo-Arabic (Arabic in Hebrew script) see P. Sj. van Koningsveld, 'La Apologia de al-Kindi en la Espana del siglo XII, huellas toledanas de un "animal disputax"', in Estudios sobre Alfonso VI y la reconquista de Toledo. Actas del II Congreso Intemacional de Estudios Mozdrabes, Toledo, 20-26 Mayo 1985 (Toledo 1989). 29 The nearest parallel I can find is mentioned in no. 9. The ruin of a noble family (no. 4 below) and subservience to fate (nos 10-12) are topics that conform to al-Muctamid's preoccupations after he was deposed and exiled, but the subjects are described in too general a way to be related directly to the Seville ruler's condition.

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Petrus translates five of the nine 'versus' into prose; the remaining six into verse: nos 4 and 8 are each two lines of hexameters, nos 10, 11 and 12 are in elegiac couplets (the metre of no. 7 is unclear). 'Versus' nos 4, 8, 10 and 11 have the nature of proverbs.30 Both hexameters and elegiac couplets were very commonly used in Latin proverbs. Of examples contemporary with Petrus Alfonsi are Eberhard of Bethune's variation of the Proverbia Senecae, written in hexameters, and Peter Abelard's Carmen ad Astralabium, written in elegiac couplets.31 The prose renderings, on the other hand, give the appearance of being rather literal translations from a Semitic language.32 Verse was also used by Petrus Alfonsi's associate and, possibly, pupil, Adelard of Bath, who included two poems of his own composition in his introduction to the seven liberal arts, the De eodem et diver so. What is curious is that Arabic verse appears, in Latin transcription, in the margins of a set of astronomical tables on which both scholars were working: the tables (xi\v: ('Nicht wahr, Freund, zieht sie [= die Lust bereitende Dichtung] dich nicht auch an, und am meisten, wenn sie im Homeros erscheint?').

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des 15. Jahrhunderts sah sich der Augsburger Patrizier Sigismund Gossembrot4' gezwungen, AngrifTen auf die Dichtkunst entgegenzutreten.48 Ahnlich hatte Jacob Locher (Philomusos)49 sich 1509 mit Gedichten zur Wehr zu setzen contra fmrem ordinis Dominici ad Ingolstat locutum furiose contra poetas.30 Aber das waren Riickzugsgefechte, die den Lauf der Geschichte nicht mehr entscheidend veranderten. Der iocus setzte sich in der Folgezeit—auch gegen puritanischen Widerspruch—durch, auBerhalb des literarischen Bereichs noch entschiedener als innerhalb, so dass in der zeitgenossischen Jugendkultur das 'SpaB haben' fast zum Lebensinhalt geworden ist. Vielleicht ware es aber gar nicht so schlecht, wenn sich dem wieder ein bisschen philosophischer seriositas hinzugesellen wiirde.

47 Dazu F. Worstbrock, 'Gossembrot, Sigismund', in Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters. Verfasserlexikon, III (1981, 2. Aiiflage), S. 105-108. 48 HS Miinchen, Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek, Clm 3941, enthalt auf fol. 163 169 das 1458 geschriebene responsum des Wiener Theologieprofessors Konrad Soldner an Gossembrot invehens in poetriae defensores theologiamque defendens und auf fol. 75—77 derselben Handschrift steht Gossembrots 1466 geschriebene epistola ad mag. Ludovicum de Dringenberg scolarum rectorem in Schletztstat in defensionem poetarum ne penes vulgare proverbium mendaces opinentur. 49 Vgl. W. Kiihlmann, 'Locher, Jacob', in W. Killy (Hg.), Literaturkxikon VII (1990), S. 317-318. 50 Clm 24835, fol. 118-120.

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LEDA AND THE SWAN: THE UNBEARABLE MATTER OF BLISS Marina Warner

In the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the 'instructive romance" of Francesco Colonna published by Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1499, the protagonist becomes the privileged spectator at a series of four triumphs: the chariots, encrusted with gems and intaglios and arrayed in rich marbles with magical properties, are fabulously and extensively described, the author giving happy rein to his very particular combination of sybarite relish and accumulative pedantry. The first triumphal car is being pulled by 'six lusty centaurs' ridden by musician nymphs; its centrepiece features Europa, carried off by the bull. On the second triumphal chariot, the side panels show a nativity scene; like many Renaissance images of the birth of a saint or hero (John the Baptist, for example; Saint Anne giving birth to Mary), it is set in a contemporary bedroom with midwives and helpers gathered around. In this case, the mother has laid two eggs: 'there issued from one egg a little flame, and from the other two bright stars.'2 On the corresponding panel on the car's other side, the attendants are depicted carrying off the eggs to a temple of Apollo and praying to the oracle for the meaning of this portent. The enigmatic answer comes: 'Uni gratum mare alterum gratum man' ('One loves the sea; the sea loves the other').3 This second triumphal chariot, drawn 1 Peter Dronke, Introduction to facsimile of Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Zaragoza 1981) ((Colleccion Mnemosine 1), pp. 7-75, at p. 24 (reprinted in id. Sources of Inspiration. Studies in Literary Transformations, 400-1500 (Rome 1997) (Storia e letteratura: Studi e Testi 196), pp. 161-240 as 'Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia and its Sources of Inspiration': this quotation, p. 179). 2 Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, ed. and trans. J. Godwin (London 2000), p. 164. 3 Colonna, Hypnerotomachia, p. 164. ''Uni gratum mare alterum gratum man': I wonder if it is possible that the engraver omitted letters, and that the message should read 'Uni gratum amare alterum gratum amari'? This does not entirely fit the destinies of Helen and Clytemnestra, but could possibly refer to the selfless refusal of Pollux to enjoy immortality if Castor was denied it. The flame rising from the egg does not point forward to burning Troy, but rather evokes the pointed flames of a torch of victory, or a heart on fire.

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by six bejewelled and betasselled white elephants, is crowned by a tableau vivant of Leda and the swan: 'The swan was kissing her with its divine beak; its wings were down, covering the bare parts of the noble lady, as with divine and voluptuous pleasure the two of them united in their delectable sport. . . Nothing was lacking to contribute to the increase of delight.' This erotic performance, the author continues, 'gave especial pleasure to the onlookers, who responded with praise and applause.'4 After Leda, the pageant of Jupiter's loves and, by implication, the triumph of Love, or Cupid, continues with a car on which another nymph appears, 'extremely happy to see drops of gold falling into her virginal lap.'5 After this, anonymous invocation of Danae, it is the turn of Semele, also unnamed, to bring to a close the theatrical procession and this chapter in Colonna/Poliphilo's extended and often anguished meditation on the mysteries of love. Regarding the band of youths dancing and singing near the pageant, the author exclaims, 'I would have dared, almost, to utter a foolish thought: that the infernal spirits suffer no other torment than envy of those here.'6 The trope of the triumphal pageant is related to ekphrasis, and indeed, while Colonna/Poliphilo is clear that the side panels of the chariots are images, the narrative does more than imply that the figures on top are acting and moving: only the most ingenious of automata could return the swan's caresses. Yet the lovers' lifelikeness could remain an impression made on the beholders through the dazzling enargeia of the images, as vivid and highly wrought as the caparisons and trappings of the vehicles. The indeterminacy is important: it helps to communicate the dream state of the teller, and of all the people and things he sees. But as ambiguous ekphrasis, suspended in the oneiric state beyond both the reality of artefacts and the actuality of experience, Poliphilo's vision interestingly echoes two earlier, comparable sequences about Jupiter's dalliance: the scenes woven into the tapestry of Arachne in The Metamorphoses of Ovid, and the procession of shades of dead lovers whom Odysseus encounters in the underworld. * Colonna, Hypnerotomachia, p. 166. Leda is identified here as 'Theseus' daughter', which is perhaps a misprint of the typesetter, or simply a mistake on the part of the author, for Thestios' daughter. See Apollodorus, The Library of Greek Mythokgy, trans. Robin Hard (Oxford 1997), 120-1. 0 Colonna, Hypnerotomachia, p. 167. 6 Dronke, Introduction, p. 40.

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Cornells Bos, after Michelangelo, 'Leda and the Swan'. © Copyright The British Museum, London.

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When Arachne defies Minerva, the goddess in high fury challenges the brilliant human weaver to a contest of skills. She traces in her web stories of Olympian feats, followed by examples of mortal hubris and their dire consequences. Arachne, by contrast—her spirit unbroken by the incensed goddess—embroiders her tapestry with a seemingly infinite series of gods' rapes in a variety of shifting shapes. The loves of Jupiter begin the sequence, with Leda 'reclining under the swan's wings'7—a pose elaborated but nevertheless reprised in Colonna's tableau. This single phrase is the only mention of Leda's story in the whole of the Metamorphoses, an economy which comes as a surprise considering the importance of Ovid in the humanist transmission of tales of divine metamorphosis and the remarkable recurrence of Leda as a figure in the Renaissance imagination, as I hope to show. Whereas Daphne inspires one of the poet's most poignant and vibrant dramatic passages, Leda is only referred to, within the story of Arachne's transformation, as part of a living, fabricated image spun from the fingers of a defiant young woman. Arachne includes several more episodes in her 'gallery of divine indiscretions'8—including unremarked seductions of Neptune, Apollo, Bacchus and even Saturn, and the work is so accomplished that 'You would have thought that the bull was a live one, and that the waves were real waves.'9 But Minerva tears Arachne's work to pieces, and hits her over the head with her 'shuttle of Cytorian boxwood' (sounds harder than hard: Ovid being precise on the details).10 Arachne, in shame and despair at the goddess's assault, begins to hang herself. Through pity then, Ovid writes, Minerva sprinkles her with some juice of Hecate's and changes her into a spider to dangle and spin as it were for ever: metamorphosis as a form of talion, but better to be an insect than a corpse. The poet draws no conclusions from Arachne's defeat; however, the move from Minerva's depiction of revenge punishments on humans who presume against the gods, to Arachne's vivid narration of divine deceptions and disguises, with its repeated use of the word 'to trick', evince his ironical stance towards the Olympians. He also shows sympathy for his protagonist and evident admiration for her skill and 7

Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book VI, trans. Mary M. Innes (Harmondsworth 1973; first published 1955), p. 137. 8 Ted Hughes, 'Arachne', in Tales from Ovid (London 1997), pp. 174-82. 9 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1. 137. 10 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 11. 137-8.

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'her fine show of spirit'.11 Furthermore, he tellingly does not award the palm to the goddess, thus leaving the clear possibility that Arachne's web surpassed Minerva's. In their battle of wits, Leda, as a marginal participant in this story, takes her place beside many other piteous Ovidian victims of the arbitrary power and antimomian tendency of Jupiter and the other gods. In the Odyssey, among 'the women who had been the wives or the daughters of princes' in the flock of the dead whom Odysseus encounters in Hades, he sees Leda 'wife of Tyndareus, who bore him those stout-hearted twins . . ."2 Homer does not allude to Zeus' change of shape into a swan, or, indeed, to his paternity of Helen and Clytemnestra, but only of the male twins, Castor and Polydeuces; and he singles out for remark their special privilege: 'each is a living and a dead man on alternate days, and they are honoured like the gods."3 That Leda is mortal, and her mortality attested by no less a source than Homer also comes as a surprise; unlike other protagonists in tales of metamorphosis (Callisto, for example), her story does not climax in a catasterism, or another exalted alteration. Leda does not herself metamorphose, but dies, and appears to Odysseus in Hades, where the hero hears one of her sister shades, Tyro, tell how she was seduced by Poseidon, who said to her 'Lady . . . be happy in this love of ours, and as the year completes its course, since a god's embrace is never fruitless, you will give birth to beautiful children . . ."4 The concourse of female shades in the Underworld, solemnly praised and honoured by the hero and the poet, are identified through their consorts, however casual or violent, and through the inevitable fruits of divine unions. The apparitions of the Homeric underworld are not exactly recapitulated by Arachne, nor, later, by Colonna, but, as ghosts, they partake of their later reappearances' insubstantial character; the phantoms whom Odysseus cannot touch, cannot feel, as he discovers when he tries to embrace his mother, exist in an analogous, imaginary, unfleshed dimension to Poliphilo's dream pageants, and Arachne's

11

Ovid, Metamorphoses, I 138. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. E. V. Rieu (Harmondsworth 1982; first published 1946), Book XI, 1. 179. 13 Homer, Odyssey, 1. 179. 14 Homer, Odyssey, 11. 177-8. 12

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embroideries: they appear to be alive, but it is a mere semblance: they are become insubstantial. The images are figments, the shades similar illusions of presence. With regard to the story of Leda and the swan, this concept of the figment and the related questions about a figment's status, can help to yield new insights into the famous story of Zeus' metamorphosis, and its later variations. For the swan and the egg are linked, as symbols, within a history of ideas about quickening into life, about the infusion of form into matter and the activity of spirit in generation: this is a myth about making, about materialization, and it correspondingly inhabits rhetorical and narrative modes where language is doing the work of making the real, of making it up, and drawing attention to the powers of words—and by extension, of images— to bring things into being. The god Zeus/Jupiter, generating life, operates as a fictive agent, and in performing these acts of creation, he demonstrates his power of fashioning himself into now an animal, now a bull, now a cloud or a shower of gold—into figments of himself. It is suggestive that the scenes of these transformations are so frequently celebrated in the form of artifacts, not real events, as if the poets intuited the correspondence between metaphor's work of metamorphosis and the gods' changes of shape.15 Dronke emphasizes Poliphilo/Colonna's poetic elusiveness, and the eggs, one with a flame and the other with stars, that are laid in the images on Leda's triumphal car are not identified; however the stars might allude to Castor and Pollux' translation to the heavens, while the flame might possibly look forward to the fatal future of Helen and Clytemnestra, as Yeats does in his famous sonnet Leda and the Swan (1923): A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead.16 The oracle's pronouncement does not however help to confirm this, and remains properly a riddle. However, the unfolding of the mystery, from the laying of the eggs, their being offered at the temple and the hints of their future destiny can help illuminate compara-

15 Spenser in The Faerie Queene also describes the loves of Jupiter as depicted, on a tapestry: see Book III, Canto XI, 11. 28-46. 16 The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London 1973), 241.

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ble enigmas about generation and spirit that are present in later, famous Italian Renaissance paintings of Leda and the Swan by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Correggio. In the Hypnerotomachia, the lovers are eventually united in the temple of Venus of Living Nature, Venus Physizoa, and, as Edgar Wind noted, several years ago, the story of Leda in Colonna's romance occurs in a sequence of theogamies allegorizing the elements 'subject to the physizoa Venere': namely, Europa, Earth, Leda, Water, Danae, Air and Semele, Fire."7 (I would switch two of these identifications: it seems to me, that Danae belongs to the element of water, even though Jupiter descends on her from on high, and Leda to the airy element, for reasons I give below.) Wind also pointed out that this comparatively rare epithet, physizoos describes the Dioscuri in both the Odyssey and the Iliad. Hatched from the shell, the twins are somehow doubly made of living natural matter, combining physis and zoon', they are, in today's imagery, authentic, guaranteed organic material. In the temple of Venus Physizoa, during the liturgy which plights Poliphilo to his true love Polia at last, the priestess sacrifices a pair of swans, the bird that provides the goddess with her airborne mount in classical Greek art, that in widespread cultures is thought—like the stork—to bring babies, and whose dying song associates it with love.18 The engraving in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili precedes the dates suggested both for the beginning of Leonardo's interest in Leda (1504) and Michelangelo's lost painting (1529-30), although Michelangelo's reclining nude, covered by the swan who is billing her lips with his beak, bears more than a little resemblance to the Poliphilo image.19 The kiss was depicted in this way on several antique reliefs and gems that were known at the time, so the similarity is perhaps not worth remarking.20 The painting in the National Gallery in London,

17

E. Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (Harmondsworth 1967; first published 1958), p. 168. 18 On the symbolism of swans, see J. Chevalier - A. Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire des symboles (Paris 1975), pp. 172~5; G. de Tervarent, Attributs de symboles dans I'art profane: Dictionnaire d'un langage perdu (1450-1600) (Paris 1997), pp. 332-4. 19 See J. Wilde, 'Notes on the Genesis of Michelangelo's Leda', in Fritz Saxl: Memorial Essays, ed. D. J. Gordon (London 1957), pp. 270-80; M. Hirst, Michelangelo and His Drawings (New Haven-London 1988), pp. 73-4. 20 Cf. P. Bober and R. Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources (London 1986).

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attributed to Michelangelo, very badly rubbed, and almost certainly not by his hand, does not show the eggs Leda has laid, but the magnificently drawn engraving after Michelangelo by Cornelis Bos in the British Museum includes one unbroken shell, transparently revealing Helen curled up within, foetus-like, while behind this first egg, a second has hatched the twins Castor and Pollux. The light falls on one of the boy babies in the background, while his twin, behind him, stands in shadow, as if hinting at their alternating mortality and immortality in the future. This engraving reveals Michelangelo's Leda as a powerfully muscled androgyne, in her heavy recumbency very close to the monumental figure of Night on the Medici tombs; she lies in an arc, tightly intertwined with the bird's wings (wonderfully conveyed by Bos's drawing—every feather aquiver), her head fallen forwards in slumber, and her left arm falling languidly, as if she were dreaming the swan's presence, not assaulted by him (see p. 265). Leonardo's interest in the theme developed into two compositions, one showing Leda on one knee in the position of a classical Venus anadyomene, the other showing her standing, beguilingly musing with downcast eyes, at the sight of her babies, who have hatched at her feet. The swan extends a wing to cradle her and she twists her body into his downy serpentine curves. The paintings are both lost—if the artist ever painted one at all (Berenson thinks he may not have taken the idea further than a cartoon),21 but several epigones interpreted the drawings, and the naked Leda is accompanied in these strange pictures by her hatchlings, one pair of twins or, sometimes, two pairs of twins playing on the flowery meadow under her feet. Martin Kemp comments, 'The Leda and the Lady [a portrait on which Leonardo was also working in 1507] express two sides of the macrocosmic coin: the procreative powers of all living things; and the circulatory processes of "vivification" which arise from natural flux.'22 The general point about generation and quickening, about Leda's relationship to erotic mystery and natural forces, can be nuanced, I think, by looking more closely at the bird and egg imagery in Leda's story and its connections to the wider view of hatching and meta-

21 B. Berenson, The Drawings of the Florentine Painters (Chicago 1970; 3 vols.; first published 1938), I, p. 180. 22 M. Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci. The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man (London 1981), p. 277.

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morphosis. Doubling structures her myth with almost comic plenitude: two eggs with two pairs of twins, in either matching pairs (twin boys, twin girls), or, more commonly, in contrasted pairs (the mortal Castor and Clytemnestra from one egg, the immortal Pollux and Helen from the other). Furthermore, in the version given by Apollodorus in The Library, Leda herself is a substitute, a double, who becomes the twins' mother after the goddess Nemesis, pursued and raped by Zeus, gives the egg into her care. Nemesis changed herself into a goose to fly from the god, but taking on the shape of a swan he flew after her and pinned her down. Nemesis then dropped the egg in the lap of Leda, who slept with her husband Tyndareus on the same night; she then bore one pair of human children to him, and raised the other divine progeny of Zeus as her own. This twist provides an explanation for the human mortality of two of the siblings (Castor and Clytemnestra) and the immortality of Helen and Pollux. Euripides' Helen refers to this story, but in terms that throw suspicion on its veracity: like a celebrity picked over by a scandalsheet, she seems to set it aside as fantasy, and calls herself Tyndareus' daughter.23 Hyginus also reports this version, but cannot decide which of the four children are Tyndareus': he also makes him Helen's father as well at one point. When he tells the story of Nemesis, he concludes, 'Other say that Jove, in the form of a swan, lay with Leda. We shall leave the matter undecided.'24 Several vase paintings show Leda discovering the egg, sometimes with Tyndareus observing from the sidelines, looking sceptical and raising his arms in exclamation.25 All this confusion is itself fruitful, however—it reveals that the myth's oddity persisted and that the idea of a human woman laying eggs after mating with a swan could not settle into a fixed form; the mythographers worried at it ('we shall leave the matter undecided') because it displays those fantastic and uncouth features that 23

Helen says: 'There is you know, a legend which says that Zeus took the feathered form of a swan, and that being pursued by an eagle and flying for refuge to the bosom of my mother Leda, he used this deceit to accomplish his desire upon her. That is the story of my origin—if it is true.' Euripides, Helen in The Bacchae and Other Plays, trans. Philip Vellacott (Harmondsworth 1972; first published 1954), pp. 135-6. 24 Hyginus, Poetica Astronomica, ed. and trans. Mary Grant (Lawrence 1960), pp. 73-6, 193-4. 23 See L. Kahil, N. Icard-Gianolio, 'Leda' in Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae [abbreviation: UMC\, VI, 1 (Zurich-Munich 1992), pp. 231-46, II, Pis. 1-133.

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Plato despised in 'old wives' tales'; it also disobeys the congruity of analogous, animal metamorphoses. For example, Hyginus includes an episode that Arachne wove in her tapestry, when Saturn changed himself into a horse to unite with Philyra, and she subsequently gave birth to the centaur Chiron. He adds that when Philyra saw 'that she had borne a strange species, she asked Jove to change her into another form, and she was transformed into the tree which is the linden.'26 This suite of events possesses an intuitive and even biological logic, structured by the animal motifs and personal violence in the story, which remains altogether missing from the incongruous, often insouciant (and undeveloped) story of Leda and the swan in extant, classical texts. But the mysterious progeny of Leda also conveys a love of difference, contained and unified, a glorying in the permutation of opposites, and the multiplication of possibility. Leonardo's fecund nude appears to promise goodness from sexual union and natural processes such as fertilization and division; the imagery defies sin, reconciles contraries, announces bounty, and praises beauty and its effects. The blossoming earth, the moist, fertile ground, the gambolling pairs of hatchlings out of their eggshells, the docile and still lovestruck swan in Leda's encircling arm of Leonardo's vision (as conveyed by the 'copy' at Wilton House, or the Sodoma 'copy' in the Borghese Gallery, Rome)27 communicate a dream of unstained plenitude, embodied by a Venus Physizoa at harmony in natural creation. Yet this naked woman is not unadorned: her elaborate coiffure, an intertwining of braids and curls elaborately drawn by Leonardo in his notebooks from the back as well as the front, betokens the cosmetic self-fashioning, the artistry that accompanies pristine female beauty, as it does in the Hesiodic description of Pandora's coming into being. From sexual encounter to blessed, fertile and aesthetic physical harmony, Leda and the swan offer a poetic theophany of beauty triumphant in the earthly paradise. In an article about Eriugena's utopianism, Peter Dronke cites Jean Jolivet's gloss on 'Gramision', the name of the earthly paradise in Bernard Silvestris' Cosmographia: 'Gramision is not only a grassy place, but a little womb: Bernard is playing upon the word gremium, adding 26

Hyginus, Fabula 138, ed. and trans. Mary Grant (Lawrence 1960), pp. 114-5. Kemp considers the Wilton House version 'probably as close as any to Leonardo's original': Kemp, Leonardo, p. 275. 27

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the diminutive ending -sion imitated from the Greek. The great womb is that of Silva, the receptacle and nurse of becoming; the little womb is the earthly paradise.'28 Whereas Eriugena was very little known between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Cosmographia was very widely read in the later Middle Ages. Could Bernard Silvestris' imaginary Gramision have been known to Leonardo, for example? Martin Kemp does not mention Bernard Silvestris as represented in his library. Nevertheless, it is worth setting aside the evident lasciviousness of many artifacts inspired by Leda to look at the myth in this more subtly erotic poetic tradition of fecundity and harmony. If the theogamies of Zeus/Jupiter with nymphs such as Leda are not aligned with metamorphosis as translation between species, but more with metamorphosis as the vital principle of creation, these erotic mysteries can be understood differently, and their elemental character linked to different manifestations of the life force, and thence, to different theories of insemination: the swan, a creature of the airy element, breathes life into Leda's womb when he kisses her with his beak, while Danae receives the god in the form of fertilizing moisture, falling in golden dew. The changes of shape that hold Ovid's full poetic attention offer aetiologies for stable life forms— Daphne the laurel tree, Arachne the spider, Philomela the nightingale. By contrast, Jupiter's shape-shifting and disguises might be seen as belonging to a different category of metamorphosis, to natural mutability and organic development. This is a form of transformation with which Ovid is indeed concerned, but it provides a persistent underlying thematic in his Pythagorean account of nature, rather than inspiring episodes of exceptional, dramatic intensity, when abruptly and supernaturally, one being is altogether, permanently changed into another: Tereus into a hoopoe, Callisto into a bear. The idea of breathing life into forms, conveyed by the billing of the swan, provides the metaphor for the creation of Adam: 'He breathed into his nostrils a breath of life and thus man became a living being.' (Gen 2:7)29 But there is a further step taken in the myth of Leda, 28 J. Jolivet, 'Les principes feminins dans la Cosmographia de Bernard Silvestre' in L'homme et son unwers au moyen age, I, ed. C. Wenin (Louvain-la-Neuve 1986), pp. 296—305, quoted Peter Dronke, 'Eriugena's Earthly Paradise', in Begriff und Metapher Sprachform des Denkens bei Eriugena (Heidelberg 1990), pp. 213-229 at pp. 227-8. 29 Compare also the animation of Pandora, in Hesiod, Theogony, ed. M. West (Oxford 1966), 11. 572 ff., 133, 326.

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for she is not herself animated by the airy creature, but fertilized; here, the myth seems to me attentive to the biology of birds and imaginatively cogent, for the male bird does indeed quicken otherwise sterile eggs that, in contradistinction from human progeny, can be birthed—laid—but do not hatch. The Renaissance artists who were inspired by Leda's myth need not have read Bernard Silvestris or Eriugena to find in her wondrous maternity a model of miraculous but natural fecundity: the activity of the Holy Spirit, most commonly manifest in the shape of a bird, quickened Mary's womb according to the central tenet of the Incarnation. Medieval images of the Annunciation vary in their representation of the beam emitted by the bird, and its point of contact with Mary's virgin body. Occasionally, as in a Nottingham alabaster in the Ashmolean, Oxford, the bird's beak touches Mary's lips, to infuse her with the life force. In a Coronation of the Virgin by the Rubielos Master in the Cleveland Museum of Art, the large, pneumatically firm, white bird is descending, headlong, each outstretched wingtip touching the mouth of God the Father on Mary's left and God the Son on Mary's right; this is an unusual depiction of the Trinity, suggesting the Holy Spirit conjoins the other two Persons, as breath issuing from their lips. Noting the popularity of Leda and the swan in the sculpture and painting of Christian Egypt, Lilly Kahil and Pascale Linant de Bellefonds comment that the analogy with the Holy Ghost probably helped the pagan myth's survival.30 However, even if the resemblance was serenely accepted and enjoyed by Christian Copts in Alexandria, it was certainly rejected by Christian authorities, and it would be a mistake to see Leonardo's and Michelangelo's potent erotic visions as anything but profound, even scandalous challenges to the Christian doctrine of the virgin birth. W. B. Yeats, in a poem written several years after 'Leda and the Swan' openly, even swaggeringly, seized the blasphemous analogy, and evoked 'The Mother of God' suffering a violent assault from a bird. Three times he uses the word 'terror' to express the conception of the saviour: The threefold terror of love; a fallen flare Through the hollow of an ear;

L. Kahil - P. Linant de Bellefonds, LJMC VI, 1, p. 246.

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Wings beating about the room; The terror of all terrors that I bore The Heavens in my womb.31 But while Yeats's powerful fantasy reveals symbolic principles at work in both myths (the dove, like the swan, was sacred to Aphrodite/Venus), it has the effect of obscuring differences to which the Renaissance interpreters were certainly alive. The earthly paradise is strictly earthly, and Leda, as a type of Venus Physizoa, also represents the fallen world of unredeemed creatureliness, where virginity is not prized and grace other than the physical set aside. The preparatory drawings of Leda by Leonardo and the subsequent painted 'copies' eeriely mirror both the child playmates and the deep, knowingly exchanged glances of Mary and Anne in the National Gallery cartoon of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and John the Baptist, drawn in 1506/8, during the period when Leonardo was also thinking about the Leda. This subtle correspondence begins to tell another story of doubles: Leda becomes Mary's shadow, her dark twin, her naked and unashamed alter ego, who has known sex and parturition; whereas Saint Anne points heavenwards, in the manner of a sibyl in the cartoon, the paintings show Leda's paradise as grounded, her bare feet in the damp, fertile greensward, her babies gambolling on the earth. It is a place where creatures live in harmony and fertility, an earthly paradise continuing after the Fall, in apparent ignorance of its consequences: an Eden without grace, or God, or any transcendent dimension at all. One of the marks of this fallen condition is metamorphosis itself: the hybridity of the twins' origins, their defiance of the laws of human reproduction (of like from like) assign them to that shifting, contrary realm of devilish mischief and bricolage, of combinatory monsters and mixed species. In the National Gallery of Prague, an unusual painting of Saint Christopher, from the circle of the Master of Frankfurt, shows a sable-skinned homunculus hatching upside down from an eggshell at the giant's feet; this startling gryllus' appearance is echoed in sixteenth and seventeenth century votive woodcuts depicting the

31 Ed. cit., p. 281; see E. Larissy, W. B. Teats (Plymouth 1998), p. 51; also E. Cullingford, Gender and History in Yeats' Love Poetry (Cambridge 1993), pp. 140-64 for a highly perceptive historical essay on the political and social context in which Yeats wrote these lyrics.

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popular patron of travelers and ferrymen.32 As Christopher fords the stream with the Christ Child on his shoulders, he sometimes scatters a host of imps and goblins (as in a woodcut by Alart du Hameel, after Bosch) or is observed as he wades by a mermaid or triton; such pagan monsters and hybrid creatures, whose hour has come with this miraculous epiphany, attest his own past as an outcast— his name was Reprobus, the Golden Legend tells us.33 The wilder offshoots of his legend describe him in his previous life as a dogheaded cannibal himself, who before his conversion to the true faith could only bark like a Patagonian giant or a subhuman beast. (He is even sometimes depicted in this form, when he resembles Anubis, a more ancient ferryman.) But the example of the devilish sprite wriggling out of an egg in the painting of course strikes a powerful resonance with Hieronymus Bosch, who populated his visions of hell and temptation with hatchlings of various orders, proportions and assorted limbs. In some instances, these fantastical semi-comic, semihorrific inventions are still wearing their shells, as snails do, or crabs. As this imagery reveals, in numerous fantastical flights of imagination by Breughel and other fantasists, the physiology of birds, the marvel of eggs and of hatching, in short the processes of avian generation, belonged, like the metamorphosis of insects and the selfrenewal of reptiles and serpents, to the repertory of medieval and Renaissance depictions of hell's instability, flux, miscegenation and zoomorphic mayhem. In such nightmares, grown men walk on all fours inside cracked shells; lovers mate inside eggs, and witches and hobgoblins ride in half-cups (the superstition still survives that one should always crack the bottom of an eggshell to prevent witches putting out to sea in them to raise storms). This is not the place to speculate on the imagery's meaning for Bosch, for it would lead me into a labyrinth with no ball of thread to help my way. But it is worth drawing attention to the disquieting scent of heathenism, devilry and illicit pleasure that hangs around the idea of this most central and natural of metamorphoses (egg into chick). Edgar Wind, discussing Marsilio Ficino's struggles with the

32

A drawing in the Louvre, Paris, attributed to a follower of Van Eyck, resembles this painting very closely, and so postulates an older model. See Chefs-d'oeuvres de Prague 1450-1750. Trois siecles de peinture Flamande et Hollandaise (Bruges 1974), pp. 24~5. 33 Jacopus de Voragine, The Golden Legend Readings on the Saints, XI (Princeton 1993), trans. W. Ryan, p. 10.

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often salacious if not obscene episodes in pagan myth, invokes his celebrated Neoplatonist argument that such profane images concealed sacred mysteries. 'The eggs of Leda,' writes Wind, 'belong to the genre of sacred drolerie. . .'34 But there is another context in which the eggs of Leda can be placed, which also demarcates it as a story that defied cherished values of Christian teaching and instituted another order in their place. In the twelfth century, Moscus, the author of the Turba Philosophorum, went so far as to specify the primordial egg as 'first that of a crow, and then the egg of a swan'. As the model for obtaining the longedfor philosopher's stone, alchemists preferred to invoke the egg and its development rather than the gestatory cycle of human reproduction: 'the interior fire of matter, excited by the outer fire, just as the interior fire of the egg, excited by the heat of the hen, becomes reanimated little by little and gives life to the matter of which it is the soul, from which the philosophical child is born . . .'3a Incubation offered a more appropriate metaphor than parturition for the particular transformation of matter at which they aimed: the texts reverberate with paeans to yolks and albumen and their potentiality. The eggshell itself becomes the metonymic vehicle of the alchemical process, the gourd-shaped vessel in which the raw matter is cooked and changed. 'The philosopher's egg . . . is Nature's vessel . . . even during putrefaction . . ,'36 This viewpoint engages with metamorphosis as part of the cycle of nature, an inherent energy directing growth in all things and in all directions, from emergence to decay; change here is not sudden, extreme or willed, but a material and organic cause and effect. However, the field of alchemy is so overgrown and tangled that I hesitate to try and make a closer map. But it is worth drawing attention to the strangeness of the transparent egg in the engraving by Cornelis Bos after Michelangelo, for it is in alchemical imagery that the egg-shaped vessel in which phenomena are quickened into life is frequently represented as if it were the inner sac, not the outer shell, so that Mercury, or the Sun and Moon can be seen inside it in potential' 34

Wind, Pagan Mysteries, p. 169. ' A.-J. Pernety, Dictionnaire Mytho-Hermetique (Paris 1972; first published 1787), p. 258. 36 Pernety, Dictionnaire, p. 258. 3/ L'Alchimie et son livre muet [Mutus Liber] [La Rochelle, 1677], ed. Eugene Canseliet, Paris 1967, figs. 8,19,11,13; 99-111. 3

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Many painted Ledas have been lost: Michelangelo's quadrone da sala, a large and uncharacteristically sensual picture, displaying all his skill with heroic anatomy, was taken to France, to be offered for purchase to Francois I by one of the artist's gar^oni, Antonio Mini. There it somehow disappeared. The Leonardo seems to have been also taken to France, by the artist in 1516, where it too disappeared at some point after 1625, when Cassiano del Pozzo mentions seeing it. Correggio's Leda suffered an ever harsher fate, in many ways, than vanishing. Commissioned by Federico Gonzaga in Mantua, it was painted around 1531 and passed into the collection of Philip II of Spain. In 1603 Rudolph II of Prague acquired it. Then, as part of the booty carried off by the Swedes in 1648, it finally passed into the hands of the Orleans family in Paris. Louis, son of Philippe, Due d'Orleans, Regent of France during Louis XV's minority (1715-23) was so enraged by the image that he attacked the painting and hacked out Leda's face. It was patched up by the painter Antoine Coypel and others, but art historians are agreed that a copy in the Prado, made before the mutilation, gives a much more convincing account of Correggio's original than the restoration.38 Correggio knew Leonardo's lost Leda, for her standing pose inspired the figure of Venus in his glowingly tender painting in the National Gallery, London, The School of Love.m He also knew Michelangelo's interpretation: drawn copies have been attributed to Correggio. But unlike theirs, Correggio's Leda belongs in a sequence of metamorphoses: she takes her place alongside his Ganymede, 7o, and Danae. He also, interestingly, may have known the Hypnerotomachia, where the subject of the School of Love—Mercury teaching Cupid his letters— appears on the third triumphal car, the one featuring Danae and following Leda, though there Venus is angry with her son and is trying to pluck out his wings.40 According to the evidence of the copy in the Prado, Correggio set aside both artists' compositions, and seated his lovely, girlish Leda facing forward on the ground, acceptingly settling the swan-sized bird between her knees, and steeply inclining her head to the god's approaching beak and quickening

38

It is thought that other painters, including Boucher, may have had a hand in the restoration too. See A. Bevilacqua - A. Quintavalle, L'Opera complete di Correggio, (Milan 1970), pp. 109-10; D. Ekserdjian, Correggio (London 1997), p. 288. 39 Ekserdjian, Correggio, p. 270. 40 Colonna, Hypnerotomachia, p. 169; Ekserdjian, Correggio, p. 269.

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breath. This Leda, like Correggio's Venus from The School of Love., radiates gentle, amorous delight in a pastoral setting; the swan spreading his wings between her knees does not overwhelm her, or cover her, unlike the slumbrous, giant burden enveloping the woman in Michelangelo's postcoital vision. This swan-Jupiter allows Leda to dandle him like a pet; there are no hatchlings, but a gaggle of amormi playing to the left. Correggio was dealing with the myth as a story in time. His Leda appears three times: first approached by the swan as she is bathing; then dandling him in her lap; lastly, the swan flies away on the right as her maid helps her back on with her clothes.41 So he may have been respecting narrative logic, unlike Leonardo and Michelangelo, who stage the simultaneous appearance of the children, surprisingly well grown, at the very moment of sexual union. Lightly, unabashedly, Correggio evokes a material paradise; he does so with less earnest and obvious incursions into biological, theological, scientific or alchemical theories than his predecessors. In the Leda, as in his series of metamorphoses, he was able to communicate, with unaffected gaiety and ease, a sense of reciprocal delight in material creation—and procreation. As a female embodiment of pleasure, as a Venus Physizoa presiding over a postlapsarian state of bliss, his Leda stirred a beholder's righteous frenzy. We may surmise that the vanished Ledas of Leonardo and Michelangelo may also have been figments of love too powerful to resist, too vivid to abide. Poliphilo was perhaps more acute than he knew when he exclaimed, at the sight of the lovers' pleasure, 'I would have dared, almost, to utter a foolish thought: that the infernal spirits suffer no other torment than envy of those here.'42 Correggio was certainly successful in creating, from the unlikely figment of a swan's caresses, an image of serene and unalloyed joy, and it excited a terrible torment of envy in one iconoclast at least.

41 42

Ekserdjian, Correggio, pp. 289-91. Dronke, Introduction, Hypnerotomachia, p. 40.

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INDIVIDUALITY, ORIGINALITY AND THE LITERARY CRITICISM OF MEDIEVAL LATIN TEXTS Haijo Westra

Every human individuality is an Idea rooted in the visible world, and from some individuals this idea shines forth so brightly that it seems to have assumed the form of the individual only in order to reveal itself in it. When we analyse human activity, after removing all determining causes there remains behind in it something original which, instead of being overpowered by their influence, is more likely to transform them.

Wilhelm von Humboldt Individuality and the self are interrelated notions that are problematic in their historical and hermeneutical dimensions, often charged with philosophical biases and ideological issues. Aristotle regarded the variety of human individuals as accidental, a variant combination of universal characteristics, but also admitted an irreducible 'thisness' of the individual being. Plotinus reflects on the differences between individual beings and is the first to value such difference as beautiful. He also posits the fundamental originality of the individual soul: since it has no archetype, it is therefore itself something original and authentic. Moreover, 'every soul, authentically a soul (autopsyche), has some form of Tightness and moral wisdom; in the souls within ourselves there is true knowing' [Enneads V, 9.13 (49)]. Combined with the Platonic and indeed mystical notion of the ascent of the soul, the perfection of the self becomes the brilliant aim and ideal of the philosophical life. As Georg Misch points out in his study of forms of autobiographical writing in antiquity, it is in the Romantic era that the Neo-Platonic ideal returns, but now the godlike soul is incarnated as an Idea operating in the world of (cultural) phenomena.1 In the quotation from Wilhelm von Humboldt at the beginning

1 G. Misch, A History of Autobiography in Antiquity (1950, rept. 1973), Vol. II, 586-593, whence the quotation from Wilhelm von Humboldt at the beginning is derived as well (Werke I, p. 22). Cf. Dictionary of the History of Ideas, pp. 595-6 for Humboldt's ideal of the full and harmonious development of the individual personality as representing humanity and pointing towards its highest cultural development.

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of this article, it is the transformative power of the unique soul working on the limitations of the phenomenal world that is being celebrated, entailing an idea of (limitless) improvement and perfectibility.2 The Romantics also realised the possibility of the fully self-conscious individual reflecting on his selfhood and expressing it in art. Its concomitants, alienation and the tragically divided self, led to quintessentially modern expressions of irony and ambivalence and to new forms of the tragic and the comic. By contrast, the divided authorial persona of ancient Menippean satire reflects an intellectual point of view derived from the Cynics, not a tragic view of human life. In modern political philosophy, the opposition individual v. society became a privileged theme of modernist self-definition, especially in the context of British liberalism as well as in French and American revolutionary thought. Moreover, the individual imagination and its expression in the arts and letters became a celebrated locus of resistance against political and aesthetic dogma in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Totalitarian suppression and censorship by the modern state demonstrated, time and again, the irrepressibility of the individual imagination and creativity and the refractoriness of the aesthetic experience. Individuality and consciousness of the self are fundamental to our society. The freedom of the individual has become a matter of natural law and the primacy of the individual has been inscribed at the top of universal declarations of human rights. Even in post-modernism, where the autonomy of the subject is put to the question or regarded as a fiction altogether, these concepts remain operative.3 2 The idea of improvement seems to be more germane to the ancient notion of the self than the ideas of interiority or of self-control: see C. Markschies, s.v. Innerer Mensch, RAC 18 (Stuttgart 1998), pp. 266-311; cf. C. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass. 1989), esp. Chs. 6 and 7. 3 For responses to Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and Lyotard, see M. Frank, G. Raulet, and W. van Reyen, eds., Die Frage nach dem Subjekt (Frankfurt 1988). In contemporary continental philosophy, the subject of subjectivity has had a full run, usually as a source of solipsism and epistemological despair, but also in more constructive ways. On the one hand, the irreducible element of subjectivity in interpretation has been hijacked to produce a black hole into which the entire project of western culture is made to disappear. On the other, Lonergan manages to define 'authentic subjectivity' as the process and foundation for making reasoned judgements by the individual. On post-modernist interpretation of history, see G. Himmelfarb, 'Telling It As You Like It: Post-Modernist History and the Flight from Fact', TLS Oct. 16, 1992, pp. 12-15; cf. B. Stock, Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past (Baltimore-London 1990), Ch. 4: Literary Discourse and the Social Historian, pp. 75-97.

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Michel Foucault speaks of the freedom and degree of independence of the private individual, the valorisation of private life over public activities, and 'the intensity of relations with respect to the self, by which the individual takes himself in his different dimensions as an object of preoccupation and concern . . . and also the elaboration of the self, the formation of the self using all the mental techniques of attention directed toward the self, self-examination, self-testing, taking one's own bearings . . . self-clarification, self-expression.'4 Historically, the definition and applicability of individuality as a norm or form of self-understanding, let alone as an aesthetic ideal or an actual literary practice, is more problematic. Naturally there is moral introspection and confession of shortcomings of the self in ancient 'autobiographic' texts (Marcus Aurelius), and especially the search for the ideal philosophical self combined with urbane self-revelation (Horace) or witty Selbstspott in apology (Apuleius), even psychomachy and religious auto-psychoanalysis (Aelius Aristides), but it is not until Augustine that we encounter a recognisable concept of the self as a project of 'self-improvement' unfolding in relation to others (mother, father, friends, God), inspired by a religious purpose and conveyed by a concomitant confessional style that aims to leave nothing unsaid.3 Before Augustine, Roman autobiography typically presents no self-expression, only self-justification with an eye to reputation and the continued fame of one's name after this life: it looks forward to death, not back towards life. There is no accounting of the self to the self. The true, unique interior self is not even a complete or worthy subject of examination, as the writings of Cicero demonstrate, but rather the justification of the actions of the individual.6 Any glimpse of the self is really an involuntary, almost accidental self-revelation; voluntary 'confession' serves as captatio benevolentiae. As Misch realised, there is no preoccupation or elaboration or intimacy with the self on the part of the autobiographical author, and no 'intimacy of the self shared with the reader, let alone 'full disclosure' or reckoning. In literary texts, too, the modalities of individual expression in antiquity are profoundly different from those of 4 Le souci de soi (Paris 1984), pp. 56-57, trans. R. Hurley, The Care of the Self (New York 1986), pp. 42-43. 0 On this subject, see B. Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass. 1996), esp. Ch. 9. 6 Most revealing is Epist. ad Fam. V. xii, to Lucceius, where autobiography is rejected as a genre in which one is expected not to praise nor condemn oneself.

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the Romantic movement: they are not willed expressions of a unique individuality. This difference is fundamental to the alterity of ancient as well as medieval literature and requires further elaboration. Augustine's confession is an exception because it appeals to moderns as authentic and original self-expression; at the same time, however, it alienates because its subject is a relentless abasement and subordination of the self. Nevertheless, the application of the concept of individuality to ancient and medieval literatures is not necessarily anachronistic. Even though the concept/ideal of authentic self-expression did not exist or was not expressly stated, and even though individuality was not expressly stated ideals of aesthetic theory and artistic practice, the phenomenon does occur in literary texts, avant la lettre and in unexpected forms. It is a typically philological mistake to think that, without explicit formulation, the concept does not exist. As Michel Zink has pointed out, medieval spiritual literature is vitally interested in the individual, but for different reasons, namely the salvation of the individual and his relation to God.7 Christianity is a religion of 'interiority' and of self-scrutiny, intimately acquainted with the psychology of penitence. Zink also points out that, in secular literature, the romance hero's quest often entails adventures that lead to a discovery of the self, indeed the adventures themselves (the quest) symbolise this process of discovery of the self. Another apparently anachronistic concept that can be applied is originality. Originality as an ideal is of course connected with the Romantic notion of the original genius of the artist,8 but it can also be used descriptively in a short-hand way for a multitude of phenomena, including what is referred to in reception history and aesthetics as alterity, discontinuity, and changes affecting the 'horizon of expectation'. Originality has the advantage of being phenomenonbased, not dependent on the eliciting of a specific individual from the text, but concerned instead with broader issues affecting medieval Latin literature, such as genre and the interaction between learned

7 M. Zink, La subjectivite litteraire autour du siecle de Saint Louis (Paris 13-16. 8 Ernst Robert Curtius labels this as 'the English theory of original 'Zur Literaeraesthetik des Mittelalters', ^eitschrift fur romanische Philologie pp. 139~140; cf. E. Young's Conjectures upon Original Composition (1759) and Biographia Literaria, IV.

1985), pp. genius' in 58 (1938), Coleridge,

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and popular, written and oral, Latin and vernacular. Such issues can be shown to affect the stylistic and generic choices of individual authors. Probably the best locus for a start of the study of individuality and originality is late antiquity. At this juncture, an entire literary tradition and outlook on life are called into question by a new religion that somehow has to come to terms with them as well. The dilemma is encapsulated by the fact that, when Julian the Apostate banned Christians from teaching in the traditional schools of rhetoric, some thought was given to founding Christian schools, but such a move was doomed surely because of the relative paucity of Christian texts and the overwhelming preponderance of the classical tradition. The early rejection of the (rhetorical) tradition had already been abandoned; Prudentius is probably the best example of the integration of the classical canon and its transformation through processes such as ironic quotation or Kontrastimitation. Originality, then, is from the start constituted as a transformation of the tradition in the reception of antiquity, whether by choice or necessity. The former holds true for the attitude of the Romans towards their Greek models,9 marked as it is by an intense self-consciousness of one's relationship vis-a-vis one's models and their expression, i.e. a preoccupation with the canonical other rather than the authentic self, in a reception process that seeks to emulate the past. By contrast, the Romantic principle of originality constitutes a new 'literary ideology'.10 The Romantic movement represents a fundamental change in the reception of the classical tradition as well as a radical break with the aesthetics of imitatio. From Prudentius we also derive the first Selbstverstandnis of the Christian poet through the presentation of the poetic persona in quasisacerdotal fashion as leader of the chorus while delivering his hymn to St. Eulalia at her grave site (Peristephanon 4.197-200). This is a departure from the thoroughly traditional expressions of self-modesty we also find in Prudentius.11 But in the Epilogue the classical 9 See 1968). 10 M. temporary p. 100. 11 H.

for example G. Williams, Tradition and Originality in Roman Poetry (Cambridge Spariosu, 'Contemporary French Theory', in Spariosu, ed. Mimesis in ConTheory: An Interdisciplinary Approach, I (Philadelphia and Amsterdam 1984) Westra, 'Augustine and Poetic Exegesis', in H. Meynell, ed., Grace, Politics

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modesty topos has been varied and Christianised to introduce pride in the contribution of the poet, however modest a vessel, to the cause of salvation. Through the doctrine of salvation, perfection of the soul has become the project of each individual (author) and of Christendom collectively. The articulation of the Christian authorial self is strikingly original in the work of Egeria, whose personality continually enters her narrative either directly through her involvement in the action of her pilgrimage account and her enthusiasm for her subject or indirectly through her varying stylistic personae. Significantly, she tries to suppress this intrusion of the self (sed ut redeam ad reni), but equally significantly, her personality is irrepressible.12 However, it is undeniable that, in Christian literature, individuality and the understanding, definition, and 'elaboration' of the self are not particularly in evidence as expressed values, except in the mystic's approach to God. But even here the ultimate goal, salvation, entails a loss/death of the self. Conversely, in the denial of salvation in the Archpoet's curam gero cutis instead of salutis, parody and satire ultimately reaffirm the dominance of the normative concept of the self as a project for salvation by opening up the abyss of perdition. For Aquinas, there exists a unique individual responsible for his/her moral choices and, in theology, there was at least the possibility of a theory of the subject in the concept of the hypostasis. The principium individuationis question seems to have sidetracked the scholastics into a purely technical problem of definition rather than issues of substance relating to human life.13 The fundamental originality of Christian literature and indeed its revolutionary character in terms of the classical tradition has been demonstrated by Erich Auerbach through a variety of phenomena

and Desire: Essays on Augustine (Calgary 1990), pp. 87-100, esp. pp. 96-97; cf. Westra, Trudentius', in W. T. H. Jackson, ed., European Writers: The Middle Ages and the Renaissance, I (New York 1983), pp. 1-22. 12 L. Honey, with H. Westra, 'Eliciting Egeria: The Woman Behind the Text', in L. Olson, ed. Reading Women: New Approaches to Female Literacy in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Notre Dame University Press, forthcoming); cf. Westra, 'The Pilgrim Egeria's Concept of Place', Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 30 (1995), pp. 93-100. 13 Interestingly, Diderot and Dalembert's Encyclopedie, VII (1757), still defines 'individu' as 'un etre dont toutes les determinations sont exprimees. . . Les scholastiques expriment les circonstances d'ou Ton peut receuillir ces proprietes par le vers suivant: Forma, figura, locus, stirps, nomen, patria, tempus'. Etienne Gilson has concerned himself with the elaboration of scholastic theory in this area.

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such as authorship, style, genre, audience, and purpose. Auerbach did not use the example of Egeria, a woman author who transforms the traditional genre of the itinerarium into a personalised pilgrimage account in which she seeks to re-evoke the experience for the 'sisters' back home. Because she is a woman, she has escaped the school of rhetoric and thereby both the ubiquitous, homogenising filter for experience and the universal straight) acket of expression, even though she is able to use it when she wants to, thus arriving at a carefully bracketed variety of styles that suits her purpose, the transmission of a new religious experience deriving from the coincidence of Biblical text, sacred landscape and salvation history. The modalities and object of her hermeneutical pleasure are surely new and original in terms of the classical tradition. As noted, the irrepressibility of her personality is evident in both narrative and style, but her self-understanding involves precisely the repression of the self. The question whether the late eleventh and twelfth centuries '(^discovered' the individual has been debated in the recent past,14 but the preoccupation with the sinful and/or the suffering self in the autobiographical/confessional narratives of Guibert of Nogent and Abelard recall Augustine's project of confession and self-improvement in relation to others (esp. mother, mistress, teacher, child/teenage self). There is an element of persecution mania in both Guibert and, especially, Abelard, which points forward to the ultimately regressive use of the genre by Rousseau, whose obsession turns confession back into a means of (classical) self-justification. Individual expression is clearly not an issue or an ideal in the discussions of inventio, ingenium, memoria, copia or ornatus: rather, imitatio is the norm. But it is possible to find original forms of expression in medieval literature that involve a construction of the self. A beautiful example of such a positioning of the self in medieval society through the

14

C. Bynum, 'Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual', The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 31 (1980); cf. e.g. W. Ullmann, The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages (Baltimore 1966); C. Morris, The Discovery of the Individual: 1050-1200 (New York 1972); P. Zumthor, in La mesure du monde. Representation de I'espace au Moyen Age (Paris 1993), p. 41, suggests that prior to the 14th century the need for identification was stronger than the desire for a personal identity and that only a few members of the elite were able to escape this condition from the twelfth century on.

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use of the classical tradition is provided by Baudri of Bourgeuil. As Gerald Bond has demonstrated, Baudri was not a unique, isolated genius, but connected with an Ovidian subculture among the lower ranks of the monastic and cathedral schools, asserting an 'aristocracy of the heart' in his poetry based on Ovid.15 The self is present indirectly as an aspiration or as a project of emancipation through the expression of the true, noble self in the language of the most sophisticated yet ultimately rejected, exiled Roman poet. Other forms of originality involving the interactions between the oral and the written, Latin and vernacular, and popular and oral culture come into play when we consider the case of the Ruodlieb, a subject on which Peter Dronke and this author have crossed pens on occasion, particularly over the role of the dominella.16 The most fascinating part of the Ruodlieb phenomenon is the history of the text: habent sua fata libellil Vollmann has described the genesis of this most unusual text in detail in the Introduction to his edition, raising new caveats and adding new insights to what had already been established.17 He concludes that the Tegernsee MS (now in Munich) was not intended for binding, i.e. not meant to have the status of a 'proper' text in book form, which is certainly significant in terms of its conception, execution and reception. 'Cheap' parchment was used, and parchment showing signs of having been designated for other use, some of it actually used before for colophons. Initially, there is a liberal use of parchment, but, from Fragment 9, the text is crowded into the margin. Add to this the fact that the generic conception of the story changes in the course of its unfolding, and one is left very much with the impression of a trial effort. Vollmann hypothesizes that Fragments 1-8 in the Tegernsee MS constitute the first fair copy; by Fragment 9, the author had decided on a second fair copy; hence the use of the margins. Here one could object that the use 15 G. Bond, ''locus Amoris: The Poetry of Baudri of Bourgeuil and the Formation of the Ovidian Subculture', Traditio 42 (1986), pp. 143-193, esp. pp. 188-191. 16 For a resolution of the issues under contention, now see A. Zissos, 'Marriage in the Ruodlieb', Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 32 (1997), pp. 53-78. Cf. H. Westra, 'Brautwerbung in the Ruodlieb'', ibid., 18 (1983), 107-120 and 'On the Interpretation of the Dominella's Speech in the Ruodlieb', ibid., 22 (1987), 136-141, as well as my review of the second edition of Dronke's Poetic Individuality, ibid., 26 (1991), 229-235. 17 B. Vollmann, ed. Ruodlieb: Faksimile-Ausgabe des Codex Latinus Monacensis 19486 der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek Muenchen und der Fragmente von St. Florian, II, Teil I (Wiesbaden 1985), reviewed by this author in Speculum 65 (January 1990), pp. 162-166.

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of margins is usually due to an anticipated lack of writing material, and this simple explanation is consonant with the impression conveyed by the low-quality parchment scraped together for the occasion, so to speak. Vollmann uses his hypothesis to explain why the MS from Tegernsee was left unfinished: presumably, the ending of the Ruodlieb was copied directly from the wax tablet into the second fair copy, the (incomplete) St. Florian MS. It is clear that Vollmann wants to date the MS from Tegernsee, which is in part an autograph, by tying it closely to the St. Florian MS, presumed to have been executed under authorial control. It is equally clear that Vollmann does not want to think of the Ruodlieb as somehow left unfinished, deliberately or by default, which, given the trial character of the text, could be entertained as a reasonable hypothesis. The evidence provided concerning the author's hand, showing that the work was written over a period of time, not continuously, and in a variety of writing 'moods', and under a constant reworking of the text, especially the prosody, reinforces the tentativeness of the textualization. What is equally significant is the subsequent history of the text, especially the reception of the work in the Middle Ages: there are no hands later than those of the eleventh century to be found in the MS from Tegernsee, where the parchment on which the text was written reverted to its original function as binding material, probably during the second half of the fifteenth century, when the library was expanding. In 1803, when the monastery of Tegernsee was suppressed, the MS came to Munich in its unique form, as binding material in other codices. Discovered by the librarian Docen, the recovered leaves were entered into his private collection which was auctioned off after his death. It is not impossible that, in addition to the known fragments recovered since the auction, others were lost or remain to be discovered—two leaves were found loose in one of Docen's books! Another posible source, the fonds of Tegernsee MSS and incunabula in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, appears to be exhausted after the discovery of two additional parchment strips presented in V's edition as Fragments 1A and 3A. But not all Tegernsee MSS ended up in the Staatsbibliothek. During the secularization, library contents first went to a conservatorium, whence many volumes were auctioned off, even dumped at low prices. This is probably the route by which one leaf ended up in the library of Freiherr von Moll, whose 80,000 volumes were subsequently sold and dispersed between London and Moscow. So it is conceivable that somewhere

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in Europe or America, in MSS of Tegernsee provenance, leaves of the Ruodlieb remain hidden as binding material. The Ruodlieb involves originality in terms of genre: it combines oral, Germanic narrative, with both courtly and fabliau-like elements, cast in the written, Latin genre of the epic. Whereas Virgil in his Kunstepos is able to connect Roman legend with his fully internalised Greek model through a complex of allusion at all levels, the author of the Ruodlieb was unable to effect this kind of conjointure with later Latin epic. The originality of the work lies manifestly in its genesis as a trial effort, unsuccessful as its non-reception shows. But does it derive from a conscious will to experiment, i.e. experiment for the sake of experiment, or from an attempt to validate Germanic material through the medium of grammatical Probably the latter, and clearly, this route was not acceptable to its intended audience (if any). In other words, the originality of the Ruodlieb also lies in the attempt to start a written German literature in Latin. One has to go back to Charlemagne who is said, by his biographer, Einhard, to have planned a grammar of his Frankish vernacular.18 At the same time, he is said to have recorded the traditional, epic lays of his people in the vernacular. Even if this report is not historically accurate, it represents the dilemma of an oral, vernacular literature facing a privileged, written (and therefore grammatical) body of literature with which it could not compete since its largely clerical audience was conditioned by the latter. In the case of the Merovingian and Carolingian epics, it simply may not have been possible to textualise the Frankish language (hence, the need for a vernacular grammar). In the case of the Ruodlieb, the Latin textualisation of the first vernacular 'roman' was a non-starter. The fact that the unusual generic structure of the Ruodlieb did not correspond to any Latin model current at the time may have contributed to this disjuncture: the Waltharius, by contrast, connects much more closely with the classical epic on several levels, and one can see why it would have been relatively more successful precisely because it satisfied audience expectations. Only when a significant non-Latinate audience with other expectations developed, were the necessary preconditions for a vernacular novel fulfilled. Looking back, the Ruodlieb represents an

18

Cf. H. Westra, 'Literacy, Orality and Medieval Patronage: A Phenomenological Outline', The Journal of Medieval Latin 1 (1991), pp. 52~59, esp. p. 54, n. 9.

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intermediary phase, almost a necessary or inevitable experiment in the development of a (courtly) literature in the vernacular, a trial effort that may have confounded and perplexed its own author, producing originality by anomaly. The question then arises as to what "systemic" originality might exist. In general, one would expect originality in the medieval reception and transformation of ancient genres, subject matter and its expression. Then there is likely to be originality deriving from the idiosyncrasies of the medieval world view reflected, for example, in Christian symbolism; from the situation of literary culture, e.g. the monasteries and the schools as loci of literary activity; and from specific social, political and historical circumstances. Sometimes any given number or configuration of these factors will even result in totally new genres, often with pronounced oral/popular, local backgrounds. A fine example of such an original genre exists in the beast epic. It is very much a deliberate creation, witness its parodic and satirical elements. Of course, there were classical sources, and nineteenth century scholar fought great battles over the question whether the origin of the beast epic was oral and popular or textual and learned. Clearly, the two are not mutually exclusive, and it is far more productive to see the Wechselwirkung between the two as a possible source of originality. Add to this the possibility of 'contamination' of Byzantine and Christian Latin sources as, for example, in the motif of the hypocritical wolf-monk that forms the basis of the medieval Latin beast epic, Ysengrimus, and originality begins where Quellenforschung disappears into the mist.19 Such originality is not always a source of aesthetic pleasure.20 One of the most extraordinary and extravagant passages from medieval Latin literature is the scene where the perfidious Ysengrim, the fraudulent cleric and rapacious glutton, is torn apart and devoured by 19

See B. Kaczynski and H. Westra, 'The Motif of the Hypocritical Wolf in Medieval Greek and Latin Animal Literature', in M. Herren, ed. The Sacred Nectar of the Greeks: The Study of Greek in the West in the Early Middle Ages (London 1988), pp. 105-141, esp. p. 117, n. 38. A good example of popular elements entering the learned milieu is the Fecunda Ratis of Egbert of Liege, ca. 1023: see Wolfgang Maaz, 'Egbert von Luettich', in Enzyklopaedie des Maerchens, vol. 3, fasc. 4/5 (Berlin 1981), 1010-1019. 20 However, the realisation that beauty is not limited to the harmonious or the merely pretty extends back to Aristotle (Poetics 1448b; Rhet. 1371a21~1371b25).

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the sow Salaura, the infernal abbess, and her brood, in an apocalyptic sparagmos/omophagy (Tsengrimus 7, lines 371-442). Every (sacred) category is reversed in this inversion of the Eucharist: whereas Christ is the Word made Flesh that issued from the mouth of God to be partaken of by mankind in redemptive sacrifice, the wolf—the very antithesis of the Good Shepherd—incorporates and exemplifies the fallen word, a discourse devoured by omnivorous, unclean pigs in a missa silvestris (cf. Tsengrimus 7, lines 45, 230).21 Along with the redemptive word, love itself is inverted: following the biblical command to love one's enemies, Salaura decides to unite Ysengrim with her greatest enemy, her belly, so that she may be filled with sacred love (Tsengrimus 7, lines 397-408). The fantastic, the absurd, the burlesque and the apocalyptic are not unique to medieval Latin literature, but the way they are woven into this bitter clerical satire certainly is. One can even imagine a study of originality in medieval Latin literature that would focus precisely on the satirical and the parodic as loci for demonstrating unique expression, as a counterpart to the study of mystical discourse or courtly love. This would be an exploration of the dark side, but the dialectic could be fruitful.22

21 On Salaura and the death of Ysengrim, see E. Charbonnier, 'Un episode original: la mort du loup dans le livre VIII de V Tsengrimus' and W. Schouwink, The Sow Salaura and her Relatives in Medieval Literature and Art', both in G. Bianciotto and M. Salvat, eds. Epopee animate, fable, fabliau, Actes du IVe Colloque de la Societe Internationale Renardienne, Evreux 7 1 1 septembre 1981 (Paris 1984), pp. 133-139 and 509-523, respectively. See J. Mann, Tsengrimus: Text with Translation, Commentary and Introduction (Leiden 1987), pp. 537-541. A similar, unholy communion takes place at the end of Patrick Suesskind's disturbing novel Perfume, where the main character is constructed as a diabolical inversion of Christ. 22 Three years after Peter Dronke's Poetic Individuality was first published (1970), I was a graduate student at the University of Toronto. Excited by the perspectives opened in the first, major study of the nature of medieval Latin literature since Curtius' ELLMA (and entailing a significant correction to Curtius' insistence on the rhetorical tradition), I proposed a thesis on precisely the topic of originality in Medieval Latin literature. I was eventually told in no uncertain terms that such a subject simply would not do, which demonstrates clearly how innovative and challenging the book actually was. I would like to thank my colleague James Hume for his valuable suggestions on the penultimate version of this contribution.

THE HIGHEST FORM OF COMPLIMENT: IMITATIO IN MEDIEVAL LATIN CULTURE Jan Ziolkowski

Especially since the publication in 1948 of Ernst Robert Curtius's (1886-1956) European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages, it has been recognized that many medieval writings, true to the textile metaphor that the Middle Ages bequeathed us in the very word text, are fabrics that incorporate fibers from earlier writings and preceding traditions.1 Such intertextuality has typified literature in many times and places, but it is particularly pronounced in the Middle Ages, and the explanation for this salience lies partly in the centrality of imitation in the aesthetics and training of the medieval craftsmen who spun the yarns we call texts. In the case of Medieval Latin writers the imitation would have included formal practice in school in replicating different features of literature, such as styles, forms, commonplaces, and turns of phrase. In counterpoint to the whole Curtian emphasis on the traditional and the typical has been the recognition of individuality, originality, and unconventionality—a recognition championed clearly and deftly by Peter Dronke in Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages: New Departures in Poetry 1000-1150? To honor Peter Dronke with an examination of imitatio, which many might presume to be the converse of individuality, might seem paradoxical at best and inappropriate at worst, but it can be justified for two very different reasons. From one perspective it is obviously helpful sometimes to define a concept such as individuality through juxtaposition to its opposite (or one of its opposites). From another vantage point it is false to establish a

1 Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. Trask (Princeton, New Jersey 1990) (Bollingen Series 36). The German original was first published in 1948, the English translation in 1953. On the metaphor at the basis of the word text, see J. Ziolkowski, 'Text and Textuality, Medieval and Modern', to appear in Unfester Text, ed. B. Sabel. 2 (Oxford 1970; 2nd ed. London 1986). This aspect of the book was remarked upon by G. Bruns, 'The Originality of Texts in a Manuscript Culture', Comparative Literature 32 (1980), 113-29, at p. 124.

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dichotomy between individuality and imitation: The opposition is neither intrinsic nor automatic. Much of the complex interplay that, often owing to imitatio, took place in the Middle Ages between conservation and innovation as well as between life, reading, and writing can be sensed in a letter to Boccaccio (1313-1375) in which Petrarch (1304-1374), in his own adaptation of well-worn metaphors, expresses several of his attitudes toward imitation: I grant that I like to embellish my life with sayings and admonitions from others, but not my writings unless I acknowledge the author or make some significant change in arriving at my own concept from many and varied sources in imitation of the bees. Otherwise, I much prefer that my style be my own, uncultivated and rude, but made to fit, as a garment, to the measure of my mind, rather than to someone else's, which may be more elegant, ambitious, and adorned, but deriving from a greater genius, one that continually slips off, unfitted to the humble proportions of my intellect. Every garment befits the actor but not every style the writer; each must develop and keep his own lest either by dressing grotesquely in others' clothes or by being plucked of our feathers by birds flocking to reclaim their own, we may be ridiculed like the crow. Surely each of us naturally possesses something individual and personal in his voice and speech as well as in his looks and gestures that is easier, more useful, and more rewarding to cultivate and correct than to change.3

Petrarch's distinction between imitation in speech and imitation in writing is fascinating. Whether or not other literati before him differentiated similarly remains to be seen. Less uncertain is that the value he placed on either signaling a debt to an author or else fusing materials taken from various authors and modified was widespread among earlier Medieval Latin writers. The former approach, of acknowledging indebtedness, fits with the circumstance that in an age when authority was still vested in major authors, writers had powerful incentives to advertise their borrowings. The latter tack, of fusion, would seem to come considerably closer to modern notions of individual style and creativity. 3 Francesco Petrarca, Rerum familiarium libri 22.2, trans. A. Bernardo, Letters on Familiar Matters, III (Baltimore-London 1985), p. 213; ed. Le Familiari, vols. 1-3, ed. V. Rossi, and vol. 4, ed. Rossi and U. Bosco (Florence 1933—41); discussed by Bruns, 'Originality of Texts', p. 124; T. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry, (New Haven 1982) (Elizabethan Club Series 7), passim; and J. Miller, Poetic License: Authority and Authorship in Medieval and Renaissance Contexts (New York-Oxford 1986), pp. 121-6.

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This essay will probe briefly the significances of imitatio as a concept and practice in the Latin Middle Ages. In this exploration the grammatical-rhetorical phenomena cannot be separated neatly from the ethical-theological, since the two categories were not always quarantined from each other in earlier times.4 Furthermore, this investigation requires at least passing attention to imitatio in the classical philosophical and rhetorical traditions that influenced the Middle Ages directly and indirectly. A fuller appraisal would take into consideration how theories of imitatio were adapted by the Church Fathers within the overall Christianization of the verbal arts in the trivium. Finally, it would entail a comparison between imitatio as it appears in practice as well as in theory, since applications of imitatio in poetry have almost always been subtler than the doctrines enunciated by grammarians, rhetoricians, . . . and even by literary critics and theorists. The index to the English translation of Ernst Robert Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages contains separate entries for imitatio and imitation (as well as for mimesis). Curtius's attentiveness to these phenomena itself recurs almost as a topos within the book, the main body of which ends with a section entitled 'Imitation and Creation'.3 That Curtius should have enlisted the Latin imitatio in contradistinction to imitation (Nachahmung in German) is no accident. His preference of the Latin can be explained as an effort not only at precision, but also at avoidance: We do not wish the poems we discuss to be tainted with the pejorative connotations of the plain old English derivative imitation (or its equivalents in German and other modern European languages). Imitation when adduced as an epithet implies simulation, falseness, and inferiority: An item that is 4 For an exhaustive survey of the grammatico-rhetorical tradition, see A. Cizek, Imitatio et tractatio. Die literarisch-rhetorischen Orundlagender Nachahmung in Antike und Mittelalter, (Tubingen 1994) (Rhetorik-Forschungen 7). Dina De Rentiis succeeds well in juxtaposing the grammatico-rhetorical and the ethical-theological, although he limits his purview to the period from the twelfth through the sixteenth century: see Die ^eit der Nachfolge: ^ur Interdependent von 'imitatio Christi' und 'imitatio auctorum' im 12—16. Jahrhundert (Tubingen 1996) (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fur romanische Philologie 273). The broadest overview that pays attention to both traditions is a short encyclopedia entry: N. Kaminski, 'Imitatio,' in Historisches Worterbuch der Rhetorik, ed. G. Ueding, IV (Tubingen 1998), col. 246-257. The Middle Ages receive very short shrift in the otherwise excellent thumbnail sketch on the topic offered in G. Else and H. Regueiro Elam, 'Imitation', in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. A. Preminger and T. Brogan (Princeton, New Jersey 1993), pp. 575-579. 0 European Literature, 'Imitation and Creation,' pp. 397-401.

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qualified as 'imitation' is often the same as one tagged as 'faux' or 'pseudo'. As the historian of rhetoric Richard McKeon declared in the opening of a now-classic article on imitation in antiquity, 'The term "imitation" is not prominent in the vocabulary of criticism today. In such use as it still has, it serves to segregate the bad from the good in art. . .'6 A similar defensiveness may lie behind the heavy application that mimesis, the Greek progenitor of imitatio, has seen in modern literary criticism since Erich Auerbach (1892^1957) emblazoned it upon his most influential book, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, when it was published in 1946.7 Auerbach's book, in which mimesis designates the representation of social reality in European literature, initiated a renewal of attention to the topic from literary historians and aestheticians that held strong throughout the second half of the twentieth century.8 Mimesis and imitation are often treated as being more or less synonymous, but as even the cursory definition of mimesis just provided indicates, the two terms can serve productively to discriminate among very different manifestations. Mimesis comprehends the representation of reality in art, whether through words or action, and describes a relationship between the world and representational arts, whereas imitation pertains to the relationship of one text to another. Where the two overlap is in their distance from reality. The status of imitation, both the term and the practice, has been questionable since the end of the eighteenth century. Imitation conflicts with ideals (sometimes illusory) of originality, spontaneity, innovation, unconventionality, improvisation, self-expression, and individuality that have held sway since Romanticism. Reservations about imitation belong to a larger complex, in which modern views toward the old and new differ sharply from medieval ones. The literature and history of the Middle Ages are filled with instances in which people base claims of authority upon ancient authors or texts and old parchment or manuscripts; whereas in the present day people 6 R. McKeon, 'Literary Criticism and the Concept of Imitation in Antiquity', Modem Philology 34 (1936), 1-35; reprinted in Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern., ed. R. Crane (Chicago 1952), pp. 147-75, at 147. 7 Trans. W. Trask (Princeton, New Jersey 1953). 8 See G. Gebauer and C. Wulf, 'Mimesis', in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. M. Kelly, 4 vols. (Oxford 1998), III, pp. 232~8, and J. Ziolkowski, 'Erich Auerbach', Ibid., I, pp. 157-9.

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are inclined to place more weight upon new studies and the latest reports or technologies, as purveyed in such media as the internet, television, and newspapers. The Romantic and post-Romantic distrust of imitation revives doubts that were voiced already in classical philosophy. In Plato (c. 429-347 BC) mimesis refers particularly to the relationship of art to ideal forms. Plato sets forth his theory of artistic imitation in Book 10 (and to a lesser extent in Book 3) of the Republic, when he discusses the three kinds of couches: the idea of the couch, over which God presides; the imitation of the couch, which a carpenter produces; and the picture of a couch, which a painter makes. To summarize crudely, Plato identifies imitation as the method of all art. Painters and poets devise objects that are twice removed from the truth of ideal forms, since their external appearances counterfeit the appearance of ideas rather than the ideas themselves. The distance of art from the ideal constitutes one component in the explanation for Plato's famous, or infamous, banishment of poetry as a mimetic art. Another aspect of it would be distrust of imitation as a form of falsification. In this light a story is an imitation or image of a lie in the soul.9 Yet evidently Plato does not condemn wholesale the imitation of the ideal found in poetry and art, since he presents the universe as being imitation of ideas by a divine craftsman.10 A loosely similar conception of imitation, perhaps derived very indirectly from the Platonic, appears in Medieval Latin when imitatio is employed to describe the attempted reproduction of an ideal that exists not in reality but only in the mind of the would-be imitator. But it is typical of the profound textuality characteristic of the Latin literary tradition that the key passage cited to document this usage has at its basis reading. 'What they have read, may they believe; what they have come to believe, may they teach; what they have taught, may they imitate.'11

9 Republic 2, 382bc as quoted and analyzed in McKeon, 'Literary Criticism', p. 151. 10 Plato, Timaeus 27O29C, trans. F. Cornford (Indianapolis-New York 1959), pp. 1618; trans. Calcidius, ed. J. H. Waszink, Corpus Platonicum Medii Aevi 4, 2nd ed. (London-Leiden 1975), pp. 20.6-22.8. 11 'Quod legerint, credant/Quod crediderint, doceant,/Quod docuerint, imitentur', in Pontificate romanum, ed. de Benoit, XIV (Rome 1752), p. 419, quoted by J. de Ghellinck, 'Imitari, imitatio', Bulletin Du Cange (Archivium Latinitatis Medii Aevi) 15 (1940), 151-9, at p. 151.

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Like almost all the rest of Plato's writings, the Republic was not directly accessible in the Latin Middle Ages, but Macrobius (ca. 400 AD), who was well versed in Neoplatonic doctrines, incorporates very similar thoughts into his interpretations of Vergil's Aeneid. For example, he establishes connections between the structure of the Aeneid and that of the macrocosm.12 Furthermore, in his schema Vergil as a student of Homer is essentially an imitator of archetypes: in Vergil Macrobius sees an accommodation of the Platonic model to literary production.13 Plato's notion of poetry as being a self-reflexive, doubly mimetic form of expression was also embedded in the Timaeus, which was widely available in the translation and commentary by Calcidius (fourth century AD). Plato declares: My incapacity is not surprising; but I have formed the same judgment about the poets of the past and of today. Not that I have low opinion of poets in general; but anyone can see that an imitator, of whatever sort, will reproduce best and most easily the surroundings in which he has been brought up; what lies outside that range is even harder to reproduce successfully in discourse than it is in action.14 This statement of Plato's was later absorbed into the Latin context of imitatio and emulatio, with commentators perceiving that Latin poets imitate both life and each other.13

12

Curtius, European Literature, p. 400. Saturnalia 5.13.40, ed. J. Willis (Leipzig 1970), p. 301:9-15: see D. Kelly, The Conspiracy of Allusion: Description, Rewriting, and Authorship from Macrobius to Medieval Romance (Leiden, Boston, and Cologne 1999) (Studies in the History of Christian Thought 97), pp. 49-51. 14 Plato, Timaeus 19d, trans. Cornford, p. 6; Latin trans, by Calcidius, ed. J. Waszink (London and Leiden, 2nd ed., 1975), pp. 10:18-11:4: 'Nee mirum non posse me, quando nee ueteres quidem auctores uel praesentis saeculi poetas posse confidam, non quo contemnam poeticam nationem, sed quod euidens perspicuumque sit imitandi peritos ea demum aemulari posse perfecte quorum ab ineunte aetate habeant usum experientiamque et in quibus propemodum sint educati, at uero incogniti moris peregrinaeque institutionis imitationem effictam, praesertim oratione seu uersibus, praeclaris licet praestantibusque ingeniis esse difficilem.' 15 The Commentary on the First Six Books of the Aeneid' of Vergil commonly attributed to Bernardus Sihiestris, ed. J. Jones and E.Jones (Lincoln-London 1977), pp. 74:21-75:2: 'Zetus Grece quasi zelus, id est emulatio Latine; Calais vero quasi calon, id est bonum. Emulatio autem hoc loco poesis intelligitur que tota est in imitatione. Unde Plato in Timeo dicit poetas imitandi peritos ea demum emulari posse quorum ab ineunte etate experientiam habent. Respice enim ad Horatium, Juvenalem et Stacium, Vergilium. In omnibus se imitantur'; Bernardus Silvestris, Commentary on the First Six Books of Virgil's 'Aeneid,' Book 6, line 289, trans. E. Schreiber and T. Maresca 13

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In Aristotle mimesis refers to the correspondence of art with modes of human action and expression. In the Poetics Aristotle suggests that all arts are imitative—a point of view that Augustine would later revisit and reexamine at length, with specific reference to music, in his De musica (composed AD 388-91).16 Some kinds of art imitate action, others words. For Aristotle poetry was mimesis, in that its characteristic form of creation resulted from imitation of men doing something.17 The Aristotelian concern with imitation of actions lingered throughout antiquity and late antiquity. For instance, we read in Quintilian's (ca. 35-100 AD) Institutio oratoria (10.2.27) that 'imitation . . . should not be confined merely to words.'18 And Aelius Donatus' De comedia (fourth century AD) features the following observation: 'Comedy, says Cicero, is "an imitation of life, a mirror of character, and an image of truth."'19 Also in late antiquity, the grammarian Diomedes (fourth century AD) presents a generic typology of poetry that includes one he labels 'the active or imitative genre, which the Greeks call the dramatic or mimetic'.20 The usage of imitation and mimesis in both Aelius Donatus and Diomedes retains the association with drama and related forms that had emerged already in ancient Greek. Such mimesis is bound conceptually and etymologically with mimicry. This understanding of imitatio did not vanish in the Middle Ages and in (Lincoln-London 1979), pp. 71-72: '^etus is so called in Greek as if zelus, that is, emulatio, "emulation," in Latin; Calais, as if colon, that is, bonum, "the good." For emulation here is understood as poetry, which consists entirely of imitation. Whence Plato in the Timaeus (19D) says that poets practiced in imitation can recreate the experiences which anyone has from birth. Read attentively Horace, Juvenal, Statius, and Virgil; they imitate each other in all things.' 16 PL 32, 1309-1378. 17 Poetics 1448 al, trans. I. Bywater, in The Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. J. Barnes (Princeton, New Jersey 1984) (Bollingen Series 71), II, p. 2317: 'The objects the imitator represents are actions, with agents who are necessarily either good men or bad'. 18 Institutio oratoria 10.2.27, ed. and trans. H. Butler (London 1922), IV, pp. 88-89: 'Imitatio autem (nam saepius idem dicam) non sit tantum in verbis.' 19 De fabula, in Commentum Terenti, ed. P. Wessner, 2 vols., I (Leipzig 1902~5), pp. 22-31, at 22.19^20: 'comoediam esse Cicero ait imitationem uitae, speculum consuetudinis, imaginem ueritatis'; trans, in Medieval Literary Criticism: Translations and Interpretations, ed. O. Hardison, Jr., A. Preminger, K. Kerrane and L. Golden (New York 1974), p. 45. 20 Artis grammaticae libri III, in Grammatici latini, ed. H. Keil, I (Leipzig 1857), pp. 297-529, at 482:14-15 '(genus) activum est vel imitativum, quod Graeci dramaticon vel mimeticon': see Curtius, European Literature, p. 440.

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fact resurfaced with the rediscovery of Aristotle, especially as mediated and modified in Hermann the German (d. 1272).21 In a Christian context imitatio came to be valued first and foremost in the context of imitatio Christi. Although this imitatio attained particular prominence only in the twelfth century and later, it was hardly unknown in the earlier Middle Ages.22 Even in Bede (672/3-735) it is linked implicitly with reading—reading of the Gospels.23 But generally in the Latin tradition such nods to the Greek philosophical conception of mimesis become rarer with the passage of time.24 In the main those who wrote about imitatio had concerns much less philosophical than philological: They were interested in the imitation of words.25 The term imitatio as it is customarily applied in the interpretation of Latin literature refers to an extensive band within the complete spectrum of verbal imitation, what could be called imitation of the Classics or of canonical texts.26 A conviction that imitation of great speakers and writers constitutes the surest means of attaining stylistic excellence was entrenched in rhetorical doctrine at the latest by the first century, in the Rhetorica ad Herennium (perhaps c. 86-82 BC), Cicero's Brutus and Orator, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus's On Imitation (extant only in fragments). In Latin this imitation was often inherently creative, since it necessitated the adaptation of models from one language and culture, Greek, into another, Latin. The creativ-

21

Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c. 1100-c. 1375: The Commentary-Tradition, ed. A. Minnis and A. Scott (Oxford 1988), pp. 290 3 and 301-3. 22 For the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries, see De Rentiis, Die ^eit der Nachfolge. 23 Homeliarum euangelii libri ii, Lib. II, hom. 10, ed. D. Hurst (Turnhout 1955) (CCSL 122) p. 247:1-5. 24 J. Schneider, Die Vita Heinrici IV. und Sallust. Studien zu Stil und Imitatio in der mittelalteinischen Prosa (Berlin 1965) (Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. Schriften der Sektion fur Altertumswissenschaft 49), p. 2. 25 This particularization of imitatio in the verbal can be seen in John of Salisbury's Metalogicon when he states: 'Nee in solis nominibus conspicua est naturae haec imitatio, sed in aliis omnibus orationis partibus si diligentius attendatur': Metalogicon 1.14, ed. J. Hall (Turnhout 1991) (CCCM 98), p. 34:48-50; trans. D. McGarry (Berkeley-Los Angeles 1955), p. 40: 'Upon reflection, one sees that this imitation of nature also maintains in other parts of speech, as well as in nouns.' 26 See G. Conte and G. Most, 'Imitatio', in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd eds., ed. S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth (Oxford 1996), p. 749, who define imitatio as 'the study and conspicuous deployment of features recognizably characteristic of a canonical author's style or content, so as to define one's own generic affiliation.'

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ity remained even after the native tradition burgeoned and the models imitated became Latin. Whether the exempla were Greek or Latin, the imitation presumed a form of competition—a rivalry for distinction expressed in Greek as ^fjXoq or £r)A,coat