Blindness and Therapy in Late Medieval French and Italian Poetry 1843842726, 9781843842729

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an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620, USA www.boydellandbrewer.com

BLINDNESS AND THERAPY IN LATE MEDIEVAL FRENCH AND ITALIAN POETRY Julie Singer

Julie Singer

JULIE SINGER is Assistant Professor of French at Washington University, St Louis.

BLINDNESS AND THERAPY IN LATE MEDIEVAL FRENCH AND ITALIAN POETRY

This book argues that late medieval love poets, from Petrarch to Machaut and Charles d’Orléans, exploit scientific models as a broad framework within which to redefine the limits of the lyric subject and his body. Just as humoral theory depends upon principles of likes and contraries in order to heal, poetry makes possible a parallel therapeutic system in which verbal oppositions and substitutions counter or rewrite received medical wisdom. The specific case of blindness, a disability that in principle forecloses the possibility of love, serves as a laboratory in which to explore poets’ circumvention of the logical limits of contemporary medical theory. Reclaiming the power of remedy from physicians, these late medieval French and Italian poets prompt us to rethink not only the relationship between scientific and literary authority at the close of the middle ages, but, more broadly speaking, the very notion of therapy.

Gallica

Gallica Volume 20

BLINDNESS AND THERAPY IN LATE MEDIEVAL FRENCH AND ITALIAN POETRY

Gallica ISSN 1749–091X General Editor: Sarah Kay

Gallica aims to provide a forum for the best current work in medieval and Renaissance French studies. Literary studies are particularly welcome and preference is given to works written in English, although publication in French is not excluded. Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to the editor, or to the publisher, at the addresses given below; all submissions receive prompt and informed consideration. Professor Sarah Kay, Department of French and Italian, Princeton University, 303 East Pyne, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA The Managing Editor, Gallica, Boydell & Brewer Ltd, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK

Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the end of this volume.

BLINDNESS AND THERAPY IN LATE MEDIEVAL FRENCH AND ITALIAN POETRY

Julie Singer

D. S. BREWER

© Julie Singer 2011 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Julie Singer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2011 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 978–1–84384–272–9 D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

A CPI catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate Papers used by Boydell & Brewer Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests

Printed in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgements

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Introduction: On Rhetoric and Remedy

1

Chapter 1. The Love-Imprint

23

Chapter 2. Medical Blindness, Rhetorical Insight

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Chapter 3. Irony, or the Therapeutics of Contraries

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Chapter 4. Metaphor as Experimental Medicine

113

Chapter 5. Metonymy and Prosthesis

147

Chapter 6. Blindfold Synecdoche

187

Epilogue. Just Words

211

Bibliography

215

Index

235

In loving memory of Mrs Doris Patz artist, benefactress, friend

Illustrations Figure 1. Gilles li Muisis undergoing cataract surgery. Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique ms 13076–77, fol. 50v c. 1351–1360. Photo Credit: Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique

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Figure 2. Guillaume de Machaut, vallet borgne. BnF ms fr. 1584, fol. D (detail) c. 1370–1377. Photo Credit: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

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Figure 3. The Compas of Baude Cordier, Musée Condé ms 564/1047, fol. 12r, c. 1408–1420. Photo Credit: Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY

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Acknowledgements This project would not have been possible without the generosity of many colleagues and friends. My first thanks go to Helen Solterer and Valeria Finucci, under whose guidance I initially researched the love-imprint and its cultural contexts. I am honoured to have earned a place as their colleague and friend. Michael McVaugh kindly introduced me to key concepts in the history of medieval medicine and surgery, while Marc Schachter and Martin Eisner, with their queries and critiques, helped me question my assumptions about French and Italian lyric. Roberto Dainotto, Michèle Longino, and Alice Kaplan sustained me with their unwavering belief in my abilities. Kevin Brownlee’s encouragement inspired me as his conversation helped me focus my ideas. I am also thankful to Deborah McGrady, who has encouraged me to think about the book in new ways, and has epitomized the intellectual generosity of a true scholar. My colleagues in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Washington University are not just supporters, but models of the scholarly heights I have sought to achieve; among them I must extend special thanks to Elzbieta Sklodowska, Harriet Stone, and Akiko Tsuchiya. Several of this book’s chapters grew from ideas I presented at conferences and symposia, in discussions formal and informal. I am grateful to all those who listened and who provided me with further food for thought. A draft of Chapter Four was presented to the CUNY Symposium on Music and Disability in January 2010: Joe Straus, Licia Carlson, Anne Stone, and the other symposium participants helped me supplement my literary readings with musicological and philosophical perspectives. Mark O’Tool kindly shared with me his excellent dissertation on the Hospice des Quinze-Vingts, and he and other members of the Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages, especially Joshua Eyler and Wendy Turner, have inspired me to think creatively about blindness. My research was funded in part with a Bourse Chateaubriand, provided by the French embassy, which enabled me to spend a year researching this topic in France. I also received material support from the Graduate School at Duke University, and from the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. Of the many librarians who facilitated my research, I am especially grateful to Paula Carns at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and to Kasia Leousis of Washington UniverBLINDNESS AND THERAPY

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ACKNOWLEGEMENTS

sity, who provided much-needed aid at a critical moment. Gwendoline Maucher has provided invaluable assistance in the preparation of the manuscript. From an intellectual and editorial standpoint Sarah Kay, Ellie Ferguson, and Caroline Palmer have helped me make this book the best it can be. Lastly, I wish to express my love and gratitude to my parents, Gordon A. and Kathryn G. Singer. They took me on a trip to Britain when I was five years old, but only on the condition that I study a bit of history first – and it was then that my love for all things medieval was sparked. Thank you for your unflagging support.

Introduction On Rhetoric and Remedy BLINDNESS INTRODUCTION AND THERAPY

Why do great excesses cause disease? Is it because they produce either excess [hyperbole] or defect [elleipsis]? And after all these constitute disease [nosos].1

The author of the hugely influential Aristotelian Problemata, repeatedly translated into Latin and the Romance vernaculars during the last three centuries of the Middle Ages, asks whether humoral imbalances cause disease because they give rise to hyperbole or elleipsis (superfluity or lack).2 The semantic overlap between verbal and humoral states, between rhetorical figures and the etiology of disease, is striking. This enticing trace of a common ground shared by the two disciplines begs the question: what is the perceived relationship between medicine and rhetoric in the later Middle Ages? The medical domain’s dependence upon basic rhetorical principles is firmly established from the early medieval period onward. According to Isidore of Seville’s well-known formulation (Etymologiae IV.xiii), medicine is not included among the liberal arts because it incorporates all seven

1 2

Cited in Mirko D. Grmek, ‘The Concept of Disease’, in Grmek, 248. The Problemata were translated into Latin by David de Dinant before 1210, and by Bartholomew of Messina around 1260; Bartholomew’s translation served as the basis of Pietra d’Abano’s Latin commentary (c.1310), disseminated in Paris by Jean de Jandun (after 1315), which in turn served as a source for Évrart de Conty’s late-fourteenth-century Middle French translation, the Problemes. On this text and its medieval reception, see the essays contained in Pieter de Leemans and Michèle Goyens eds, Aristotle’s Problemata in Different Times and Tongues (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2006). Danielle Jacquart discusses the date of David de Dinant’s translation in ‘Medical Scholasticism’, in Grmek, 239, and Annelies Blœm and Michèle Goyens provide a brief overview of medieval translations in ‘À propos des mouvemens et des affections de l’ame. Analyse du champ sémantique des émotions dans la traduction en moyen français des Problèmes d’Aristote’, in Lexiques scientifiques et techniques: Constitution et approche historique, ed. Olivier Bertrand, Hiltrud Gerner, and Béatrice Stumpf (Palaiseau: Éditions de l’École Polytechnique, 2007), 105–20. Zdislow Kuksewicz discusses Jean de Jandun’s role in the dissemination of Pietro d’Abano’s commentary in ‘Les Problemata de Pietro d’Abano et leur “rédaction” par Jean de Jandun’, Medioevo 11 (1985), 113–37.

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disciplines.3 Indeed, the encyclopedist holds that rhetorical training is essential to the physician, that he might formulate arguments (‘Similiter et Rhetoricam, ut veracibus argumentis valeat definire quae tractat’). Moreover, medicine, as practised in the medieval West, is a theoretical venture based in the creation of a discourse – that is, in a rhetoric – of symmetry and complementarity. Humoral medicine constitutes a rhetorical almost as much as a medical construct, as its emphasis on the balance and substitution of elements is dependent upon verbal representations of its system of conditions, complexions, and attributes. As we shall see, the ‘medicalization’ of lyric poetry is a phenomenon with great staying power in medieval vernacular verse. And yet, late medieval poets – especially those in the French tradition – revise and reconstruct contemporary medical theory in a manner that differs significantly from high medieval writers’ engagement with similar material. In this study I shall focus primarily on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century French and Italian poets’ explorations of eyesight and blindness, arguing for a late medieval transformation in poetic models of the body. More than they cite or incorporate scientific knowledge (a procedure we see in the writings of Chrétien de Troyes, Jean de Meun, and even Dante Alighieri), late medieval lyricists construct an alternative rhetorical system that embodies the written (poetic) word by using rhetorical constructs to supplement or ‘heal’ impaired bodies. Thus, while later medieval lyricists owe much to their predecessors – the troubadours, the Sicilians, and, especially in France, the Roman de la Rose – their use of language to reshape the human body signals a new, differently embodied sort of ‘medicalization’ from the turn of the fourteenth through the middle of the fifteenth century. This is a turn that we first observe in Italy, among the poets of the dolce stil novo, and that flourishes in the hands of its two greatest practitioners, Petrarch and Guillaume de Machaut. These authors exploit humoral medicine’s principles of symmetry and complementarity, with their rhetorical strategies of substitution, concealment, and verbal transformation serving to establish not just poetic but physiological harmony. Just as humoral theory depends upon principles of likes and contraries in order to restore balance (and thus to heal), poetry makes possible a parallel therapeutic system in which verbal oppositions and substitutions counter or rewrite received medical wisdom. After all, given the rhetorical underpinnings of medieval medicine, it is far from inconceivable that the author of lyric would employ rhetorical figures as categories of 3 ‘Quaeritur a quibusdam quare inter ceteras liberales disciplinas Medicinae ars non contineatur. Propterea, quia illae singulares continent causas, ista vero omnium’ (It is asked why the art of medicine is not included among the other liberal disciplines. The reason is that the liberal arts constitute distinct subjects, while medicine is truly a part of all of them). Etymologiarum sive Originum libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay (London: Oxford University Press, 1911/1962).

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therapy; indeed, a number of late medieval writers create physically impaired poetic personae whose faculties they attempt to restore by the diverting and verbalizing of medical principles. Beyond a mere assimilation of medical and scientific language, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries love poetry comes to attempt a rewriting of biological pathways, offering alternate modes of perception and performing (or at least attempting) textual healing.4

Lyric and therapy The later Middle Ages, the period spanning the mid-thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth century that will be the primary focus of the present study, is an age of marked and pervasive Aristotelianism, bookended by twelfth- and thirteenth- century translations of Aristotelian texts (and commentaries thereon) into Latin and, from the later fourteenth century on, into European vernaculars. There clearly exists a significant degree of overlap between poetic and medical writing traditions during this period. Writers such as Guido Cavalcanti, primarily known as poets, were often well versed in natural science; medical practitioners such as Pietro d’Abano and poets, including Petrarch, sought to define the interactions and the boundaries between medicine and rhetoric; poets and medical writers often treated shared subject matter, as both sought to describe the human body and its relationships with the outside world.5 The function of lyric as both a symptom of and a cure for illness is perhaps the most overt point of contact between poetry and medicine in the later Middle Ages. According to late medieval convention the state of the poet-narrator’s body conditions his literary output, particularly when the content of that literary production is explicitly medicalized. Not surprisingly, then, the composition of lyric poetry is frequently listed, along with depression and fever, as a symptom of love. For instance, the lover’s last will and testament (Laiz) in La Confession et testament de l’amant trespassé de deuil 4 The connections between poetic and medical writing are recognized, but have not received adequate study. For an introduction to the complexities of such lines of inquiry, particularly in the classroom, see Lilian R. Furst, ‘Medical History and Literary Texts’, in Teaching Literature and Medicine, ed. Anne Hunsaker and Marilyn Chandler (New York: MLA, 2000), 55–64. 5 See Nancy Siraisi’s discussion of Pietro d’Abano in Arts and Sciences at Padua: The Studium of Padua Before 1350 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1973). On Guido Cavalcanti’s scientific grounding, especially as expressed in the canzone Donna me prega, see J. E. Shaw, Guido Cavalcanti’s Theory of Love (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1949); Enrico Fenzi, La canzone d’amore di Guido Cavalcanti e i suoi antichi commenti (Genoa: Il Melangolo, 1999); Maria Luisa Ardizzone, Guido Cavalcanti: The Other Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); and Jonathan Usher, ‘Boccaccio, Cavalcanti’s Canzone “Donna me prega” and Dino’s Glosses’, Heliotropia 2.1 (2004), unpag. Petrarch’s far more ambivalent (and often contradictory) stance will be discussed more thoroughly in Chapter 2.

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by Pierre de Hauteville, probably composed between 1441 and 1447, builds on Alain Chartier’s attribution of poetic activity to ‘amoureux malades’ (sick lovers, stanza IV, v. 25) in the Belle Dame sans mercy.6 Hauteville associates the composition of rondeaux both with (unhappy) love and with feverish malady: Je laisse aux pouvres amoureux Qui sont courcés et douloureux En cueur sans en monstrer semblant Faire rondeaulx aventureux, Rire et puis pleurer à tout yeulx, Puis entrer en fievres tramblant.7 I leave poor lovers, who suffer anger and pain in their heart without showing it on the outside, to compose adventurous rondeaux, to laugh and then cry their eyes out, then to fall trembling into fevers.

Indeed, in a more general sense poets of the later Middle Ages appear to have constructed a privileged relationship between love and the lyric. Guillaume de Machaut, for one, suggests as much when, in the Lai d’Esperance inserted in the Voir Dit (1362–5), the narrator Guillaume declares that it is only as a servant of love that he can compose lyric pieces such as lais and virelais. Longuement me sui tenus De faire lais, Car d’amours estoie nus. Mais des or mais Ferai chans et virelais: Je y sui tenus, Qu’en amours me suis rendus A tous jours mais.8 For a long time I restrained myself from composing lais, because I was stripped of love. But from now on I will make songs and virelais, as I am bound to do, as I have surrendered myself to love forevermore.

And later in the Voir Dit, the loss of love leads directly to the loss of poetic productivity, suggesting a correspondence between love-experience and ballades, rondeaux, and virelais. 6 Alain Chartier, Baudet Herenc, and Achille Caulier, Le Cycle de la Belle Dame sans mercy, ed. David F. Hult and Joan E. McRae (Paris: Champion, 2003). 7 Pierre de Hauteville, La Confession et testament de l’amant trespassé de deuil, ed. Rose M. Bidler (Montreal: CERES, 1982), vv. 835–40. This and all other translations from French are mine unless otherwise noted. 8 Guillaume de Machaut, Le Livre du Voir Dit, ed. Paul Imbs and Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet (Paris: Poche, 1999), 384, vv. 4342–9.

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Et s’arai perdu ma science, Car ja mais ne ferai sans doubtance Balade, rondel, virelai, Biau dit, biau chant n’amoureus lai.9 And so I will have lost my art, for I’ll probably never compose ballades, rondeaux, virelais, dits, songs or amorous lais.

The loss of love implies not only a loss of inspiration but the loss of the ability to compose. Indeed, in many texts love is portrayed as a poetic muse of sorts: in Pierre Michault’s fifteenth-century Dance aux aveugles blindfold Love declares ‘je faiz rondeaux et balades parfaire’ (I cause rondeaux and ballades to be made).10 Love-songs do not necessarily alleviate the lover-poet’s suffering, though, for they can easily become a sickly noise – a transformation of which the aural similarity of melody and malady is highly evocative.11 The lovernarrator of Jean Froissart’s Orloge amoureus (c.1368), an allegorical dit in which the lover is compared to a mechanical clock, shows how easily melody and malady can be conflated when he describes the manner in which his ‘chimes’ lose their musical quality and become a jarring, unhealthy noise. En ce frefel et en celle rihote Fai maint souspir, maint plaint et mainte note Qui ne sont pas de sons melodïeus, Mes attemprés de chans maladïeus.12 In this tumult and commotion I let out many sighs, complaints, and notes that are not melodious sounds, but are tempered by sickly songs.

If love (sickness) can lead to the composition of verses, these verses, in turn, can become not only a symptom but also a remedy. As Glending Olson has demonstrated, in the Middle Ages literary pleasure is characterized as serving a therapeutic function, especially in the works of Boccaccio and Chaucer;13 lyric, because of its musicality, bears an enhanced therapeutic potential. Music, as one of the ‘non-naturals’ (that is, external factors affecting health, such as air, movement, and diet), was perceived to have a 9 10 11

Ibid., 662, vv. 7480–83. Pierre Michault, Oeuvres poétiques, ed. Barbara Folkart (Paris: 10/18, 1980), 90. A similar effect is achieved in the French pair mélodie/maladie and in the Italian pair melodia/malattia. 12 Jean Froissart, Le Paradis d’amour; L’orloge amoureus, ed. Peter Dembowski (Geneva: Droz, 1986), vv. 857–60. 13 Glending Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), especially Chapter 2, ‘The Hygienic Justification’, 39–89.

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particular impact on emotional health. The continued inclusion of Boethius’s De institutione musica in university curricula guaranteed a widespread awareness of the theoretical connection between melody and malady: ‘the anecdotes of ancient feats of musical correction, moral improvement and healing, replayed throughout the European Middle Ages in copies of, and commentaries on, Boethius’s De Musica, and endorsed by the theory of the non-naturals, ensured that the medicinal power of music became a topos of medieval discussion’.14 Therefore, while singing of love can deepen a poet’s melancholy, it can also be a healing process: ‘both ancient and medieval medicine prescribed music for its therapeutic effects’.15 Medieval practitioners prescribed passive exposure to music, as well as the recitation of lyric, especially for those patients afflicted with lovesickness.16 Despite Christopher Page’s contention that ‘the prescription of music for the treatment of ailments, physical or mental, was technically almost impossible, except in the most general terms’, Peter Murray Jones has demonstrated that Western medical discussions of such a course of therapy become more prominent, and more theoretically sophisticated, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.17 This discourse depends on the truism that ‘like responds to like’ –

14 Peregrine Horden, ‘Religion as Medicine: Music in Medieval Hospitals’, in Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages, ed. Peter Biller and Joseph Ziegler (York: York Medieval Press, 2001), 151. 15 Mary Frances Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: the Viaticum and its Commentaries (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 46. Wack continues: ‘Recitation of verses was also supposed to alleviate the patient’s obsession with a particular woman. As Avicenna recognized, sometimes this strategy only served to reinforce the lover’s preoccupation, especially when the songs were about unsuccessful love. Constantine, in contrast, though giving the cure only the briefest mention, introduces no doubts as to its efficacy. This particular cure provided a fertile point of convergence between the medical tradition of lovesickness and literary representations of passionate love. From the twelfth century onwards, fictional characters or lyric personae claim to compose or sing in order to relieve love-sorrow, and in the hands of Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer, the lovesick poet or poetic lover was variously reinterpreted according to medical ideas about lovesickness.’ On the theoretical bases for music therapy in the Middle Ages, see Charles Burnett, ‘“Spiritual medicine”: Music and Healing in Islam and its Influence in Western Medicine’, in Musical Healing in Cultural Contexts, ed. Penelope Gouk (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 85–91. 16 Madeleine Pelner Cosman notes that in the fourteenth century ‘medical theorists in their texts and practitioners with their patients remarkably utilized both musical ideas and music performance in diagnosis of disease, prognosis of cure or death, and treatment by medication or surgery.’ ‘Machaut’s Medical Musical World’, in Machaut’s World: Science and Art in the Fourteenth Century, ed. Madeleine Pelner Cosman and Bruce Chandler, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 314 (1978), 1. 17 Christopher Page, ‘Music and Medicine in the Thirteenth Century’, in Horden, 113. Peter Murray Jones provides a number of later medieval examples of the theory and practice of music therapy in the same volume: ‘Music Therapy in the Later Middle Ages: The Case of Hugo van der Goes’, 120–44.

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that is, that the correspondence between the mathematical principles that structure the human soul and those that underlie the physical world would permit music, which shares that same mathematical basis, to bring physiological and celestial rhythms back into harmony.18 Melody can function as a remedy for malady precisely because the two have such similar effects on bodily balance and rhythm. Like does not always respond to like, however. Other remedies are often needed, an exigency that leads late medieval poets to experiment with formal ‘remedies’ that rewrite, rather than simply readjust, the structures and rhythms of the body. This ‘lyric therapy’ is possible, and available to poets, thanks to the rhetorical underpinnings of medieval medicine.

The ‘medicalization’ of lyric One of the most explicit intersections between late medieval poetic and medical texts lies at the lexical level, as the language of healing becomes incorporated in verse, from descriptions of the sensory and cognitive faculties in Guido Cavalcanti’s ‘Donna me prega’ (late thirteenth century) to diagnoses of melancholy and playful allusions to uroscopy in the verse of Charles d’Orléans (mid-fifteenth century). The adoption of such language has been interpreted, in most of the critical literature, as evidence of the cultural capital of medical theory. As both Michael McVaugh and Irina Metzler have argued, later medieval society is subject to a perceptible ‘medicalization’, a phenomenon that occurs, according to McVaugh, ‘when aspects of human behavior that had previously been judged normal or deviant, good or bad, by the lay public are assigned to medical control and are redefined as health or illness, shedding their moral overtones’.19 This sort of medicalization is marked not only by the increasing assignment of certain phenomena to the realm of medical expertise, but also by appropriation of medical language in markedly nonmedical contexts. The ‘growing faith in medicine manifested by individuals’ that McVaugh detected in his study of medical practice in the Crown of Aragon from the late thirteenth through mid-fourteenth centuries was a significant enough phenomenon, across sociolinguistic boundaries, to

18 William of Auvergne (d. 1249) summarizes this argument. As Page paraphrases his De universo: ‘a skilled musician can produce changes in a person’s disposition because like responds to like: music has a mathematical basis and we react to it because the human soul shares the numerical motion of the soul of the universe.’ ‘Music and Medicine in the Thirteenth Century’, 113. Page notes that William goes on to refute this premise, though, pointing out that like does not always respond to like. 19 Michael McVaugh, Medicine Before the Plague: Practitioners and their Patients in the Crown of Aragon 1285–1345 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 190. Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Physical Impairment in the High Middle Ages, c.1100–c.1400 (London: Routledge, 2006), 66.

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have attracted French and Italian poets’ attention;20 this could explain, in part, the trend toward medical themes in vernacular lyric. The medicalization manifest in medieval literature must, however, be distinguished from the modern species of medicalization defined by Simi Linton as that which ‘casts human variation as deviance from the norm, as pathological condition, as deficit, and, significantly, as an individual burden and personal tragedy’.21 For in late medieval letters, medical authority is not accepted as absolute, but is tempered with healthy doses of satire: medieval physicians ‘managed to transmit certain of their ideas to philosophers and poets’, according to Danielle Jacquart, without improving their status as ‘the objects of eternal ridicule’.22 Indeed, the challenge posed to medical authority by an equally potent and persuasive poetic model of the body is a fundamental component of this tricky give-and-take between medical and rhetorical remedies.23 The interpretive fluidity of the language of remedy in late medieval Romance vernaculars points to just such a sharing of therapeutic potential: the Middle French verb mirer (‘to reflect’ or ‘to doctor’), for instance, at once evokes poetic and medical models of salvation or healing.24 Thus a text such as George Chastelain’s mid-fifteenth- century Miroir de Mort presents itself as an instrument of both physical and spiritual healing, its directive ‘Mirons nous pour estre saulvé’ (Let us reflect on ourselves/doctor

20 21

McVaugh, Medicine Before the Plague, 190. Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 11. 22 Jacquart, ‘Medical Scholasticism’, 240. 23 As Arthur Hyman and James J. Walsh point out in the introduction to Philosophy in the Middle Ages ((Indianapolis: Hackett, 1973), 7), while lip-service is often paid to ‘authorities’ in medieval texts, these authorities are often manipulated to the point where their words are instruments of latter authors rather than monuments to be slavishly imitated. ‘The medievals were aware of this, and the slogan “Authority has a nose of wax” (and hence can be turned wherever one wishes) is attributed to several medieval figures and seems to have been something of a commonplace. One should ask, then, just how these so-called “authorities” function in the actual argument, keeping in mind the difference between using a text to settle an issue, to delineate a problem by presenting representative positions, to serve as a point of departure for finer discriminations, or simply to serve as do many modern footnotes, as a reference to fuller discussions elsewhere.’ 24 The homonymic forms mirer converged from different roots: mirer (to heal) and mire (doctor) developed from the Latin medicus, with the shift from a d to an r characteristic of words of scholarly influence, while mirer (to reflect) derives from the Latin mirari. ‘Le mot mirer a plusieurs sens, qui résonnent comme en contrepoint de notre petite enquête lexicale: il s’agit bien de regarder, de considérer, mais aussi de méditer, de regarder au-delà de la simple apparence: mirer un œuf, n’est-ce pas justement le regarder en transparence ? Par les rencontres de l’homophonie, ce mot est lié au mire, le médecin, et mirer a aussi le sens de soigner. L’examen est donc aussi bien physique que physiologique et moral.’ Denis Hüe, ‘Miroir de mort, miroir de vie, miroir du monde’, in Miroirs et jeux de miroirs dans la littérature médiévale, ed. F. Pomel (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes 2, 2003), 41.

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ourselves in order to be saved) serving as an impetus to introspective poiesis and to textual self-medication.25 It is therefore apparent that with medieval medicalization, unlike its modern corollary, the use of medical language does not necessarily imply a concession of authority to the medical domain. Furthermore, in a late medieval context to medicalize is not always to pathologize, but simply to avail oneself of certain terms of medical discourse. Broadly speaking, then, I propose that we consider the ‘medicalization’ of late medieval poetry – that is, the adoption of medical concepts and terminology – not as an endorsement of medical theory or practice but simply as a signal of a turning inward: a renewed emphasis not on the external world but on the poet-lover’s body, its functions and its dysfunctions. While the appropriation of medical language may in some cases indicate a deference to medical authority, it also serves in other cases as an instrument of satire, or, in the texts I will examine in this book, as a means of highlighting the therapeutic potential of poiesis. In order to nuance our view of the functions of medicalized language in late medieval poetry I would like to begin with a brief look at two examples that make manifest this ‘medicalization’ of medieval verse: references to uroscopy in Dante da Maiano’s late-thirteenth-century sonnet ‘Di ciò che stato sei dimandatore’ and Charles d’Orléans’ rondeau ‘Puis qu’estes en chaleur d’amours’.26 Though both poets allude to medical practice with humorous results, this tongue-in-cheek use of medical language is underpinned by two very different attitudes toward medicine. I will argue that these differences illustrate a general trajectory from thirteenth- to fifteenth-century poetic appropriations of scientific language, from medicalization as it is commonly understood (a process by which aspects of human experience are assigned to medical control) to a later medieval (and primarily French) model of poetry as a sort of alternative medicine. 25 Chastelain probably composed the Miroir de Mort after his Oultré d’Amour, somewhere between 1436 and 1450. On the difficulty of dating Chastelain’s text, see Tania Van Hemelryck’s introduction to her critical edition. George Chastelain, Miroir de Mort (Louvain-la-Neuve: Publications de l’Institut d’Etudes Médiévales, 1995), 20–21. On text’s influence, see Tania Van Hemelryck, ‘Jean Molinet ou de l’autre côté du Miroir. Etude des rapports entre le Miroir de Mort et le Miroir de Vie’, in A l’heure encore de mon escrire: Aspects de la littérature de Bourgogne sous Philippe le Bon et Charles le Téméraire, ed. Claude Thiry (Louvain-la-Neuve: Université Catholique de Louvain, 1997), 233–51. 26 On the medieval practice of uroscopy see Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 124–6; Lorrayne Y. Baird-Lange, ‘The Physician’s “urynals and jurdones”: Urine and Uroscopy in Medieval Medicine and Literature’, FifteenthCentury Studies 2 (1979), 1–8; W. A. Moonen, ‘Piskijken in de kunst’, Geschiedenis der Geneeskunde 2 (1995), 4–11; and Faith Wallis, ‘Signs and Senses: Diagnosis and Prognosis in Medieval Pulse and Urine Texts’, Social History of Medicine 13:2 (2000), 265–78.

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Dante da Maiano’s well-known sonnet ‘Di ciò che stato sei dimandatore’ is constructed as a response to Dante Alighieri’s ‘A ciascun’alma’ (1283), the first sonnet of the Vita nuova, in which the poet had solicited interpretations of a vision in which Love fed the lover-narrator’s heart to his beloved.27 Unlike Guido Cavalcanti’s more serious reply in ‘Vedeste, al mio parere, onne valore’,28 Dante da Maiano’s sonnet attributes the young poet’s dream to baser bodily impulses. If the younger Dante is of sound mind, according to Dante da Maiano, he should wash his scrotum until the ‘vapours’ having caused his vision subside (‘se san ti truovi e ferm de la mente, / che lavi la tua coglia largamente, / a ciò che stingua e passi lo vapore / lo qual ti fa favoleggiar loquendo’, vv. 6–9); if not, his dream was mere delirium (‘sol c’hai farneticato’, v. 11) and no further interpretation is needed.29 Dante da Maiano closes his sonnet with an affirmation of the finality of his diagnosis but one that he quickly qualifies in the last verse as contingent upon medical authority: ‘n’e cangio mai d’esta sentenza mea, / fin che tua acqua al medico no stendo’ (Nor will I ever waver from this pronouncement of mine, until I show your piss to the doctor, vv. 13–14).30 The sonnet’s language evokes a quasi-medical procedure wherein two potential diagnoses, the first followed by a suggested course of treatment, are pronounced with the authoritative gravity of a sentenza. In his well-known reading of this sonnet Bruno Nardi argues that Dante da Maiano proceeds as would a physician: ‘ricevendo il sonetto A ciascun’alma, il rimatore di Maiano l’ha interpretato come avrebbe fatto un medico del punto di vista della sua arte’ (upon receiving the sonnet A ciascun’alma, the poet of Maiano interpreted it as a doctor would have done from his professional perspective).31 The posture of an older, wiser man, in this poem, seemingly becomes 27 On this sonnet see Erich Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1961); Dino S. Cervigni, Dante’s Poetry of Dreams (Florence: Olschki, 1986); Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Albert Russell Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 28 On Cavalcanti’s response, see Lucia Battaglia, ‘Per l’interpretazione del sonetto cavalcantiano “Vedeste al mio parere”’, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 147 (1970), 354–62. Another reply survives, ‘Naturalmente chere ogni amadore’, which has been attributed to Cino da Pistoia or to Terino da Castelfiorentino. 29 Dante da Maiano, Rime, ed. Rosanna Bettarini (Florence: Le Monnier, 1969), 150–51. Dante Gabriel Rossetti includes the sonnet in his The Early Italian Poets, Part II, though his euphemistic translation does little to capture the verve of the original. The Early Italian Poets from Ciullo d’Alcamo to Dante Alighieri in the Original Metres Together with Dante’s Vita Nuova (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1861), 396. 30 All translations from Italian are mine unless otherwise noted. 31 Bruno Nardi, ‘L’Amore e i medici medievali’, in his Saggi e note di critica dantesca (Milan: Ricciardi, 1966), 264. The reading of Dante da Maiano’s sonnet occupies pp. 263–7.

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analogous to the posture of a doctor. Words become, like blood or urine, another flux from the body – a basis for diagnosis and for a proposed therapeutic regimen. Despite the poet’s apparent displacement of the medical practitioner as supplier of therapeutic advice, however, the sonnet’s final verse serves to reinforce rather than undermine medical authority. Thus Nardi’s reading, while accomplishing the vital task of rescuing Dante da Maiano’s sonnet from those who would dismiss it as mere vulgarity and bad taste, in a sense oversimplifies the rimatore’s diagnostics.32 Dante is not a medical doctor, as his last line makes clear; he does not interpret the sonnet as a doctor would, but rather he provides an analysis that stands in for what a doctor would do. Dante proffers a diagnosis even as he makes it clear that his pronunciation would naturally be supplanted by medical opinion; the poet’s sentenza will stand ‘fin che tua acqua al medico no stendo’, but upon urinalysis by a professional, he will (presumably) defer to medical authority. The tercets’ rhymes of loquendo, intendo, rendo, and stendo reproduce the chain of ‘medical’ consultation: the first poet (Dante Alighieri) speaks, then the reader (Dante da Maiano) understands and renders a critique, but ultimately extends the object of analysis to a medical professional, moving it out of the literary realm. Dante da Maiano’s sonnet therefore reinforces the model of medicalization put forth by McVaugh: human behaviour (in this case, a dream-vision) is attributed to medical causes, manifesting an underlying faith in the power of medicine. Thus, despite the sonnet’s apparent blurring of poetic and medical discourses, in effect these disciplinary/professional boundaries are maintained, even highlighted, by the allusion to the medico’s potential to undermine and reverse the poet’s sentenza. The poet-reader interprets words as a doctor interprets urine, but the doctor’s ‘reading’ of urine can trump the poet’s reading of the text. Dante da Maiano’s allusion to urine, the product of a (sickly) body, keeps diagnosis and treatment out of the poetic realm, the figurative excretion of words subsumed to the real excretion of bodily fluids. A very different sort of medicalization, however, is present in fourteenthand fifteenth-century lyric, especially that composed in French.33 Whereas in Dante da Maiano’s sonnet medicalization implies a deference to medical authority (or, at the very least, medicine’s potential to shed light on poetic constructs), in later poems the appropriation of medical language endows the 32 He perhaps exaggerates his recuperation of the poem in insisting, for example, that he sees in it ‘niente di ironico, di sgarbato o di volgare’ (nothing ironic, unseemly or vulgar). ‘L’Amore e i medici medievali’, 267. 33 Popular scepticism of the medical profession in France seems only to have been enhanced by poison plots (erroneously) linked to the duchess of Orléans Valentina Visconti in the 1390s, and by physicians’ inability to cure the madness of Charles VI. See Chapter 2 for further discussion of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century antimedical discourse in France.

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poet with healing powers that, while inspired by medical practice, surpass the therapeutic potential of available medical remedies. Now, instead of words becoming like urine, urine can perhaps become like words. Charles d’Orléans provides a tongue-in-cheek illustration of this new poetic focus: Puis qu’estes en chaleur d’amours, Pour Dieu, laissez voir vostre orine! On vous trouvera medecine Qui briefment vous fera secours.34 Since you are in the heat of love, by God, let’s see your urine! We’ll find you some medicine that will help you in no time.

The medicine in question is not to be provided by a physician but by the poet himself, who continues by taking the lover’s pulse, diagnosing a ‘fièvre blanche’ and prescribing a few days’ rest, all the while returning to the refrain’s persistent request for a urine sample. The patient’s prognosis is excellent provided that he follow the poet’s advice. While the tone of this rondeau is lighthearted, the way in which the poet approaches the diagnosis and treatment of disease marks a fundamental shift in medicalized poetics: the poet is practising his own sort of therapy, described in terms borrowed from the semantic field of medicine, but he never defers to medical authority.35 Beyond its obvious humour, the poem by Charles d’Orléans shows the increasingly pronounced convergence of love-poetry and love-disease. Love is not the side effect of another malady (as it is characterized in Dante da Maiano’s sonnet), but an illness unto itself. Poets, like physicians, have begun treating love not just as a phenomenon but as an accident (that is, an attribute or event that cannot exist unto itself but only within a person or thing) and, eventually, a malady. In order to understand love, the poet must deepen his knowledge of his own body. Even as medieval poets increasingly rely upon medical terminology to describe the condition of the body, medicine’s inspiration (as a source for structural paradigms of the body) stands in tension with a sense of rivalry as poets mock physicians and counter medical convention by proposing alternate constructs. This simultaneous borrowing and rejection of medical models only intensifies in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as an increased emphasis in love lyric on the eye’s role in 34 Charles d’Orléans, Poésies, ed. Pierre Champion, 2 vols (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1956), CLX, vv. 1–4. 35 Though Charles d’Orléans often employs medicalized language, this aspect of his poetic output has been far less studied than has the medicalized language of Eustache Deschamps. See Claudio Galderisi, Le Lexique de Charles d’Orléans dans les rondeaux (Geneva: Droz, 1993) and Joëlle Ducos, ‘Savoir médical et poésie médiévale: la mélancolie chez Jean de Meung, Jean Dupin et Charles d’Orléans’, Eidolon 50 (1997), 41–56.

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the generation of love, and on the physiology of the lover’s eye, coincides roughly with what Mary Wack has characterized as an ‘apparent upsurge in European interest in the disease of love’ as well as with the emergence of ophthalmology as a surgical field of specialization.36

Windows to the body and soul: eyes, love, and medicine Theoretical models prominent in the later Middle Ages posit a well-attested link between the body, love, and medicine. Late medieval love discourse therefore presents itself as an apt arena in which to test the relative boundaries of medicine, ‘poetic fantasies’ (as Wack puts it37), and social practice. Love almost necessarily involves the interaction of the poetic subject’s (or medical patient’s) psyche with the external world, except in highly pathological narcissistic cases; it is conceived as the product of a specific biological pathway; it is a social and psychological construct that is nonetheless manifested in physical symptoms; and it is a popular subject among both poets and medical theoreticians, especially from Constantine the African’s translation of the Viaticum (1124) onward. The medieval love- experience is part of a larger social construct of erotic relationships and cannot be reduced to a physiological mechanism; however, that physiological (and pathological) mechanism is undeniably present. Educing the link between the anatomical body of the lover and the socially constructed corps de jouissance, then, is key to an understanding of the textual love tradition in the late Middle Ages.38 Historians of medicine such as Mary Wack, Danielle Jacquart, and Massimo Ciavolella have devoted their critical attention to the effect of the erotic on the physical (anatomical) body: that is, to lovesickness, wherein erotic desire results in a set of documented bodily symptoms.39 Conversely, 36 Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages, 13. Lovesickness and the love-imprint were apparently not initially identified with each other – the language of sickness and injury was not prevalent in Sicilian love poems, as it was seemingly rejected in favour of idealized portraits of the beloved and reflections on the optical riddle of perception – but in the later thirteenth century the two currents finally converge. Likewise, ophthalmology and the physiology of the eye replace optics and the physics of vision as a poetic preoccupation only toward the turn of the fourteenth century. 37 According to Mary Frances Wack, ‘The cultural authority of medicine may have in part enabled the poetic fantasies of the troubadours to become the social realities of the late Middle Ages and early modernity.’ Lovesickness in the Middle Ages, 50. 38 Roland Barthes proposes in Le Plaisir du texte ((Paris: Seuil, 1973), 29–30) that texts, like humans, have multiple bodies: an anatomical body, composed of grammatical or physiological structures, and an erotic body, or ‘corps de jouissance’. This duality, owing to which ‘the pleasure of the text is irreducible to its grammatical function … just as the pleasure of the [human] body is irreducible to physiological needs’ (Le plaisir du texte serait irréductible à son fonctionnement grammairien (phéno-textuel), comme le plaisir du corps est irréductible au besoin physiologique), is reflected in recent scholarly approaches to the problem of love and vision. 39 The most important book-length studies of medieval lovesickness are Massimo

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my project considers the effect of the physical on the erotic. Love, as it is often described in the Middle Ages, is a bodily process that begins in the eyes, so it is mediated and filtered – even engendered – by the lover’s physiology. Hence physiological models of the human eye (i.e., the anatomical) affect the manner in which the psychological process of innamoratio (the erotic) is perceived and described. Taking this basic observation one step further, we will explore the ways in which a lover’s body can mould not only his behaviour but his poetic process, and the rhetorical strategies by means of which the poet can seek to reshape a visually impaired body. The eye is of vital importance in the process of innamoratio, whether or not that process is pathologized.40 Even setting aside medieval optical debates on the precise role of the eye in human vision,41 the eye is crucial as the portal between the external and internal worlds, and as the first point of contact between the lover and beloved; sight is the first of the quinque lineae perfectae ad amorem.42 The eye also marks a point of contact between numerous scientific realms: optics (the physics of vision), medicine (the theory of the interior of the body), and surgery (the practice of operating on external bodily structures). The model of love that gained prominence throughout the late medieval West, dominating medical, philosophical, and poetic descriptions of the

Ciavolella, La ‘malattia d’amore’ dall’antichità al medioevo (Rome: Bulzoni, 1976); Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexualité et savoir médical au Moyen Age (Paris: PUF, 1985); and Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages. See also Wack’s articles ‘The Liber de Heros Morbo of Johannes Afflacius and Its Implications for Medieval Love Conventions’, Speculum 62 (1987), 324–44; ‘The Measure of Pleasure: Peter of Spain on Men, Women, and Lovesickness’, Viator 17 (1986), 173–96; and ‘New Medieval Medical Texts on Amor Hereos’, in Zusammenhänge, Einflüsse, Wirkungen, ed. Joerg Fichte, Karl Göller, and Bernhard Schimmelpfennig (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1986), 288–98. Other relevant studies include John Livingston Lowes, ‘The Loveres maladye of Hereos’, Modern Philology 11 (1914), 491–546; Nardi, ‘L’amore e i medici medievali’; Daniel L. Heiple, ‘The Accidens Amoris in Lyric Poetry’, Neophilologus 67 (1983), 55–64; and Hans Schadewaldt, ‘Der ‘Morbus amatorius’ aus medizinhistorischer Sicht’, in Das Ritterbild in Mittelalter und Renaissance, ed. Hubertus Schulte Herbrüggen (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1985), 87–104. Several of the essays in Theo Stemmler (ed.), Liebe als Krankheit (Tübingen: Narr, 1990), also touch on the question of lovesickness. A more recent (and more popular) synthesis is to be found in Peter Lewis Allen, The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and Present (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1–24. 40 As Mary Wack remarks, ‘the affliction of the eyes, whose radiant and flexible substance interposed between the outer world containing the beloved and the inner world filled with appetitive desire, is possibly the most fitting symbol of the disease [lovesickness] and its causes’. Lovesickness in the Middle Ages, 102. 41 For more on the debate between intromissive and extramissive models of vision, see pp. 46–50. 42 See Ernst Robert Curtius’s Excursus XVI, ‘Numerical Apothegms,’ European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 512–14.

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process of innamoratio, is a construct to which I will refer as the loveimprint. Coloured by Avicenna’s descriptions of mental functions, which are in turn inspired by the Aristotelian model of perception outlined in De anima, the love-imprint draws upon what is now termed ‘faculty psychology’: a schema of localized mental functions seated in discrete, functionally and anatomically differentiated ‘ventricles’ of the brain.43 While various versions of this theory may identify different numbers of ventricles, and many authors (particularly poets) tend to skip certain phases entirely,44 the standard mental construct, outlined in Avicenna’s De anima (Book IV) and illustrated in the Cambridge diagram brilliantly commented by Michael Camille, is as follows.45 The forms of sensible objects, after passing through the eyes (i.e., the external sense), are received by the internal sense, which is composed of a series of five faculties. First, the common sense centralizes and integrates information received from the external senses; then the imaginative faculty retains and preserves the information relayed to it by the common sense. The cogitative faculty combines or separates images so that the estimative faculty may contemplate and judge them, and finally the memory retains the information relayed to it by the estimative faculty.46 When sense perception leads to love, a sixth step is necessary: the fantasia, or phantasy, configures absent objects, making way for the imprint of the phantasm in the heart.47 Love arises from the contemplation of this internal image imprinted in the lover’s body, the ‘bel viso leggiadro che depinto / porto nel petto et veggio ove ch’io miri’ (beautiful, carefree face that I carry painted within my chest and see wherever I look: Petrarch, RVF 96, vv. 5–6).48 Typically it is this imprinted,

43 For a full treatment of medieval faculty psychology, see E. Ruth Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1975). 44 See Chapter 1 for further discussion of such poetic modifications. 45 Michael Camille, ‘Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Late Medieval Practices of Seeing’, in Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw, ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 197–223. Avicenna’s account of sense perception became dominant in the later medieval West, as it was spread not only in the Latin translation of the De anima (executed at Toledo circa 1152–66), but in encyclopedic texts such as the Speculum doctrinale of Vincent de Beauvais. 46 This admittedly bare-bones account is based on Avicenna’s Liber De Anima seu Sextus de Naturalibus (2: 49–56). See the edition by S. Van Riet (Leiden: Brill, 1972). 47 According to Wack, the fantasia is the faculty most damaged by lovesickness (Lovesickness in the Middle Ages, 90–92). In Chapter 12 of Stanzas (‘Eros at the Mirror’), Giorgio Agamben provides a good summary of Avicennian faculty psychology. Stanze:la parola e il fantasma nella cultura occidentale (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), translated by Ronald Martinez as Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). See also Camille, ‘Before the gaze’, and Harvey The Inward Wits. 48 Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics, ed. and trans. Robert

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phantasmatic image, rather than the person or object originally seen, whom the subject loves.49 The poetic construct of the love-imprint reflects the new modes of vision and of visuality that scholars have recently observed, from the mid-thirteenth century onward, in a variety of medieval fields of discourse: optics, epistemology, theology, aesthetics.50 Not surprisingly, this proliferation of new ways of understanding the eye and the gaze also coincides with the rise of ophthalmology as a surgical specialization in the medieval West. Benvenutus Grassus (or Grapheus), the author of the first specialized ophthalmological treatise in the medieval West, did much to spread knowledge of the eye not just as an optical instrument but as an organ.51 In the following century, many physicians and surgeons wrote specialized treatises on, or devoted significant portions of their writing to, the eye: most notably Jehan Yperman, the second book of whose Old Dutch Surgery (1328) is dedicated to the eyes, and Guy de Chauliac, whose Inventarium (1363) features extensive and thorough discussion of the eyes and their diseases.52

M. Durling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 198. Recent accounts of the love-imprint construct are to be found in Agamben, Stanze, and in Dana Stewart’s The Arrow of Love (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002). 49 ‘Not an external body, but an internal image, that is, the phantasm impressed upon the phantastic spirits by the gaze, is the origin and the object of falling in love; only the attentive elaboration and immoderate contemplation of this phantasmatic mental simulacrum were held capable of generating an authentic amorous passion.’ Agamben, Stanzas, 23–4. 50 Cynthia Hahn has noticed a similar shift in regards to medieval visual experience of the divine (to a model which, in this context, she characterizes as Augustinian); she likewise sees the thirteenth century as the key moment of this transition. ‘Visio Dei: Changes in Medieval Visuality’, in Nelson, 169–96. Brigitte Bedos-Rezak also sees the thirteenth-century entry of seals into legal discourse as indicative of a new valorization of the imprinted image: ‘Replica: Images of Identity and the Identity of Images in Prescholastic France’, in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché (Princeton, NJ: Department of Art and Archaeology, 2006), 46–64. On optics and knowledge in the fourteenth century, see Katherine H. Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham: Optics, Epistemology, and the Foundations of Semantics, 1250–1345 (Leiden: Brill, 1988). On changing theological notions of vision, see Dallas Denery, Seeing and Being Seen in the Later Medieval World: Optics, Theology, and Religious Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 51 Benvenutus Grassus, De oculis eorumque egritudinibus et curis, ed. and trans. Casey A. Wood (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1929). Middle French and Provençal translations have been edited by Pierre Pansier, Charles Laborde, and Henri Teulié: Le compendil pour la douleur et maladie des yeulx qui a esté ordonné (Paris: Maloine, 1901); the Middle English translation is edited by L. M. Eldredge: The Wonderful Art of the Eye (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1996); a medieval Italian translation was published by Giuseppe Albertotti: Volgarizzamento italiano inedito dell’opera oftalmojatrica di Benvenuto tratto da un codice Marciano del secolo XV (Modena: Società Tipografica Modenese, 1910). 52 Jehan Yperman, La Chirurgie de Maître Jehan Yperman (1260?–1310?), Livres I et

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The Inventarium, or Chirurgia magna, represents the culmination of the medieval textual tradition of medical and surgical compendia. One of the most widely diffused medical texts of the Middle Ages, it survives in numerous fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts and was published in more than a dozen latin editions between 1490 and 1550; within 150 years of its composition the Inventarium had been disseminated in a number of vernacular translations.53 Like most other late medieval medical compendia (or Petrarchan ‘long canon’ poems, for that matter), the Chirurgia magna catalogues the anatomic structure of the human body in head-to-toe, or a capite ad calcem, order. Following a capitulum singulare outlining the history of surgery (and Guy’s place therein), the Inventarium is divided into seven books devoted to anatomy, apostemes, wounds, ulcers, fractures, other diseases, and parasurgical therapies. The Inventarium represents an early and significant confluence of the hitherto separate medical and surgical traditions as its author discusses both internal and external structures, symptoms, and treatments. It thus provides us with a useful catalogue of the medical and surgical remedies for ocular maladies that were available in the later Middle Ages: dietary and behavioural modification, mild eye exercise (such as reading books with large lettering), phlebotomy, enemas and purgatives, anti-inflammatory washes and ointments, opiates, eyeglasses, and, if all else fails, cataract surgery.54 As the above summary should make clear, late medieval medical practitioners had a number of methods at their disposal with which to treat, or possibly to cure, afflictions of the eye. Some, like dietary regimens, were of limited therapeutic value but also posed limited risks to the patient; some correctives, like eyeglasses, were effective but still in their infancy; and more radical procedures, like surgery, had the potential to restore sight or to cause permanent harm to the patient. But one of the tools that physicians were not entitled to wield, at least according to Petrarch, was eloquence. In Seniles XII.2 Petrarch denies words the power to heal, stating that just as no medicine can make one eloquent, no eloquence can restore health (‘Ut enim nulla medicina eloquentum, sic nulla eloquentia sanum facit’).55 But Petrarch’s own writings, and those of the other fourteenth- and fifteenth-century poets we propose to discuss, suggest otherwise. Eloquence may not be able to restore health, as Petrarch remarks; but it can change the way we think of blindness, and it can offer a path to well-being that bypasses the weakness of the body and renders medical remedies undesirable if not obsolete. II, ed. and trans. A. de Mets (Paris: Collection Hippocrate, 1936). Guy de Chauliac, Inventarium sive chirurgia magna, ed. Michael McVaugh (Leiden: Brill, 1997). 53 See McVaugh’s introduction to his edition, esp. p. xiv. 54 Michael McVaugh, ‘Cataracts and Hernias: Aspects of Surgical Practice in the Fourteenth Century’, Medical History 45:3 (July 2001), 319–40. 55 Opera quae extant omnia (Basel: Sebastianum Henricpetri, 1581), 906.

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Italian poets from the mid-thirteenth-century Sicilian School to the Dolce Stil Novo and Petrarch elaborate the language of love-imprint even as they give voice to an ongoing rivalry with medical practitioners,56 while fourteenth- and fifteenth-century French writers, adopting this ocularcentric poetic model from the Italians, conduct ever more ambitious experiments with the logical limitations of the love-imprint. In proposing alternate physiological and psychological pathways to the blind lover, poets like Petrarch and Machaut indicate that there exist certain remedies that poetry, but not medicine, can provide. Thus reclaiming the power of remedy from physicians, these late medieval poets prompt us to rethink not only the relationship between scientific and literary authority at the close of the Middle Ages, but, more broadly speaking, the very notion of therapy. Faculty psychology, with its complex of internal senses, is enthrallingly elaborate, and therefore has absorbed an inordinate proportion of recent scholarly attention to the late medieval construct of innamoratio. As previously mentioned, poetic descriptions of love that draw upon the language of the internal senses have long been interpreted as an example of ‘poets directly referr[ing] to the physiological doctrines of their day’.57 But poetic interventions in medical doctrine stretch far beyond allegorical cannibalizations of scientific knowledge. For while medieval medical theory was unable fully to account for the phenomenon of the blind lover – if an image cannot enter through the eye, how can it be processed in the mind and embedded in the heart? – the ‘medicalization’ of late medieval poetry permitted a poetic rewriting of physiological pathways. In specific instances – Petrarch’s exempla of blindness overcome, Guillaume de Machaut’s ‘prosthetic’ forms, Pierre Michault’s verbal blindfolds – poets propose alternative, rhetorically based remedies to the material obstacles of vision. The prevalence of medicalized themes and language in late medieval poetry, often dismissed as mere convention or attributed to a subordinate relationship to medical/scientific thought, in fact tells a much more complicated story about the relationship of rhetoric and medicine in the late Middle Ages. Poetic medicalization reflects not the imposition of medicine’s theoretical and lexical authority on a lesser discipline, but rather the exploitation of scientific models as a broad framework within which to redefine the limits of the poetic subject and his body. The presence of the love-imprint in late medieval lyric, for instance, introduces an element of biological constraint that mirrors the technical constraints of fixed-form poetry; the specific case of blindness, a disability that in principle forecloses the possibility of love, serves as a laboratory in which poets explore and circumvent the logical 56 David Lindberg notes that ‘poets were among the first intellectuals in Europe to engage Aristotelian optical theory’. Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 18. 57 Agamben, Stanzas, 78.

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limits of contemporary medical theory. Late medieval poets supplement, bypass, or restore their subjects’ eyesight with irony, both textual and Socratic, which may be likened to cure by contraries; with metaphor, by which they can achieve results similar to those of surgical interventions while avoiding the associated risk of bodily harm; with metonymy, the replacement of an element of discourse with a related element, a process that shares its underlying logic of substitution with the prosthesis; and with synecdoche, the substitution of a part for a whole, which enables the isolation and neutralization of the afflicted organ. These basic figures of rhetoric, later identified by Vico as the four fundamental tropes to which all others may be reduced,58 constitute the medieval poet-healer’s therapeutic arsenal.

Remedial verse: rhetorical therapies for blindness Framing our inquiry more specifically as an exploration of rhetorical ‘therapies’ for blindness, the specificity of the period at hand – the mid-thirteenth through fifteenth centuries – becomes more apparent. Beyond its intellectuals’ devotion to Aristotelian thought, this is an age marked by what one might term a poetics of constraint. From the mid-thirteenth-century introduction of a physiological rather than a physical/optical language of eyesight into Italian and French love poetry (an innovation that coincides, chronologically and geographically speaking, with the emergence of ophthalmology as a surgical speciality in the West) to the end of ‘fixed form’ poetry’s period of greatest popularity, the double constraints of physiology and fixed poetic form are more closely aligned than ever before. In this book, then, I propose to elucidate this ‘poetics of constraint’ with specific regard to the ways in which poetic form can amplify or mitigate the constraints to which the impaired eye is subjected: first outlining late medieval literary explorations of the physiological conditions of eyesight and blindness, and introducing the particular problem of the blind lover, then presenting late medieval experimentation with irony, metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche as healing strategies. These poetic remedies for impairments of the eye seek either to restore bodily function or to modify love’s biological pathway. As a simultaneous reading of poetic texts, medical/surgical practices and devices, and popular and learned conceptions of the body and its (dys)functions, this inquiry into poetic models of ‘remedy’ in late-medieval French and Italian literature is of necessity situated at the intersection of philology, cultural history, and disability studies. In Chapter 1 I further define the love-imprint and detail its evolution, over the course of the thirteenth century,

58 Scienza Nuova, Book II, Chapter II. Giambattista Vico, Opere, ed. Fausto Nicolini (Milan: Ricciardi, 1953).

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from what I term an optical to an ophthalmic construct (that is, from a physically to a physiologically based understanding of eyesight). Here I will demonstrate that fourteenth-century poets break from medical tradition and increasingly treat love as a malady of the eye, arising not from physical phenomena but from bodily (dys)function. This renewed focus on the vulnerability of the eyes gives rise to nuanced portrayals of the problem of blindness in love lyric, for not only are blind men deemed incapable of love but lovers are in danger of being blinded – by Love, a deity who is himself increasingly depicted, precisely in this period, as blindfold or blind. In Chapter 2 I return to the question of medicine and rhetoric, arguing that the concept of blindness may help unlock the relationship between these two domains. The figure of blindness recurs in poetic attacks on the medical and surgical professions, from Henri d’Andeli to Petrarch, Honoré Bovet, and Charles d’Orléans – even when such attacks occur in tandem with an appropriation of medical concepts and terminology. Especially in Petrarch’s writings, chief among them the Invective contra medicum and letters from the Familiares and Seniles, blindness is associated not with the lover but with the practitioner who would heal him. Petrarch demonstrates that medical doctors cannot appropriate instruments of rhetoric, but when the blind doctor cannot heal, the rhetor and the poet can, indeed must, step in. The remaining chapters are devoted to four literary strategies for building and reconstituting the narratorial/textual corpus: rhetorical therapies for blindness attempted in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts by Petrarch, Guillaume de Machaut, Gilles Li Muisis, Christine de Pizan, Alain Chartier, Pierre Michault, Martin Le Franc, and Charles d’Orléans. Chapter 3 links humoral theory’s principle of contraries to irony, a device that likewise reinforces wholeness (or meaning) through the introduction of opposed elements. Irony is, indeed, used as a remedy for ill Fortune and the ocular damage she can inflict in the pseudo-Senecan De remediis fortunae and its fourteenth-century vernacular translations and adaptations. Jacques Bauchans’ French translation of the pseudo-Seneca, and especially Petrarch’s colossal expansion of the same source text in De remediis utriusque fortunae, employ irony – both textual and Socratic – as a cure for misfortune and, in particular, for blindness. Metaphor, too, is a mode of medicalization with which numerous late medieval poets experiment. In Chapter 4 I read metaphorical reference to cataract surgery in Guillaume de Machaut’s Boethian-inspired Remede de Fortune and in Gilles Li Muisis’ autobiographical verse as a cognitive instrument: that is, a verbal procedure that expands healing potential while mitigating the risk of permanent injury inherent in contemporaneous surgical procedures. The healing that results, however, does not merely replicate the results of surgical operations; metaphorical surgery surpasses the therapeutic potential of its practical counterpart, restoring not just bodily function but psychological and spiritual welfare.

INTRODUCTION

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Chapter 5 centres on one of the most complex healing strategies attempted in late medieval poetry, namely the replacement of the lover’s missing or defective eye with a verbal structure. In language such an act of substitution is known as metonymy; in surgery, prosthesis. The device I have termed ‘lyric prosthesis’, by which poetic form compensates for the incomplete or deficient narratorial body, lies at the heart of Machaut’s Livre du Voir Dit. In this text the reconstruction of the one-eyed lover’s body, achieved through the insertion of round lyric forms, figures the broader (prosthetic) project of building a literary corpus. Yet Machaut’s attempts at lyric prosthesis ultimately fail, as rounded poetic form in effect reinforces, rather than de-emphasizes, the lover’s bodily difference. The final rhetorical remedy detailed in Chapter 6 differs from the others insofar as it is performed not just on the injured lover’s eyes but on the offending eyes that have victimized and disabled him. Numerous French texts of the fifteenth century, notably Martin le Franc’s Estrif de Fortune et de Vertu and Pierre Michault’s Dance aux aveugles, reduce aggressive Love and Fortune to a pair of eyes (or, as is sometimes the case with Fortune, to a single eye) – replacing, through synecdoche, a whole threat with a part thereof – and neutralize that threatening part with a blindfold. When even the eyes alone of Love and Fortune prove impossible to contain, though, fifteenth-century poets such as Charles d’Orléans counter these blindfold (and blinding) figures through a repetition of the same synecdochic process, blindfolding the lover himself. Where contraries, surgeries, and prostheses have failed, the wilful blockage of sight becomes, perversely, the sole poetic cure for externally inflicted blindness. Manipulating their characters’ eyesight by means of irony, metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche, late medieval poets suggest that words can succeed where cutting-edge medical interventions cannot. Their blind poetic subjects, though (paradoxically) unable to look, nonetheless reinforce the paronomastic interplay of the mire and the miroir: how we look at ourselves is how we heal ourselves.

1 The Love-Imprint BLINDNESS THE LOVE-IMPRINT AND THERAPY

The eye, according to long-established tradition, is construed as a portal linking the outer, physical world and the inner world of the mind. Nowhere is this communicative liminal function more manifest than in the celebrated illumination that opens the unique manuscript of an anonymous latethirteenth- or early-fourteenth-century mise en vers of the physician, cleric, and poet Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaires d’amour (BnF ms fr 1951, fol. 1).1 Personified Memory stands in a gothic arched doorway flanked by two lancets; the disembodied eye floating in the aperture to the left, and the ear in its pendant to the right, give visible form to the metaphor of the senses as portals to the mind and heart. This iconography reinforces the specific pathway by which the eye conveys images to the mind, where they are impressed in the memory; the position of the eye to the left side of the picture, where the viewer’s eyes first fall, underlines its position atop the hierarchy of the senses;2 and the illumination’s association with Fournival’s text reminds the reader that the eye and ear often facilitate the production of mental images that are specifically amorous in nature.3 The Bestiaires d’amour illumination is positioned at a crucial juncture, not just in the book it illustrates, but in the development of the sensory model of love it promulgates. While Richard de Fournival and his imitator, like their French and Occitan predecessors, do underline the importance of sensory perception (especially vision) in love, their constructs tend to be rather

1 Le Bestiaire d’amour rimé, ed. Arvid Thordstein (Lund: Gleerup, 1941). The illumination was recently reproduced in Claire Richter Sherman, Imaging Aristotle: Verbal and Visual representation in Fourteenth-century France (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 79, fig. 18. Elizabeth Sears provides an outstanding discussion of this illumination, and of similar illustrations to the prose Bestiaire, in ‘Sensory Perception and its Metaphors in the Time of Richard of Fournival’, in Medicine and the Five Senses, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 17–39. 2 On this hierarchy, with particular reference to Richard de Fournival’s bestiary, see Louise Vinge, The Five Senses: Studies in a Literary Tradition (Lund: Gleerup, 1975). 3 On memory and perception in Richard de Fournival’s text, see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 277–8; and Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 135–73.

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loosely conceived and bear at best a tenuous relationship to contemporary scientific understanding of the mechanics of vision.4 In the fifty or so years that passed between the composition of the source text (c.1250) and the production of this manuscript (c.1300), though, poets – especially Italian poets – were transforming the manner in which they described the role of the eye in the generation of love. These generations forged a new language that French poets would adopt in the fourteenth century, in the wake of Jean de Meun’s hugely influential ruminations on optics and vision in his continuation of the Roman de la Rose.5 But at the moment when the Bestiaires d’amour was put into rhymed verse such poetic language was not yet commonplace in texts written in the north of France. This newly medicalized construct, the love-imprint, would soon come to dominate love lyric composed in French. The love-imprint is the poetic topos, founded in Aristotelian principles (via the commentaries of Avicenna and Alhazen), according to which love is a physiological condition that is brought about through a precise bodily mechanism. First, the image of the beloved woman enters the male lover’s eye. Secondly, the image is processed by a series of localized mental functions seated in discrete, functionally and anatomically differentiated ventricles of the brain. Finally, the resulting phantasm is imprinted on the heart, and love arises from the contemplation of this internal image. As I will discuss below, the love-imprint is dependent upon the intromissive model of eyesight that gained currency in university settings in the mid-thirteenth century; thus it would seem an exemplary case of ‘medicalization’. Yet fourteenth- and fifteenth-century poets exploit the love-imprint’s medical grounding not just to lend their texts a sort of learned authority, but to propose rhetorical therapies unavailable to the medical practitioner. In order to explore how poets of the western tradition make this subtle yet empowering series of moves – from less precisely defined constructs of visually based love to one based in the physical mechanics of vision, from a physical to a physiological model, and from passive medicalization to active deployment of new thera4 In a reversal of more strictly Aristotelian descriptions of the sensory imprinting process, which focus on the male gazer’s imaginative process, the narrator of the Bestiaire wants to be inscribed within his lady’s memory. For Richard de Fournival’s text, see Le bestiaires d’amours di maistre Richart de Fornival e li Response du bestiaire, ed. Cesare Segre (Milan: Ricciardi, 1957). 5 On optics in the Rose, see, most notably, Suzanne Conklin Akbari’s Seeing Through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004) and ‘‘Medieval Optics in Guillaume de Lorris’ Roman de la Rose,” Medievalia et Humanistica 21 (1994), 1–15; Stephen G. Nichols, ‘‘The Pupil of Your Eye: Vision, Language, and Poetry in Thirteenth-century Paris’, in Nichols, Kablitz, and Calhoun, 286–307; and Patricia J. Eberle, ‘The Lovers’ Glass: Nature’s Discourse on Optics and the Optical Design of the Romance of the Rose’, University of Toronto Quarterly 46 (1977), 241–62.

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peutic tools – I propose that we first sketch a brief prehistory of the love-imprint in the High Middle Ages (passing from north to south) before moving on to the love-imprint’s emergence and its subtle transformation from optical to ophthalmic models in the course of thirteenth century. We shall see that while tantalizing traces of language resembling the love-imprint appear in French and Occitan verse composed as early as the twelfth century, such language becomes consistent – and, eventually, conventional – only in the specific milieu of the thirteenth-century Sicilian court.

Capellanus, the Trouvères, and visual models of love Medical treatises on love abound in the Middle Ages, from Constantine the African to Arnald of Villanova6 – a textual tradition that extends, with considerable continuity, through early modern treatises such as Jacques Ferrand’s Traité de l’essence et guérison de l’amour ou De la mélancolie érotique (1610).7 But these medical texts cannot be considered the ultimate source of medieval wisdom concerning the mechanisms of innamoratio, as the Western tradition of philosophical and practical treatises on love stretches back through Ovid’s Ars Amatoria to Greek foundational texts. This classical literary tradition returns to prominence in the High Middle Ages with the anonymous Anglo-Norman Roman d’Eneas (c.1160), which cleaves to Ovidian rather than Virgilian models in its description of the love between Lavine and Eneas,8 and especially with the De amore of Andreas Capellanus, a notoriously ambiguous treatise probably written around 1186.9 De amore soon inspired at least a dozen vernacular translations;10 the 1277 condem-

6 I refer the reader to the exhaustive list of medieval medical treatises on love contained in Mary Wack’s Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and its Commentaries (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). See also Massimo Ciavolella, La ‘malattia d’amore’ dall’antichità al medioevo (Rome: Bulzoni, 1976). 7 Interestingly, in Ferrand’s treatise lovesickness is characterized as a malady that primarily affects women. This stands in sharp contrast to the medieval model by which it is typically the male lover who suffers. A Treatise on Lovesickness, ed. and trans. Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990). 8 On this text’s Ovidian inspiration, see Raymond J. Cormier, One Heart One Mind: The Rebirth of Virgil’s Hero in Medieval French Romance (University, MS: Romance Monographs, 1973), 204–16; and Helen C. R. Laurie, ‘Eneas and the doctrine of courtly love’, Modern Language Review 64 (1969), 283–94. 9 For further discussion of the text’s dating see Claude Buridant’s introduction to his translation, Traité de l’amour courtois (Paris: Klincksieck, 1974). See also Alastair Minnis, Magister Amoris: The Roman de la Rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). For a recent rereading of the text’s ambiguities, see Kathleen Andersen-Wyman, Andreas Capellanus on Love? Desire, Seduction, and Subversion in a Twelfth-Century Latin Text (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 10 Don A. Monson, ‘Andreas Capellanus and his Medieval Translators: the Definition

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nation of the treatise attests to the text’s continued popularity in academic circles.11 Though composed prior to the emergence of the love-imprint as I define it, in a period roughly contemporaneous with development of troubadour fin’amors, De amore features certain characteristics of that later literary construct. The treatise, divided into three books (what love is and how to gain it, how to keep love, and a condemnation of love), builds on its obvious structural debt to Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris, adding a renewed emphasis on vision and the eye. Sight is implicated in love from the opening words of the treatise in section I.1, Quid sit amor: ‘Amor est passio quaedam innata procedens ex visione et immoderata cogitatione formae alterius sexus’ (Love is an innate suffering that arises from the sight and unbridled contemplation of the bodily form of the other sex: 32).12 Thus love is an innate condition13 stemming from the twin processes of eyesight (visione) and unbridled contemplation (immoderata cogitatione), an association Andreas makes sure to repeat.14 This same complicity of the eyes and the internal senses will reappear in love-imprint poetry. Capellanus’s visually based model bears significant medical and social implications. Early in Book I Capellanus declares the blind unable to love, as their physical condition precludes the phantasm-forming process: ‘Caecitas impedit amorem, quia caecus videre non potest unde suus possit animus

of Love’, Mediaevalia 26 (2005), 155–68. On the French translations, see Peter F. Dembowski, ‘Two Old French Recastings/Translations of Andreas Capellanus’s De amore’, in Medieval Translators and their Craft, ed. Jeanette Beer, Studies in Medieval Culture XXV (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1989), 185–212. The fourteenth-century Italian adaptation known as the ‘Gualtieri’ has been published by Salvatore Battaglia as the Trattato d’amore (Naples: Penella, 1947). 11 The definitive study remains A. J. Denomy, ‘The De Amore of Andreas Capellanus and the Condemnation of 1277’, Mediaeval Studies 8 (1946), 107–49. On Andreas’s readers, see Bruno Roy, ‘Un art d’aimer: pour qui?’ in his Une culture de l’équivoque (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1992), 47–73. 12 All Latin citations from De amore are drawn from Andreas Capellanus on Love, ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh (London: Duckworth, 1982). These and all other translations from Latin are mine unless otherwise stated. 13 Toril Moi’s insightful reading of De amore uses this statement to link the physicality of love to broader nature–nurture thematics within the text, and to argue that ‘Andreas’s treatise can be read as an effort to conceal or displace the painful naturalness of love by dressing it up in the necessary courtly trappings. This process is, however, never entirely successful: the “inborn” suffering never disappears; love for Andreas, like desire for Freud or Lacan, is doomed to remain unsatisfied.’ ‘Desire in Language: Andreas Capellanus and the Controversy of Courtly Love’, in Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology and History, ed. David Aers (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986), 21. 14 Capellanus repeats twice more in same opening section that ‘ex sola cogitatione quam concipit animus ex eo quod vidit passio illa procedit’ and ‘Est igitur illa passio innata ex visione et cogitatione’ (I.1, 34).

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immoderatam suscipere cogitationem’ (blindness impedes love, for the blind man cannot see and so cannot provide an object to his soul for immoderate contemplation: 40, I.5). The eyes, then, are clearly a crucial link in the chain of innamoratio as it is established in the chaplain’s text, and the language of looking is the language of love. Capellanus also makes reference to the imprint of the beloved’s image in the penultimate of the king of love’s thirty-one rules, delivered in II.8: ‘Verus amans assidua sine intermissione coamantis imaginatione detinetur’ (the true lover should hold a constant and uninterrupted inner image of his beloved: 284). Thus the contemplation of the beloved’s internalized image is not just one model of love among many: it is the only avenue available to a verus amans. Despite his insistence on the primacy of vision, Andreas does not specify the means by which the beloved’s image enters and traverses the lover’s mind; vision and the gaze, though of capital importance in Capellanus’s treatise, are alluded to only in a vague sense. Mary Wack has demonstrated Andreas’s debt to theories of imagination and desire prevalent in ‘Salernitan psychology’ – that is, in the eleventh- and twelfth-century Latin translations and commentaries on Arabic medical sources that dominated Western medical teaching in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.15 These similarities have led Paolo Cherchi to claim, somewhat hyperbolically, that ‘Andreas’s definition of love is so strictly physiological that it closely resembles a definition given by medical authorities.’16 It is true that Andreas’s definition of love is firmly anchored in the body; it is scarcely ‘physiological’, though, since Andreas does not specify how the relevant bodily processes occur, nor, as Wack points out, does he couch his love discourse in medical language.17 In comparison to later literary texts, the chaplain’s treatise subscribes neither to a rigorous scientific system of vision nor to the highly sophisticated system of faculty psychology which, in combination with the ideas expressed in De amore, will give rise to the love-imprint. Similarly, while some northern French trouvère lyric of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries insists on the primacy of vision in the generation of love, attributing amorous suffering to the eyes, such language is conventional without being codified. The best-known (and most widely read) passage in which love enters the lover’s heart through his eyes comes from Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la Rose:

15 Mary F. Wack, ‘Imagination, Medicine, and Rhetoric in Andreas Capellanus’s De amore’, in Magister Regis: Studies in Honor of Robert Earl Kaske, ed. Arthur Groos (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986), 101–15. 16 Paolo Cherchi, Andreas and the Ambiguity of Courtly Love (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 28. 17 The chaplain’s refusal to do so is consistent and explicit. Wack, ‘Imagination, Medicine, and Rhetoric’, 113.

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Et quant la corde fu en coche Il entesa jusqu’a l’oreille L’arc qui estoit forz a merveille Et trait a moi par tel devise Que parmi l’ueil m’a ou cuer mise La saiete par grant redor (1687–92)18 And when the bowstring was in the notch, he pulled the prodigiously strong bow back to his ear and shot at me so as to firmly place the arrow, through my eye, into my heart.

Like that of De amore and the Roman d’Eneas, the Rose’s language is Ovidian, rather than Aristotelian, in inspiration. This passage undoubtedly contributed to the later popularity of the love-imprint in French lyric, as it provided a canonical precedent for similar language. The absence of the mental faculties from love’s pathway, however, distinguishes Guillaume de Lorris’s vision of innamoratio from the soon-to-emerge language of the love-imprint. Interestingly enough, the earliest and most notable exception to the general absence of a rigorously conceived physics of vision from the trouvères’ descriptions of love appears not in lyric, but in romance: in Chrétien de Troyes’ Cligés, composed around 1176, the young lover Alixandre (father of the titular hero) muses upon love’s pathway through the eyes to his heart. In a monologue that (like the romance as a whole) betrays a clear Ovidian influence,19 he posits that love’s arrow has penetrated him without leaving an external wound because the eyes are the heart’s mirror (‘li meroers au cuer’, v. 712), a passive lens depending on another light source (‘autre clartez’, v. 730) in order for its images to be relayed to the heart.20 The eyes are windows that allow the heart’s light to shine through (vv. 709–41); thus they are in a certain sense receivers, but also transmitters, of light. But if the eyes’ role in vision is not entirely consistent throughout Alixandre’s pseudo-scholastic 18 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Armand Strubel (Paris: Poche, 1992). 19 Chrétien is, of course, a translator of several Ovidian texts into Old French, of which only Philomena has survived. See Foster E. Guyer, ‘The Influence of Ovid on Crestien de Troyes’, Romanic Review 12 (1921), 97–134, 216–47; Durant W. Robinson Jr., ‘Chrétien’s Cligés and the Ovidian Spirit’, in Essays in Medieval Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 173–82. Additionally, Alexandre Micha has shown the direct influence of the Roman d’Eneas in ‘Eneas et Cligès’, in De la chanson de geste au roman (Geneva: Droz, 1976), 55–61. 20 Chrétien de Troyes, Cligés, ed. Stewart Gregory and Claude Luttrell (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993). On the eyes as the heart’s mirror, see Claude Luttrell, ‘The Heart’s Mirror in Cligés’, in Arthurian Literature XIII, ed. James P. Carley and Felicity Riddy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), 1–18; and Ruth Cline, ‘Heart and Eyes’, Romance Philology 25 (1972), 263–97.

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monologue, the mind’s role is nonexistent. The cognitive faculties are absent from Alixandre’s account: the eyes (previously described as windows) now merely serve as a mirror on which the image is reflected, rather than conveying an image to the ventricles of the brain, and it is the heart that actively looks at the reflected image (vv. 735–6). Claude Luttrell has concluded that the model of vision on which Alixandre propounds is primarily extramissive, while Dana Stewart has recently read this passage as an early (and prescient) instance of Aristotelian influence.21 The text’s rather jumbled juxtapositions of Aristotelian intromission, Platonic extramission, and theological language lead me to concur with Peter Haidu’s reading of this discourse as humorously nonsensical,22 though it does serve the purpose, as Luttrell points out, of foreshadowing later discourses on Fenice’s virginity and on entry into her tower.23 The speech that initially seems to reflect a scientific understanding of vision in fact serves other purposes; its logic collapses under scrutiny, especially when the reader attempts to understand just how the eyes function according to Alixandre’s model. Obscured beneath multiple metaphoric layers (mirrors, lanterns, windows) and described with a mishmash of technical language derived from very different source traditions, the eyes, paradoxically, cease to serve any coherent purpose. Unlike later poet-lovers who will use metaphor to combat the blockage of their eyes, Alixandre takes his contradictory eye metaphors too literally, which results in humor rather than in earnest healing.24 Aside from Chrétien’s early, humoristic use of this language, the idea of an image traversing the eyes and wounding the heart appears most frequently in the songs of the later trouvères, those active in the mid- to late thirteenth century: Henri III of Brabant, Philippe de Remy, Perrin d’Angicourt, Guillaume d’Amiens.25 These poets seem to derive their language primarily from Thibaut de Champagne, whose chansons contain many elements of what will become the love-imprint: the eyes allowing the heart to be wounded (‘Ne me firent lors si oeil point d’anui, / Ainz me vindrent ferir si doucement / Dedens le cuer d’un amoreus talent’: My eyes didn’t cause me any trouble 21 See Luttrell, ‘The Heart’s Mirror’, and Dana Stewart, The Arrow of Love (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002), 33–48. Luttrell’s study builds upon Guido Favati, ‘Una traccia della cultura neoplatonica in Chrétien de Troyes: il tema degli occhi come specchio’, in Studi in onore di Carlo Pellegrini (Turin: Società Editrice Nazionale, 1963), 3–13. 22 Peter Haidu, Aesthetic Distance in Chrétien de Troyes (Geneva: Droz, 1968), 60–61, 70–71. 23 Luttrell, ‘The Heart’s Mirror’, 15–18. 24 According to Peter Haidu, ‘Alexander is so caught up in his metaphor as to forget its relation to reality. Rather than an explanation of reality, it has become a reality which itself must be explained.’ Aesthetic Distance, p. 61. 25 Chansons des trouvères, ed./trans. Samuel N. Rosenberg and Hans Tischler (Paris: Poche, 1995), 676, 686, 708, 866–70.

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then, but they came and gently struck me in the heart with an amorous desire),26 the power of the gaze (‘Ausi conme unicorne sui’). As in Andreas’s treatise, though, Thibaut’s construct lacks the philosophical (Aristotelian) underpinnings of the love-imprint. The eyes can cause love, and they can cause pain, but they do not do so by actively imprinting a mentally processed image upon or within the heart.27

Vision and the problem of Amor de lonh Like Andreas Capellanus and the trouvères, the Occitan troubadours of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries privilege eyesight in their descriptions of the engendering of love; and, as with their northern counterparts, the troubadours’ emphasis on sight typically lacks the strong ‘scientific’ or ‘medicalized’ element that will characterize the language of the love-imprint. Certain elements of the love-imprint topos, though, do bear at least a superficial resemblance to troubadour poetics: notably the tradition of amor de lonh, which Jacques Roubaud has characterized as at once the ‘affirmation absolue de l’amour’ and ‘la défaite de l’amour, son néant’ (the absolute affirmation of love and its defeat, its negation).28 This lyric commonplace is most associated with Jaufre Rudel (before 1125–after 1148) but appears, in one form or another, as far back as the earliest troubadour verse. The troubadour poets’ establishment of their poetic–rhetorical tradition, and of their ‘poetry of paradox’,29 begins with the so-called first of the troubadours, Guilhem de Poitiers (1071–1126). Of particular interest is his cryptic yet tongue-in-cheek poem Farai un vers de dreit nien. Among its other enigmas, this devinalh pairs the thematics of medicine and love. In the fourth stanza the poet debates whether he should call a doctor, declaring that ‘Metge querrai al mieu albir’ (I will call for a doctor if I feel like it: v. 21).30 But the narrator’s ailment remains unspecified and he turns his attention to the love of a woman he has never seen: ‘Amigu’ai ieu, no sai qui s’es: / c’anc no la vi’ (I have a lover and I don’t know who she is, / For I’ve never seen her: vv. 25–6); ‘Anc no la vi et am la fort’ (I’ve never seen her and I love her deeply: v. 31). Still, the reader is cautioned against taking this long-distance love seriously, as the poem is just ‘un vers de dreit nien’ (a poem about abso-

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Chansons des trouvères, 588. See Christopher Lucken, ‘L’imagination de la dame, fantasmes amoureux et poésie courtoise’, Micrologus 6 (1998), 201–23. 28 Jacques Roubaud, La fleur inverse: Essai sur l’art formel des troubadours (Paris: Ramsay, 1986), 127. 29 Sarah Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 18. 30 Martín de Riquer, Los trovadores, 3 vols (Barcelona: Planeta, 1975), v. I, 113–17.

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lutely nothing); the poet’s sickness may be a symptom of his love, but, then again, there may be no logical connections between the desultory thoughts ‘trobatz en durmen/ sus un chivau’ (composed while sleeping on horseback: vv. 5–6).31 Thus begins (albeit in perverse fashion) the troubadour convention of amor de lonh; the fact that the ‘first troubadour’ includes an apparent parody of this courtly language in his verse invites conjecture that the themes of visually based love and of love from afar may have been present earlier than the extant romance verse can allow us to establish with certainty.32 Guilhem’s verse intimates that love from afar, without visual or physical contact with the beloved, is ‘absolutely nothing’; yet in the space of a century this model of love is transformed by the Sicilian poets into a love engendered through sensory experience, whose lasting mark in the lover’s body proves that love-imprint poetry is more than a ‘vers de dreit nien’. Guilhem’s poetics of ‘nien’ provoked a number of poetic responses, including Jaufre Rudel’s ‘No sap chantar qui so non di’, which proffers lovesickness as a resolution to Guilhem’s medical quandary.33 But Jaufre’s broader contribution to our discussion of vision and love in troubadour poetics stems from his elaboration of the ideal of amor de lonh (or of ‘la dame jamais vue’).34 According to the troubadour’s well-known vida – drawing upon elements of Jaufre’s poems, especially the canso ‘Lanquan li jorn son lonc en mai’ – the prince of Blaye crossed the sea and ultimately died for the love of a noblewoman whom he had never seen.35 The vida, which 31 On the troubadour’s state of dorveille, and on the critical fortunes of this poem, see Michel Stanesco, ‘L’expérience poétique du ‘pur néant’ chez Guillaume IX d’Aquitaine’, Médiévales 6 (1984), 48–68. 32 Stanesco cautions that ‘tout rapprochement du thème poétique de l’amor de lonh est fallacieux’ because of the generational difference between Guilhem IX and Jaufré Rudel, and because Guilhem professes not to know the identity of his unseen beloved: ‘L’expérience poétique’, 62. I agree, rather, with Jean-Charles Payen, who writes in his explication of ‘Farai un vers de dreyt nien’ that ‘la chanson VI préfigure aussi la poétique de l’amor de lonh’. Le Prince d’Aquitaine: Essai sur Guillaume IX, son oeuvre et son érotique (Paris: Champion, 1980), 88. Philippe Ménard summarizes the debate as to this poem’s parodic nature and its relationship to hypothetical literary precedents in ‘Sens, contresens, non-sens, réflexions sur la pièce Farai un vers de dreyt nien de Guillaume IX’, in Mélanges de langue et de littérature occitanes en hommage à Pierre Bec (Poitiers: CESCM, 1991), 339–48. 33 Gay Bardin, ‘The Poetics of Nullity: “Nonsense” Verses of William of Aquitaine, Jaufre Rudel, and Raimbaut d’Orange’, Comitatus 34 (2003), 1–23. 34 Pierre Bec insists on the distinction between these two themes in Jaufre’s lyric. ‘“Amour de loin” et “dame jamais vue”. Pour une lecture plurielle de la chanson VI de Jaufré Rudel’, in Miscellanea di studi in onore di Aurelio Roncaglia, ed. Roberto Antonelli (Modena: Mucchi, 1989), 101–18. 35 Paul Spillinger has commented on the structural and thematic centrality of vision in ‘Lanquan li jorn son lonc en mai’ in his article ‘Memory and Distance in Dante and Jaufre Rudel’, Tenso 5 (1989), 11–32. For another study of this canso, see Rita Lejeune, ‘La chanson de l’ “amour de loin” de Jaufré Rudel’, in Studi in onore di Angelo Monteverdi

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contains the story of his love for Countess of Tripoli, helped to solidify the amor de lonh mode: according to his later biographer the poet ‘enamoret se de la comtessa de Tripol, ses vezer’ (fell in love with the countess of Tripoli without having seen her) and ‘per voluntat de lieis vezer, el se crozet e mes se en mar, per anar lieis vezer’ (in his desire to see her, he took the cross and put to sea in order to go and see her).36 The troubadour’s capacity for love ‘ses vezer’ (without sight) seems to suggest an auditory alternative to visually based constructs of love – though neither Jaufre nor his biographer stakes it in those terms. The vida’s emphasis on the lack and the restoration of visual capacities continues: during his voyage Jaufre falls ill, losing his sensory faculties, but upon his arrival the new proximity to his beloved countess restores his eyesight – when she comes to him, the poet reportedly ‘si recobret lo vezer e·l flazar’ (recovers his senses of sight and smell) immediately before expiring in her arms.37 While the veracity of this biographical account is dubious at best, it made of the troubadour a stock figure of amor de lonh: for instance, in an anonymous jeu-parti that stages a debate on the relative importance of the eyes and the heart to the generation of love, the story of Jaufre Rudel is cited as proof that one can fall in love without ever having seen one’s beloved.38 And yet, in Jaufre Rudel’s poetry, as in later Occitan commentaries on it, the question of love in the absence of sight is not yet grounded in (Aristotelian) sensory theory or staked in scientific or medicalized terms. Sight and the contemplation of the beloved’s image are important in much troubadour verse, to such a degree that Eric Jager has referred to the imprinted image in the heart as ‘something of a commonplace’ in troubadour lyric.39 The faculties are quite frequently personified in troubadour poetry: often the heart or reason, less frequently the eyes.40 However, if we are to seek in troubadour poetry a systematic and physiological understanding of the interaction of these faculties – that is to say, early instances of the (Modena: Società tipografica editrice modenese, 1959), 403–42. On the process by which Jaufre’s poems were converted into biography, see Don A. Monson, ‘Jaufré Rudel et l’amour lointain: les origines d’une légende’, Romania 106 (1985), 36–56; Margaret Switten, ‘“Amor de lonh” Once More’, in Chancon legiere a chanter, ed. Karen Fresco and Wendy Pfeffer (Birmingham, AL: Summa, 2007), 333–57. 36 Biographies des troubadours, ed. Jean Boutière and A.-H. Schutz, Textes provençaux des XIIIe et XIVe siècles (Paris: Nizet, 1964), 16–19. Jaufre’s vida has survived in five manuscripts. 37 In a later manuscript tradition vezer (sight) becomes auzir (hearing), as commented by Jacques Roubaud, La fleur inverse, 105. 38 Cited in Alberto Mamino, La poesia e la musica dei trovatori (Genoa: Tolozzi, 1986), 34. 39 Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 69–70. Jager cites only Sordello and Folquet da Marselha; to these we may add Arnaut Daniel, Bernart de Ventadorn, Uc Brunec, and Peire d’Alvernha. 40 On the personified faculties, see Kay, Subjectivity, 62–9.

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love-imprint – the only remarkable attestation we find before the midthirteenth century is in the verse of Folquet de Marselha (d. 1231), the son of a Genoese merchant whose poetic activity dates from the final two decades of the twelfth century. We encounter language related to the love-imprint in two of his cansos. In ‘Tant m’abellis l’amoros pessamens’, composed around 1180–85 – a poem which, incidentally, displays its descendance from the poetry of Guilhem IX in the opening line of its second cobla, with the declaration ‘Be sai que tot quan faz es dreiz niens’ (I know well that what I’m doing is absolutely nothing) – it is a preoccupation (‘pessamens’) that becomes lodged in the lover’s heart, following the pathway, if not the precise mechanism, of the love-imprint. The canso ‘En chantan m’aven a membrar’, which Stronski dates around 1187, provides the most notable example of the impression of the beloved’s image within the lover’s heart.41 The poet sings in order to forget his lovesickness, but he cannot forget, for he carries his beloved’s image (‘faisso’) within his heart.42 Furthermore, this image chastises him: ‘per qu’es vertatz e sembla be / qu’ins e·l cor port, dona, vostra faisso / que·m chastia qu’ieu no vir ma razo’ (For it’s true, and well it seems that I carry your image within my heart, Lady, which chastises me such that I can’t change my thoughts: vv. 8–10). True to troubadour form, though, this is a declaration that undoes itself before it can even establish itself as a model of love. Is the image truly present within the heart (‘es vertatz’), or is this imprint just a plausible impression (‘sembla be’)? Is it the lady’s image (‘faisso’) lodged in the heart, or is it the lady herself? The rest of the canso suggests the latter: Folquet begins the second cobla by stating ‘E pos Amors mi vol honrar / tant qu’e·l cor vos mi fai portar’ (And then Love honors me so much that he makes me carry you in my heart: vv. 11–12; emphasis added). And in verse 16 he repeats that ‘mos Cor, dona, vos a dinz se’ (my heart, lady, has you within it: emphasis added). The inconsistency suggests that the connection between the eyes and the generation of love is by no means a rigid, fully elaborated theoretical construct. The poet never explains the specific physiological mechanism by which the lady – or is it her ‘faisso’? – has found her way to the lover’s heart. These few examples suggest to me that ‘sight’ in troubadour lyric is not necessarily to be taken literally, as a bodily sense, for it can occur without any contact or even proximity; it should be understood more as a stand-in for phantasy – that is, as a catalyst for innamoratio that does not play a crucial 41 On the dating of this poem, see Stanislaw Stronski, Le Troubadour Folquet de Marseille (Krakow 1910, repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1968), 71. 42 In Pierpont Morgan ms M.819 this poem is accompanied by a fascinating illumination (fol. 59r) depicting a lover whose beloved’s face appears, externally, over his heart. The illumination is reproduced in Jager, The Book of the Heart, 71, and discussed at greater length by Angelica Rieger, ‘“Ins e.l cor port, dona, vostra faisso”: Image et imaginaire de la femme à travers l’enluminure dans les chansonniers de troubadours’, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 28 (1985), 385–415.

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role in the physiological development of love. In this respect the relationship between body and love elaborated in troubadour poetry bears little connection, and poses little threat, to contemporaneous medical models of the body.43 What, then, would lead the troubadours’ literary heirs to make this leap, to medicalize (and ultimately, as we shall see in later chapters, to pathologize) the eyes in their capacity as generators of love?

Sicilian schools of love, science, medicine The Mediterranean basin has long been a crossroads of Arabic, Judaic, and Christian cultures, and, as such, a locus of commercial and cultural exchange. The Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II, heir to a Sicilian kingdom whose culture was still heavily influenced by the Greek colonization and Arabic rule of the previous centuries, used his considerable power and influence to bring together diverse strains of scientific, philosophical, and lyric production stemming from diverse Mediterranean cultural traditions.44 Frederick’s support of scientific and philosophical inquiry is well known and relatively well documented.45 The stupor mundi’s patronage of philosophers, translators, and poets, as well as of institutions of higher learning, created a flourishing intellectual community at the heart of the imperial court.46 Frederick II was also a noted patron of universities: he founded the studium generale of Naples47 and supported and regulated the medical school at Salerno.48 The important stature accorded to medicine in the Sicilian court 43 Or at least, troubadour poetry bears little connection to contemporary scientific models of the body until very late. Ulrich Mölk cites a few tardive counterexamples in ‘Le sonnet Amor è un desio de Giacomo da Lentini et le problème de la genèse de l’amour’, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 14 (1971), 337. 44 Karla Mallette explores medieval Sicily’s multilingual literary community in The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100–1250: A Literary History (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). According to Andrea Burroso, at Frederick II’s court ‘la poesia, le lettere, e la musica italiane cominciarono a fiorire sotto l’influenza provenzale e – oggi pare sempre più probabile – sotto quella arabo-islamica’. ‘Federico II e la tradizione culturale arabo-islamica’, Federico II: immagine e potere, ed. Maria Stella Calò Mariani and Raffaella Cassano (Venice: Marsilio, 1995), 19. For an account of the emergence of the Sicilian School, see Furio Brognolo, ‘La Scuola poetica siciliana’, in Storia della letteratura italiana, ed. Enrico Malato (Rome: Salerno, 1995), 265–337. 45 See the essays contained in Le scienze alla corte di Federico II, Micrologus II (Turnhout: Brepols, 1994) and in Pierre Toubert and Agostino Paravicini-Bagliani, eds, Federico II e le scienze (Palermo: Sellerio, 1994). I also refer the reader to Piero Morpurgo, ‘Federico II e la scienza’, in Federico II e l’Italia. Percorsi, luoghi, segni e strumenti (Rome: De Luca, 1995), 157–61. 46 On the integration of poetry and natural science, see Elena Lombardi, ‘‘, Italianist 24 (2004), 5–19. 47 For an account of Frederick’s foundation of the university see Antonino Sambataro, Federico II e lo ‘studium’ di Napoli (Catania: CUECM, 1994). 48 For the history of the Salerno school and of Frederick’s patronage, see Salvatore De Renzi, Storia documentata della Scuola medica di Salerno (1857; repr. Salerno: Ripostes,

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is illustrated by Aimeric de Peguilhan (before 1190–after 1221), whose poem ‘La metgia’ (Medicine) presents Frederick II as a doctor at the Salerno school. Aimeric proclaims that God has sent a good, wise, and learned doctor from Salerno (‘Qu’un bon metge nos a Dieus sai trames / Deves Salern, savi et ben apres’: vv. 11–12).49 This doctor’s knowledge of medicine enables him to conquer both heaven and Earth (‘Qu’elh sap ensemps guazanhar mezinan / Dieu e secgle’: vv. 27–8). It is later revealed that Aquest metges savis, de qu’ieu vos dic, Fon filhs del bon emperador Enric, Et a lo nom del metge Frederic, E.l cor e.l sen e.l saber e.l fag ric (vv. 33–6) This wise doctor I’m telling you about is the son of the good emperor Henry and is named doctor Frederick, rich in heart, mind, knowledge and deeds.

In ‘La Metgia’ Aimeric uses medicine as a metaphor, but he does not adopt more precisely medical language, nor does he embrace the workings of the human body as his subject matter. Nonetheless, this most singular poem is highly suggestive of the types of interdiscursive exchange fostered by the intellectual environment of Frederick’s court. Its poetic allusions to medicine and its mixture of Occitan language and southern Italian subject matter are melded together by the transcultural author Aimeric, a Provençal poet living and working in thirteenth-century Sicily.50 Indeed, Provençal poets such as Aimeric, working under the patronage of Frederick II, brought many elements of Occitan lyric to Sicily and southern Italy: along with poetic forms such as the canso, tenso, and alba, the thematics of the eyes apparently derived at least in part from troubadour sources. Vernacular lyric combined with the innovative scientific and philosophical currents swirling around the court, creating a dynamic new fusion of troubadour themes and Arabo-Aristotelian theories of sense perception. The 2000) and Maria Pasca, ed., La Scuola medica salernitana: storia, immagini, manoscritti dall’XII al XIII secolo (Naples: Electa, 1988). 49 Aimeric de Peguilhan, The Poems of Aimeric de Peguilhan, ed. and trans. William P. Shepard and Frank M. Chambers (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1950), 146. 50 In addition to expatriates like Aimeric, a number of thirteenth-century Italian poets, notably Sordello da Goito (who, incidentally, exchanged injurious verse with Aimeric), wrote lyrics in Provençal. Sordello, famously portrayed in Dante’s Purgatorio, created the refrain ‘Ailas, e que.m fau miey huelh, / Quar no vezon so qu’ieu vuelh’ (Alas, and what good do my eyes do me when they do not see that which I desire), which revisits the problem of the eyes’ role in love as it harks back to Aristotle’s assertion that the eye that cannot see is no longer a true eye. Sordello da Goito, Le poesie, ed. Marco Boni (Bologna: Libreria Antiquaria Palmaverde, 1954), 3.

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incorporation of elements of Aristotelian theory in Italian love poetry in the early thirteenth century marks the introduction of a new element largely absent from troubadour verse: it is here that the poetic language of love-imprint appears to emerge and to solidify its status as lyric commonplace. Aimeric de Peguilhan, in ‘Anc mais de joy ni de chan’,51 and Lanfranc Cigala (before 1235–after 1257), in ‘Un avinen ris vi l’autrier’,52 are among the earliest poets to base their description of love on the Aristotelian model of the love-imprint, in which the eyes serve as portal to the heart. Lanfranc details love’s biological pathway to a degree that is without precedent in previous generations of Occitan lyric: Et intra se.n per l’oil primier, Mas pero car l’oils no.l soffier, Vai al cor afortidamen. (vv. 20–22) And it [the beloved’s smile] first enters through the eyes, but then, since the eyes can’t abide it, it goes straight to the heart.

This theme also appears in the verse of Sordello (‘Ab selh esguar m’intret en aisselh dia / Amors pels huelhs al cor’; With that look, on that day, Love entered my heart through my eyes: 22, vv. 13–14) and of the Sicilian school; it is unclear whether it first appeared in Lanfranc’s lyric or in the works of the Sicilians. The foremost of the Sicilian poets, the notary Giacomo da Lentini, is remembered for the formal innovation of the sonnet and is distinguished by his careful elaboration of the process of phantasmatic love-vision.53 More than any other single figure, Giacomo da Lentini is responsible for the language of the love-imprint that was soon to sweep across European literary circles. His canzone ‘Maravigliosamente’, for instance, describes the kind of love that springs from the figura in the lover’s heart: com’om che tene mente in altra parte, e pinge la simile pintura, così, bella, facc’eo:

51 Ulrich Mölk identifies this poem as the direct source of love-imprint language in Sicilian poetry. ‘Le sonnet Amor è un desio’, 337–8. 52 Lanfranc Cigala, Il canzoniere di Lanfranco Cigala, ed. Francesco Branciforti (Florence: Olschki, 1954), 122. 53 On the origins of the sonnet, see Christopher Kleinhenz, The Early Italian Sonnet: The First Century (1220–1321) (Lecce: Milella, 1986); Pierre Blanc, ‘Sonnet des origines, origine du sonnet: Giacomo da Lentini’, in Le Sonnet à la Renaissance: des origines au XVIIe siècle, ed. Yvonne Bellenger (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1988), 9–18.

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dentr’a lo core meo porto la tua figura.54 (vv. 4–9) Like a man whose mind is somewhere else, and who paints a lifelike painting, so, beauty, do I: I carry your image within my heart.

Such love is marvelous, as is the formation of internal image.55 The lover is now deemed an artist; the poet’s analogy likens painting to the art of love, and thus the poet, as artist, also takes on the role of the inner painter who creates the phantasmatic image in the heart.56 Any description of the beloved is therefore ekphrastic rather than mimetic – ekphrasis being, as Jan-Dirk Müller has eloquently stated, ‘the literary equivalent of sight in a culture of visuality’.57 Giacomo’s debt to Folquet da Marselha is obvious; nonetheless, the notary takes pains, in the poem’s congedo, to underline the novelty of his poetic language.58 The major difference, however, is that unlike Folquet, who alternates between talking about his beloved and her ‘faisso’, Giacomo has definitively distinguished the figura from the person it represents.59 The eyes are the immediate source of this figura: Giacomo’s contribution to the tenzone ‘Amor è un desìo, che ven da core’ contains the formulation that ‘gli ocli in prima generan l’amore’ (the eyes first generate love: 648, v. 3).60 It should be noted that, while the image of the painter is an active one, the eyes are not assigned a particularly active role in this poem. The eyes do not paint or place the image in the heart; rather, the lover becomes a ‘painter’ in a more generalized sense, and the precise physiological mechanism by which this ‘painting’ takes place is never fully explained. So how, precisely, does the mechanism work, and how can so small a portal as the eyes become the entry point to heart and mind? Giacomo da Lentini composed a pair of sonnets resolving the apparent physical impossi54 Le Rime della Scuola Siciliana, ed. Bruno Panvini, 2 vols (Florence: Olschki, 1964), vol. I, 7. I cite all of the Sicilian poets’ verses from this edition. 55 On manuscript variants, including manuscript L’s reading of ‘figura’ for ‘pintura’, see Joachim Schulze, ‘Die Kanzone Meravigliosamente von Giacomo da Lentini und die Memoria’, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 120 (2004), 478–92. 56 On the syntax of Giacomo da Lentini’s similes, see V. Louise Katainen, ‘Simile in the Poetry of Giacomo da Lentini (fl. 1220–50)’, Romance Languages Annual 3 (1991), 230–234. 57 Jan-Dirk Müller, ‘Blinding Sight: Some Observations on German Epics of the Thirteenth Century’, in Nichols, Kablitz, and Calhoun, 208. 58 See Rolando Damiani, ‘La dama del cuore in Giacomo da Lentini’, in La poesia di Giacomo da Lentini. Scienza e filosofia nel XIII secolo in Sicilia e nel Mediterraneo occidentale, ed. Rossend Arqués (Palermo: Centro di Studi Filologici e Linguistici Siciliani, 2000), 205–14. 59 On this novelty in Giacomo da Lentini’s poetry, see Franco Mancini, La figura nel cuore fra cortesia e mistica (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1988). 60 This tenzone consists of a series of sonnets, one each by Jacopo Mostacci, Pier delle Vigne, and Giacomo da Lentini. See Mölk, ‘Le sonnet Amor è un desio.’

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bility of the beloved’s entry through the eyes, both of which engage with their Occitan influences as well as with contemporary optical doctrine in order to link the physical mechanisms of love and sense perception.61 The first sonnet of the pair, ‘Sì come il sol, che manda la sua spera’, is earnest in tone. Sì come il sol, che manda la sua spera e passa per lo vetro e no lo parte, … così l’Amore fere là ove spera e mandavi lo dardo da sua parte; fere in tal loco che l’omo non spera, e passa gli occhi e lo core diparte. (I: 44, vv.1–2, 5–8) Just like the sun, which sends its rays and passes through glass without breaking it, … thus Love strikes wherever he wishes and sends his dart there himself; it strikes in a way that strips man of all hope, and passes through his eyes and breaks his heart.

The second, and more famous, sonnet provides a tongue-in-cheek treatment of the same problem. Or come pote sì gran donna intrare per gli occhi miei, che sì piccioli sone? (I: 45, vv. 1–2) But how can such a large woman enter through my eyes, which are so small?

According to Giacomo’s proposed solution, the answer is to be found in contemporary physics and natural philosophy. ma voglio lei a lumera assomigliare, e gli occhi mei al vetro ove si pone: lo foco inchiuso poi passa di fore lo suo lostrore, sanza far rottura; così per gli occhi mi pass’a lo core no la persona, ma la sua figura. (I: 45, vv. 7–12) but I want to compare her to light, and my eyes to glass on which it shines: the inner light then transmits its luminosity outward, without causing a break. Likewise it is not the person, but her image, that passes through my eyes and to my heart.

61 On these influences, see Antonio Catalfamo, ‘La scuola poetica siciliana di Federico II: Provenzalismo, averroismo e poesia popolare’, Rivista di Studi Italiani 20 (2002), 88–115.

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It is not the lady herself who enters the lover’s heart, but her figura, an entity that shares the properties of light.62 The poet’s eye becomes an optical lens with the heart as its focal point. Although Giacomo da Lentini is the most prolific and influential exponent of the love-imprint at Frederick’s court, he is not the only one: other poets of his circle, most notably Guido delle Colonne, Rinaldo d’Aquino, Jacopo d’Aquino, and Jacopo Mostacci, make use of similar phantasmatic language.63 The gaze, which played an important but incompletely defined role in troubadour poetry, is situated at the foreground of the poetry and politics of the Sicilian court. The poetry of the Scuola siciliana is not just an important offshoot of southern French troubadour lyric, though, but a major (proto)national and international movement in its own right. The poetry of the Sicilian School played a vital role in the establishment of the Italian vernacular literary tradition; but, more importantly for our purposes, it also promulgated a poetic topos, the love-imprint. The love-imprint was soon diffused in the poetry of the Dolce stil novo, as poets such as Cavalcanti and especially Petrarch spread its popularity northward through the Italian peninsula and ultimately to France and the rest of Europe.64

Optical and ophthalmic constructs In the decades following its first appearance in the poetry of the Sicilian School, the use of the love-imprint topos gained widespread popularity, its dissemination accelerated by its predominant role in dolce stil novo poetics and its ubiquity in the musically driven lyric of the period. It is not in its Sicilian form, but rather in the slightly later incarnation espoused by writers of the later thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries – the version I characterize

62 The woman’s figure which penetrates the lover’s eye without breaking it bears a remarkable similarity to language used to describe the conception of Christ in the virgin Mary, as both are assimilated to light that penetrates a pane of glass without breaking it. For a summary of the history of this religious image, which was disseminated in sermons falsely attributed to St Augustine and to Ildefonsus of Toledo, see Andrew Breeze, ‘The Blessed Virgin and the Sunbeam through Glass’, Celtica 23 (1999), 19–29. 63 For a full inventory of Sicilian poems employing eye imagery see Walter Pagani, Repertorio tematico della Scuola poetica siciliana, Biblioteca di Filologia Romanza 12 (Bari: Adriatica, 1968). While eyesight does not occupy a prominent position in his poetic vision, Pier della Vigna is also intimately bound to the problematics of the eye, for he was blinded by Frederick II in 1249 as punishment for an unspecified treasonous act. Most scholarship on Pier della Vigna centers on his appearance in Inferno XIII, where he is included among the suicides. Anthony Cassell, ‘Pier della Vigna’s Metamorphosis: Iconography and History’, in Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio: Studies in the Italian Trecento in Honor of Charles S. Singleton, ed. Aldo Bernardo and Anthony Pellegrini (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983), 31–76. 64 Jager, too, attributes responsibility for the spread of this language primarily to Petrarch. The Book of the Heart, 71.

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as ophthalmic in nature – that the topos gained currency throughout Western Europe during the 150 years after its invention.65 The Sicilian inventors of love-imprint poetry, Giacomo da Lentini chief among them, owe a clear and well-documented debt to contemporary optical theory.66 According to the earliest incarnation of the love-imprint, typified by Giacomo’s famous pair of sonnets on the generation of the phantasmatic image of the beloved, love arises from a physical process akin to solar radiation. Not surprisingly, then, the phenomena of love and vision continue to be paired by the poets of the dolce stil novo, notably by Cino da Pistoia, who revisits the love-imprint theme in dozens of sonnets and canzoni. But while superficially derived from the poetic conceit developed by their predecessors, and often faithfully echoing its language, sonnets like Cino’s ‘Veduto han gli occhi miei sí bella cosa’ show that the stilnovisti’s love-imprint poetry departs from the Sicilian model in a more fundamental way. Veduto han gli occhi miei sí bella cosa, che dentro dal mio cor dipinta l’hanno, e se per veder lei tuttor no stanno, in fin che no la trovan non han posa; e fatt’han l’alma mia sí amorosa, che tutto corro in amoroso affanno67 (vv. 1–6) My eyes have seen such a beautiful thing that they have painted it within my heart, and if at any time they cannot see her, they know no repose until they find her; and they have made my soul so amorous that I run about, breathless with love …

Like Giacomo da Lentini, Cino da Pistoia describes the passage of the beloved woman’s image through the gazing poet-lover’s eye and its ultimate inscription in his heart – and yet his poem is fundamentally different. Despite thematic and lexical similarities, and despite Cino’s clear awareness of his

65 Although the present study is concerned primarily with the use of love-imprint language in lyric poetry written in French and Italian, it should be noted that similar language appears in texts as varied as fourteenth-century Spanish narrative poetry (e.g. the Archpriest’s battle with love in stanza 405 of Juan Ruiz’s Libro de buen amor) and Middle English love narrative (John Gower’s Confessio amantis, Book I). 66 Though thoroughly documented, Bienvenido Morros Mestres’s characterization of Giacomo da Lentini’s poems as ‘medically’ grounded remains unconvincing due to its confusion of physical (optical) and physiological concepts. ‘Medicina y literatura en Giacomo Lentini’, in La poesia di Giacomo da Lentini. Scienza e filosofia nel XIII secolo in Sicilia e nel Mediterraneo occidentale, ed. Rossend Arqués (Palermo: Centro di Studi Filologici e Linguistici Siciliani, 2000), 105–36. 67 The works of Cino da Pistoia, Guido Cavalcanti, Guido Guinizelli, and Lapo Gianni are cited from Rimatori del Dolce Stil Nuovo ed. Luigi Di Benedetto (Bari: Laterza, 1939).

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poetic antecedents,68 the sonnets’ scientific underpinnings – that is, the poets’ respective understandings of the process by which the love-imprint occurs – seem to exist in completely separate spheres. As we have seen in our readings of Giacomo da Lentini’s sonnets, discussions of the eye in Sicilian School poetry often centre on the optical problem of innamoratio: how can a life-sized woman penetrate the much smaller human eye and become embedded in the heart? This problem of physics having been resolved, poets of the following generations refocus their inquiry into the eye’s contribution to the generation of love, framing it in more firmly physiological terms. The eyes (in their capacity as participants in the generation of love) are recast not as a lens across which an image passes, but as an active entity whose vital role in innamoratio is to relay images to the waiting intellect.69 Thus from the Sicilian School to the dolce stil novo the poetic focus may be said to transform from optical to ophthalmic. I characterize the original use of the love-imprint topos as optical because the poets’ primary concern is with the lady’s assimilation to a ray of light and with the physically explained phenomenon of the passage of her image through the lens of the lover’s eye. The ophthalmic model, on the other hand, reflects a growing interest in the biological potentialities of the lover’s eye, and an interest in the degree to which the love-experience is controlled, mediated, or even shaped by the lover’s body. Even with the passage from the optical to the ophthalmic model, the end result of the poet-lover’s experience, the love-imprint, remains the same; but the way which the beloved’s image enters the lover’s body, though described in both poems as akin to the transmission of light, has changed from a passive phenomenon (‘passa gli occhi’) to an active one governed by the eyes (‘gli occhi miei … dipinta l’hanno’) and by the lover’s will. The Sicilian model of love is certainly not discarded outright, as later Italian poems continue to cite the Notary’s earlier descriptions of 68 John Took describes Cino as a poet who ‘is always aware of the tradition in which he stands and is always eager to pay his dues’. ‘Cino da Pistoia and the Poetics of Sweet Subversion’, in Reflexivity: Critical Themes in the Italian Cultural Tradition, ed. Prue Shaw and John Took (Ravenna: Longo, 2000), 186. 69 A. J. Smith notes, in reference to the poets of the Dolce Stil Novo, that ‘the task these poets set themselves was to praise a living beauty which is nonetheless to be apprehended by intelligence rather than by sense, or by intelligence through the eyes only, since sight is the purest of the senses. Their poems often begin with the passing of love from the eyes to the mind.’ The Metaphysics of Love: Studies in Renaissance Poetry from Dante to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 42. To this it should be added that while passare is a watchword of Sicilian verse – the image passes through the lover’s eye just as light passes through a pane of glass – it is porgere (to extend, to offer, to place or to present) that is key to understanding of Dolce Stil Novo love-imprint, as the Stilnovisti typically represent the eyes’ active transmission and placement of the beloved’s image within the mind and heart. For an inventory of poems emploting the language of the eye, see Eugenio Savona’s Repertorio tematico del Dolce Stil Novo (Bari: Adriatica, 1973).

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innamoratio, echoing his attribution of the primary responsibility for love to the eyes. In ‘Veduto han gli occhi miei sí bella cosa’, for instance, we see that Cino da Pistoia has revisited Giacomo’s theme of the internal painter; but unlike Giacomo, whose ‘Maravigliosamente’ describes the lover as a painter, Cino assigns the act of painting specifically to the eyes. And Francesco Landini’s ballata ‘Gli ochi che ‘n prima tanto bel piacere / mi porson dentr’al core’ (The eyes which first placed so much pleasure within my heart) betrays the direct influence of Giacomo da Lentini’s ‘Amor è un desìo che ven da core’, which states that ‘gli ocli en prima generan l’amore’ (the eyes first generate love).70 The latter two poems, though similar, demonstrate the subtle increase in importance assigned to the eyes. According to Giacomo, the eyes indiscriminately represent all that they see to the heart (‘ché gli ocli representan a lo core/ d’onni cosa che veden, bon’e ria’: 648, vv. 9–10), while it is the heart that does the crucial work of imagining and engendering desire (‘e lo cor, che di zo è concepitore, / immagina, e qual place, quel desìa’: 648, vv. 12–13). In Francesco Landini’s ballata, though, the eyes deliberately place (porson) a certain pleasurable image in the heart and cause pain (‘mi fan dolere’: 178, v. 3) when love does not result. Though the similarity between the two models is evident, the ballata clearly belongs to a second poetic generation, one in which the eyes actively initiate the love-process, their function no longer relegated to the passive representation of the seen world for the heart’s consumption. The stilnovisti were not only heirs of Giacomo da Lentini’s great formal innovation, the sonnet, and of his language of love-imprint – they were also, more than any of their poetic predecessors, ‘particularly indebted to Aristotelian natural philosophy’.71 With their infusion of Aristotelian psychology and physiology into Giacomo da Lentini’s optical model, the stilnovisti were largely responsible for giving the love-imprint topos its definitive form. Poets such as Guido Guinizelli, Guido Cavalcanti, and especially Cino da Pistoia composed a number of well-known sonnets and canzoni about image-love, 70 Francesco Landini (1325/35–1397) was a blind organist of Florence and the most prolific composer of the Italian ars nova. It is presumed that, with a handful of exceptions, Landini composed the texts of most of his songs; the ballata ‘Gli occhi che ‘n prima tanto bel piacere’ is one of the poems whose lyrics have been attributed to Landini with the greatest certainty. Leonard Ellinwood, The Works of Francesco Landini (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1939), 313. Landini’s lyrics are edited in Poesie musicali del trecento, ed. Giuseppe Corsi (Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1970). On the literary implications of Landini’s blindness, see Julie Singer, ‘Playing by Ear: Compensation, Reclamation, and Prosthesis in Fourteenth-Century Song’, in Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations, ed. Joshua R. Eyler (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 39–52. 71 They ‘were particularly indebted to Aristotelian natural philosophy and, further, had an interest in redefining inspiration, or the moment of vision that gives rise to poetry, in generational terms.’ Heather Webb, The Medieval Heart (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 63.

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and more specifically about the love-imprint; even Dante dedicates his Vita Nuova not to Bice Portinari but to the ‘gloriosa donna de la mia mente’ (glorious lady of my mind); in the canzone ‘La dispietata mente che pur mira’, too, Dante adopts the language of the painter in declaring that Love painted his beloved within his heart (‘per man d’Amor li entro pinta sete’: v. 22).72 The dominance of the love-imprint continues throughout the following century, as it appears prominently in the lyric production of the major poetic figures of both the Italian and French vernaculars – Petrarch and Guillaume de Machaut.73 In both the French- and Italian-language traditions, the love-imprint becomes increasingly codified and consistent, both thematically and formally, over the course of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Thematically, post-Sicilian versions of the topos demonstrate an increased emphasis on the eye as the locus of innamoratio. This new focus, which I characterize as ophthalmic, is a marked shift from the optical model promulgated by the Sicilian poets. The ‘ophthalmic’ love-imprint is also accompanied by a pronounced tendency to turn love into idolatrous image-worship; the eyes are key to the production and activation of the lover’s internal phantasm. Formally, expressions of the love-imprint topos remain rather homogeneous, as the topos is expressed most commonly in just a handful of poetic forms: the sonnet, canzone, and ballata in the Italian tradition, and the ballade, virelai, and rondeau in French. In the post-Sicilian incarnation of the love-imprint it is no longer the optical mechanism by which the lady’s image enters the eye, but rather the psychological aftermath of its embedding in the heart, that preoccupies the poet.74 This does not mean, however, that the eye takes on a diminished importance; on the contrary, once the poetics of love are somewhat removed from the optical (i.e., physics-based) discourse in which Giacomo da Lentini had placed them, poetic discussions of love begin to be framed in more firmly physiological terms. What is most striking about the Italian and French poems that use the language of the love-imprint in the two centuries following its early use by Giacomo da Lentini is, first, the near-uniformity of the descriptions of the process, which suggests a genuine continuity between thirteenth- and fourteenth-century production and between ‘Italian’ and 72 Dante Alighieri, Vita nuova e Rime, ed. Fredi Chiappelli (Milan: Mursia, 1965). Dante’s engagement with contemporary optical theory has been widely discussed: see, for instance, Simon Gilson, Medieval Optics and Theories of Light in the Works of Dante (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2000) and Robert Podgurski, ‘Where Optics and Visionary Metaphysics Converge in Dante’s “Novella Vista”’, Italian Quarterly 35 (1998), 29–38. 73 Petrarch explicitly acknowledges his debt to Cino in the Rime sparse; he uses language of love-imprint in XCVI, one of the sonnets commemorating Cino. Edward L. Boggs, ‘Cino and Petrarch’, MLN 94 (1979), 146–52. 74 Or, as John Took puts it, ‘a passing over from the propositional to the predicamental’. ‘Cino da Pistoia and the Poetics of Sweet Subversion’, 188.

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‘French’ poetic models; and, secondly, the preponderance of poetic explanations of the love-imprint, the frequency of which suggests that, despite its growing popularity, the concept is still novel enough to require elaboration. Such explanations may not be sufficient to capture the essence of the love experience: Guido Guinizelli questions the wisdom of trying to explain love rationally, despite his Sicilian predecessors’ attempts to do so, when he writes, ‘ancorch’è fallimento / volendo ragionare / di cosí grande affare’ (although it is folly to want to speak reasonably about such a great matter: 6, vv. 7–9). Guido himself is sometimes less cautious, however; his canzone ‘Tegnol di folle ‘mpresa, a lo ver dire’ provides a more standard explanation. Di sí forte valor lo colpo venne che gli occhi no ‘l ritenner di neente, ma passò dentr’al cor che lo sostenne e sentési piagato duramente (12, vv. 11–14) The blow came with such force that the eyes couldn’t hold it back at all; rather, it passed into the heart which endured it and felt itself gravely wounded

Here the passage of the image through the eyes is not a purely passive process, akin to the passage of light through a pane of glass; the perceived image is a force which can only enter the lover’s body by gaining the consent, or overcoming the resistance, of the gazer’s eyes. Similarly, Cino da Pistoia states that his beloved lady penetrates his eyes, enters his mind, and is imprinted on his heart. The poet loves ‘La bella donna, che ‘n virtù d’Amore / Per gli occhi mi passò dentro la mente’ (The beautiful lady who, by virtue of Love, passed through my eyes and into my mind: 161, vv. 1–2); elsewhere, ‘Una donna mi passa per la mente / Ch’a riposar se ‘n va dentro nel cuore’ (a lady passes through my mind so that she may go and rest within my heart: 149, vv. 1–2). Petrarch, too, explains the physiological pathway followed by the beloved’s image ‘quando giugne per gli occhi al cor profondo’ (when [it] arrives in my deepest heart through my eyes: RVF 94, v. 1).75 The eye– mind–heart pathway is also alluded to in song, including Francesco Landini’s ballata ‘Ne la tuo luce tien’ la vita mia’: ‘Da gli occhi vien la speranza nel core’ (hope enters the heart through the eyes: 203; v. 2). Similar but somewhat later examples may be found in fourteenth-century French lyric, from Jehan Acart’s (active 1332) song ‘Dés que je fui hors d’ignorance’, which 75 All of Petrarch’s vernacular verse is cited from Robert M. Durling’s Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), though I do not use Durling’s translations. Petrarch’s isolation of his poetic persona’s organs and faculties has not been described to the degree that his partitioning of the beloved woman’s body has. See the now-classic study by Nancy Vickers, ‘Diana Described, Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme’, Critical Inquiry 8 (1981), 233–48.

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declares that ‘Emprienta vo douce semblance, / Dame, en mon cuer loial amours’ (Loyal love, my lady, imprinted your sweet likeness in my heart76) to Froissart’s rondeau ‘Mi oel ont mis mon coer en grant dangier’ (My eyes have put my heart in great danger77). Though most descriptions of love-imprint do not include every phase of the process – in song, for example, the beloved’s image often bypasses the cognitive faculties, passing directly from the eyes to the heart78 – these love poems of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries clearly function as variations on a single theme. In this body of texts love’s pathway is mapped out and the specific role of the eye is foregrounded. Cino da Pistoia’s sonnet ‘Dante, quando per caso s’abbandona’ is typical in the manner in which its author places the responsibility (or is it blame?) for love squarely on the eyes. lo disio amoroso de la speme, che nascer fanno gli occhi del bel seme di quel piacer che dentro si ragiona (196, vv. 2–4) the amorous desire of hope, which the eyes cause to be born from the lovely seed of that pleasure that speaks within

Similar language is to be found in Petrarch’s Rime sparse and Guillaume de Machaut’s Louange des Dames.79 In fact, while there exists no concrete evidence to suggest that Machaut was aware of Petrarch’s early verse, the close parallels between the contemporaries’ lyrics indicate that Petrarch may, indeed, have influenced Machaut’s extensive use of the love-imprint.80 As 76 Nigel Wilkins, ed., One Hundred Ballades, Rondeaux and Virelais (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 17, vv. 3–4. 77 Jean Froissart, Ballades et rondeaux, ed. Rae Baudouin (Geneva: Droz, 1978), 96. 78 Similar examples may be found in Cino’s sonnets ‘Quella che in cor l’amorosa radice’ (also attributed to Onesto da Bologna), ‘Madonna, la beltà vostra infollío’, and ‘Veduto han gli occhi miei sì bella cosa’, and in Landini’s ballate ‘Or è tal l’alma mia’ and ‘Per la mie dolze piaga, che per li ochi’. 79 See, in particular, Petrarch’s sonnets ‘Occhi, piangete, accompagnate il core’, ‘Io avrò sempre in odio la fenestra’, ‘Qual ventura mi fu quando da l’uno’, and the previously cited ‘Quando giugne per gli occhi al cor profondo’, as well as the so-called ‘canzoni degli occhi’: ‘Perché la vita è breve’, ‘Gentil mia donna’, and ‘Poi che per mio destino’. Similarly, Guillaume de Machaut praises his eye, characterizing it as the ‘droit archier / D’amours’ (sure archer of Love, 278, vv. 1–2); ‘Certes, mon oueil richement visa bel, / Quant premiers vi ma dame bonne et belle’ (Surely my eye aimed well when I first saw my good and beautiful lady, 219, vv. 1–2). Guillaume de Machaut, La Louange des dames, ed. Nigel Wilkins (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1972). 80 Françoise Ferrand remarks that the similarities between the two writers may not be limited to their reference to the same literary sources. ‘En effet, leurs routes ne manquent pas de parallélismes, qui peut-être se croisèrent: dans les premières années du siècle, ils fréquentent, en France, la même avant-garde intellectuelle européenne’: ‘Le De remediis utriusque fortunae de Pétrarque et Le remède de Fortune de Machaut: Le passé des lettres

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will be discussed below, ballade 109 of the Louange des Dames rewrites Petrarch’s sonnets 13 and 61, while Petrarch’s sonnet 124 is echoed in Machaut’s ‘Amour, ma dame et Fortune et mi oeil’.81 In such poems the eye is more than a window to the mind and heart: it is an active player in the generation of love.

Intromission and imprint The love-imprint at once reflects contemporary scientific knowledge of the eye and the lover’s visceral fear of his own physical and emotional vulnerability. With its hyperawareness of contemporary debates, both optical (the physics of vision) and ophthalmic (the structure and function of the eye itself), the love-imprint topos moves beyond a mere stylistic device, taking on the character of a relatively consistent physiological and psychological model. More specifically, the love-imprint depends on a fundamentally Aristotelian understanding of the physiology of the human eye. The medieval world inherited from classical antiquity two competing models of eyesight, extramission (whereby the eyes emit rays) and intromission (whereby the eyes are receivers, rather than emitters, of light). While Plato espoused extramission in Timaeus, available in Latin translation from the fourth century and gaining broader dissemination from the twelfth onward, Aristotle adhered to an intromissive model of sight. The extramissive model of sight was widely accepted in the earlier Middle Ages, no doubt due in large part to Galen’s subscription to it, but as Arabic medical and optical texts were translated into Latin the Aristotelian intromissive model gained currency. Alhazen, whose influential optical treatise Kitab al-Manazir was translated into Latin in the early thirteenth century, effectively ‘demolished the extramission theory’ and proposed in its stead a synthetic intromission theory based in mathematics, physics, and physiology.82 This theory, adopted by Bacon and his followers, became the dominant paradigm in the late medieval West.83 et le présent de Dieu’, in Contez me tout. Mélanges de langue et littérature médiévales offerts à Herman Braet, ed. Catherine Bel, Pascale Dumont, and Frank Willaert (Louvain: Peeters, 2006), 465–87. 81 And while Machaut does not translate Petrarch’s sonnet 168 nearly so closely, its scenario – Love acting on an aging lover through the intermediary of a secretary who sometimes tells the truth and sometimes lies – certainly encourages this reader to imagine a connection with the Voir Dit. For a discussion of eyesight and lyric in the Voir Dit, see Chapter 5. 82 David Lindberg, Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 85. 83 See David Lindberg, Roger Bacon and the Origins of Perspectiva in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) for a thorough account. Excellent summaries of intromission/extramission debate are to be found in Michael Camille, ‘Before the

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The intromission/extramission debate, of course, was not limited to scientific discourse: poets, drawing upon the convention of love as a condition stemming from the sight of the beloved, also struggled with the exact nature of the mechanisms that allowed for the introduction of the beloved’s image in the lover’s heart. In contrast with the love-imprint, the type of love with which readers of sixteenth-century Lyonnese School poems are familiar – that is, the love-construct termed by Lance Donaldson-Evans the ‘aggressive eye topos’ – is fundamentally extramissive: the eyes actively send forth rays, which are typically represented as darts coming from the loved woman’s eye that wound the man.84 While the breed of love described with ‘aggressive eye’ language ‘is born not simply as a result of seeing the Beloved but by the active participation of the Beloved’s own glance’, the type of innamoratio described through the earlier love-imprint topos is intromissive in nature.85 Both the love-imprint and the ‘aggressive eye’ describe the process by which a man falls in love; the tension between these two topoi, and their underlying models of vision, stems in large part from the differing degrees of emphasis they accord to an active, complementary construct of female physiology. For if contemporary understandings of the structure and function of the eye help determine the way in which innamoratio is described in ‘intromissive’ Romance poetry, it must be noted that only the structure and function of the gazing male eye are at stake. Female lovers (as opposed to beloveds, who often appear in a secondary role) are conspicuously absent from poetry written according to the intromissive love-imprint model, with one noteworthy exception being Christine de Pizan’s Cent Ballades d’Amant et de Dame.86 It is primarily male poets, writing through the voice of a male lover-persona, who typically use both ‘love-imprint’ and ‘aggressive eye’ imagery in the Middle Ages.87 Indeed, even Christine de Pizan writes the love-dialogue of the Cent Ballades d’Amant et de Dame through ventriloquized female and male voices. Christine’s use of the familiar topos feels like a stylized appropriation of a well-established (read: masculine) type of language rather than a natural expression of the pain of unrequited love. Gaze: The Internal Senses and Late Medieval Practices of Seeing’, in Nelson, 197–223; Stephen Perkinson, The Likeness of the King: A Prehistory of Portraiture in Late Medieval France (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 64; C. M. Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 21–22. 84 Lance Donaldson-Evans, Love’s Fatal Glance: A Study of Eye Imagery in the Poets of the Ecole Lyonnaise (University, MS: Romance Monographs, 1980). 85 Ibid., 9. 86 Christine de Pizan, Cent ballades d’Amant et de Dame, ed. Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet (Paris: Bibliothèque Médiévale, 1982). 87 The male dominance of these love topoi will change in the sixteenth century, when they are appropriated and adapted by the female Petrarchists. Mary B. Moore, Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000).

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Though her female character gives voice to a lament on blind love, it is the lament’s conventional language that absorbs and takes possession of the female voice: the speaker’s identity, and by extension her femininity, are subsumed by the overwhelming force of masculine poetic tradition. Despite the universality of the love-experience, the intromissive language of loveimprint seemingly belongs only to the male lover. In the medieval period, the extramissive model is associated nearly exclusively with the woman’s body (she shoots forth harmful darts or rays), while the male lover’s physiology is generally constructed according to the intromissive model (his eyes are receptors, rather than emitters, of light). This fundamental opposition built into the love-imprint model in effect constructs the eyes as another sex organ, another means of differentiating male and female physiology.88 If the ways in which men and women love each other are not the same, it is ultimately because their respective bodily structures and functions are complementary rather than analogous. The anonymous twelfthor thirteenth-century author of Aucassin et Nicolette hints humorously at just such a conception of the physiology of love as a marker of sex difference: Fenme ne puet tant amer l’oume con li hom fait le fenme; car li amors de le fenme est en son oeul et en son le cateron de sa mamele et en son l’orteil del pié, mais li amors de l’oume est ens el cué plantee, dont ele ne puet iscir. (XIV)89 A woman can’t love a man like a man can love a woman, because a woman’s love is in her eye and in the end of her nipple and in the tip of her toe, but a man’s love is planted in his heart, where it’s stuck.

In our later and less overtly comical love-imprint poems, women’s eyes emit harmful rays, typically likened to arrows or darts; men’s eyes deflect or admit these rays. This construct bears witness to a subtly misogynistic vision wherein man is undone by woman, the active–passive power dynamic representing a fantasy reversal of real-life roles that extends even to the penetrative and ejaculative connotations (respectively) of the terms intromission and extramission.90 The new ‘ophthalmic’ focus we have observed in latethirteenth- and early-fourteenth-century lyric localizes sex difference in the 88 On the distinguishing marks of sex difference in the medieval West, see Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. 169–227. 89 Aucassin et Nicolette, ed. and trans. Jean Dufournet (Paris: Flammarion, 1984), 84–6. 90 Heather Webb observes this gendered difference (The Medieval Heart, 67) but declines to comment on it, perhaps because it troubles her stated notion of extrusion as masculine and reception as feminine (96). By maintaining these distinctions she is able to posit a ‘double-gendered heart’, 98.

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eyes, rather than the nipples or toes, and renders only the lover’s eyes more vulnerable. As poetic preoccupation with the (sometimes violent) invasion of the lover’s body by love’s arrow (or the beloved’s gaze) rises, the intromission model – whose very name is more suggestive of insertion or penetration – appears with ever-increasing frequency in Western love poetry. The model is even more frequent in French lyric than in Italian verse, owing perhaps to the popularity of the Roman de la Rose with its elaborate explication of love’s arrows.91 Though these competing models of vision co-existed throughout the later Middle Ages, most poets chose to make primary use of just one. The majority of the stilnovisti and post-dolce stil novo poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries opted for the intromissive model; the later revival of Platonist discourse, especially among the post-Petrarchan poets of the sixteenthcentury Lyonnese school (who practised a brand of neoplatonism particularly obsessed with the eye and its functions), led to the increased use of the extramissive model.92 Of course, some thirteenth- and fourteenth-century poets, especially Dante and Cavalcanti, made use of both: Dana Stewart remarks that ‘while previous poets tended to focus on either the passivity of the lover’s eyes or the power of the beloved’s eyes, Cavalcanti emphasizes both and utilizes greater technical detail than most of his predecessors’.93 This is not necessarily the mark of inconsistency or ignorance of current optical theory: in the case of Cavalcanti (who could hardly be characterized as unfamiliar with the basic principles of natural science), the simultaneous drawing upon both models represents a stylistic choice that compounds his love poetry’s ocularcentric obsession.94 Or, as Elena Lombardi argues,

91 On the legacy of the Rose in late medieval French letters, see Pierre-Yves Badel, Le Roman de la Rose au XIVe: étude de la réception de l’oeuvre (Geneva: Droz, 1980); Sylvia Huot, The Romance of the Rose and its Medieval Readers: Interpretation, Reception, Manuscript Transmission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 92 For an account of the coexistence of the intromission and extramission models, see Marie-Thérèse Lorcin, ‘Le Soleil, l’oeil et la vision au Moyen Âge’, Le Soleil, la lune et les étoiles au Moyen Âge, Senefiance 13 (1983), 217–25. 93 Stewart, The Arrow of Love, 82. 94 The scientific underpinnings of Guido Cavalcanti’s lyric, and particularly of his canzone Donna me prega, have been amply explicated and need not be commented here. I refer the reader to the following studies: J. E. Shaw, Guido Cavalcanti’s Theory of Love (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1949); Maria Corti, La felicità mentale: Nuove prospettive per Cavalcanti e Dante (Turin: Einaudi, 1983); Marie-Madeleine Fontaine, ‘La lignée des commentaires à la chanson de Guido Cavalcanti Donna me prega: Évolution des relations entre philosophie, médecine et littérature dans le débat sur la nature d’Amour (de la fin du XIIIe siècle à celle du XIVe)’, in La Folie et le corps, ed. Jean Céard (Paris: Presses de l’ENS, 1985), 159–78; Enrico Fenzi, La canzone d’amore di Guido Cavalcanti e i suoi antichi commenti (Genoa: Il Melangolo, 1999); Elena Lombardi, ‘The Grammar of Vision in Guido Cavalcanti’, in Guido Cavalcanti tra i suoi lettori, Proceedings of the International Symposium for the Seventh Centennial of his Death, ed. Maria Luisa

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‘Guido’s poetry is constructed around the clash of two gazes: the woman’s gaze …, a wounding, active gaze, and the man’s gaze …, a passive gaze which receives the wound.’95 Cavalcanti thus combines elements of both topoi, as his beloved’s ‘aggressive eyes’ set in motion the process that will lead to the impression of her image in his heart.

Love’s assault on the eyes According to the model whose emergence we have just traced, love enters through the eyes, often wounding them in the process, and then afflicts the heart, wherein it can cause lovesickness. A number of stilnovist poets describe these ocular and psychological maladies; the somewhat later poets, whose works will form the basis of later chapters, propose ‘therapies’ that go beyond the available (medical and surgical) treatments for blindness and for lovesickness. Many of these poetic therapies focus, of necessity, on the eye. The eye is an important component, though not the single defining site, of medical lovesickness.96 Poetic lovesickness, however, is a condition attributed more directly to the eye. Love’s invasion can take place only through the lover’s eyes; it is no surprise, then, if poet-lovers often complain of eye symptoms. Francesco Landini, for example, in his ballata ‘Benché crudele siate stat’e fera’, laments that love has left him ‘gli ochi angosciosi e ‘l corp’afflitto e lasso’ (with anguished eyes and a weak, afflicted body: 200, vv. 4–5), and Petrarch likewise complains of his ‘occhi lagrimosi e ‘nfermi’ (tearful and infirm eyes: RVF 19, v. 12). Indeed, late medieval poems in which the eyes are damaged by, then blamed for, unhappy or unreciprocated love are even more common than the aforementioned instances in which the eyes are credited for love in a positive or neutral light. Guido Guinizelli’s sonnet ‘Lo vostro bel saluto’ furnishes a well-known example of the destructive force of love acting through the eye: Love’s arrow ‘Per li occhi passa come fa lo trono, / che fèr per la finestra de la torre / e ciò che dentro trova spezza e fende’ (passes through the eyes like lightning, which strikes through Ardizzone (Fiesole: Cadmo, 2003), 83–92; Julie Singer, ‘Lines of Sight: Love Lyric, Science, and Authority in Late Medieval and Early Modern French and Italian Culture’ (Ph.D. thesis, Duke University, 2006), 67–77. 95 Lombardi, ‘The Grammar of Vision in Guido Cavalcanti’, 88. 96 The question of whether lovesickness is properly classified as a disease of the eyes, the mind, the heart, or the loins is debated in Peter of Spain’s commentary on the Viaticum of Constantine the African, Questiones super Viaticum (version B), in which amor hereos is ultimately identified as a disease of the imaginative faculty (‘ostenditur quod sit passio virtutis ymaginative’). Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages, 240, lines 141–2. But even though love is not a disease of the eyes per se, it does cause the eyes to suffer: ‘Queritur de signis et queritur utrum oculi plus paciuntur in amore et ostenditur quod sic’ (it is inquired about symptoms, and it is inquired whether the eyes suffer more in love, and it is shown that they do). Ibid., 246, lines 248–50.

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the window of the tower and breaks and shatters that which it touches inside: 16, vv. 9–11). Unlike the divine ray of light described in Giacomo da Lentini’s verse, a benign emanation that could pass through glass without breaking it, Guido Guinizelli’s arrow of love shatters all that it touches. The poet is broken inside and has become, as he declares in the last tercet, a statue, the hollow shell of a man. Guido Cavalcanti likewise berates ‘Le mie foll’occhi, che prima guardaro / vostra figura piena di valore’ (my foolish eyes that first looked at your worthy face: 27, vv. 1–2). The eyes are even more vehemently blamed by Machaut in ballade 109 of the Louange des Dames: Je maudi l’eure et le temps et le jour, La semainne, le lieu, le mois, l’année, Et les .ij. yex dont je vi la douçour De ma dame qui ma joie a finée. (vv. 1–4) I curse the hour, the time, the day, the week, the place, the month, the year, and the two eyes with which I saw the sweetness of my lady who ended my joy.

Machaut’s ballade provides an enticing hint of Franco-Italian intertextuality, as it seems to rewrite a Petrarchan commonplace: whereas Petrarch blessed the place and the time and the hour when his eyes gazed upon Laura (‘I’ benedico il loco e ‘l tempo et l’ora/ che si alto miraron gli occhi miei’: RVF 13),97 Machaut revisits those same sites only to curse them. The eyes, as portals between the outer world and the interior of the body and soul, risk bringing both delight and death into the poet’s mind and heart. While the malady caused by love (and hence by the eyes) is often psychological, and specifically melancholic in nature,98 it can also manifest itself as a physiological ailment affecting the eyes. Love itself (himself) is often depicted as blind, as in Lapo Gianni’s canzone ‘Amor, nova ed antica vanitate’: ‘Amor, mendico del piú degno senso, / orbo nel mondo nato eternalmente’ (Love, beggar of the noblest sense, forever born blind in the world: 73, vv. 27–8).99 Love can also blind the lover, as described in

97 Petrarch also blesses the day, month, year, season, time, place, hour, second, landscape, and place where Laura’s eyes struck him (‘Benedetto sia ‘l giorno e ‘l mese et l’anno / e la stagione e ‘l tempo et l’ora e ‘l punto / e ‘l bel paese e ‘l loco ov’io fui giunto / da’ duo begli occhi che legato m’ànno’) in RVF 61. 98 Mary Wack refers to lovesickness (as depicted in the Viaticum and its early European commentaries) as a subtype of melancholy or as a precursor to melancholy/mania: Lovesickness in the Middle Ages, 6. The B-version of Peter of Spain’s commentary, for instance, cites Avicenna, stating that ‘amor est melancolica sollicitudo’ (love is a melancholic worry). Ibid., 242, line 185. 99 While personified Love is masculine in Italian, the figure is more ambiguous in Old

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Petrarch’s sonnet ‘Quand’io son tutto volto in quella parte’ (‘vommene in guisa d’orbo, senza luce’; I go as a blind man, without light: RVF 18, v. 7). Similarly, in Christine de Pizan’s Cent Ballades d’Amant et de Dame, the lady states in ballade XX that ‘amour vaine / M’avugloit’ (vain love blinded me: vv. 15–16) – though, as we have remarked, such female engagement in love-imprint discourse is highly atypical. In addition to darkening eyesight, Love can disrupt the other senses. Machaut details this type of sensory devastation in the Louange des Dames, ballade 181: Car je pers tout le veoir et l’oïr Et le parler, quant en pensant saveure Sa tres fine douçour que tant desir A reveoir, si qu’adont me court seure Desirs par si grant ardour Que je n’ay sens ne pooir ne vigour, Einsois me sens de s’amour si ravis Que je ne say se je sui mors ou vis. (vv. 9–16) For I lose all sight and hearing and speech, whenever I savor in thought her noble gentleness that I so desire to see again; Desire rushes toward me with such great ardor that I lack sense, power, and vigor. Thus I feel myself so ravished by love that I do not know if I am dead or alive.

Even though love is technically understood as a melancholic mental affliction, it provokes a decidedly visceral response in the poet-lover. The eyes, in their capacity as gateway from the perceived world to the inner faculties, thus receive a large part of the blame for, and the consequences of, the lover’s emotional and physical anguish. The writers and readers of these love-imprint poems face a somewhat paradoxical cast of characters: the blind man unable to love (as per Capellanus), the lover blinded, the lady who is at once idealized and culpable. How can afflicted poetic personas, given these circumstances, seek to heal themselves? Once poetry has been medicalized, can, and should, medicine be rhetoricized? When does the discursive overlap of medicine and poetry begin to pose a threat? Do poetic cures necessitate the denigration of medicine? As we consider these questions in our effort to understand how poetic remedies for blindness can both adopt and surpass medicalized language, we will turn to Petrarch for guidance. The laureate plays a crucial role in elaborating the

and Middle French, as the word amour(s) may be either masculine or feminine. For more on the fourteenth-century iconography of love, and specifically of blind love, see Chapters 5 and 6.

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potential for rhetorical therapies in his capacity as both a lyricist – as some of the clearest instances of love-imprint in late medieval verse bear his signature or his (at least indirect) influence – and as a theorist of the overlap between medical and poetic discourses.

2 Medical Blindness, Rhetorical Insight MEDICALBLINDNESS BLINDNESS, AND RHETORICAL THERAPY INSIGHT

Et vis videre quid in imo viscerum ac fibrarum lateat? Quod est ante oculos non vides! And you claim to see that which lies within the viscera and tissues? You can’t even see what’s before your very eyes! Petrarch, Invective contra medicum II1 Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning – that meaning being invariably a moralistic one. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor2

In the preceding chapter we traced a significant overlap between medical and poetic discourses of eyesight and love. This well-documented intersection of poetic, physical, and physiological constructs of the body is often ascribed in contemporary critical literature, implicitly or explicitly, to a process of poetic ‘medicalization’, as defined in the Introduction. In this chapter, however, we shall see that some medieval writers remark upon this overlap and attribute it, rather, to an inappropriate rhetoricization of medicine. When medical discourses are seen as borrowing the terminology and tools of the writerly arts, poets push back: critiques of medical practitioners’ attempts at rhetorical ornamentation are commonplace in the antimedical writings that abounded in the fourteenth-century West, and especially in the invectives and letters of Petrarch. Petrarch’s telling reliance on the figure of visual impairment in his attacks on the medical profession pathologizes not love, this time, but medicine itself. Consequently the physician cannot heal himself; only the rhetorician holds the keys to therapeutic discourse. In the Invective contra medicum, along with a number of his epistles, Petrarch defends his art – rhetoric – against medical practitioners, seeking to delineate the boundaries between medical and poetic writers’ respective fields of authority. According to Carol E. Quillen, such a comparison is 1 Petrarch, Invectives, ed. and trans. David Marsh (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 78. 2 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, AIDS and its Metaphors (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 58.

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almost inevitable: ‘Because these men – medical doctors, natural philosophers, theologians – wielded power and commanded respect, even in some sense represented the most innovative members of fourteenth-century academe, Petrarch could not but define his own intellectual priorities and persona explicitly against their standards.’3 And yet, more than just defining his poetic and rhetorical stance in relation to natural scientists’ standards, Petrarch (far more compellingly) judges medical practitioners by what we might term literary standards. His invectives are not just an offensive against one particular medical practitioner, but a pushback against the broader culture of medicalization. We have seen that the language of love-imprint persists in Petrarch’s vernacular lyric; in his Latin prose, however, eyesight is often portrayed as a key player in the generation of knowledge and authority rather than simply of love. Petrarch’s Invective contra medicum, in particular, link eyesight with (rhetorical) authority, and ignorance and envy with blindness. Petrarch’s invectives and letters constitute a venomous attack on the medical profession: not content to differentiate medical and poetic authority, Petrarch debases medicine and its practitioners in order to strip them of all authority. In these texts, notably in the invectives, Petrarch ties the doctors’ lack of authority to the problem of vision, positing blindness both as an insult and as a handicap to be overcome through rhetoric: a remedy that the poet, but not the physician, can provide. He thus illuminates the theoretical and practical grounds on which poets may attempt the rhetorical remedies we shall discuss in our remaining chapters.

Antimedical discourse in the late Middle Ages Petrarch’s attacks on the medical profession often hinge on his characterization of physicians as blind. A similar comparison appears in the pseudoHippocratic astrological corpus, and thence in the Amphorismes Ypocras of Martin de Saint-Gilles (1362–5): Et en quoy plusieurs medecins sont deceuz qui ne scevent ne veullent savoir la racine et le fondement de trouver iceulx jours, pourquoy ilz jugent d’icelles maladies comme un adveugle des couleurs et comme un sourt fait des oyans. And so many doctors who neither know nor want to know how to figure out these days [i.e., key dates in the development of certain diseases] end up judging these maladies like a blind man judges colors, or like a deaf man judges sounds.4 3 Carol E. Quillen, ‘A Tradition Invented: Petrarch, Augustine and the Language of Humanism’, Journal of the History of Ideas 53:2 (1992), 180. 4 Cited in Danielle Jacquart, La médecine médiévale dans le cadre parisien (Paris:

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A physician who deprives himself of an important diagnostic tool, in this instance, is likened to a blind man. In Petrarch’s writings, however, the same comparison is reserved for physicians who seek to add to their therapeutic arsenal with overreaching attempts to co-opt rhetorical tools. Petrarch’s effective disabling of medical practitioners is thus a deformation of a notunheard-of critique – a deformation that becomes crucial, as we will see, to the elaboration and justification of rhetorical therapeutic strategies. Before proceeding to a more detailed analysis of Petrarch’s invectives it is essential to situate them within a broader antimedical context. For even if Petrarch’s particular usage of the metaphor of blindness is somewhat unconventional, his attempt at a literary attack on the medical profession is hardly without recent precedent. It is difficult to know to what extent Petrarch’s writings are representative of contemporary attitudes, much less of the author’s own point of view: as Guillaume Mollat points out in reference to the poet’s harsh criticisms of the papal court, ‘we have no means of checking the point at which straightforward description ends and satire begins’,5 and Petrarch himself admits in the first of the Invective contra medicum that he has made it his vocation to despise everything (‘universa contemnere’).6 However, his letters and invectives are certainly not the only texts in the period to question physicians’ skills, methods, and motives. The invectives’ popularity may be seen as part of a broader trend of antimedical discourse, or, as Andrea Carlino has stated, as ‘a particularly flamboyant fraction of a much longer history of uncertainty, incredulity, and contempt that has often characterized attitudes toward medicine in Western culture’.7 This antimedical trend flourished in the fourteenth century, both in the aftermath of the first outbreak of the Black Death and again at the century’s close.8 Though the popularity of antimedical writings might seem at odds with literary and cultural trends of medicalization, in fact the mockery of medicine often appears in tandem with the appropriation of medical procedures and Fayard, 1998), 271. See also Martin de Saint-Gilles, Les Amphorismes Ypocras, ed. G. Lafeuille (Geneva: Droz, 1954). 5 Guillaume Mollat, The Popes at Avignon, trans. Janet Love (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 315. 6 Invectives, 6. Nancy Struever, as well, casts doubt on the logical merits of Petrarch’s attacks on doctors, asserting that both the invectives and the letters dealing with medicine in the Seniles are at least in part ‘motivated simply by a steady ill-temper’. ‘Petrarch’s Invective contra medicum: An Early Confrontation of Rhetoric and Medicine’, MLN 108 (1993), 661. 7 Andrea Carlino, ‘Petrarch and the Early Modern Critics of Medicine’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35:3 (Fall 2005), 560. 8 Giuseppe Dell’Anna describes a post-Black Death wave of antimedical sentiment, characterizing it as ‘un disprezzo per le scienze che accompagnerà lo sviluppo della società occidentale fino alla prima metà del XVI secolo’. ‘Il Petrarca e la medicina’, in Petrarca e la cultura europea, ed. Luisa Rotondi Secchi Tarugi (Milan: Nuovi Orizzonti, 1997), 217.

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terminology. Indeed, medicalization seems to contribute to the prevalence of antimedical satire, for practitioners may find themselves unable to satisfy a medicalized or medicalizing society’s escalating expectations of them. As Stephanie Cain Van D’Elden remarks in reference to the greatest European medical faculty of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, ‘On the one hand, the mere name Salerno evokes a certain deference; on the other hand, accounts of treatments given to specific patients often contain deprecatory components. So great was the fame of Salerno and its doctors that it was tempting to parody, to satirize, even to malign them.’ She calls this phenomenon ‘the “Salerno Effect,” where this fount of contemporary medical knowledge does not live up to its reputation’.9 As the public places greater confidence in the abilities of its physicians, medical failures become more noteworthy, and, I venture to add, poets’ experiments in healing take on a greater sense of urgency. Criticism of the medical profession and its practitioners, especially those deemed charlatans, was commonplace at all levels of society.10 Scepticism of medical treatments’ efficacy was often based on personal or collective experience, as evidenced in, respectively, the writings of Henri d’Andeli and of Honorat Bovet. The former, a Rouennais cleric active in the mid-thirteenth century, suggests in two of his ‘battle’ poems that he may have been at least partially blind, and that medical and surgical practitioners were unable to help. The authorial persona refers to his blindness in the Bataille des Vins: ‘Li vins S. Jehan d’Angeli / Si dist a Henri d’Andeli / Qu’il li avoit crevé les ex / Par sa force, tant estoit prex’ (The wine of St Jean d’Angeli told Henri d’Andeli that he was so strong he had gouged out his eyes by force: vv. 123–6).11 Henri accompanies a similar allusion to his visual impairment with harsh words for surgeons in his Bataille des VII Ars (after 1236), a verse dramatization of the philosophical conflict between the grammar-orientated school of Orléans and the dialectical methods of Paris.12 Having associated physicians with Glatini, a Parisian quarter known for its prostitution (v. 102), Henri deplores the greed and incompetence of surgeons. Conflating the field of surgery with its practitioners, he reproaches their inability to cure his eyes:

9 Stephanie Cain Van D’Elden, ‘The Salerno Effect: The Image of Salerno in Courtly Literature’, in L’imaginaire courtois et son double, ed. Giovanna Angeli and Luciano Formisano (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1992), 503. On the prestige of Salerno, see Monica Green’s introduction to The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 3–14. 10 Jacquart, La médecine médiévale, 309. 11 Henri d’Andeli, Œuvres, ed. A. Heron (1881; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1974). 12 See Brigitte Stark, ‘Henri d’Andeli, La Bataille des VII Arts – ein Streit um den Niedergang des Studiums der Grammatik und Rhetorik an der Pariser Universität’, in (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1994), 900–917.

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Cirurgie, la vilenastre, Se seoit lez .i. sanglant astre, Qui moult amoit miex les descordes Qu’el ne fist les gentiz concordes … S’est cele science del mains; Mès ele a si hardies mains Qu’ele n’espargne nule gent Dont ele puist avoir argent. Je les tenisse por molt preus S’il m’eüssent gari des iex; Mès il cunchient mainte gent, Que des deniers & de l’argent Qu’il reçoivent de lor poisons Font il a Paris granz mesons. (vv. 111–29) Nasty Surgery, who loved discord much more than peaceful accord, sat by a bloody planet … Hers is a manual occupation, but she has such bold hands that she spares no one from whom she might profit. I would have thought them very skilled if they had been able to cure my eyes. But they shit all over people, and build grand houses in Paris with the money they gain from their poisonous acts.

Complaints of surgeons’ incompetence and greed, though increasingly commonplace in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, are presented in this instance as being prompted by the poet’s unsatisfactory personal experience. Like many of the authors illustrating Van D’Elden’s ‘Salerno Effect’, Henri d’Andeli highlights a gap between professional ideals and practical efficacy, exploiting the discrepancy to comic effect.13 Such accusations of venality remain commonplace through the end of the Middle Ages – appearing, for instance, in Eustache Deschamps’s ballade MCCCXCII. D’avocas, de phisiciens, De ciurgiens, de mareschaulx Gardez vos corps, gardez vos biens Car ilz tuent gens et chevaulx; D’un petit mal font pluseurs maulx, De .IIII. mos grant escripture, Et s’il leur vient riche homme en cure, Tousjours veulent nouvel argent:

13 On these poems, see Alain Corbellari, ‘Il n’est pour voir que l’œil du clerc: unité et richesse de l’œuvre d’Henri d’Andeli’, in Buschinger (Amiens: Centre d’Etudes Médiévales, 2003), 24–31; Alain Corbellari, La voix des clercs. Littérature et savoir universitaire autours des dits du XIIIe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 2005); Gerald Herman, ‘Henri d’Andeli’s epic parody: La bataille des sept arts’, Annuale medioevale 18 (1977), 54–64.

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C’est toute couvoitise pure; Pour Dieu, gardez vous de tel gent. (vv. 1–10)14 Protect your bodies and your wealth from lawyers, physicians, surgeons, and marshals, for they kill man and beast. They turn one ill into many, and turn four words into a long text. If a rich man comes to them for help they always want more money, motivated by pure greed. By God, protect yourself from such people.

Though these opening lines target lawyers and military commanders as well as medical professionals, the remainder of the poem, with its references to uroscopy (v. 14), excrement (v. 26), and unhelpful but near-fatal treatments (vv. 32–5), clearly singles out the physicians. When it comes to murderous greed and incompetence medical doctors are in a class of their own. In France, antimedical discourse became even stronger in Eustache Deschamps’s day as private medical disappointments were compounded by physicians’ notable public failures. Following the Black Death the chief among these failures was the madness of Charles VI.15 Stigmatized by their inability to cure the king’s mental illness, and condemned to guilt by association thanks to the two Augustinian charlatans who accused the duke and duchess of Orléans of treasonous sorcery,16 during the final years of the fourteenth century doctors, especially in Paris, were very poorly regarded by satirical writers and the public alike.17 This antimedical attitude is portrayed by Honorat Bovet, a Provençal prior, diplomat, and supporter of Charles VI. 14 Eustache Deschamps, Œuvres complètes de Eustache Deschamps, ed. Queux de Saint-Hilaire, 11 vols (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1878–1903), vol. 7, 247–9. 15 On the madness of Charles VI, see Françoise Autrand, Charles VI: la folie du roi (Paris: Fayard, 1986); Richard Famiglietti, Royal Intrigue: Crisis at the Court of Charles VI, 1392–1420 (New York: AMS Press, 1986); Anne D. Hedeman, Of Counselors and Kings: The Three Versions of Pierre Salmon’s Dialogues (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001). For a social history of mental illness in fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury France, see Aleksandra Pfau, ‘Madness in the Realm: Narratives of Mental Illness in Late Medieval France’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Michigan, 2008). On popular attitudes toward mental illness in late medieval France, see Marie-Luce Launay, ‘Les miettes du sens: la folie dans les proverbes français antérieurs au XVIIe siècle’, in La folie et le corps, ed. Jean Céard (Paris: presses de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure, 1985), 31–48. 16 For more on this controversy, see Ivor Arnold’s introduction to his edition: Honoré Bovet, L’Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun, ed. Ivor Arnold (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1926). See also the more recent edition and English translation: Medieval Muslims, Christians, and Jews in dialogue: the Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun of Honorat Bovet, ed. Michael Hanly (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), 191–2, n. 48. All citations from the Apparicion refer to Hanly’s edition. 17 Nicole Chareyron notes that surgeons were often regarded with equal contempt in the period, stating that ‘le nombre élevé de faux savants sorciers et rebouteux crée la confusion et explique le discrédit global qui pèse sur les opérateurs.’ ‘Chirurgien et patient au Moyen Âge: l’opération de la cataracte de Gilles le Muisit en 1352’, Revue Belge de Philologie 74:2 (1996), 303.

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Though clearly sympathetic to the medical profession, Bovet includes a physician among his four ‘outsider’ characters in the Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun (1398). The narrator dreams that he and the spectre of Jean de Meun, in whose house Bovet lived while in Paris in the 1390s, see and speak with ‘un phisicien accompaignié d’un faulx Juifz et d’un Sarrazin aussy noir comme charbon, et par derrierez venoit un Jacobin qui par semblant menoit grant dueil’ (a physician accompanied by a false Jew and a Saracen as black as coal, and behind them came a Dominican who seemed to be in great mourning: 68, par. 115). Bovet’s characters are by and large sympathetic figures who speak with intelligence and grace: the mere inclusion of a doctor in a group that also includes a Saracen and a Jew, though, attests to the low esteem in which physicians were held. Bovet’s ‘phisicien’ complains of the unjustified abuse to which he is subjected, calling the people’s prejudice against his profession ‘fole oppinion, / Simple ymaginacion’ (foolish opinion, simple fantasy: 70, vv. 107–8), and later, a ‘puante mensonge’ (stinking lie: 76, v. 203). This prevailing antimedical sentiment is ungrounded in reality – at least, according to Bovet’s physician, who insists on the sanctity of medicine (‘l’art de medecine / Qui sus au ciel prist sa racine’: 72, vv. 127–8). Authority would seem to bolster the character’s position: among Bovet’s extensive marginal glosses, one in BnF ms fr 810 reinforces the physician’s declaration with a paraphrase of Ecclesiasticus 38:4.18 Referring to his colleagues as wise, learned, and loyal (‘sages clers et leaulx et grans’: 76, v. 196), the doctor blames his profession’s poor reputation on false healers, ‘meschans devins, / Sorceliers, arquimans, coquins’ (malicious diviners, sorcerers, alchemists, good-for nothings: 72, vv. 135–6). Neither the narrator nor the spirit/vision of Jean de Meun contradicts him on this point; indeed, Jean de Meun quite respectfully addresses this interlocutor as ‘dant phisicien’ (sir physician: 70, v. 83), a marked contrast to the venomous manner in which he then speaks to the Jew. The fact that the physician’s remarks remain uncontested by both Jean de Meun and the Apparicion’s narrator lends them a definitive, if not authoritative, air. As his sympathetic audience looks on, the physician bewails popular condemnation of his entire discipline (‘voy ma science confondre’: 70, v. 97). Given the substantial number of fourteenth-century texts mocking doctors, we can presume that this ‘fole oppinion, / Simple ymaginacion’ was rather widespread.19 The description of antimedical attitudes as ‘fole oppinion’ is at 18 19

Honoré Bovet, Medieval Muslims, Christians, and Jews, ed. Hanly, 185–6, n. 38. On fourteenth-century antimedical and antisurgical discourse, see Marie-Christine Pouchelle, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages, trans. Rosemary Morris (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 70–86. In English letters, texts containing antimedical passages include Miroir de l’Onme, Piers Plowman, and the Romaunt de la Rose; the question of whether Chaucer’s Physician is described admiringly

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the very least a pointed irony, given that it was a king’s madness that contributed largely to this popular belief. Likewise, ‘fole oppinion’s’ companion and pendant, ‘simple ymaginacion’, hints at the perceptual challenges that can arise when medicine and rhetoric collide. The word ymaginacion – that is, the creation of images – enjoys in its medieval sense a special relationship with the concept of representation and image formation: visual rendering of concepts or sensory observations, concretization of abstract expectations.20 A simple ymaginacion informed by foolish opinion rather than by firsthand experience, however, counterfeits genuine insight. Honorat Bovet’s linkage of antimedical ignorance and ymagination suggests, much more forcefully than modern understandings of the term ‘imagination’ would indicate, a certain blindness (or, at the very least, a tendency toward visual misperception) on the part of the medical profession’s attackers. But in the same period, and within the context of the same debate, accusations of blindness are much more effectively incorporated into attacks on the medical and surgical professions. For while eyesight constitutes a crucial component of the medieval doctor’s diagnostic tool set, defenders of poetic rhetoric – Petrarch, most notably – argue that medical professionals’ limited vision, namely their inability to see through the poetic veil, renders their rhetorical flourishes both inept and ridiculous. Petrarch’s rhetoric of blindness enacts a process that is, in a certain sense, the inverse of medicalization: medical practitioners who attempt to adopt tools of the rhetorical trade are revealed to lack vision, and therefore end up losing a significant contributor to their own healing powers. Unlike the blindness of a lover/poet (which is, as we shall see in the remaining chapters, surmountable), the blindness of a medical practitioner is a devastating professional impediment. Such asymmetry affords a privileged position to the rhetor: although medical doctors cannot appropriate instruments of rhetoric, Petrarch leaves open the possibility that poets can heal.

or satirically remains open. See Huling E. Ussery, Chaucer’s Physician: Medicine and Literature in Fourteenth-Century England (New Orleans, LA: Tulane Studies in English, 1971); Giuliano Pellegrini, ‘Ancora in margine al “Doctour of Phisik”’, Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate 40 (1987), 301–15. 20 Furthermore, as Lucien Foulet points out in his study of Froissart’s abstract language, ‘c’est bien Froissart qui le premier a cherché à le [ce mot] façonner, à l’assouplir, à en faire un instrument commode au service de la pensée abstraite’ (257). Imaginer, in the Chroniques, is a way of envisaging a potential tactic; of elaborating on a sensory observation or logical process; of interpreting one’s environment; of creating a vivid representation: ‘Études sur le vocabulaire abstrait de Froissart: Imaginer’, Romania 68 (1944–5), 257–72. Foulet argues that Froissart was the ‘first’ to render the word more abstract; Bovet’s use of ymagination, though narrower, is quite similar.

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Petrarch versus the doctors: invectives in and around the curia Though he is one of the tre corone of Italian letters, Petrarch spent a substantial part of his career in Provence – much of it unhappily, if we are to believe the repeated excoriation of ‘l’empia Babilonia’ (wicked Babylon) in the Canzoniere.21 He lived in Avignon and studied law at Montpellier during his youth, and returned to Avignon after continuing his legal studies in Bologna (1320–26). While Petrarch did not study medicine, he was not unfamiliar with its theory or practice.22 His letters describe various illnesses and treatments he underwent, and his library included a medical manuscript containing several writings of Arnald of Villanova.23 Petrarch’s years in Montpellier coincided roughly with the apogee of that medical faculty’s influence in the decades immediately preceding the end of the Avignon papacy.24 In the middle of the fourteenth century Montpellier, with its renowned medical school boasting a geographically diverse professorate and student body, and Avignon, as the centre of Catholic religious administration from 1305 to 1378, were cosmopolitan centres; the proximal placement of these two institutions, at a distance of approximately 80km, drew numerous students, jurists, writers, artists, diplomats, and church leaders to the area that is now southern France.25 More specifically, Avignon (and especially the curia) was a site of Franco-Italian cultural and political contact. Artists attracted to the papal court, such as Petrarch and Simone Martini, brought with them Italian theories, techniques, and texts; the encounters between different disciplines and national traditions could be both productive and 21 He does so, for instance, in poems 114, 136, 137, and 138. See Alexander Lee, ‘Sin City? The Image of Babylon in Petrarch’s Canzoniere’, in The Idea of the City: Early Modern, Modern and Post-Modern Locations and Communities, ed. Joan Fitzpatrick (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), 39–51. 22 For an overview of Petrarch’s relationship with the medical profession, see the papers collected by Monica Berté, Vincenzo Fera, and Tiziana Pesenti in Petrarca e la medicina. Atti del Convegno di Capo d’Orlando 27–28 giugno 2003 (Messina: Centro interdipartimentale di studi umanistici, 2006). 23 The contents of this manuscript, Biblioteca di San Marco ms 538, are described in Dell’Anna, ‘Il Petrarca e la medicina’, 211–13. 24 On Petrarch’s sojourn in Provence see Ernest H. Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1961). 25 During the period in question, the political status of the Avignon–Montpellier corridor was somewhat unstable. Montpellier became part of France in May 1349; the kings of France had been staking their claim to Montpellier since the second half of the thirteenth century. While Avignon was not formally annexed to France until 1791, it had periodically been occupied by the French monarchy (as it was after Louis VIII’s 1226 siege, for instance) and Avignon’s French pontiffs exercised a decidedly gallicizing influence on the city and on the papacy. Guy Romestan, ‘Sous les rois d’Aragon et de Majorque (1204–1349)’, in Histoire de Montpellier, ed. Gérard Cholvy (Toulouse: Privat, 2001), 39–69.

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contentious, as is demonstrated by Petrarch’s dispute with the papal physicians. After Salerno, the medical school at Montpellier became one of the premier institutions of its kind in medieval Europe. The first statutes organizing medical teaching at Montpellier date to 1220; by the early fourteenth century Montpellier had reached its apogee.26 The fourteenth century saw a heightened demand for trained physicians as universities multiplied and expanded and as waves of disease swept across Western Europe. Montpellier boasted an international body of both students and masters.27 The University of Montpellier was not just an institution serving locals, but a forum in which students from much of Western Europe were trained; the use of Arabic texts added to the air of intercultural exchange, establishing Montpellier’s medical faculty as an intellectual melting pot. Strong connections existed between the Avignon papacy and the medical faculty at Montpellier. Avignon popes protected the University of Montpellier from the time when Clement V, the first of the Avignon popes, codified the statutes of the Faculty of Medicine, and drew a great number of their personal physicians from Montpellier: Clement V consulted the celebrated Arnald of Villanova, among others.28 Likewise, a half-century later, Urban V supported the university by founding the College of St Benedict and the College of the Twelve Doctors.29 For much of the fourteenth century the university’s fortunes were linked to direct papal support; Danielle Jacquart has suggested that the popes’ departure in 1378 seems to have contributed to Montpellier’s decline.30 In any case, by the late fourteenth century, after the departure of the popes, the intellectual centre of gravity was shifting northward, away from Montpellier; only in the sixteenth century did the Montpellier medical faculty begin to regain some of its lost prestige.31 The Avignon popes’ association with physicians trained in Montpellier, 26 Danielle Jacquart, Le Milieu médical en France du XIIe au XVe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 1981), 65–6. 27 Fourteenth-century rosters indicate that the largest numbers of students came, in order of predominance, from northern France, Iberia, the low countries, and German-speaking areas, whereas Languedociens made up a much smaller proportion; in the 1379 rotulus, for example, the latter comprise only 10 per cent of the population. André Gouron, ‘Deux universités pour une ville’, in Histoire de Montpellier, ed. Gérard Cholvy (Toulouse: Privat, 2001), 118. 28 Mollat, The Popes at Avignon, 7. 29 Ibid., 54. 30 Jacquart, Milieu médical, 67–8. Indeed, the beginning of Montpellier’s loss of prestige is typically fixed at this moment: ‘à une phase de prospérité, très nette dès les environs de 1290, fait contraste un déclin sensible après 1380 et tout au long du 15e siècle’ (a clear-cut phase of prosperity beginning around 1290 stands in contrast to a noticeable decline after 1380 that continued throughout the fifteenth century). Gouron, ‘Deux universités’, 117. 31 Gouron, ‘Deux universités’, 124.

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coupled with the curia’s literary and artistic patronage, produced an atmosphere of intercultural and interdisciplinary contact that was, in at least a superficial sense, analogous to that seen at the court of Frederick II in the previous century. The papal library, for instance, provided scholars affiliated with the curia access to a vast array of texts, including many previously unknown in Southern France. Practitioners such as Guy de Chauliac were thus able to consult medical treatises which they would not otherwise have encountered, such as Niccolò da Reggio’s direct translations of Galen from the Greek.32 However, it would be an overstatement to characterize this intellectual contact as a particularly productive exchange. While the papacy supported the University of Montpellier, the curia was a relatively closed entity and true intellectual exchange – like access to the papal library – was restricted to the initiated. The ranks of this ‘inner circle’ included scholars whose interactions were motivated as much by curial politics as by intellectual drive. Such closeness inevitably brought about conflict between political factions, between French and Italians, between representatives of different disciplines. This acrimony is most notably represented by the bitter debate arising from Petrarch’s letters to Clement VI of February 1352 (described in Seniles XVI.333) and 13 March 1352 (Familiares V.19), in which he advises the ailing pontiff not to heed the advice of his physicians. Petrarch’s clarification and expansion of his first message to Clement on the subject of his doctors, disseminated in the Familiares (V.19), bears the heading ‘Ad Clementam sextum Romanum Pontificem, fugiendam medicorum turbam’ (To Clement VI, Roman pope, that he should flee the crowd of physicians). The letter elaborates the criticisms alluded to in Seniles XVI.3, criticisms that will find an echo in the Invective contra medicum. According to Petrarch, contemporary doctors devote too much energy to rhetoric and not enough to their art. Doctors kill with impunity and a patient is therefore better off on his own. Petrarch includes a number of stinging barbs complaining of the lethality of contemporary medical practice, even composing a mock epitaph, ‘Turba medicorum perii’ (I died because of a mob of doctors: 217).34 But he reserves his greatest scorn for what he deems doctors’ excessive attention to eloquence, a preoccupation that masks their incompetence and detracts from their true purpose. Doctors, according to 32 Guy de Chauliac, Inventarium sive chirurgia magna, ed. Michael McVaugh. (Leiden: Brill, 1997), xiii. 33 The Seniles are identified by the numbers assigned in their English translation: Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta A. Bernardo, 3 vols (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). Divergences between this numbering and that of the 1581 Opera quae extant omnia, from which my citations from Petrarch’s Latin works are drawn (except the Invective and the Familiares), will be noted. 34 I cite from Ugo Dotti’s edition of the Familiares because V.19 is not included in the 1581 Opera omnia. Petrarch, Lettres familières, ed. Ugo Dotti, trans. André Longpré (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2002).

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Petrarch, are more concerned with persuasion and disputation than with healing. As he will claim in the Invective contra medicum, the physician’s ridiculous syllogisms are just as lethal as his toxic medicaments (‘confice ridiculum sillogismum, qui sepe mortiferum poculum confecisti’: IV, 167).35 Petrarch therefore advises the pontiff against heeding the advice of his throng of physicians, warning him to avoid any poisonous doctor known for his eloquence rather than for the effectiveness of his medical counsel (‘ut vero iam desinam, medicum non consilio sed eloquio pollentem velut insidiatorem vite, sicarium aut veneficum vitare debes’: 219). In Petrarch’s estimation, dialectical, often syllogistic medical disputation is a distraction from the physician’s true profession, which should be to heal. ‘Iam enim professionis sue immemores et dumetis propriis exire ausi, poetarum nemus et rethorum campum petunt, et quasi non curaturi sed persuasuri, circa miserorum gratabulos magno boatu disputant’ (now truly forgetful of their profession and boldly daring to leave their own thicket, they make for the poets’ forest and the rhetoricians’ field, and they debate about the miserable with great shouting, not healing but persuading: 217). Petrarch’s evocation of the confined domain of the doctor (the dumetis or thicket) and the wide-open spaces accorded the poets and rhetoricians makes it clear that he is, quite explicitly, engaging in a ‘turf war’ with the physicians, as the boundaries between their respective intellectual spheres take on a physical and geographical dimension.36 Such language will continue in the Invective, especially in Book IV, when Petrarch contrasts his bucolic solitude with the physician’s residence in the filthy and iniquitous city: ‘locum tibi aptissimum delegisti’ (you have chosen a place wonderfully suited to you: IV, 179). Offended by Petrarch’s rhetorical assault in Familiares V.19, an anonymous physician responded with a now-lost polemical letter that not only responded to the poet’s accusations but attacked poets and poetry.37 Petrarch’s quarrel had escalated into a war over cultural authority as not only individual practitioners but the very disciplines of medicine and poetry were pitted against one another. The poet, in turn, responded with the first of his four Invective contra medicum and then, after another lost epistolary counterattack, with the remaining three invectives; these four invectives, first written in 1352 and 1353, were later reworked to form a cohesive whole.38 Like 35 The text and translation are cited from Petrarch, Invectives. Parenthetical references provide the invective in roman numeral followed by the paragraph in arabic numeral. 36 Carol E. Quillen identifies this question of ‘territory’, in its figurative sense, as the starting point of the debate. ‘A Tradition Invented’, 190. 37 Neither the author’s identity nor his text has survived to the present day. Thus, as Andrea Carlino remarks, ‘Petrarch’s strategy of damnatio memoriae has clearly worked well.’ ‘Petrarch and the Early Modern Critics of Medicine’, 563. 38 David Marsh outlines the development of the Invective in the introduction to his edition. ‘This more elaborate epistle [Familiares V.19] provoked an angry response from one of the papal physicians, to whom Petrarca replied in a quickly drafted composition,

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Petrarch’s other invectives (Contra quendam magni status, De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia, and Contra eum qui maledixit Italie), they mark a departure from the classical model of the invective as they reject traditional lines of rhetorical attack, relying instead on abusive epithets and stark contrasts between the writer and the object of his disdain.39 Still, the violent personal attacks are tempered by loftier discussions of the relative social and intellectual statures of the arts and sciences.40 The Invective contra medicum survive in numerous fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts as well as in six fifteenth- and sixteenth-century printed editions, suggesting that they enjoyed considerable success. They were also translated into Italian by the Florentine Ser Domenico Silvestri during the fifteenth century, a translation that survives in three late-fifteenth-century manuscripts. It is telling that the vulgarized text bears the title Invettiva contro agli ignoranti medici (Invective against ignorant doctors): although Petrarch repeatedly insists that his attack is levelled at one practitioner rather than at the medical profession as a whole, the title given to the fifteenth-century translation indicates that the text was regarded (by at least one late medieval reader) not merely as a response to one medicum but as an assault on many physicians, or even on the medici as a professional body.41 In the Invective contra medicum Petrarch mounts a refutation of his opponent’s attacks by distinguishing as sharply as possible the literary and medical professions.42 In so doing he advances the invectives’ larger project, what which later became his first invective. The angered physician wrote a second attack, to which Petrarca again responded between January and May of 1353, before he left Vaucluse for Milan. Later, during his Milanese residence, he revised his two responses and published them as the four Invectives against a physician of 1355.’ Invectives, viii. Marsh’s account summarizes the findings of Umberto Bosco: ‘Datazione delle Invective contra medicum’, in Saggi sul Rinascimento italiano (Florence: Le Monnier, 1970), 216–27. See also Francesco Bausi, ‘La sconosciuta redazione originaria delle Invective contra medicum di Francesco Petrarca (Libro I) in un codice di Danzica’, Rinascimento ser. 2, 45 (2005), 91–115. 39 An overview of Petrarch’s rhetorical strategies can be found in Marsh’s introduction, especially pages 11–16. For a more in-depth rhetorical analysis, see Conrad Rawski, ‘Notes on the Rhetoric in Petrarch’s Invective contra medicum’, in Francis Petrarch, Six Centuries Later: A Symposium, ed. Aldo Scaglione (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 249–77. 40 See Pier Giorgio Ricci, ‘La tradizione dell’invettiva tra il Medioevo e l’Umanesimo’, Lettere italiane 26:4 (1974), 405–14. 41 Andrea Carlino points out a similar ambiguity within the Invective themselves, in many passages of which Petrarch slips from the singular form of address, tu, to the plural vos. ‘Petrarch and the Early Modern Critics of Medicine’, 564. 42 Petrarch’s position on this matter contrasts with that of Pietro d’Abano (d. 1315), whose Conciliator differentiarum quae inter philosophos et medicos versantur seeks through reconciliation of the Aristotelian and Galenic traditions to bridge the gap between rhetoric and natural philosophy with medicine. Like Petrarch, Pietro d’Abano’s intellectual itinerary took him across Europe – from Padua to Paris to Constantinople – but, unlike

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Giuseppe Mazzotta has characterized as a ‘full-fledged defense of the primacy of rhetoric’, as he decries the intermingling of medicine and rhetoric and accuses physicians not just of duplicity but of incompetence and blindness.43 Apparently wounded by the unnamed doctor’s attack on poetry, Petrarch seeks to differentiate the medical enterprise from his own intellectual projects – this despite Petrarch’s earlier construction of himself, in the Secretum, as a sort of spiritual physician, and despite his later dispensing of ‘remedies’ in De remediis utriusque fortunae.44 He seeks to differentiate the liberal and mechanical arts (as in III, 110), depriving the medical practitioner and his writings of any rhetorical force.45 The poet expresses anxiety over the overlap of rhetoric and medicine, citing Familiares V.19 as he proclaims the ideal doctor one who is ‘non eloquentia, sed scientia et fide conspicuum’ (notable not for his eloquence, but for his learning and faith: I, 4). Indeed, it is a violation of the natural order for a ‘mercennarius et infamis artifex’ (mercenary and ill-famed mechanic: I, 1), as he calls his adversary at the opening of the first invective, to master the noble art of rhetoric: such presumption is a sacrilege akin to a mistress being subjugated by her maid (I, 14). Petrarch mocks the physician’s attempts at eloquence (which he characterizes as ‘tue ridiculose eloquentie’: I, 41), lambasting the duplicity of medical jargon and its tendency to impose foreign words and graft foreign word parts onto the language (‘radicibus nostri orbis imponere peregrina vocabula’: II, 44). In the third invective the poet ultimately attempts to silence the physician altogether: ‘on the strength of Vergil’s comment in the Aeneid (12.397), he consigns medicine to the region of silence. Petrarch’s point is clear’, Mazzotta explains: ‘the realm of discourse belongs to the rhetorician and poet’.46 In order to further differentiate the relative worth and reliability of the poet and of the physician, Petrarch raises the issue of truthfulness. He notes that his unnamed correspondent has described the aim of poetry as ‘mulcendo fallere’ (to deceive soothingly: III, 105), but notes that salves and deception are his opponent’s speciality, not his own. In a defence of poetry addressed to the general reader, not to the physician with whom he was ostensibly corre-

Petrarch, Pietro responded by seeking to break down, rather than to establish or reinforce, boundaries between different disciplines and traditions. Pietro maintains that all seven of the liberal arts, particularly logic, are important for medicine. See Nancy Siraisi’s discussion of Pietro d’Abano in Arts and Sciences at Padua: The Studium of Padua Before 1350 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1973). 43 Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 41. 44 See Charles Trinkaus, The Poet as Philosopher: Petrarch and the Formation of Renaissance Consciousness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 94. 45 Carol E. Quillen notes that Petrarch collapses the distinctions of rank among medical practitioners in order to characterize medicine as a mechanical craft. ‘A Tradition Invented’, 189. 46 Mazzotta, Worlds of Petrarch, 41.

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sponding, Petrarch distinguishes between the sorts of obscurity or disguise necessary to poetic language and the fundamental deceit of medical eloquence. If poets use deliberately obscure language, as Petrarch’s opponent has charged, it is because difficult language serves as a stimulus to greater reflection (‘intentioris animi stimulus, et exercitii nobilioris occasio’: III, 132); what the physician has mistaken for deception is actually polysemy (III, 133). Therefore the poets deceive no one. Any dissimulation inherent in poetry exists as a marker of subtlety (‘efficacior est autem dissimulata callide, quam inaniter ostentata subtilitas’: III, 147), not as a means of dodging blame, as with a physician who has killed a patient (III, 156). Therefore, according to Petrarch, it is medical language, not poetry, that distorts the truth. He ranks doctors among ‘illos qui mendacio vivunt’ (those who live by lying: I, 11) and cites the popular proverb ‘Mentiris ut medicus’ (You lie like a doctor: I, 37).47 Poetic language, on the other hand, merely adorns the truth rather than manipulating and deforming it. The poet, according to Petrarch, ‘studium est veritatem rerum pulcris velaminibus adornare’ (is devoted to adorning the truth of things with beautiful veils: I, 37). The difference between medical eloquence and poetics, then, becomes a question of fabrication versus embellishment.48 A rhetorician’s integumentum enhances the truth rather than obscuring or distorting it; mishandled by the physician, though, the veil of language can easily become a blindfold. Within his invectives Petrarch rips the rhetorical veil from medical practice to reveal what he sees as the ugly (and pungent) realities of late medieval medicine. He paints the repugnance of the medical profession in the most physical of terms. Doctors come into contact with waste and filth; they are manual laborers and not intellectuals. Petrarch highlights the physical inferiority of the physicians – claiming, for instance, that his opponent has taken on the pale, sickly complexion that he calls ‘colorem medici’ (I, 21) because he wallows in ‘pontificum et pauperum latrinas’ (the latrines of pope and paupers: I, 6). In a similar vein, Petrarch repeatedly calls the doctor a ‘cloaca’ (as in Invective II, 53) and, at the close of the second invective, claims that the waste with which the doctor regularly comes into contact has permeated his very being: ‘inquam stercoribus et colorem et odorem traxeris et saporem’ (I say you have taken on the color and the odor and the taste of shit: II, 100). The healer comes to resemble his insalubrious surroundings and his ailing patients, as his pathologically pale coloring recalls that of the melancholic or lovesick sufferers whom he would purport to treat. But even more than his 47 Elisabeth Schulze-Busacker cites a French analogue, ‘mire sevent molt bien mentir’. Proverbes et expressions proverbiales dans la littérature narrative du Moyen Âge français: Recueil et analyse (Paris: Champion, 1985). 48 On figurative language as a ‘veil’ see Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Seeing Through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), especially 57–8.

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odor or his complexion, it is on the unnamed physician’s intellectual blindness that Petrarch seems to dwell. The physician’s inability not only to speak the truth but even to see the truth is encapsulated in Petrarch’s relentless return to the figure of the doctor’s metaphoric blindness. With his insistence upon the primacy of sight, coupled with continual accusations of blindness, Petrarch challenges his medical adversary and redefines the very nature of authority. As we have already seen, theories of vision permeate the love poetry of the period, including Petrarch’s vernacular verse. In the late thirteenth century the eyes become a battleground, disputed turf claimed by medical theory and poetic convention alike. In Petrarch’s letters and invectives, eyesight – and particularly the dysfunction or total lack thereof – also comes to define the rhetorical boundaries between the poet and the medical practitioner. More than any of the other senses, eyesight is associated with experiential knowledge and general awareness. Blindness may therefore be easily likened to ignorance, or at the very least to a lack of insight. One of Petrarch’s most stinging condemnations of the doctor’s murderous incompetence appears, in tandem with a characterization of the doctor as blind, early in Book I: Sed quid colores ceco, quid surdo sonos ingero? Mechanice res tuas age, oro te; cura, si potes; si minus, interfice; et precium posce, cum occideris. Id nulli imperatori aut regi, sed tibi uni, vite necisque domino, ut iactas, humani generis cecitate permittitur. (I, 13) But why do I thrust colors upon a blind man, or sounds on a deaf one? Laborer, do your work, I pray you; cure if you can; if you’re not quite up to it, kill; and request your pay if you murder. There is no emperor or king who has dominion over life and death but you, as you boast, thanks to the blindness of the human race.

It is not only the blindness of the physician himself, but the blindness of all humankind that allows him to continue his imposture. According to Petrarch his adversary is coarse and his intellect not just unrefined but blind: ‘ruditatem illam tuam et caligantis ingenii cecitatem occultare nullo modo potes’ (in no way can you hide the coarseness and blindness of your foggy intellect: I, 16). Similar attacks recur throughout the four invectives. Accusations of blindness are a threat not just to a doctor’s eloquence but to his livelihood. Eyesight is one of the primary tools of the physician’s trade, as many diagnoses were made based on a visual analysis of urine or other bodily fluids – and Petrarch clearly delights in flinging the uroscope in his adversary’s face, imagining a concert of farts and bedpans (III, 141), dubbing his rival ‘Cloacina’ (IV, 190).49 The capital importance of eyesight in diagnostic 49 See our Introduction, n. 25, for studies of medieval uroscopy. By the later Middle Ages uroscopy had become visual shorthand for medical practice, as is apparent in Peter

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practices is highlighted in numerous late medieval texts, from the two uroscopy poems discussed in our introduction to the well-known marginal illustration of a bespectacled rabbit examining a flask of urine in a midfifteenth-century book of hours illustrated by Barthélemy d’Eyck and Enguerrand Quarton (Pierpont Morgan ms 358, fol. 20v).50 This imagery demonstrates that literal, bodily blindness is just as much of an impediment to medical practice as is metaphoric ‘blindness of intellect’. Petrarch is thus able to conflate literal and metaphoric blindness to great effect, questioning how the physician is able to diagnose patients when he cannot even see the truth of his own situation: ‘Et vis videre quid in imo viscerum ac fibrarum lateat? Quod est ante oculos non vides!’ (and you claim to see that which lies within the viscera and tissues? You can’t even see what’s before your very eyes! II, 98). The doctor’s blindness, more specifically his ‘ingenii cecitate’ (blindness of intellect: II, 77) is construed as the immediate cause of his inability to practise medicine, as well as his confusion between the arts of medicine and rhetoric, not to mention his presumptuous attack on Petrarch.51 For if anything could drive an unknown physician to challenge the immortal writer, it must be invidia (IV, 201–2): the vice arising from sight that Petrarch elsewhere calls ‘nimica di vertute’ (enemy of virtue).52 Indeed, Petrarch’s insistent recourse to (and revelling in) the image of blindness gains much of its force from that condition’s capacity to at once evoke obtuseness and envy. The image of the doctor’s blindness also highlights the poet’s sensory superiority. The environments that Petrarch and his opponent occupy, respectively, offer profoundly different stimuli to their faculties.

Murray Jones, Medieval Medicine in Illuminated Manuscripts (London: British Library, 1998), esp. 43–57. 50 Lillian M. C. Randall catalogues dozens of marginal illustrations of physicians examining urine flasks – be they human, simian, equine, or vulpine. Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966). See also David A. Sprunger, ‘Parodic Animal Physicians from the Margins of Medieval Manuscripts’, in Animals in the Middle Ages, ed. Nona C. Flores (New York: Garland, 1996), 67–81. 51 A similar association of blindness with a lack of reason is expressed in other late medieval texts, notably in Pierre Michault’s Dance aux aveugles (1464), as we will discuss in Chapter 6. On folly and blindness see Barbara Folkart, ‘Structures lexicales et idéologie au XVe siècle: la Dance aux aveugles de Pierre Michault’, Cultura Neolatina 37 (1977), 41–74. 52 RVF 172. The posited relationship between blindness and envy is by no means an innovation on Petrarch’s part. The very etymology of envy/invidia suggests its dependence on sight, and the words obliquus and strabo, both of which may refer to people suffering from afflictions of the eye, are used figuratively in classical Latin to describe envious people. See Matthew Shoaf, ‘The Heart, the Eyes and Medieval Envy’, Micrologus 11 (2003), 213–28. This tradition is reflected in Dante’s Purgatorio XIII, in which the eyes of the envious are sewn shut. Anthony Cassell, ‘The Letters of Envy. Purgatorio XIII–XIV’, Stanford Italian Review 4 (1984), 5–22.

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Dum certe oculos tuos ille mestus atque horrens pelvium ferit aspectus, meos grata serenitas et agrorum ac nemorum letissimus viror lenit; dum auribus tuis irati ventris murmur intonat, meas suavis volucrum cantus et dulcis aque strepitus delectat; dum naribus tuis inclusus aer et aure tristioris flatus ingeritur, meas florum circumfusa diversitas et calcatarum odor mirus herbarum recreat atque permulcet; dum lingua hebes infelixque palatum tuum delibandis atris potionibus inviscantur, michi lingua in aliquo vel honesto colloquio vel salubri soliloquio detinetur; dum manus tua miserorum rimatur atque explicat purgamenta, mea aliquid scribit gratum posteris, ut spero, dum legetur. (IV, 198) While the grim and horrible sight of bedpans surely assaults your eyes, the pleasant serenity of lush fields and forests beguiles mine. While the angry roar of a stomach thunders in your ears, soft bird songs and the sweet sound of water delight mine. While stuffy air and bursts of bad breath are thrust upon your nostrils, diverse flowers all around and the marvelous scent of trampled grass refresh and caress mine. While you dull your tongue and your unhappy palate sampling poisonous potions, mine is occupied either in worthy conversation with others or in salutary soliloquy. While your hand rummages through and explicates the excrement of the wretched, mine is writing something that will be pleasing to posterity, I hope, when read.

Petrarch contrasts his experience to that of his adversary with respect to all five senses; he treats them in descending order, from the noblest (eyesight) to the humblest (touch).53 Yet he also uses this sensory array, once again, to establish as much distance as possible between the medical profession and his own literary endeavors. As we have seen, sight is critical to medieval medical practice. Petrarch associates writing, though, with touch, the sense that is farthest (within the conceptual hierarchy as well as the physiology of the human body) from sight. A blinded doctor is deprived of a primary tool of his trade; a blinded poet, though, still enjoys a variety of sensory stimuli, his ability to compose left intact. By highlighting the stark contrast between the milieus in which poets and physicians operate, Petrarch also inscribes their disciplinary difference within their bodies.

A debate revisited Petrarch displays a continued preoccupation with incompetent physicians in his letters composed after the Invective, particularly in the Seniles. He revisits his earlier critiques of doctors and of the medical profession in missives to 53 For further discussion of the medieval hierarchy of the senses, see Louise Vinge, The Five Senses: Studies in a Literary Tradition (Lund: Gleerup, 1975); C. M. Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 23.

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numerous friends and acquaintances, including Boccaccio in Seniles III.5 (1365) and V.3 (1364–6),54 Giovanni Dondi in XII.1 (1370) and XII.2 (1370), Guglielmo da Ravenna in III.8 (1363),55 and the grammarian Donato Apenninigena in V.4 (1366–7).56 Perhaps surprisingly, a number of the friends to whom Petrarch addresses these complaints, including Giovanni Dondi and Guglielmo da Ravenna, are themselves physicians.57 Petrarch repeats and further develops several of the primary themes of the Invective, namely the doctors’ misguided attempts at eloquence; their blindness and their tendency to do more harm than good; and anti-Arab rhetoric, which formed a subtler undercurrent in the invectives and is foregrounded in these later texts.58 The critique of doctors’ overindulgence in the pursuit of eloquence, so prominent in the invectives, is perhaps most forcefully argued in Seniles III.8 (1363), addressed to the physician Guglielmo da Ravenna. Identified as a ‘Dehortatio a studio eloquentiae’ (dissuasion from the study of eloquence), in this epistle Petrarch harps constantly on the need for physicians to separate their craft from the art of rhetoric, repeating many of the arguments already put forth in the invectives. Petrarch argues that medical practitioners should limit themselves to the activities for which they are engaged, as ‘nemo medicum conducit eloquentiae appertens, sed salutis’ (no one hires a doctor for eloquence, but for health: 778). Eloquence is not only outside the doctors’ realm of expertise, but it can actually harm patients, thousands of whom may already have perished while their physicians were too preoccupied with speech to offer treatment (‘Dici nequeat, quot hominum millia, disputandibus Medicis, aut perorantibus periere’: 779). Petrarch likewise revisits his earlier critiques of the medical profession in Seniles book XII (1370), which comprises a pair of letters addressed to the physician Giovanni Dondi. Again, Petrarch underlines the inappropriateness of medical practitioners’ attempts at rhetorical flourishes: ‘Medicine subiectum credo sit sanitas, non ornatus, et Medici officium, non perorare, ut ego arbitror sed curare’ (I believe that the object of medicine is health, not ornamentation, and the office of doctors is in my judgment not to conclude fancy speeches, but to cure: XII.2, 905). He once again pairs his effort to differentiate medical and rhetorical pursuits with a pathologization of the physician. However, this pathologization takes 54 55 56 57

This letter is numbered V.4 in the 1581 Basel edition. This letter is numbered III.7 in 1581 Basel edition. This letter is numbered V.5 in the 1581 Basel edition. For brief notices on the physicians with whom Petrarch corresponded, see Girolamo Tiraboschi’s still useful eighteenth-century Storia della letteratura italiana (Milan: Bettoni, 1833), vol. 2, 319–36. 58 For a discussion of anti-Arab rhetoric in the Vita solitaria and the letters, see Nancy Bisaha, ‘Petrarch’s Vision of the Muslim and Byzantine East’, Speculum 76 (2001), 284–314. See also Francesco Gabrieli, ‘Petrarca e gli Arabi’, Al-Andalus 42 (1977), 241–8.

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on new dimensions with the introduction of further binary oppositions: between the medical and surgical professions, between Arabic and Latin genealogies of knowledge. For instance, Petrarch contrasts the work of the surgeon, who can see what he is doing, to the ‘blind remedies’ (‘caeca remedia’) of doctors (907).59 And even as he rehearses the same criticisms he had previously levelled at doctors in the Invective, Petrarch replaces the ad hominem attack on his medical adversary with an ad religionem attack on the Muslim world. Petrarch’s anti-Muslim rhetoric is so prevalent in his writings, from vernacular lyric (such as the political canzone ‘O aspettata in Ciel beata e bella’: RVF 28) to Latin treatises and epistles, that Francesco Gabrieli has called the laureate a ‘confirmed arabophobe’.60 Already present in the Invective and in earlier epistles (such as Seniles V.3 to Boccaccio, composed in 1364–6), Petrarch’s anti-Arab rhetoric emerges with particular vehemence in Seniles XII.1–2, the former of which Nancy Bisaha has characterized as ‘the strongest criticism of Muslims, specifically Arabs, found in Petrarch’s letters’.61 Whereas the anti-Arab comments in the Invective, hyperbolic as they may be, are comparatively subtle – Averroës is repeatedly attacked (especially in Invective II, 66–8), and at one point Petrarch’s opponent is even accused of preferring Averroës to Christ (I, 28) – the equation of antimedical and anti-Arab discourse in the Seniles, particularly in XII.2, is unmistakable. In epistle V.3, addressed to Boccaccio, Petrarch complains that too many medical texts are written in Greek, ‘quodque est molestius, Arabice geritur’ (and what is worse, carried out in Arabic: 800). Muslim recommendations against the imbibement of wine are dismissed as a ‘latranum canis perfidi’ (an infidel’s dog-bark: XII.1, 901), and Arabs are quite literally belittled, referred to as ‘Arabiculis’ (XII.2, 913 and XVI.3, 952). In his second letter to Dondi Petrarch lets loose an even more stinging series of insults, dismissing medical doctrine as ‘Arabum mendaciis’ (lies of the Arabs: 905), stating that he cannot be convinced that anything good could come from Arabia (‘vix mihi persuadebitur ab Arabia possid aliquid boni esse’: 913), and even asking his correspondent to refrain from citing Arabic authorities, as he (Petrarch) detests their kind: ‘Unum antequam definam te obsecro, ut ab omni consilio meorum rerum, tui isti Arabes arceantur, atque exulent, odi genus universum’ (One last thing I ask of you, that you exile those Arabs from all advice to me, for I hate the entire race: 913). Petrarch follows with a critique of the ‘soft-

59 This is a reversal of the more usual hierarchical relationship by which physicians were, by virtue of their university training, considered superior to surgeons. See Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), esp. 179–81. 60 Gabrieli, ‘Petrarca e gli Arabi’, 241. 61 Bisaha, ‘Petrarch’s Vision’, 306.

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ness’ of Arabic poetry.62 His binary opposition of eloquence and medical practice thus shifts from a turf war to an all-out culture war, in which the doctors (and bad poets) are represented by the Arabic infidel while the standard of eloquence is borne by the Latin West. Any prestige accorded to the Arab-loving doctors, then, is a blow to Latin culture: ‘doleo Latinorum’ (I weep for the Latins: 913), as Petrarch laments. Thus Petrarch’s identification of modern medicine itself with the geographical and religious alterity of the Arabic authorities furnishes Petrarch with yet another means of erecting intellectual and spatial barriers and of marginalizing his adversary. The blind doctor’s physical and mental weakness is compounded by his spiritual deficiency. When medicine fails to valorize, let alone restore, a Western, Christian order, writers must bear that responsibility. Doctors spread social ills such as the ‘Arabum mendaciis’; poets heal them. Petrarch seems to be splitting hairs when he insists in the Invective and in Seniles XII.1, V.3, and XVI.3 that it is not medicine itself that he is disparaging, but simply its incompetent practitioners (‘non quidem artem ipsam, sed artefices parvipendi’: XII.1, 897) – incompetents evidently comprising the vast majority of physicians, of course. In these later letters Petrarch traces his antimedical feelings back to the dispute that provoked the composition of the Invective contra medicum. In Seniles V.3, for instance, Petrarch refers to his scorn for the ‘innumerabilis turba’ (innumerable horde: 799) of incompetent physicians, recalling his initial tirade against the ‘medicorum turbam’ in Familiares V.19. The laureate refers even more explicitly to the earlier missive when he later argues that, while he does not hate all doctors, it seems that way because of his notorious quarrel against them: ‘Scio ego multis persuasum, imo insitum, Medicorum omnium, me publicum hostem esse, propter vulgatum certamen, quod cum illis mihi in Gallia olim fuit’ (I know that many are persuaded, or have been indoctrinated into thinking, that I am the public enemy of all doctors, because of my well-known quarrel with them in Gaul: 799). Petrarch makes similar claims in his pair of letters to Giovanni Dondi. In the second Petrarch makes passing reference to the quarrel that arose with the pope’s doctors. In the first letter, though, he goes into somewhat greater detail, framing his current discourse in light of the earlier exchange of invectives. All of Petrarch’s later writings on doctors and on the medical profession are necessarily filtered through ‘the fresh memory of an old argument I had had with the Pope’s doctors in Gaul, who had declared 62 Francesco Gabrieli (‘Petrarca e gli Arabi’) is convinced that Petrarch’s critique stems from real contact with some Arabic poetry (however fragmentary the source texts might have been), but does not speculate as to the nature or circumstances of this contact. C. H. L. Bodenham has proposed Averroës’s Poetria aristotelis (translated into Latin by Hermannus Alemannus at Toledo in 1265) as a likely source – though a somewhat remarkable one, given Petrarch’s critique of Averroës as anti-Catholic infidel. ‘Petrarch and the Poetry of the Arabs’, Romanische Forschungen 94 (1982), 167–78.

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war on either my reputation or my life because I had dared write a brief (but if I am not mistaken, truthful) letter to the pontiff’ (‘recenti memoria contentionis antiquae, que mihi cum Papae Medicis fuit in Gallia, qui nescio cur famae me e nescio, an et vitae bellum indixerant, quod epistolam unam brevem, sed ni fallor veram, ausus fueram scripsisse Pontifici’: 900). While it is Seniles XVI.3 (addressed to Francesco da Siena) that contains the most complete summary of the chain of events that gave rise to the composition of the Invective, the same antimedical debate, clearly still unresolved in Petrarch’s mind, repeatedly springs forth in the letters of Petrarch’s old age. Though in his Invective and letters alike Petrarch fails to identify his correspondent, his medical adversary has traditionally been identified as Guy de Chauliac.63 In his appendix to Pier Giorgio Ricci’s edition of the Invective and their fifteenth-century Italian vulgarization, though, Bortolo Martinelli questions this identification, claiming that there are no grounds for believing that Guy could be Petrarch’s correspondent (‘nulla autorizza a vedere nel borioso avversario di Petrarca il famoso Guy de Chauliac’).64 As Martinelli points out, Petrarch states in the first invective, written in Spring 1352, that he does not know his interlocutor, and that he is not well known (‘famam tibi nullus eripiet quam non habes’: I, 8); whereas at that time Guy de Chauliac was already a high-profile figure, having served the pontiff for nearly a decade and having counselled other famous patients, including John the Blind. Although Martinelli’s conclusions may well be correct, his line of reasoning seems a little simplistic. If the rest of the invective is so overthe-top (as it clearly is, and as one would expect an invective to be), then why would Petrarch’s declaration of his adversary’s obscurity not be exaggerated as well? A closer reading suggests that perhaps Petrarch knows his interlocutor after all. Petrarch as much as admits that his ignorance of his adversary is merely a rhetorical posture: ‘tibi nescio cui – imo quidem scio, sed dissimulo – dolorem peperit ac furorem’ (it stirred up pain and furore in you whom I do not know, or rather, whom I pretend not to know: I, 20). Petrarch’s stance is dependent upon the diminishing of his adversary’s standing; the physician’s obscurity may be real, exaggerated or perhaps invented. References to the doctor’s age in the Invective do not strongly support the identification of Petrarch’s adversary with Guy de Chauliac, nor do they allow him to be ruled out as a possible candidate. In the first invective Petrarch claims that the doctor has been boasting of his age and experience but also admits that he does not know his adversary’s age (‘tu qua etate sis non satis scio’: I, 26). By 63 A summary of the arguments for this theory may be found in Pier Giorgio Ricci’s introduction to his edition of the Invective and its fifteenth-century Italian vulgarization. Invective contra medicum, ed. Pier Giorgio Ricci (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1950). 64 Invective contra medicum, ed. Pier Giorgio Ricci, appendix by Bortolo Martinelli (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1978), 211.

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the second invective, though, Petrarch is referring to his interlocutor as a foolish and ignorant old man (‘stulte senex et ignare’: II, 34). Guy de Chauliac’s precise date of birth is unknown, but he is presumed to have been born at the very end of the thirteenth century, a few years before Petrarch.65 In the 1350s, at time of the invectives’ composition, Guy would certainly not have been an elderly man, but he was not, as Martinelli seems to suggest, too young to be a possible interlocutor for Petrarch. Indeed, the few vague details Petrarch provides us about his opponent do not allow us to discount the identification of Guy, or one of his colleagues displaying a similar devotion to Galen, with the ‘insano medico’ (Familiares XV.6) of the Invective. Petrarch makes numerous references to his opponent’s reliance on Galen’s Therapeutica (as in II, 84) in his writings. As we have already noted, new translations of Galen were available at the papal library in Avignon and, perhaps not coincidentally, Guy de Chauliac cites Galen more than any other authority in his landmark medical and surgical treatise the Inventarium sive chirurgia magna (1363).66 If Petrarch’s adversary is not Guy de Chauliac, he is at the very least one of Guy’s colleagues in the ‘turba medicorum’, an avid reader of Galen, a spirited writer confident enough in his own skill and reputation to take on one of the best-known authors and scholars of his day. Petrarch, in turn, apparently regarded his interlocutor as a serious enough adversary to merit four invectives and two decades’ worth of letters rehashing the debate.

Tools of the trade What is at stake in this debate is much more than a struggle for disciplinary supremacy – though the same deep-rooted rivalry between poetry and medicine that lies at the heart of literary medicalization certainly does contribute much ammunition to Petrarch’s rhetorical arsenal. But Petrarch’s antimedical invectives – with their argument for ‘the superiority of the psychotherapy of the liberal arts over the physician’s bodily medicine’67 – also raise a more significant set of problems: which disciplines can, and should, appropriate others’ tools and techniques? How does the misappropriation of discourses lead to intellectual blindness? Which kinds of blindness can be overcome, and how? Petrarch’s antimedical rhetoric suggests a unidirectional model of

65 This commonly given date of 1300 is, in essence, a conjecture based on dates of Guy’s writings and of his death; it is possible, and not altogether implausible, that he was in fact born earlier; in the introduction to his edition of the Inventarium Michael McVaugh states that Guy was born ‘probably in the last years of the thirteenth century.’ Inventarium, ii. 66 McVaugh notes that ‘by the sixteenth-century count, Galen (who wrote no specifically surgical text) is cited most often by Guy, 890 times’. Inventarium, 13. 67 Trinkaus, The Poet as Philosopher, 95.

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interdiscursive borrowing: rhetoricians may borrow the language of medicine, but physicians must never attempt poetic turns of phrase. This double standard ultimately empowers the poet not only to create ornaments of style but to dabble (figuratively, at least) in medical techniques. After all, even as he insists that physicians should refrain from attempts at rhetoric, Petrarch examines their external symptoms and ‘diagnoses’ their blindness. There are no physicians in Petrarch’s lyrics – his unnamed adversary being unworthy of the immortality that such allusions would incur (‘indignus visus es, qui per me posteris notus esses aut locum in meis opusculis invenires’: Invective I, 12) – but this is not to say that the language of healing is absent from the laureate’s vernacular works. After all, we have seen that the medicalized language of love becomes increasingly prevalent in Sicilian and stilnovist verse; and the poetic works of Petrarch represent, both formally and thematically, a summa of the preceding Italian lyric tradition. In the Trionfi and in the Canzoniere (also known as the Rime sparse, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, or RVF) Petrarch, like the stilnovisti, appropriates Sicilian poetic innovations, both formal (the sonnet) and thematic (the love-imprint).68 Petrarchan lyric displays the continued importance of eyesight in the generation of love; after all, it was upon seeing Laura in church on Good Friday that the poet was inspired to compose his vernacular verse. The by-now familiar language of wounded, even blinded, eyes abounds in the Canzoniere. When it comes time to heal those ‘occhi lassi’ (weary eyes: RVF 14, v. 1), the remedies Petrarch sketches stand in stark contrast to the ‘poisons’ of his medical enemy. At times Petrarch suggests that while medicines and herbs are insufficient to heal his love-wound, only the eyes of his beloved can provide relief: ‘I begli occhi ond’ i’ fui percosso in guisa / ch’ e’ medesmi porian saldar la piaga, / et non già vertù d’erbe’ (the beautiful eyes by which I was struck in such a way that only they, not medicinal herbs, could close the wound: RVF 75, vv. 1–3). Later, in sonnet 276, Petrarch suggests that the best way to heal his own blindness is with words. ‘Sconsolato e cieco’ (disconsolate and blind: v. 12) following the death of his beloved – and thus deprived of her healing gaze (‘rimedio’: v. 7) – Petrarch seeks to alleviate his suffering through speech (‘cerco parlando d’allentar mia pena’: v. 4). This strategy is consistent with Petrarch’s broader poetic project, as both the Canzoniere and the Trionfi are verse compilations that invite the reader to interpret them as narratives of overcoming: prevailing over vice, death, love, or youthful foolishness (the ‘primo giovenile errore’ of RVF 1, v. 3).69 Even 68 For discussions of Petrarch’s appropriations of earlier lyric traditions, see Pietro G. Beltrami, ‘Spigolature su Sordello e la poesia italiana del Duecento’, Cultura neolatina 60 (2000), 233–79; Kevin Brownlee, ‘Power Plays: Petrarch’s Genealogical Strategies’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35 (2005), 467–88; Edward L. Boggs, ‘Cino and Petrarch’, MLN 94 (1979), 146–52. 69 Teodolinda Barolini comments on the manner in which narrativity is ‘deliberately

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when words fail to heal, as in the sequence 71–74 of the Canzoniere, the mere fact that Petrarch has attempted such a therapy (and has explicitly identified it as therapeutic, as he does in RVF 276) indicates a mise en oeuvre and a logical extension of Petrarch’s vindication of the superiority of rhetoric to medicine. Petrarch’s simultaneous justification of poetic medicalization and rejection of medical rhetoricization sets the stage for a late medieval poetics of quasi-medical correction wherein certain composers of lyric attempt not just to diagnose but to heal blindness in their writings. In so doing these poets, including Guillaume de Machaut, Pierre Michault, and Charles d’Orléans, transform the medicalized discourse of the love-imprint into a new sort of medicine that surpasses the capabilities of any medical practitioner. Not surprisingly, it is by accessing tools unavailable to the physician – rhetorical figures – that these late medieval poets can seek to circumvent or overcome ‘blind love’ while physicians themselves remain ‘blind’.

injected into the Fragmenta’ in ‘The Self in the Labyrinth of Time (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta)’ in Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 33–62.

3 Irony, or the Therapeutics of Contraries IRONY, OR BLINDNESS THE THERAPEUTICS AND THERAPY OF CONTRARIES

Ainsi va des contraires choses: Les unes sont des autres gloses; Et qui l’une en veult defenir, De l’autre li doit souvenir. So it is with contraries: opposites gloss each other, so that whoever wants to define anything must remember its opposite. Jean de Meun, Roman de la Rose1

Late medieval medical texts bear witness to a coherent and complex construct of the eye and its function, and a well-developed typology of ocular dysfunctions identified with an array of diagnostic tools. Fourteenth-century medical and surgical treatments for visual impairment, on the other hand, remain somewhat limited: with ointments and dietary regimens comprising the bulk of therapeutic options, surgeries and eyeglasses are relegated to a last resort. In other words, while late medieval medical theorists have elaborated a standard physiological model of the eye, medical and surgical practitioners have a relatively narrow range of therapies at their disposal, among which those with the greatest potential for effectiveness – eyeglasses and surgery – remain controversial and, in the latter case, high-risk. In the face of such a gap between theory and practice, between diagnosis and cure, there is ample space for a different sort of remedy altogether, a rhetorically based cure that enables its practitioners to explore the therapeutic potential of high-risk treatments without realizing their potential for bodily damage. These poetic experimentations with remedies for blindness range from verbalized variations on medical treatments to radical departures from contemporary practice. As discussed in the Introduction, medieval medical theory is an elaborate rhetorical construct comprising the verbal representations of a complex of conditions and attributes; medical and surgical practice is devoted to the substitution, enhancement, and balance of these elements. Medical and surgical remedies, like the rhetorical remedies to be outlined in the chapters that follow, restore equilibrium as they counteract, compensate, replace, and 1 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Armand Strubel, vv. 21577–80.

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divert physiological imbalances and deficiencies. Practitioners manipulate physiological attributes, that is, such that they balance one another in ironic (counteraction), metaphoric (compensation), metonymic (substitution), and synecdochic (diversion) fashion. Yet poetic remedies, as we shall see, extend these figures further than medical or surgical treatments can.

The principle of cure by contraria Diseases, according to complexional theory, arise as a result of an excess of one humor or a deficiency of another. The logic underlying most courses of therapy, then, is the restoration of balance through the introduction of qualities opposite to those present in excess, or an augmentation of the deficient qualities: hence Isidore of Seville’s observation that ‘every cure is brought about either by the use of contraries or by the use of similars’ (IV.9.5). The structural symmetry of the humoral construct, consisting of opposing pairs of principles (hot and cold, moist and dry), facilitates the conceptualization of such cures. Indeed, as Mirko D. Grmek notes, ‘the adoption of the quaternary scheme as an explicatory system had a notable advantage, in that it allowed the cross-linking of a double set of opposed principles’.2 Simply put, the Galenic principle of cure by contraries (contraria contrariis curantur or omnis cura per contrarium) is one of the most basic tenets of medieval medical practice.3 The notion of therapy through the introduction of opposing elements is one that lends itself to other rhetorical ends: similar problems of substitution and equivalency are inherent in the replacement of a word, or an idea, with its contrary.4 Such strategies of substitution, of countering an affliction with its contrary, are particularly evident in a specific tradition of remedy texts, nonmedical texts whose titles explicitly identify their content as therapeutic in nature: the pseudo-Senecan De remediis fortuitorum, its fourteenthcentury French translation by Jacques Bauchant, its adaptation and expansion in Petrarch’s massive De remediis utriusque fortunae, and Jean Daudin’s 1378 translation of Petrarch.5 Within these textual ‘remedies’ the therapeutic logic of contraries increasingly gives rise to an ironic turn. 2 3

Mirko D. Grmek, ‘The Concept of Disease’, in Grmek, 249. Noga Arikha, Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours (New York: Harper, 2007), 91; Mary F. Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and its Commentaries (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 103. 4 Indeed, the problem of literary authority in the Middle Ages, according to Michelle Bolduc, is tied to the notion of contraries, or ‘authorship amid contrast.’ The Medieval Poetics of Contraries (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2006), 2. 5 Despite the similarity of its title, Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune (c.1350) inscribes itself much more thoroughly in the Boethian consolatio tradition and will be discussed in Chapter Five. Françoise Ferrand discusses the contrasts between Machaldian and Petrarchan remedies in ‘Le De remediis utriusque fortunae de Pétrarque

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If irony can serve, in these texts, as a remedy for ill Fortune and the ocular damage she can inflict, it is because irony has embodied, at least since Cicero and Quintilian, the rhetorical notion of contraria. Don A. Monson asserts, in specific reference to Andreas Capellanus’s De amore, that medieval ‘irony has at its very foundation a dialectical impulse growing out of a confrontation of opposites’.6 Such use of contraries has as much healing potential as does its medical counterpart: as Norman D. Knox notes, ‘Some theorists assert that by encompassing this conflict [between appearance and reality] in a single structure, irony resolves it into harmony or unity.’7 Yet, as numerous critics have pointed out, our contemporary range of meanings assigned to the term ‘irony’ is far broader than that which medieval rhetoricians understood as ironic.8 Furthermore, for the twenty-first-century reader to identify written irony in a medieval text, in the absence of nontextual cues, is a daunting task to say the least. The comprehension of such irony often hinges on its delivery, as the interpretation of the words themselves is, by definition, ambiguous; intonation and gestures typically serve as the primary indicator of the presence of irony.9 Written irony therefore presupposes an ability, at least among some readers, to discern authorial intent. As Simon Gaunt points out in the first chapter of Troubadours and Irony, irony’s language of opposites constructs a dual audience, one composed of those who take the author’s words at face value and the other consisting of the ‘initiated’ readers who recognize the author’s true intention. As we attempt to initiate ourselves into the medieval author’s circle of readers, we must be wary of the pitfalls of 550-year-old irony, neither reflexively privileging literal readings nor seeking irony where there is none. Irony is not omnipresent in late medieval literature, nor is it a rarity. Many medieval definitions of irony correspond to a modern understanding et le Remède de Fortune de Machaut: Le passé des lettres et le présent de Dieu’, in Contez me tout: Mélanges de langue et de littérature médiévales offerts à Herman Braet, ed. Catherine Bel, Pascale Dumont, and Franck Willaert (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), 465–87. 6 Don A. Monson, ‘Capellanus and the Problem of Irony’, Speculum 63 (1988), 541. 7 Norman D. Knox, ‘Irony’, in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Scribner, 1973–4), vol. 2, 627. 8 Medieval definitions of irony have been well treated in other studies and I will not repeat their findings here. See Vladimir R. Rossman, Perspectives of Irony in Medieval French Literature (The Hague: Mouton, 1965); D. H. Green, Irony in the Medieval Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Simon Gaunt, Troubadours and Irony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and especially Dilwyn Knox, Ironia: Medieval and Renaissance Ideas on Irony (Leiden: Brill, 1989). 9 On the importance of delivery to the indication of irony, see Knox, Ironia, Chapter IV. This emphasis on orality is somewhat at odds with Green’s notion of ‘the greater range of ironic possibilities opened up by the transition from oral to written composition’ (Irony in the Medieval Romance, 371), for while written texts may constitute a new forum in which to convey ironic language, they provide fewer clues to the identification and comprehension of irony.

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of that figure as a contrast between what is said and what is meant, or as a gap between an utterance and received wisdom. Such is notably the case in Nicole Oresme’s Livre de Ethiques d’Aristote (1370), wherein the author defines irony as follows: ‘Yronie est quant l’en dit une chose par quoi l’en veult donner a entendre le contraire. Si comme parleroit d’un sage homme notoirement et il diroit ainsi: “il ne scet rien non”. Ou, “il est plus sage qu’il ne cuide”, ou autre chose semblable’ (Irony is when one says something by which one means to convey the opposite, as one who would speak of a notoriously wise man and would say, ‘He doesn’t know anything’, or ‘He’s wiser than he thinks’, or something along those lines).10 Medieval irony can therefore be understood as allowing a text, as Sarah Kay puts it, ‘to signal disengagement from its apparent meaning’.11 Definitions such as those of Oresme and, before him, Isidore of Seville bear the influence of Cicero and Quintilian, who define irony as saying the contrary of what one means.12 Quintilian, who distinguishes between irony as figure and irony as trope, details other ironic uses of language, including feigned orders or permissions.13 But this Roman notion of irony, a strong presence in medieval rhetoric, depends upon a notion of contraria very different from the other major model of irony that, while largely unknown prior to the fourteenth century, also underlies (as I will argue) the ironic remedies of some later medieval literature.14 This is Socratic irony, or ignorance purposely affected. Like irony in its broader sense, Socratic irony gives rise to a dynamic of insider and outsider, initiated and uninitiated audiences. The ironist feigns ignorance in posing questions, thus facilitating a dialogue in which his interlocutor may arrive at the reasonable conclusions to which the ironist has wished to lead him. According to Joseph Dane, Socratic irony was a rhetorical technique unknown in the medieval West: ‘In the Middle Ages, Socrates was simply an exemplar of ordinary moral or philosophic virtue, exhibited in his patience with his wife Xanthippe. With the reestablishment of Plato’s texts in the canon and the subsequent redefinition of Socrates, first in the Renaissance and then in the romantic period, came a new understanding of 10 Quoted in Rossman, 166. Oresme’s is typically cited as the first usage of the word yronie or ironie in the French language, though Špela ak elj notes that the Petit Robert lists an earlier attestation dated 1361. ‘L’allégorie et l’ironie imitatives et productives dans la littérature médiévale’, Arcadia 42 (2007), 79. 11 Sarah Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 17. 12 On Isidore of Seville’s definition of irony, see Claire Colebrook, Irony (New York: Routledge, 2004), 9. 13 Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell, 5 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). On irony as a trope, see Book 8.6, vol. 3, 456–9; on irony as a figure see Book 9.2, vol. 4, 58–65. On Quintilian’s description of ‘ironic advice’, see Knox, Ironia, 629. 14 On the reintroduction of the notion of Socratic irony in the late Middle Ages, see Knox, Ironia, 97–100.

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irony.’15 However, the ‘new understanding’ – that is, the reintroduction of Socratic irony – seems to arrive a bit earlier than Dane suggests. Medieval theorists do sometimes take the Socratic example into account in formulating their definitions of irony, though his feigned ignorance is often interpreted in a negative light: witness Jean Buridan’s description of irony as false humility or self-depreciation undertaken with an ulterior motive.16 But it is Buridan’s slightly younger contemporary, Petrarch, who effectively revives the notion of Socratic irony in the late medieval West. In a letter to Giacomo Colonna dated 21 December 1336, Petrarch responds to an earlier communication in which his friend had asked whether Laura truly existed or was a figment of the poet’s imagination. In his reply, Petrarch characterizes Colonna’s question as an instance of Socratic irony.17 ‘Tibi pallor, tibi labor meus notus est; itaque magis vereor ne tua illa festivitate socratica, quam yroniam vocant, quo in genere nec Socrati quidem cedis, morbo meo insultes’ (My pallor and my distress are well known to you; and so I don’t respect that Socratic wit of yours that they call irony, which you don’t even leave to Socrates, but instead you insult my illness).18 Petrarch’s comment reveals a clear understanding of the term, as Colonna’s question was, according to Petrarch, posed in order to elicit a response to which the questioner (Colonna) already knew the answer. Petrarch’s ‘yronia’ is not just a contrast between what is said and what is meant, but a dialogue propelled by the questioner’s feigned ignorance. Knox notes that ‘whether or not [this mention of Socratic irony] is strictly speaking the first post-classical reference of its kind, it appropriately symbolizes the reintroduction of the concept into Western literature and philosophy’.19 It also signals the introduction of a concept that will recur in Petrarch’s writings. Petrarch’s use of irony has not received the full inquiry it merits, though two prominent translators of the Canzoniere, Robert M. Durling and Mark Musa, have referred (respectively) to ‘Petrarch’s reflexive irony’ and to his ‘Socratic irony’ in the Rime sparse.20 The Canzoniere represents an early step 15 Joseph Dane, The Critical Mythology of Irony (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 1. 16 Knox, Ironia, 129. 17 As Knox remarks, ‘When his friend Giacomo Colonna (1300/01–1341), Bishop of Lombez, wrote a letter daring to suggest, like some later critics, that Laura was merely a poetic fiction, Petrarch replied that Colonna must have been using “that Socratic humor called yronia”. Colonna could see for himself Petrarch’s pale looks and suffering’, Ironia, 103–4. 18 Petrarch, Le familiari, ed. Vittorio Rossi, edizione nazionale (Florence: Sansoni, 1933), vol. X, 95. 19 Knox, Ironia, 100. 20 See Durling’s introduction to Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 5; Mark Musa and Barbara Manfredi’s introduction to Petrarch, Canzoniere, trans. Mark Musa (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press 1996), 26.

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in Petrarch’s reflections on the healing potential of irony and of contraries. This palinodic play is often implicit, as in Petrarch’s famous antitheses, or even in the traditional division of the Canzoniere into two parts, fictively composed during the life and after the death of Laura.21 The puzzle of contrariety is sometimes made explicit, too, as in the quatrains of sonnet 48: Se mai foco per foco non si spense né fiume fu giamai secco per pioggia, ma sempre l’un per l’altro simil poggia et spesso l’un contrario l’altro accense, Amor … perché fai in lei con disusata foggia men per molto voler le voglie intense? (vv. 1–5, 7–8) If fire was never put out by fire, and a river was never dried up by rain – but rather, like builds on its like or is sparked by its contrary – then Love, why do you make my soul’s desire less intense through much wanting, in such an unheard-of way?

The response, fittingly enough, is to be found through an analogy with the temporary loss of sensory faculties: as Petrarch concludes in the tercets, just as the sound of the Nile’s great cataracts deafens the nearby listener, or the sun blinds the man who looks directly at it, so does intense desire diminish the capacity to experience that desire. Elsewhere in the Canzoniere, it is not the play of likes and contraries that leads to novel modes of healing, but a Socratic form of ironic dialogue. Petrarch’s poetic persona attempts to comfort himself through questions, a practice in which he engages with increasing frequency toward the latter part of the sequence. Intensifying in morte di madonna Laura, the Canzoniere teems with monologues and dialogues in which a questioner leads his interlocutor or himself to draw a desired conclusion.22 By the end, in sonnet 342 and in canzone 359, it is Laura herself, playing the role of teacher in Petrarch’s vision, who poses these questions. Petrarch has at his disposition, then, a number of tools classified as ironic: saying the opposite of what he means, offering wrong or contrarian advice, lavishing false praise upon an undeserving object, engaging in wordplay through antiphrasis, creating a clash of voices or of readerships, and even 21 While Petrarch divided his RVF into two parts – the second beginning with poem 264 – the rubrics entitling these parts ‘In vita di madonna Laura’ and ‘In morte di madonna Laura’ are not original. See Teodolinda Barolini, ‘The Self in the Labyrinth of Time (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta)’, in Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 34. 22 These include poems 129, 132, 150, 220, 221, 222, 299, 332, 342, and 359.

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furthering a line of questioning through pretended ignorance. He and his contemporaries deploy this arsenal of ironies in a number of literary genres,23 but its therapeutic potential is perhaps most evident in the textual tradition inspired by the pseudo-Senecan De remediis fortuitorum. The culmination of this late medieval textual tradition, Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae – a text to which Petrarch perhaps alludes in Canzoniere 40, where he boasts of the duality of his new work (‘i’ farò forse un mio lavor sì doppio’: v. 5) – is a dialogue propelled by ignorance that must, indeed, be read as feigned. In these texts a series of complaints, including a complaint of blindness, are addressed with responses that, in Petrarch’s version, take a decidedly ironic turn.

The Pseudo-Senecan De remediis fortuitorum De remediis fortuitorum is a stoic text, long attributed to Seneca, that may date to late antiquity.24 The treatise enjoyed a sustained period of popularity in the Middle Ages. Manuscript evidence suggests that De remediis fortuitorum, first attested in the seventh-century Codex Salmasianus (Par. Lat. 10318), became ever more popular from the twelfth century onward.25 About thirty twelfth-century copies have survived, in addition to excerpts contained in three florilegia.26 The following centuries see its diffusion (in its full or abridged forms) in hundreds of manuscripts, often as part of florilegia and encyclopedic texts such as the Speculum historiale (Book VIII ch 102–36) and the Manipulus florum.27 Thus the texts of De remediis fortuitorum that circulated in the later Middle Ages were often abbreviated forms of the already pithy dialogue. As Birger Olsen points out, the abridgements are rarely labelled as such; the reader would rarely have known that he was not reading the full text.28 Bauchans confirms the prevalence of such

23 See, for instance, Green’s Irony in the Medieval Romance and Gaunt’s Troubadours and Irony. 24 The text was still identified as a genuine work of Seneca by its nineteenth-century editor Friedrich Haase and by R. G. Palmer in Seneca’s De remediis fortuitorum and the Elizabethans (Chicago, IL: Institute of Elizabethan Studies, 1953). For an overview, see Gilles Gerard Meersseman, ‘Seneca maestro di spiritualità nei suoi opuscoli apocrifi dal XII al XV secolo’, Italia medioevale e umanistica XVI (1973), esp. 49–50. 25 Birger Munk Olsen, ‘Les Florilèges et les abrégés de Sénèque au Moyen Age’, Giornale italiano di filologia 52 (2000), 163–83, 164. 26 On manuscripts through the early thirteenth century, see Birger Munk Olsen, L’étude des auteurs classiques latins aux XIe et XIIe siècles, 3 vols (Paris: CNRS, 1982–9), vol. 2, 365–473; vol. 3, 102–26, 192. 27 On Seneca’s continued influence in late Middle Ages, see Meersseman, ‘Seneca maestro di spiritualità.’ 28 ‘Il est remarquable que les versions abrégées dans les recueils ne sont que très rarement signalées comme telles, si bien que le lecteur a cru se trouver devant le texte intégral.’ Olsen, ‘Les Florilèges’, 165.

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variants in the preface to his fourteenth-century French translation: ‘ie nay peut trouver vrais exemplaires ne du tout semblables, mais les uns plus contenanz & autrement que les autres’ (I have not been able to find true exemplars or even at all similar ones, but some more complete and varied than others, fol. 2v).29 Diffused in so many florilegia and compendia, the pseudo-Senecan De remediis fortuitorum must have been at once a highly available text and, owing to the quantity of variants, an unstable (or even destabilizing) one. The text’s popularity is evident not just in the variety of forms in which it circulated, but in references to the dialogue in other works. The thirteenthcentury theologian Jacques de Vitry (c.1160–1240), for instance, notably cites the pseudo-Seneca in his sermon ad leprosos et alios infirmos, the forty-first of his seventy-four sermones vulgares probably composed after 1228.30 ‘Et Seneca cuidam conquerenti quod oculos amiserat respondit: “O quam multis uoluptatibus uia tibi preclusa est quam multis rebus carebis quas ne uideres oculi tui eruendi erant. Nonne intelligis quod pars innocencie cecitas est?”’ (And Seneca replied to a certain person lamenting that he had lost his eyes: ‘Oh, without your eyes the path to so many pleasures is closed to you, and you will miss many things that your eyes ought not to have seen. Don’t you know that blindness is a part of innocence?’).31 The manner of citing De remediis fortuitorum is telling: situated between references to Ecclesiastes and Job, the pseudo-Seneca’s words are presented as both authoritative and familiar to his audience. The pseudo-Seneca’s continued popularity in the fourteenth century gave rise to numerous translations, adaptations, and works inspired by the De remediis fortuitorum in addition to its circulation in the florilegia cited above.32 Petrarch comments on the book’s ubiquity in the dedicatory epistle of his monumental De remediis utriusque fortunae: ‘is libellum passim in manibus vulgi est’ (this little book is in the hands of the common people everywhere). De remediis fortuitorum was not only a source for Petrarch but also one of his favorite books: he cited the pseudo-Senecan treatise as one of his ‘libri mei familiares’ in the famous list inscribed in his manuscript of Cassiodorus and Augustine (ms par. lat. 2201), probably compiled in 1333;33 this despite his rejection of the treatise’s attri29 BNF ms fr 1090. All citations from Bauchans’s translation refer to this unique manuscript. 30 Nicole Bériou and François-Olivier Touati, Voluntate dei leprosus : les lépreux entre conversion et exclusion aux XIIème et XIIIème siècles (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 1991), 38. I thank Mark O’Tool for bringing this sermon to my attention. 31 Ibid., 103–4. 32 On the pseudo-Senecan text’s popularity in the fourteenth century, see Olsen, ‘Les Florilèges’, 171. 33 The list, prefaced by a passage inspired by a Senecan epistle (I, 2, 5), enumerates Petrarch’s most prized books under the headings moralia, history, poets, grammarians,

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bution to Seneca.34 In De remediis utriusque fortunae Petrarch transforms the source text far more than any translation, distorting the original dialogue to greater remedial effect. Addressed and dedicated ‘ad Gallionem’ (that is, to Junius Annaeus Gallio, brother of Seneca), the original pseudo-Senecan text takes the form of a dialogue between Ratio (Reason) and Sensus (Sensuality).35 The complainant laments a litany of possible fates: his inevitable death, the possibility of death by beheading, dying far from home, dying young, remaining unburied, suffering sickness, acquiring a bad reputation, enduring exile, experiencing pain, falling into poverty, losing goods or money, losing his eyesight, losing his children, being shipwrecked, being robbed, making enemies, losing friends, and losing a good wife. In each instance the complaint is repeatedly uttered – sometimes iterated verbatim, sometimes varying somewhat in its wording from the original complaint – and is countered by rational argument. It is perhaps noteworthy that despite the foregrounding of the concept of remedy in the pseudo-Senecan dialogue’s title, eyesight is the only sense whose loss is specifically lamented, and the eyes are the only bodily organ named (at least in the abbreviated text that enjoyed the widest circulation in the later Middle Ages). While the section on blindness is not distinguished from the other complaints by its length or its position, it illustrates well the basic format of the pseudo-Senecan text; furthermore, an examination of two fourteenth-century texts inspired by De remediis fortuitorum will reveal how this particular dialogue is infused with greater irony. In the pseudo-Senecan text blindness is the eleventh of fifteen woes that Ratio seeks to counteract. Sensus repeats the complaint ‘oculos perdidi’, a complaint Ratio seeks to remedy through seduction (‘habet et nox suas voluptates’; the night has its pleasures too), then through moralizing. Ratio’s second reply, the longest and the one later cited by Jacques de Vitry, details the temptations that the complainant’s blindness has eliminated: Quam multis cupiditatibus via incisa est! quam multis hominibus carebis, quos ne videre vellem, vel eruendi erant! non intelligis partem innocentiae dialectics, and astrology; finally, without a subject heading or an author’s name, Petrarch lists several works of St Augustine. It has been discussed most notably in Pierre de Nolhac, Pétrarque et l’humanisme (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1907) and in B. L. Ullmann, ‘Petrarch’s Favorite Books’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 54 (1923), 21–38. On the probable date, see ibid., 36. 34 Meersseman, ‘Seneca maestro di spiritualità’, 50. 35 This dedication was apparently designed to lend credibility to the treatise’s attribution, as two genuine works of Seneca do bear that same dedication: De ira and De vita beata. The pseudo-Senecan text is cited from L. Annaei Senecae opera quae supersunt, ed. Friedrich Haase (Leipzig: Teubner, 1878), vol. III, 446–57. The dialogue on blindness is on 454.

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esse caecitatem? huic oculi adulterium monstrant, huic incestum, huic domum quam concupiscat, huic urbem: irritamenta sunt vitiorum, duces scelerum, [fomenta malitiae]. The path to so many desires is cut off! You will be free from so many men whom you do not wish to see, by whom you would have been undone! Don’t you know blindness to be a part of innocence? One man’s eyes show him adultery, another’s incest, another’s a house he covets, another’s a city: they are stimuli to vices, guides to sin, fomentors of wickedness.

Early versions of De remediis fortuitorum typically end the dialogue after this, Reason’s second reply; such is notably the case, it seems, for the text or texts consulted by Jacques Bauchant for his French translation. The interpolated text includes a third ‘oculos perdidi’, to which Reason replies more pragmatically (‘quot foeda spectaculorum ludibria non videbis’; you will not see the travesty of many filthy spectacles) and a new complaint, ‘oculos careo’, in response to which Reason more directly chastises Sensuality’s whining: ‘Culpis careres plurimis, si his perpetuo caruisses’ (you are wrong to lament this loss, if only you had lacked them forever!). After being berated thus, Sensuality complains of blindness no more. Appended to the discussion of blindness, though, are one complaint each about deafness (‘auditum perdidi’) and muteness (‘mutus factus sum’), to which Reason replies in similar fashion. Interestingly, these afflictions are subsumed to blindness in the interpolated text and excluded altogether from the original. This treatment of blindness, deafness, and muteness suggests perhaps that all physical infirmities may be addressed in the same manner – but it is blindness, not deafness or muteness, that is exemplary. While the pseudo-Senecan treatise is not typically read as an ironic text – nor is there any evidence, internal or external, that it should be – its brevity and its dialogic form provide ample space in which copyists, compilers, translators, and editors have expanded, transposed, or manipulated its message and its form. I now propose to examine the discourses on blindness in two such adaptations, Bauchant’s translation and Petrarch’s treatise, in order to illustrate the manner in which this particular subject has facilitated a reflection on language, contrariety, and remedy. Jacques Bauchant, in his translation, seems to highlight blindness’s unique exemplarity. And, as Petrarch will show, blindness affords the author a particularly rich opportunity to demonstrate the inherent irony of Reason’s remedial approach.

Des remedes ou confors des maulz de fortune qui aviennent ou pevent avenir aux hommes De remediis fortuitorum was translated into French at least three times in the Middle Ages: once in the thirteenth century (a version that survives in two manuscripts), once by Jacques Bauchant in the fourteenth century (preserved

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in a single manuscript), and lastly printed in an incunabulum in which the translation is attributed to Laurent de Premierfait.36 The translation that most interests us in the present discussion is that of Bauchant, who benefited from royal patronage and who attempted to collate several latin manuscripts that were at his disposition. More than the translation itself, however, it is the paratextual apparatus that indicates a shift in the notion of dialogue from the source text to the vernacular version, a shift that hints at the text’s ironic potential. Bauchant’s title, his table of contents, and especially his preface all interrogate the function of dialogue in the text. This second French translation of the pseudo-Senecan treatise was presented to Charles V by ‘Jacques Bauchans de Sainct Quentin en Vermandois vostre petit et humble serviteur et sergent darmes’ (1v). Bauchant, the translator of this ‘petit livre a lexemple du souverain’ (2v–3r), died around 1396, having completed his translation not long after translating the Voies de Dieu at the king’s request.37 Like his contemporaries, Bauchant attributes the treatise to Seneca, calling it ‘ce petit livre que Senecque fist entre les autres’ (2r). The title of his translation, which dilates upon the far more concise Latin, emphasizes and expands the concept of remedy: according to Bauchant the book ‘est intitulé des remedes ou confors des maulz de fortune qui aviennent ou pevent avenir aux hommes’ (is called On the remedies or comforts of Fortune’s ills that befall or may befall men, 2r). The addition of ‘confors’ to ‘remedes’ seems to highlight the psychological dimensions of the text, while the discussion of ‘maulz … qui … pevent avenir aux hommes’ lends the text prophylactic as well as therapeutic power. Bauchant’s preface outlines the difficulties of translation and explains his interpretive choices and modifications to the text. Despite its brevity the pseudo-Senecan treatise poses challenges with regard to both its manuscript tradition (with its preponderance of textual variants, as discussed above) and its style. ‘Et ia soit ce que le livre soit petit en escripture touttefois il ma esté assez duret en translation, tant pource que ie nay peu trouver vrais exemplaires ne du tout semblables, mais les uns plus contenanz et 36 Four additional manuscripts of a revision executed for Philippe le Bon have also survived, hence the discrepancy between Rita Copeland’s entry on translation in Medieval France: An Encyclopedia, according to which there are five manuscripts of the Bauchant translation, and Sylvie LeFèvre’s article on Bauchant in the DLFMA, which cites only one. Rita Copeland, ‘Translation’, in Medieval France: An Encyclopedia, ed. William W. Kibler and Grover A. Zinn (New York: Garland, 1995), 922. Sylvie LeFèvre, ‘Jacques Bauchant’, in Dictionnaire des lettres françaises. Le Moyen Age, ed. Geneviève Hasenohr and Michel Zink (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 726. I have consulted the sole manuscript of Bauchant’s unmodified translation: a fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale (ms fr 1090, 1r–28v), described by Léopold Delisle as ‘un bel exemplaire en grosse écriture flamande du XVe siècle.’ Recherches sur la librairie de Charles V (Paris: Champion, 1907), 89, n. 1. 37 On the life and career of Jacques Bauchant, see Delisle, Recherches sur la librairie, 88–91.

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autrement que les autres, tant pour ce que le stile est grief et estrange quant a moy et especialment pour la foiblesse de mon iugement et de ma petite science’ (And though the book might be small in length nonetheless it was quite difficult for me to translate, because I have not been able to find true exemplars or even at all similar ones, but some more complete and varied than others; and also because the style is grievous and strange in my opinion; and especially due to the feebleness of my judgment and of my meagre learning: 2r–2v). The translation is of considerable philological interest as the translator purports to have consulted, and attempted to collate, multiple copies. In the preface Bauchant also addresses the function of dialogue in the text, a characteristic that, as I will demonstrate, is essential to medieval adaptations of the text and to the ironic therapeutic strategies attempted therein. As we have seen, the original text, which stages a dialogue between Ratio and Sensus (the physical body), was dedicated to Seneca’s brother Gallio. Despite his apparent ignorance of Seneca’s family tree Bauchant seizes upon this dedication as an essential part of the text, identifying the treatise as ‘lequel livre il envoya a un sien amy appellé Callio, que iay translaté en francois selon le faible sens de mon povre entendement’ (he sent this book to a friend of his named Callio, which I have translated into French according to the feeble sense of my poor understanding: 2r). The dedication becomes fundamental to the structure of the entire text, as Bauchant chooses to replace the allegorical interlocutors Ratio and Sensus with the human characters Callio and Seneca. Mais pour la translation estre plus plaine et plus ententable, et pour ce aussi que je lai trouvé en aucuns de mes exemplaires ou lieu de Sensualité jay mis Callio auquel Seneque envoia son livre qui met avant les doubtes et doleurs: et Senecque ou lieu de Raison, si que Callio sera complaignant et mettant avant les doubtes et doleurs, et Senecque sera confortant et respondant aux doubtes. (4v–5r) But for the translation to be more plain and more understandable, and also because I found it in one of my copies, in the place of Sensuality I have put Callio to whom Seneca sent his book, and who puts forth the fears and pains; and Seneca in the place of Reason, such that Callio will be complaining and putting forth his fears and pains, and Seneca will be comforting and responding to those fears.

Despite the replacement of the more abstract personifications Reason and Sensuality with proper names, the tension between the two impulses remains. Throughout ms fr 1090 the name Callio appears in red ink and the name Senecque in blue – an apparent visual ‘translation’ of the concepts of carnality and cool detachment, respectively. Bauchant justifies his choice by the need for clarity and by codicological

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precedent. Moreover, the renaming of the interlocutors fundamentally reframes the textual dialogue, as the verbal exchange implied in the source text’s dedication – the words (pseudo-)Seneca addresses to Gallio – is extended and assimilated into the body of the treatise. The auctore stands in for reason, just as Reason, now called by the author’s name, takes on a role that is both authoritative and authorial. This authority, exercised at once by Senecque and by his double Reason, consists largely of the ability to furnish comfort and remedy: an ability Bauchant has also arrogated to himself by making the text available to a new audience. This same authority provides Bauchant with an opportunity to manipulate language and to redefine the text’s readership. As we have seen, Bauchant’s reframing of the textual dialogue permits the addition of a new readerly layer (Charles V and his circle). Hypothetically speaking, this reframing technique also makes possible the creation of another uninitiated class of readers. For if one encountered Bauchant’s text without having read or heard his preface, one would not realize that the character identified as Senecque was actually a stand-in for Reason, or that Callio was in fact a representative of Sensuality. Bauchant has translated a didactic text in such a way that, if read by an uninitiated audience not possessing the translator’s interpretive key, much of its overt pedagogical value is lost. Prior to proposing this renaming of the protagonists, however, Bauchant’s preface had not glossed over the broader moral implications of a dialogue between Reason and Sensuality. On the contrary, the translator attempts a sophisticated survey of the matter, calling upon other authorities to characterize the moral tension in question. To this end he quotes both Aristotle and St Paul, among others: ‘Or est assavoir pour lentendement de ce livre que sicomme dit Aristote en la fin du premier dethiques, en homme sont deux natures contraires, cest assavoir sensualité et raison’ (Now it should be known for the comprehension of this book that as Aristotle says at the end of the first book of Ethics, there are two contrary natures in man, namely sensuality and reason: 3v–4r). Citing Paul, Bauchant characterizes their struggle as a tension between two exigencies, described as two systems of laws: ‘Et ceste sensualité selon ce que dit monseigneur Sainct Pol est la loy des membres’ (And this sensuality, according to what Saint Paul says, is the law of the members: 4r).38 Bauchant’s emphasis on Sensuality as beholden to the ‘law of the members’ is particularly striking given the nature of the dialogue that follows: of the complaints treated by the pseudo-Seneca and translated by Jacques Bauchant, nearly all are psychological in origin (fear and dread), and very few could be identified as stemming directly from bodily impulses. In fact, the only complaint involving the loss of a sense, or of a bodily member, 38 Bauchant refers here to Romans 7:23, ‘video autem aliam legem in membris meis, repugnantem legi mentis meæ, et captivantem me in lege peccati, quæ est in membris meis’, a passage also cited by Aquinas in the Summa Theologica (Ia–IIae q. 90 a. 1).

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is the dialogue on blindness. This affliction would thus seem to relate to the treatise’s overarching concept (sensuality versus reason) in a manner different from any of the other complaints. And while the Middle French translation itself does not appear to distinguish between physiological and psychological temptations, its paratext does just that. This difference is signalled not as much in the treatise – which, in keeping with precedent, places the dialogue on blindness thirteenth of nineteen and accords it no special importance – as in its table of contents. In the table that follows the translator’s prologue in ms fr 1090 the words designating the subjects of the treatise’s nineteen dialogues suggest that they might be classified within a few major categories. The full text of the table, appearing on folios 5r–7r, is as follows: un petit prologue le paour de la mort la doubte ou paour de morir par decollation la doubte de morir pelerin ou en estrange pays la paour de morir en sa jonesse la doubte de gesir mort et de demourer sans sepulture la paour de maladie la paour destre blasmez des mesdisans la doubte destre exilliez la paour de doleur eminent la paour de povreté la paour de perdre grant avoir la paour de perte de peccune la doleur destre aveugle la paour de la mort ou perte de ses enfans la paour destre pilliez en mer ou en eaue et là perdre son avoir la paour destre robé des larrons la paour davoir cruelz ennemis la perte de ses bons amis la doleur de la mort de sa femme mesmement quant elle est bonne a little prologue the fear of death the dread or fear of death by beheading the dread of dying on pilgrimage or abroad the fear of dying young the dread of lying dead and remaining unburied the fear of illness the fear of slander the dread of exile the fear of great pain the fear of poverty the fear of financial loss

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the pain of being blind the fear of the death or loss of one’s children the fear of losing one’s goods to piracy the fear of being robbed the fear of having cruel enemies the loss of good friends the pain of a wife’s death, especially a good one

The various afflictions of which Callio/Sensuality complains are each identified variously as a paour (fear), a doubte (dread), a doleur (pain) or, in the sole case of the loss of a good friend, a perte (loss). The vast majority of Callio’s ill fortune is designated as fear: paour (twelve of nineteen complaints), doubte (three), or, in the case of beheading, a doubte ou paour. I propose that we read the paour and the doubte as belonging to a single conceptual category: even if we consider the etymological distinction between the two words (the latin pavor refers to trembling or quaking, while dubitatio expresses uncertainty or fear), they still reflect, respectively, the physical and psychological manifestations of the same impulse. Both terms express similar ideas of fear in Middle French, and the doubling of ‘doubte ou paour’ in the naming of the second complaint suggests a close relationship if not a near-absolute identity. Doleur, on the other hand, is a pain or suffering that can be either physical or mental, while perte is not a psychologically induced anxiety but a genuine loss. The table’s four designations of the afflictions to be discussed in the text call to mind Bauchant’s characterization of the ills inflicted by Fortune as ‘maulz de fortune qui aviennent ou pevent avenir aux hommes’: fears (paour and doubte) would seem to represent the anticipation of those ills that could arrive, while the language of pain and loss (doleur and perte) denotes responses to those troubles that truly have occurred. Thus blindness – along with the only other doleur, the death of a good wife, and the perte of good friends – is one of the text’s few ‘maulz … qui aviennent’, instead of one of the potential adversities that ‘pevent avenir aux hommes’. Moreover, while the table’s terminology seems to distinguish bodily and mental anguish, only doleur represents a malady that can be either physiological or psychological and thus can (at least theoretically) be treated variously by medical/surgical or emotional/intellectual/verbal means. The polyvalency of the term doleur is illustrated in its two uses here, as the loss of a wife clearly implies psychological pain, while blindness – depending on its physiological cause – may well compound emotional with bodily suffering. So if the ‘law of members’ is to be understood both figuratively and literally, as desires arising from and spurred on by the senses, our reading of the prologue suggests that the tension between this and the law of reason is perhaps best explicated, if not resolved, in a situation where the state of the members (and therefore, perhaps, their laws) has been irrevocably changed. Through the lens of the prologue, then,

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Bauchant’s relatively faithful translation of the dialogue on blindness has been assigned greater prominence. Following the new paratextual material introduced by Bauchans, the Middle French translation consists thereafter of a rather exact rendering of De remediis fortuitorum. The table’s distinction between paour, doubte, doleur, and perte is not extended into the text itself, where all afflictions are identified merely as fortunes: the dialogue on blindness is thus introduced as the ‘remede contre la fortune davoir perdu la veue’ (remedy against the fortune of having lost one’s sight: 23r). Bauchant’s translation demonstrates that, despite the variants he noted in the prologue, the manuscripts he consulted did not include the commonly copied interpolations. Callio. Iay perdu ma veue. Seneque. Par la nuit qui est obscure: on a moult de deliz, par ce test la voie trenchié a moult de convoitises. Tu seras maintenant privez de veoir moult de choses diverses et deshonnestes, et moult dhommes lesquelz affin que tu ne les voulsisses veoir: deusses tu voloir que les yeulx te fussent ostez. Ne scez tu pas que non veoir est grande partie de innocence: et la cause si est, car les yeulx monstrent et trayent lomme a ce quil face aventure. A lautre donnent mouvement de gesir a sa parente. A un autre monstrent une maison quil convoite. A cestui une cité. Et ainsi dautres choses. Certes les yeulx sont cause et esmouvemens de vices, duels et mesfaits se pechiez. (23v–24r) Callio. I have lost my sight. Seneca. One has many pleasures in dark night. In this way, the path to many desires is barred to you. Now you will be deprived of the sight of many contrary and dishonest things, and of many men who should have made you wish for your eyes to be removed, just so that you would not have had to see them. Don’t you know that not seeing is a large part of innocence? And the cause is this, that the eyes betray one man and cause him to go adventuring. They give another the desire to lie with his kinswoman. They show another a house he desires, another a city, and so forth. Certainly the eyes are the cause and motivation of vices, sorrows, and misdeeds and thus sin.

Bauchant’s text provides a faithful translation of the pseudo-Senecan text as he knew it, with one notable exception: Callio/Sensuality’s repeated laments have been reduced to a single statement at the beginning of the paragraph, countered by a full list of arguments. The ‘law of the members’ is overcome in this case by sheer force – that is, by volume as well as quality of argumentation. The sufferer complains only once, whereas Seneca’s/Reason’s arguments are translated in full from De remediis fortuitorum. The original text’s dialogue is thereby flattened into a monologue. After having gone to the trouble of changing the interlocutors’ names, a gesture that would appear to indicate a more naturalistic encounter between two real people, it seems significant that Bauchant would instead reduce his

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text’s dialogic exchange.39 Beyond a mere question of efficiency in translation, the flattening of dialogue into monologue serves another purpose, signalling a different attitude regarding refutation as a therapeutic strategy. Rather than providing a one-to-one correspondence of arguments to complaints (which would result in the sort of back-and-forth present in the pseudo-Senecan De remediis fortuitorum), in Bauchant’s version a single complaint can be treated with multiple contraries. Bauchant’s removal of Callio’s repeated lament thus highlights the distinction between medical and rhetorical therapies. For while humoral theory permits each complexional quality one contrary, Reason may deploy multiple verbal/rhetorical therapies. Contradiction becomes a means of both converting and diverting desire: transforming a loathing of blindness to acceptance or even gratitude, diverting a loathing of blindness to loathing of sin, substituting inner for outer sight. Addressing a single complaint with multiple contraries thus endows the rather rigid system of contraries with greater flexibility, allowing for different understandings of ailment and different paths to healing. Though the Bauchant translation leaves its source text largely intact, its minor modifications frame the way the reader encounters the discourse on blindness and thus the way he thinks about its remedy. The translator’s prologue seems to permit the constitution of multiple readerships, thus opening the door to irony. His suppression of dialogue, on the other hand, decreases the potential for textual irony: Seneca’s monologue allows for fewer expressions of ignorance (feigned or otherwise), less ‘struggle for mastery’,40 and no one-to-one correspondence between contraries. But in his contemporary treatise inspired by the same source Petrarch will take the opposite tack, multiplying the complainant’s laments (whose phrasing will vary even as their message and tone will not). Vastly expanding the scope of the pseudo-Senecan De remediis fortuitorum, in his dialogue on blindness Petrarch will illustrate the inefficacy of rhetorical strategies until Reason turns to one that is itself based on a notion of contrariety – irony as therapy.

Petrarchan remedies for fortune Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae, composed between 1354 and 1366, is, like its pseudo-Senecan inspiration, constructed as a remedial behavioral manual: its 254 dialogues model the behaviors through which readers can counteract the vicissitudes of Fortune, both good and bad. This text was Petrarch’s most popular in the late fourteenth and early to

39 The illustrations in ms fr 1090 reinforce the reader’s expectation of a naturalistic dialogue, as the illuminations on folios 1r and 9r depict men in contemporary dress speaking before a cityscape. 40 Dane, The Critical Mythology of Irony, 31.

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mid-fifteenth centuries.41 Nicholas Mann has identified more than 150 manuscripts of Petrarch’s Latin text, as well as an additional 94 containing abridgements, excerpts, or vernacular translations, not to mention the 70 or so manuscripts attested in various inventories and other documents no longer extant or not yet identified. Of the 29 translation manuscripts he cites, 12 are French: 7 contain Jean Daudin’s translation, commissioned by Charles V in 1378, and 5 contain an anonymous translation executed at Rouen in 1503.42 Only the Italian translation is more numerous (13 manuscripts).43 While the French translation seems to have been diffused to a somewhat restricted audience, late medieval writers such as Martin le Franc demonstrate the continued influence of the Latin De remediis utriusque fortunae in France.44 Like its pseudo-Senecan predecessor, Petrarch’s treatise takes the form of a dialogue between Reason (Ratio) and a personified impulse or emotion. Unlike its source, however, De remediis utriusque fortunae is a tour de force of Christianized stoicism divided into two books, in which Ratio addresses boasts of good fortune (Book I) in addition to complaints of ill fortune (Book II). Her interlocutors are the passions: Gaudium (Joy) and Spes (Hope) in Book I, Dolor (Sorrow) and Metus (Fear) in Book II. Petrarch specifically highlights this deviation from his principal source of inspiration in his dedicatory epistle to Azzo da Coreggio: although he claims to have no desire to add to or to emend the (pseudo-)Senecan text (‘ego nil addere nil detrahere meditor’), Petrarch immediately states that he will explore the good Fortune that Seneca had neglected. Thus Petrarch will become the new Seneca and Azzo da Coreggio the new Gallio. Petrarch’s Ratio argues against excessive joy in good fortune or sorrow in the face of calamity through a combination of logical arguments, citations, and exempla. These references often lack explicit identification, leading Conrad Rawski to posit that ‘in places, Reason seems to challenge the reader sub specie ludi, to use Huizinga’s phrase, to identify a quotation or allu-

41 Nicholas Mann, ‘The Manuscripts of Petrarch’s De remediis: A Checklist’, Italia medioevale e umanistica 14 (1971), 57–90, 57. 42 Mann mentions three other lost manuscripts of Daudin’s translation, including one listed in the Duke of Berry’s 1403 inventory: ‘La fortune de Pétrarque en France: Recherches sur le De remediis’, Studi francesi 37 (1969), 1–15, 11 n. 2. He also notes on p. 13 that the Daudin translation was printed by Galliot du Pré in 1523 and by Denis Janot in 1534. 43 As Mann notes, the Latin text of De remediis utriusque fortunae was largely abandoned in Italy in favor of Giovanni da San Miniato’s Italian translation after about 1425: ‘The Manuscripts of Petrarch’s De remediis’, p. 58. This alone accounts for the greater frequency of Italian-language manuscripts than French-language ones, and does not necessarily allow us to draw conclusions about the relative popularity of the text in the two areas. 44 On Martin le Franc’s use of the Latin text, see Oskar Roth, ‘Martin Le Franc et le De remediis de Pétrarque’, Studi francesi 45 (1971), 401–19.

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sion’.45 Seneca (including the pseudo-Seneca) is the text’s third-most cited authority, after only the Vulgate and Cicero.46 Yet, despite the clear inspiration of the pseudo-Senecan De remediis fortuitorum, that treatise is, according to Rawski, the least cited work of Seneca in the De remediis utriusque fortunae.47 It bears noting, however, that the content of Petrarch’s text shows he had at his disposition an interpolated copy of the pseudoSenecan treatise and not just a more restricted text of the sort consulted by Bauchant.48 Petrarch’s title is a clear echo of the pseudo-Seneca’s, but given Petrarch’s sceptical attitudes toward both remedia and fortuna, the presence of those concepts in his most widely read work merits further attention. What does Petrarch mean by remedy, and by fortune? As demonstrated in Chapter 2, remedy is a problematic subject for Petrarch, and a terrain he refuses to cede to the medical practitioner; popular conceptions of Fortune, too, meet with Petrarch’s scorn.49 As Petrarch explains in Seniles VIII.3, in De remediis he is interested not in Fortune herself/itself but in the remedies against her/it. Thus he reduces Fortune to an abstraction: using popular ideas of Fortune but, as Oskar Roth puts it, emptying them of all substance.50 The conventional device of Fortune’s two faces is, for Petrarch, the vehicle for a reflection on the logic of contraries, a notion that serves – much more than Fortune – as his book’s guiding principle.51 The theme comes to the forefront in the preface to Book II, which, following the citation of the Heraclitan axiom that all exists by strife (‘Omnia secundam litem fieri’), 45 Conrad Rawski, ‘Petrarch’s Scholarship in his De remediis utriusque fortunae: A Preliminary Inquiry’, in The Classics in the Middle Ages, ed. Aldo S. Bernardo and Saul Levin (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1990), 287. 46 The most frequently quoted Ciceronian text is the Tusculanae disputationes, which furnished most of the exempla, notably, for the dialogue on blindness (II.96). 47 Rawski, ‘Petrarch’s Scholarship’, p. 293. De remediis fortuitorum thus comes after (in order) Seneca’s Epistulae, De tranquillitate animi, De beneficiis, De ira, Naturales quaestiones, Apocolocynthosis, and De matrimonio fragmentum in frequency of citation. 48 Not only does Petrarch directly cite the ‘additio’, but he retains elements of its structure in De remediis utriusque fortunae. De caecitate is immediately followed by the dialogue De audito perdito; as mentioned earlier, the complaint of deafness only follows the discussion of blindness in the full pseudo-Senecan text but is suppressed in abridged copies. Beyond their adjacent position, Petrarch maintains the connection between the two topics, still evoking blindness in De audito perdito. 49 On Petrarch’s disdain for personifications of Fortune, see Klaus Heitmann, Fortuna und Virtus: Eine Studie zu Petrarcas Lebensweisheit (Cologne: Böhlau-Verlag, 1958), 55. 50 Roth, ‘Martin Le Franc et le De remediis de Pétrarque’, 403–5. See also Heitmann, Fortuna und Virtus, for an overview of Petrarch’s conception of Fortune. 51 Petrarch’s early reference to De remediis utriusque fortunae in progress, in Seniles XVI.9 (June 1354), suggests that the juxtaposition of contraries was fundamental to his project from its inception. See Conrad Rawski’s introduction to his commentary in Petrarch’s Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul, 5 vols (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), vol. 2, 16.

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gives rise to series of observations: instances of turmoil and conflict drawn from the natural world and from human social experience. Petrarch concludes from this litany of examples that contrariety is necessary to the establishment of equilibrium in all domains, from the climate to music to virtuous comportment. A similar notion that the juxtaposition of contraries gives rise to knowledge or virtue crops up in several dialogues, such as II.58, De sterilitate annua (‘optime res omnis contrarii collatione cognoscit’; all things are best understood through comparison with their opposites) and II.115, De furore (‘ex contrariis vera virtus frequentatis actibus quaeri habitum philosophicum dogma est’; it is philosophical dogma that true virtue comes from frequent contrary acts). The same principle evidently underlies the structures of the individual dialogues and of the treatise as a whole, divided as it is into two complementary books. The logical connection between this notion of contrariety and the medical principle of contraries is made explicit throughout the work, notably in the prefaces to both books. For instance, Petrarch defends his rhetorical strategy in the dedicatory letter to Azzo da Coreggio: though verbal medicines (‘medicamenta verborum’) may seem inefficacious to many, they are appropriate, as the invisible diseases of the mind require invisible cures (‘ut invisibiles animorum morbos, sic invisibilia esse remedia’).52 Petrarch reinforces the medical analogy in his preface to Book II, in which he concedes that physicians are authorities on the imbalance of humors but that each man is responsible for restoring the balance of his own passions, and in II.75, De discordia animi fluctuantis, in which he most clearly posits the mind–body analogy: ‘ut contrarii et corrupti humores febrem corporum, sic contrarii affectus febrem pariunt animorum’ (just as contrary and corrupted humors [cause] a bodily fever, so do contrary dispositions beget a fever of the soul). Given Petrarch’s paratextual emphasis on the analogy between rhetorical contraries and medical treatments, it is noteworthy that few dialogues refer to specific physiological afflictions, much less to medical or surgical remedies.53 Like the pseudo-Seneca, Petrarch writes a dialogue on blindness in which Ratio discourages the pursuit of medical or surgical treatments, instead suggesting that Dolor embrace his condition. Nor does Petrarch foreground his dialogue on blindness any more than the pseudo-Seneca had: it is the ninety-sixth of Book II’s 132 chapters. But, as with Bauchant’s translation, the seemingly minor modifications that Petrarch brings to De caecitate (II.96) underline the increased options for rhetorical remedy that arise from a 52 See George A. Trone’s brief comments on Petrarchan ‘logotherapy’ in ‘You Lie Like a Doctor! Petrarch’s Attack on Medicine’, Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 70 (1997), 183–90. 53 The most prominent exception is II.93, De tristitia et miseria, in which Ratio (rather uncharacteristically) speaks admiringly of the medical and technological advances that have vastly improved many injured or ill patients’ quality of life.

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change in the dynamics of dialogue. Here Petrarch argues, as had the pseudo-Seneca before him, that the remedy for blindness is to be found not in ointments or surgery, but in exemplary living. When the same strategy appears this time to fail, however, Petrarch’s Ratio shifts to a different remedial strategy. The tone throughout is both serious and tongue in cheek, hence the dialogue’s enhanced ironic possibilities, which culminate at the end of De caecitate. Ratio’s ironic tools of persuasion, though they represent a significant departure from previously attempted remedies, are very much in keeping with the principle of contraries. Petrarch’s De caecitate is far longer than the pseudo-Senecan dialogue on the same subject, and while the beginning closely follows its model, Petrarch multiplies Dolor’s complaints as well as Ratio’s remedial strategies. Of Dolor’s seventeen laments,54 two of the first four are cited directly from the pseudo-Seneca; ‘oculos perdidi’ is later inverted, in the eighth complaint, as ‘perdidi oculos’. In response to these complaints Ratio first characterizes blindness as the removal of temptation (and therefore a boon), echoing the language of the pseudo-Seneca, by whom many of her initial arguments are plainly inspired. Ratio then provides examples of men who accomplished great things while blind, many of which are derived from Cicero’s Tusculanae disputationes. The initial examples provided are of seers (Tiresias), ascetics (Didymus), men of letters (Homer, Democritus, Diodotus), and lawyers and statesmen (Gaius Drusus and Appius Claudius Caecus). None of these men is discussed at great length. Petrarch caps off the chapter with the examples of three warriors who epitomize selfless valor, all of whom die in pursuit of their enemies: only such extreme measures can counteract the weakness of the body. Petrarch begins with Samson, the last of the Judges of Israel, who is blinded by the Philistines and dies when he brings down the roof on the three thousand spectators at the feast of Dagon. The second example is Tyrrhenus, blinded during a naval battle at Marseilles. Each of these men is mentioned only in passing; the third example, that of John the Blind of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia, is the most fully developed of all of De caecitate’s exempla. John the Blind, like Samson and Tyrrhenus, charged into battle knowing that such an action would certainly result in defeat and death: as portrayed in De caecitate, blind valor is a desperate and defiant act, nobly carried out in the face of inevitable defeat. But lastly, her logic and her exempla having had no apparent effect, Ratio turns to humor, relating a quip she attributes to Asclepiades. This brief moment of reversal at once reinforces and undermines the dialogue that has preceded it. 54 Oculos perdidi; Amisi oculos; Caecus sum; Oculis careo; Caecitate perpetua damnatus sum; Oculorum luce privatus sum; Visum perdidi; Perdidi oculos; Luminibus careo; Lumen oculorum perdidi; Oculos mei capitis perdidi; Lumen oculis non video; Amissos oculos quaeror; Corporeos amisi oculos; Caecitate inops, et inutilis sum; Caecus sum nec quo pergam video; Caecus sum. Petrarch, Opera quae extant omnia (Basel: Sebastianum Henricpetri, 1581), 187–9.

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The amplification of the dialogue is accomplished through the establishment of a rhythmic progression: Ratio’s responses can be divided into three ‘stages of treatment’, or three thematically and stylistically distinct therapeutic strategies. This expansion of and departure from the pseudo-Senecan model creates space for ambiguity and irony. Despite the preponderance of exempla and citations, Petrarch’s Dolor is granted greater expressive variety than the pseudo-Senecan complainant, who is limited to ‘oculos perdidi’ and ‘oculos careo’; while Dolens expresses the same idea repeatedly, he does so in myriad ways. The only complaint to be repeated verbatim is ‘caecus sum’, which is both his third and his last phrase, suggesting that he has neither learned nor progressed over the course of the dialogue. Such instances of repetition prompt Ratio to shift her therapeutic approach: while variations in Dolor’s complaints remain slight, Ratio twice changes rhetorical course. The first part of the dialogue, consisting of the initial thirteen complaints and their responses, merely expands upon the pseudo-Seneca without revising his basic remedial approach. Petrarch’s dialogue begins with ‘Oculos perdidi’, precisely the same complaint that begins his source text; Ratio responds with a direct citation of the pseudo-Senecan Reason’s second answer: ‘O quot simul vitae fastidia perdidisti, qut foeda spectaculorum ludibria non videbis’ (187). In language that further echoes the pseudoSeneca, Ratio attempts to persuade her interlocutor that blindness bars the path of sin, that the eyes are guides to sin (‘duces malos’), that Dolor should only regret not having become blind sooner (‘Culpis tu careres plurimis: si his perpetuo caruisses’, 187).55 In her twelfth response she also cites the philosopher Antipater, attributing to him the quip with which the pseudo-Senecan Reason began her discourse: thus the earlier text’s ‘Habet et nox suas voluptates’ becomes Petrarch’s ‘Nulla ne inquit vobis videt voluptas ella nocturna’ (188). Throughout this first portion of the dialogue Ratio’s answers grow progressively longer, with occasional recourse to exempla such as that of Tiresias. However, when reason seems to have no effect upon sorrow, Ratio turns away from the pseudo-Seneca’s stoic moralizing and comes to rely instead on an overwhelming assemblage of exempla. Ratio’s first rhetorical shift comes in response to Dolor’s fourteenth complaint, ‘corporeos amisi oculos’ (188). This is a complaint emblematic of Dolor’s refusal to listen to reason, for, more than most other laments in this dialogue, it indicates that Dolor has heard Ratio’s arguments without truly absorbing their intent or taking them to heart. ‘Corporeos amisi oculos’ is a near-repetition of Dolor’s second complaint, ‘amisi oculos’. The precision brought to the earlier complaint, though – the specification that the bodily eyes are lost – suggests that Dolor has indeed comprehended Ratio’s distinc-

55 Here Petrarch cites verbatim another passage contained in the full, but not the abridged, versions of the pseudo-Senecan De remediis fortuitorum.

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tion between the eyes of the body and the eyes of the heart, mind, or soul. This is a distinction Ratio had first made in response to ‘amisi oculos’: ‘Frontis fortasse non pectoris’ ([You have lost the eyes] of your face, maybe, but not of your soul). Ratio thus revisits her rhetorical approach after hearing a near-repetition of an earlier complaint, and one that reflects the letter, though not the spirit, of what Ratio has been saying. While Dolor has apparently accepted Ratio’s distinction, he has not applied its lesson, for he is still complaining. Consequently, Ratio thereafter attempts to teach by example rather than by logic. Ratio’s second strategy is to provide exempla of blindness overcome through virtuous living. The exemplum is, according to Claude CazaléBérard, distinguished by a handful of basic characteristics: it is a brief narrative component within a larger text, often a sermon or homiletic discourse; it employs the rhetoric of persuasion and pretensions of veracity or authenticity in order to teach a lesson and ultimately secure the audience’s salvation; and as such, it is a text that establishes a relationship between the speaker and an audience of the faithful.56 The exemplum’s association with the sermon only adds another layer of orality to a text whose dialogic form already suggests the spoken give-and-take that will facilitate De caecitate’s ultimate irony. During this second section of the dialogue, as the sufferer’s complaints become somewhat more verbose (at least as compared to his two-word utterances at the beginning of the chapter), Reason’s replies explode in length: her exempla range from brief allusions to one- to two-sentence capsule descriptions, building up to an extensive and detailed treatment of John the Blind’s valiant death at Crécy. This final exemplum is of particular interest, standing out from the preceding anecdotes by its length, its style (it is the only exemplum to include direct discourse), and its modernity; Ratio even explicitly justifies its inclusion in her discourse, and in ironic manner at that. Ratio’s last exemplum, and the only contemporary one, is the death of John the Blind (1296–1346), Duke of Luxembourg and King of Bohemia.57 John the Blind was notorious for his fierce military campaigns in Prussia and Northern Italy; a patron of the arts and staunch ally of the French crown, he is best remembered, now as in the later fourteenth century, for his valiant and foolhardy death at Crécy.58 Completely blind since 1340, John of Bohemia’s last act was to order his men to lead him into the thick of the battle so that he 56 Claude Cazalé-Bérard, ‘L’exemplum médiéval est-il un genre littéraire? II. L’exemplum et la nouvelle’, in Les Exempla médiévaux: Nouvelles perspectives, ed. Jacques Berlioz and Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu (Paris: Champion, 1998), 29–42, esp. 33–4. 57 The standard biography of John the Blind is Raymond Cazelles, Jean l’Aveugle, comte de Luxembourg, roi de Bohême (Bourges: Tardy, 1947). See also the excellent volume edited by Michel Margue, Un itinéraire européen: Jean l’Aveugle, comte de Luxembourg et roi de Bohême (Luxembourg: Crédit Communal & CLUDEM, 1996). 58 On late medieval cultural memory of John the Blind, see Singer, ‘Lines of Sight:

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might strike a blow to his enemies. Whereas in the king’s lifetime Petrarch had characterized him as a ‘barbarian’ and a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’,59 in De caecitate he represents a courtly ideal and his life comprises the most extensive exemplum of blindness overcome. John the Blind’s valor is firmly anchored in the condition of his body and so blindness has enhanced, rather than detracted from, his courage: ‘et quid oro gloriae viri fortis obfuit visu caruisse, nisi ut quem virtus, et natura mirabilem fecerant, stupendum caecitas faceret’ (And what, I ask, did his blindness detract from the glory of this strong hero, except that while virtue and nature made him admirable, blindness made him stupendous: 188–9). Thus, in a certain sense, blindness has become its own remedy: blindness made him stupendous. Petrarch intimates that the king’s innate virtue was not enough to make him an exemplary figure, but that the circumstance of his blindness, and his virtue in the face of an impairment, are essential components of the king’s legend. Because the death of John the Blind is so different from the other exempla, and (unlike the rest) is not derived from a classical source, its inclusion is remarkable. Ratio states that she has chosen to finish with this example specifically because it is so recent, and may therefore convince readers who place little stock in the preceding tales such as those of Samson and Tyrrhenus. These two figures are known through literary accounts, as she points out, and their histories are temporally distant enough to be dismissed as mere legend: ‘de quo quidem si poëticae tubae minus est fidei, illud certius, atque recentius recordare, quid aetate gestum tua videre oculis potuisti’ (since less trust can be had in poetic trumpetings, consider this most certain and more recent case, which you could have seen with your own eyes because it happened in your lifetime: 188). The story of John the Blind is not only more recent than the other exempla cited; the Bohemian king’s exploits also fit most neatly with the vision of valorous death expressed in De remediis utriusque fortunae II.121, De morte violenta: ‘Communis tibi cum maximus fortuna, cumque optimis viris, bona pars eorum, quos vel praesens vita foelicissimos habuit, vel aeterna sanctissimos habet, gladio periere’ (You are associated with great fortune, and with the best men; a good part of them, who had happy earthly lives and now lead most blessed eternal lives, have died by the sword: 211–12). Thus we see that for Petrarch, as for so many of the contemporary French chroniclers who praise John the Blind, exemplary

Love Lyric, Science and Authority in Late Medieval and Early Modern French and Italian Culture’ (Ph.D. thesis, Duke University, 2006), Chapter 3. 59 Margue, Un itinéraire européen, 184. According to Margue, Petrarch could have met Jean de Luxembourg during his years in Avignon or his travels in Northern France and Brabant in the 1320s and 1330s; and Jean repeatedly visited Avignon, particularly in the 1330s and 1340s. Another example of Petrarch’s criticism of Jean de Luxembourg, not cited by Margue, is a verse epistle to Enea dei Tolomei, probably composed in 1331.

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‘blind courage’ is based in the idea of throwing caution to the wind;60 Dolens is counseled to aspire to ‘contemptum vitae nobilem’ (noble contempt of life: 188). Ironically, then, a blind man who behaved too reasonably, too rationally, would be ineligible to become Ratio’s ultimate example of blindness overcome. While Ratio opens and closes her final exemplum with an outright justification of its inclusion in her discourse, its logical connection to the rest of her arguments is quite subtly exposed. Unlike the preceding exempla of Tiresias, Diodorus, Caius Drusus, and Appius Claudius, whose stories respond directly to Dolor’s contention that blindness has rendered him helpless and useless (‘Caecitate inops, et inutilis sum’), the military exempla that comprise Ratio’s penultimate response are pertinent only if one purposely misreads Dolor’s complaint ‘Caecus sum, nec quo pergam video.’ Dolor is plainly speaking in a literal fashion: he cannot see where he is going. Ratio’s response, an account of three men’s ‘virtutis actis ultimos’ (ultimate acts of virtue), makes sense only if Dolor’s ‘quo pergam’ is the grave (188). Ratio’s final set of exempla can thus remedy Dolor’s complaint only when the latter’s seemingly unambiguous statement is opened to interpretation; an appreciation of Ratio’s verbal remedy hinges upon an ability to read, as she does, figuratively. The final exemplum’s interpretive difficulties do not end there, however. The seeming defence of its inclusion ultimately problematizes it: the story of John the Blind in many ways contradicts the very mission of the text as expressed by Ratio. Firstly, in De remediis utriusque fortunae’s dialogues Ratio is attempting to sway her interlocutors to virtue through reason; yet, relating the story of a ‘stupendous’ man, Ratio apparently seeks the opposite of a reasonable or logical reaction. For that which is stupendous – from the − to be struck senseless, to be amazed at – results in a gerundive of stupere, momentary suspension of reason. One might therefore expect Reason herself not to attempt such a manoeuvre. And yet this is just one of many ironies building up to the dialogue’s concluding twist. Just as the story of John the Blind’s heroic death appears inconsistent with Ratio’s aims, so too is her explanation of its persuasiveness. In defence of her final exemplum, Ratio explains that John the Blind’s end might resonate better with Dolor because it occurred recently enough to be verifiable: this strategy is consistent with the medieval homiletic exemplum’s reliance on ‘the recent incident, guaranteed by the respectability of the witnesses, to the detriment of the famous histori-

60 John the Blind’s final charge is discussed most notably in the three redactions of Froissart’s Chroniques and in his Prison amoureuse, as well as in the chronicles of Jean le Bel (1356–61) and Jean de Venette (c.1359–60) and the Istore et Croniques de Flandres. His death is mentioned in far more cursory fashion in the so-called Chronique normande du XIVe siècle, the Chronique des quatre premiers Valois, and Villani’s Cronica.

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cal precedent’.61 Yet the terms in which she stakes her claims of veracity and verifiability run directly counter to her purported aims. Despite having repeatedly argued that eyesight is an undesirable and unnecessary instrument of sin, in introducing the last exemplum Ratio intimates that the ultimate guarantor of credibility is still the ability to see with the eyes of the body: videre oculis potuisti, you could have seen it with your own eyes. In order to enlighten Dolor, and persuade him that his mode of seeing is inferior, Ratio must call upon that very mode of seeing. Still, the dialogue’s greatest irony is yet to come. The exemplum of John the Blind, Ratio’s epic valorization of blindness, appears to the reader to have been designed as climax, a culmination of all preceding arguments. It is denied this significance by the sufferer’s incomprehension, however: an incomprehension signalled by Dolor’s reversion to his earlier reactions. Not surprisingly, Ratio’s contradictory arguments have so far failed (when blind you can commit fewer sins, but can still live a full life; throw caution to the wind, be reasonable; believe your eyes, reject ocularcentrism). Therefore, even though Dolor had seemed truly to be conversing with Ratio, communication comes to a standstill yet again. He not only continues to complain but, for the first time in II.96, he repeats an earlier complaint verbatim: his last lament, ‘Caecus sum’, is identical to his third and is an abbreviated echo of ‘Caecus sum, nec quo pergam video.’ Just as she had done in response to Dolor’s other near-repetition of an earlier complaint, Ratio again adjusts her therapeutic strategy to better meet her interlocutor’s abilities and needs. After his final complaint, irony overtakes exemplarity: when logical argument doesn’t restore the senses, Ratio resorts to humor.62 This third change in rhetorical strategy is the most surprising, as it represents the sharpest deviation (in subject matter and in tone) from pseudoSenecan precedent, from the rest of the chapter, and from many other dialogues of De remediis utriusque fortunae. As with the last exemplum, Ratio explicitly signals her tactical shift. Following Dolor’s second ‘caecus sum’, Ratio announces, ‘Iocari incipiam ni desistas queri’ (I will begin to joke unless you stop complaining: 189); again, Ratio seems to make her intentions transparent, but the possibility of reading this remark as sarcastic undermines Ratio’s professed pedagogical purpose. Even if he wished, Dolor would not have an opportunity to persist in his whining: Ratio betrays the warning she 61 Peter von Moos, ‘L’exemplum et les exempla des prêcheurs’, in Les Exempla médiévaux: Nouvelles perspectives, ed. Jacques Berlioz and Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu (Paris: Champion, 1998), 67. 62 This is but one of the dialogues displaying what Timothy Kircher has called the ‘jesting, ironic persona of Ratio.’ ‘On the Two Faces of Fortune (De remediis utriusque fortunae)’, in Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 251.

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has just given, proceeding with her joke without knowing whether Dolor will stop bothering her or not. She leaps directly into her witticism, which ends the chapter, unframed by any further introduction or interpretation. Her final lesson’s lack of moral explication only enhances its abruptness and its irony. Ratio’s snappy joke seeks to minimize the psychological devastation of blindness by making light of it: ‘Iocari incipiam ni desistas queri, nam quid aliud si vires attulisse tibi caecitas quivit, quam quod de seipso caecus effectus Asclepiades ait, uno scilicet ut puero comitatior gradiare’ (I will begin to joke unless you stop complaining. For instance, what else can blindness cause you, if you are strong of body, but what Asclepiades called, in reference to himself, the blind man effect: that of course you might walk with one more boy in your retinue: 189). Ratio’s simple sentence marks a moment of reversal from the weighty epic of John the Blind, made stupendous by blindness, to a light (and verbally sparse) jest. In need of a last-ditch remedy, Reason turns not to Asclepius but to Asclepiades. In so doing, she makes a final gesture toward healing the complainer’s lost sense instead of merely preparing him to cope with its loss. The sense in question, though, is not necessarily his eyesight. For just before reciting her series of military exempla, Ratio had criticized Dolor for surrendering to blindness, throwing away his intellect and his other senses as well: ‘tu confestim uno destitutus sensu reliquos oens, atque insuper mentem ipsam abiicis’. Indeed, Ratio has only confirmed her earlier suspicion that Dolor might have lost his inner light (188). The solution is not to recover eyesight – blindness, according to Ratio, should be embraced – but to preserve the other senses, restoring Dolor’s wits and especially his capacity for reason. Ratio can no longer treat Dolor’s ailment with likes: this is what she attempted to do throughout the chapter, with no success. She must therefore turn to a cure by contraries, restoring her patient’s intellect with an ironic witticism. Where reason fails, laughter is perhaps the best medicine. The reader can seize on the quip’s irony, in the first instance, through a comparison with Petrarch’s source in the Tusculanae disputationes V.39.63 While the language is similar, hints of irony emerge from an examination of the elements of Cicero’s discourse that Petrarch supplements, reconfigures, and takes away. Cicero relates the anecdote not as a concluding joke, but as one of a series of exempla of blind men who coped admirably with their condition: ‘Asclepiadem ferunt, non ignobilem Eretricum philosophum, cum quidam quaereret quid ei caecitas attulisset, respondisse, puero ut uno esset comitatior’ (It is related that Asclepiades, no obscure follower of the Eretrian school, on being asked by someone what blindness had brought him, answered that he had one more boy in his retinue).64 To Cicero’s account 63 Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), 538–9. I cite King’s translation. 64 Cicero includes Asclepiades as the sixth of nine noteworthy blind men, all of whom

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Petrarch has added both explicit and implicit indicators of humor. Not only does Ratio introduce the anecdote specifically as a joke, she indicates that its lesson will apply to Dolor ‘si vires’, if he is otherwise strong of body; since she has just affirmed that he is not, having ‘thrown away’ his physical and mental faculties, the reader is led to question the applicability of her joke. Ratio also adds to Asclepiades’s words the term ‘caecus effectus’ (the blind man effect). Beyond the question of whether the designation ‘caecus effectus’ is humorous – and it does strike this reader as such – it also adds to the ludic element of De remediis utriusque fortunae highlighted by Rawski, the game of identifying the material Petrarch has changed or added to his sources. With this addition to the Ciceronian exemplum, Petrarch differentiates between his initiated audience, familiar with the Roman source, and the uninitiated audience taking Ratio’s words at face value. The insistence that Asclepiades coined this term in order to talk about himself, de seipso, is a redundancy that perhaps signals a need for scepticism on the part of the reader. Such is the case with a further, seemingly minor addition to Asclepiades’s answer: the word scilicet (‘certainly’, ‘of course’). Earnest as it may appear, the insertion of scilicet is a typical indicator of irony: ‘words mentioned by Renaissance and earlier authors as frequently accompanying ironia likewise emphasize the speaker’s belief, albeit feigned, that his statement is true: scilicet (“of course”), vero (“truly”), videlicet (“clearly”), and Biblical Hebrew and vernacular equivalents’, as Dilwyn Knox has shown.65 Like ‘caecus effectus’, ‘scilicet’ does not appear in Cicero’s paraphrase of Asclepiades’ words. The insertion of a common indicator of irony within Asclepiades’s quip, in addition to Ratio’s undoing of her own lesson’s pedagogical value (‘si vires’) and the author’s game of ‘find the interpolation’ (‘caecus effectus’), points to irony operating at multiple levels of De remediis utriusque fortunae’s textual frame. Beyond its evident stylistic and episodic irony (the juxtaposition of an epic battlefield drama recounted in prolix detail with the spare retelling of a light-hearted quip), through selective editing of his source Petrarch inserts in Ratio’s final argument an ambiguity that heightens its ironic potential. Petrarch’s retelling of the quip is a close adaptation of his Ciceronian source, but, in conjunction with his additions, he excludes an essential detail – the identity of the Ascepiades in question. Cicero specifies that he is referring to the ‘non ignobilem Eretricum philosophum’, that is, Asclepiades of Phlius, according to Diogenes Laertius an older friend of the

Petrarch mentions in De caecitate save Gnaeus Aufidius. Cicero relates Asclepiades’s remark with a far more serious tone, presenting the philosopher’s quip as evidence of his admirable endurance of his condition rather than as a joke. 65 Ironia, 26–8. Knox provides further examples on p. 77. Quintilian likewise signals scilicet as a possible indicator of irony: The Orator’s Education, Book 9.2, vol. 4, 62.

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philosopher Menedemus (c.339–c.265 BC).66 But this Eretrian philosopher was not the best-known ancient by that name.67 Owing in part to its resonance with the name Asclepius, Asclepiades is a name typically associated with physicians: ‘Men of the name of Asclepiades were common enough, especially perhaps in north-western Asia Minor, where the worship of Asclepius was prominent. Many, but by no means all, were doctors, whether because the profession was certainly often hereditary, or because doctors sometimes took a suitable and auspicious name.’68 Probably the most famous man by that name, Asclepiades of Bithynia, was a medical doctor;69 indeed, in Isidore of Seville’s famous discussion of the classification of medicine outside of the seven liberal arts (Etym IV.13), Asclepiades of Bithynia is the only physician whom the encyclopaedist cites by name.70 While Cicero clearly differentiates the two, Petrarch’s Ratio simply identifies the author of the quip as ‘Asclepiades’. She does so not because the Asclepiades she cites was so well known as to render further identification unnecessary; on the contrary, the omission of this detail from an otherwise faithful condensation of Cicero’s already pithy anecdote seems obfuscatory. The authority whom Ratio cites at the end of the dialogue on blindness becomes an ambiguously empty signifier to be filled in by the reader. If this is another game of allusions, it is perhaps a double game, consisting of knowing to whom Ratio does and does not allude. It is notable that Ratio suppresses not just Asclepiades’s precise identity, but his identity as a philosopher, thus encouraging (or at least doing nothing to discourage) the sort of readerly confusion that might lead to the mistaken attribution of the quip to Asclepiades of Bithynia or to another medical prac-

66 Asclepiades is mentioned in the life of Menedemus, Book II, especially parts xiii–xiv. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950). 67 Asclepiades of Phlius is obscure enough not to have merited his own entry in Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth eds, Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 68 Elizabeth Rawson, ‘The Life and Death of Asclepiades of Bithynia’, The Classical Quarterly n.s. 32 (1982), 366. 69 Furthermore, Asclepiades of Bithynia is just the type of physician Petrarch loves to hate: according to Pliny the Elder ‘Asclepiades of Bithynia, an impoverished professor of rhetoric (orandi magister nec satis in arte ea quaestuosus), thinking to make more money, suddenly turned to medicine, though he knew nothing of drugs; but he recommended himself by his eloquence (torrenti ac meditata cotidie oratione blandiens), and reduced medicine to guess-work about causes. He applied five principles of treatment to a wide variety of ailments: abstinence from food and from wine, and massage, walking and carriage-exercise.’ Ibid., 358. 70 Petrarch was certainly familiar with the Etymologiae, as his father bought him a copy when he was a boy; this despite Petrarch’s claim in Seniles II.1 that he rarely consulted Isidore. See Ullmann, ‘Petrarch’s Favorite Books’, 33, 34, 37, and Rawski, ‘Petrarch’s Scholarship’, 294 and n. 61.

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titioner; after all, in the ancient world ‘doctors called Asclepiades are legion’.71 Ratio evokes a philosopher who shares his name with a famous physician, a name that echoes that of the god of medicine, in creating the image of a healer who is himself blind. This closing joke with its echoes of medical names is, given the suppression of most identifying information, as near as Ratio comes to discussing any conventional treatments for blindness. Despite the fact that blindness is a bodily and not just a psychological condition – and despite the wonder, just expressed in De tristitia et miseria (II.93), at the development of eyeglasses and other prosthetics – references to medicine and surgery are conspicuously absent from De caecitate. The only ‘medical practitioner’ cited in II.96 uses words as a therapeutic tool. These words, however, are employed in a manner that strips them of their dialogic function. Just as Asclepiades’s joke is presented in isolation, rather than as a response to a question (as it is in the Tusculanae disputationes), it is speech that truncates dialogue instead of fostering it. After the joke, De caecitate abruptly ends. Asclepiades has both dialogues’ last word; any response he may have elicited from his original interlocutor or from Dolor, and any subsequent gloss we might expect from Reason, is cut off. Instead Asclepiades’s words, as pronounced by Ratio, hang in the abyss, pointing to the emptiness of her dialogue with Dolor – an empty dialogue that recommences, with no apparent increase in understanding, in the next chapter and in the thirty-five more that follow. Petrarch’s authorial choices, from his language to his games of citation to his manipulation of the rhythm of dialogue, seem to bear little resemblance to the choices made independently, and only slightly later, by Bauchans. This discrepancy is perhaps due, in part, to the two authors’ very different notions of irony; for while fourteenth-century French thinkers such as Nicole Oresme (to whom, incidentally, Jean Daudin’s French translation of De remediis utriusque fortunae was long attributed) retained a relatively narrow definition of irony, Petrarch’s letters demonstrate that he understood irony in a fundamentally different, more expansive manner. Socratic irony, as Petrarch well knew, involves a questioner feigning ignorance in order to elicit a desired response. Beyond Familiares II.9, he repeatedly alludes to Socratic irony in De remediis utriusque fortunae: characterizing the philosopher’s answer to a question as ‘truly Socratic’ (‘vere Socraticum responsum’: II.67, De exilio), recounting ironic advice he had given to Alcibiades (‘hyronicum planeque Socraticum responsum’: II.35, De invidia), and alluding to Aristotle’s mockery of Socrates’s ironic method (‘quo in studio et si Socratem ludat Aristoteles’: II.114, De totius corporis dolore). In De remediis utriusque fortunae Petrarch not only refers to Socratic irony but illustrates its use, distorting the pseudo-Senecan text’s dialogic form to ironic ends. 71

Rawson, ‘Life and Death’, 365 n. 42.

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De remediis utriusque fortunae’s greater irony may be precisely this voiding of dialogue of its communicative power. The chapter De caecitate, for instance, moves away from a model that might more closely resemble a genuine dialogue, not by eliminating one speaker’s words, as does Bauchant, but by retaining, even amplifying, its form. Petrarch’s sufferer speaks more frequently than his pseudo-Senecan counterpart, but no more ideas are exchanged; two characters speak, but no dialogue takes place. In such a text, the retention of dialogic form is best explained as an ironic gesture. In light of Petrarch’s references to Socratic irony in the Familiares and in De remediis utriusque fortunae itself, it is more than plausible that the remedial dialogues’ irony is not just situational (the more speech occurs, the less genuine exchange takes place) but Socratic. If so, the reader must approach De remediis utriusque fortunae in a new, and wholly counterintuitive, way. Given Ratio’s authoritative manner of speech, it is she, and not the complainers, whom the reader naturally regards as a mouthpiece of the author’s wisdom. If the text stages Socratic irony, however – if the sufferer’s simplicity is an ironic feint designed to elicit the desired responses from Ratio – then the sufferer is the true master of the dialogue, and Ratio his pawn. While Ratio gives answers that she claims should be definitive, Dolor and the other passions prolong the dialogue, bringing forth further arguments and exempla; certain of their complaints, such as ‘Corporeos amisi oculos’, demonstrate that they have indeed understood Ratio’s logic, and thus that their ignorance is at least partially feigned. In De caecitate, therefore, Dolor stops complaining only when Ratio chooses to fight irony with irony. It is she who has learned her lesson. Asclepiades’s ironic remark, and the (Socratically) ironic dialogue it caps off, are in many ways reflective of De remediis utriusque fortunae’s greater ironies. Even beyond its guiding notion of ‘strife’, manifested in its dialogic form and its division into two books, the text is anchored in a fundamental strategic paradox: swinging between extremes to achieve the middle ground. Virtue is sought in wild fluctuation between reason and the passions, between hope and sorrow, rather than adherence to a golden mean; as with her allusion to John the Blind’s ‘stupendous’ heroism, Reason’s strategy is often less than reasonable. Does structuring a remedy text, ostensibly voiced by Reason, on a fundamental irony constitute any remedy at all? Does Ratio offer a cure by contraries, as the preface to Book II suggests, or the refutation of any such possibility?

Petrarch in France: Des Remèdes de l’une et l’autre fortune The question of whether Petrarchan irony can serve as a cure is perhaps best addressed through a brief consideration of the late medieval reception and translation of De remediis utriusque fortunae. Particularly in France, it was Petrarch’s Latin letters and especially the De remediis that secured his reputation among the early humanists. Jean de Montreuil, for instance, in his letter

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praising the ‘Devotissimi catholici ac celeberrimi philosophi moralis Francisci Petrarche’, goes on to detail his collation of five manuscripts of De remediis; Gerson’s Ash Wednesday sermon of 1389, too, draws inspiration from several dialogues appearing early in Book I of the same work.72 Christine de Pizan’s sole explicit allusion to Petrarch in her works, identified by Angus Kennedy, paraphrases and reworks arguments from De remediis II.127.73 It is thus apparent that the French humanists of the turn of the fifteenth century ‘held the De remediis in particularly high esteem’74 despite Petrarch’s remarks disparaging non-Italian poets and orators (Seniles IX.1), which, according to Nadia Margolis and Lori Walters, negatively impacted the Italian humanist’s reputation in France. Though De remediis utriusque fortunae was apparently not widely read until after Petrarch’s death in 1374,75 and thus well after Seniles IX.1 had raised French commentators’ hackles, the controversy does not seem to have diminished its popularity.76 Jean Daudin (d. 1382) translated De remediis utriusque fortunae for Charles V, commanding a price of 200 francs, in 1378.77 Daudin insists, however, that this book of ‘exemples de vertus’ is not really translated for benefit of the king, ‘qui, tousjours estant saine, n’a mestier de medecines’ (who, always being healthy, has no need for medicines), but for the benefit of others.78 72 Mann, ‘La Fortune de Pétrarque en France’, 4–5, 7–8. See also Ezio Ornato, ‘La prima fortuna del Petrarca in Francia’, Studi francesi 14 (1961), 201–17 and 15 (1961), 401–14; Dario Cecchetti, ‘Sulla fortuna del Petrarca in Francia: un testo dimenticato di Nicolas de Clamanges’, Studi francesi 32 (1967), 201–22. For a different point of view concerning Petrarch’s reception among the French humanists, see Nadia Margolis, ‘Culture vantée, culture inventée: Christine, Clamanges et le défi de Pétrarque’, in Au champ des escriptures, ed. Eric Hicks, Diego Gonzalez, and Philippe Simon (Paris: Champion, 2000), 269–308; and Lori Walters, ‘“Translating” Petrarch: Cité des dames II.7.1, Jean Daudin, and Vernacular Authority’, in Christine de Pizan 2000: Studies on Christine de Pizan in Honor of Angus J. Kennedy, ed. John Campbell and Nadia Margolis (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 283–97. Walters claims it is because of ‘Petrarch’s excellence in vernacular as well as in Latin style, when conveying essential moral and aesthetic principles’ that Petrarch appealed to many French humanists (285), but this premise is shaky, since there is little evidence that his vernacular works were admired by French humanists in the Middle Ages. 73 The reference was signalled by Angus Kennedy in ‘A Note on Christine de Pizan and Petrarch’, Celestinesca 11 (1987), 24, and its probable Petrarchan source identified by Lori Walters, ‘“Translating” Petrarch’, 288. 74 Walters, ‘“Translating” Petrarch’, 289. 75 Margolis, ‘Culture vantée’, 274. 76 Jean de Hesdin, for instance, had already replied to Petrarch’s taunt around 1367–70. Margolis, ‘Culture vantée’, 275. 77 A second translation was executed at Rouen in 1503. On both translations, see Léopold Delisle, ‘Anciennes traductions françaises du traité de Pétrarque sur les remèdes de l’une et l’autre fortune’, Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Nationale XXXIV:1 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1891), 5–32. 78 Ibid., 25–6. Galliot du Pré’s dedication to his 1523 printed edition of the Daudin translation (which he attributes to Nicole Oresme, as do several manuscripts) offers

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Daudin’s judgement of the text’s healing potential is apparent in his prologue. Included in five of the eight manuscripts known to Léopold Delisle, the prologue introduces the text and cites the substantial list of authorities to whom Daudin had recourse in preparing his translation.79 Immediately after providing the title and author of the book, Daudin makes explicit De remediis’s link with complexional theory and the principle of contraries. He translates the treatise lequel, pour remedier aux langoureuses pensees humaines, icelui excellent et très renommé clerc maistre François Petrach, fleurentin, compassa nagaires et intitula Des Remèdes de l’une et l’autre fortune: pour ce que, aussi comme la complexion corporelle, par excès de chaleur ou de froideur ou d’autres qualitez, ensuit maladies et mort, se, par remèdes medecinables, tel excès des dittes qualitez n’est ramené au moien de santé, desquelles qualitez est santé formée, quant elles sont ordonnées en deue proporcion; en celle manière, humain courage, duquel, selon ce que dit Boece, la santé n’est autre chose que vertu, ne la maladie autre chose que vices, par les proufitables enseignemens de ce livre soit préservé et gardé sain de toutes grevances de passions ou de mauvaises affections; et que, s’il advient [que] par mauvais gouvernement il perde sa santé, elle soit tantost reparée et restituée par la doctrine de ce présent livre.80 which, in order to remedy langorous human thoughts, the excellent and very renowned Florentine clerk François Petrach composed not long ago and entitled On the Remedies for One Fortune and the Other: so that just as the corporeal complexion, by an excess of heat or cold or other qualities, leads to sickness and death if such an excess of the said qualities (of which health is constituted when they are ordered in due proportion) is not brought back to the middle ground of health through medical remedies; in such a manner, human consciousness, whose health, according to Boethius, is nothing other than virtue, nor its sickness anything else but vice, might through the profitable teachings of this book be preserved and kept healthy of all pains of the passions or bad desires; and so that, if it happens that by ill conduct he should lose his health, it may immediately be repaired and restituted by this book’s doctrine.

It is plain that Daudin, the near-contemporary translator, regards the book’s structural and logical dependence on binaries as analogous to the principle of cure by contraries. Petrarch’s treatise works because it offers not just any remedy, but the contrary of whatever pains or desires may afflict the reader.

similar flattery via the language of immunity: ‘comme l’oeil de chascun mortel voit et peult regarder, vous avez justement la vertu de constance contre tous assaulx et agitacions des soubdaines et aveuglées impulsions de fortune.’ Ibid., 35. 79 The prologue is printed in ibid., 23–7. 80 Ibid., 24; emphasis added.

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This healing is achieved through dialogue that, at least in certain chapters such as De caecitate, is best understood as ironic. One major contrast in the ways in which Petrarch and his French readers appear to understand the concept of literary remedy, however, is manifest in the authorities that both Daudin and the anonymous 1503 translator cite in their prologues. Rather than mentioning Seneca – who was known to many French readers as the author of often-anthologized proverbs, which are based on excerpts from the stoic’s writings81 – both French translators of Petrarch have recourse, first and foremost, to Boethius.82 And yet, even though Boethius figures near the top of Petrarch’s list of favorite books (just after Cicero, Seneca, and a squeezed-in Aristotle represented only by the Ethics), he is not an acknowledged authority in Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae. Rawski identifies Boethius as one of authors from whom Petrarch draws ‘sayings, allusions, echoes, and reminiscences’, but notes no direct citations.83 According to Rawski, ‘the absence of any reference to Boethius’ De consolatione Philosophiae may seem surprising in view of the fact that the Consolation appears in the lists of Petrarch’s favorite books, and that [De remediis utriusque fortunae] is a book in the Boethian tradition’; he proposes that Petrarch may have neglected to cite from the Consolation because he considered it ‘as being among the opera communia – works found in many places and widely accessible’.84 I propose, however, that Boethius is left to the side because De remediis utriusque fortunae is not ‘a book in the Boethian tradition’. As we will see in the following chapter, the Boethian tradition, especially in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century France, represents an altogether different type of healing. While post-Boethian remedy texts are still dialogic (and stoic in inspiration), the cures they effect are not ironic, like Petrarch’s, but metaphoric.

81 On these proverbs and the florilegia in which they were transmitted, see Marguerite Oswald, ‘Les Enseignement Seneque’, Romania 90 (1969), 31–78, 202–41. 82 The Boethian framework that many French readers seem to have imposed upon Petrarch’s text extends to the domain of manuscript illumination as well: according to J. B. Trapp, ‘at the opening of French fifteenth-century manuscripts [of de remediis utriusque fortunae] a conventional figure of the unlaureate author is often accompanied by the ultimately Boethian figure of blind and capricious fortune, with her wheel’. The image of Fortune and her wheel is ‘the most frequent illustrator’s formula’ for French-produced manuscripts of the Latin text and of Daudin’s translation. J. B. Trapp, ‘Illustrated Manuscripts of Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae’, in Poetry and Philosophy in the Middle Ages: A Festschrift for Peter Dronke, ed. John Marenbon (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 219, 236. 83 Rawski, ‘Petrarch’s Scholarship’, 292. 84 Ibid., 294.

4 Metaphor as Experimental Medicine METAPHOR BLINDNESS AS EXPERIMENTAL AND THERAPY MEDICINE

est la poisie belle et subtille quant elle puet servir a plusieurs ententes et que on la puet prendre a divers propos poetry is beautiful and subtle when it can serve several meanings and be taken in different ways Avision-Christine, preface, ex-Phillipps 1281

Contemporary disability theory warns of the danger of metaphorizing physical impairments: Susan Sontag maintains in Illness as Metaphor that ‘the most truthful way of regarding illness – and the healthiest way of being ill – is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking’, while David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, in their groundbreaking study Narrative Prosthesis, characterize metaphors of disability as ‘opportunistic’ narrative devices.2 That said, in late medieval narrative it is often not just a disability or illness, but also its cure, that is metaphorized. Are such therapies ‘untruthful’ or ‘opportunistic’ as well? Or do they free the poetic subject from the constraints of disability metaphors, allowing for more flexible models of the symbolic potential of the body? A reading of remedial metaphors in late medieval French adaptations of Boethius’s Consolatio Philosophiae – a text that is itself dependent on a rhetoric of illness and cure – demonstrates that metaphoric therapies serve as a vehicle for experimentation not just with medicalized imagery but with narrative and lyric form. Boethius’s Consolatio Philosophiae (524) is, as Pierre Courcelle and many others have demonstrated, a foundational text for late medieval vernacular poetics.3 The Consolatio’s influence in France is particularly pro1 This unique preface, contained in a presentation manuscript of unknown provenance, was published by Christine Reno in ‘The Preface to the Avision-Christine in ex-Phillipps 128’, in Reinterpreting Christine de Pizan, ed. Earl Jeffrey Richards (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 208. 2 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, AIDS and its Metaphors (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1989), 3. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 47. 3 Bibliography on the Boethian legacy in the later medieval West is extensive. See Pierre Courcelle, La Consolation de Philosophie dans la tradition littéraire: Antécédents

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nounced: in addition to the influence of the Latin commentary tradition there are some thirteen extant Middle French translations of the Consolation, of which the first eleven date from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.4 The translation best known today, and securely attributed to Jean de Meun since the early twentieth century, is exclusively in prose.5 Later versions (including the fourteenth-century Livre de Boece de Consolacion that in its manuscript tradition often bore Jean de Meun’s preface, leading to longstanding confusion), experiment with Boethius’s prosimetric form: ‘there was’, according to Noel Kaylor, ‘a development from the early all-prose, through the intermediary all-verse renderings, toward the later mixed, verse-prose translations’, with the mixed or prosimetric versions appearing in the fourteenth century.6 Indeed, the increased prevalence of prosimetric translations of the Consolatio throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries mirrors a broader trend in that same period toward the mixed narrative and lyric texts often designated today as ‘hybrids’.7 Beyond its literary vogue, though, this formal experimentation is fundamental to the curative strategy of Middle French remedy texts in the Boethian tradition.8 It is in the appropriation of both metaphor et Postérité de Boèce (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1967). Alastair Minnis (ed.), The Medieval Boethius: Studies in the Vernacular Translations of De consolatione philosophiae (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987). Nigel F. Palmer, ‘Latin and Vernacular in the Northern European Tradition of the De Consolatione Philosophiae’, in Boethius: His Life, Thought and Influence, ed. Margaret Gibson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 362–409. Maarten J. F. M. Hoenen and Lodi Nauta (ed.), Boethius in the Middle Ages: Latin and Vernacular Traditions of the Consolatio philosophiae (Leiden: Brill, 1997). On parodic rewritings of the Consolatio see Ann W. Astell, ‘Visualizing Boethius’s Consolation as Romance’, in New Directions in Boethian Studies, ed. Noel Harold Kaylor, Jr. and Philip Edward Phillips (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), 111–24. 4 On the Latin commentaries, see Courcelle, La Consolation de Philosophie, and Minnis, Magister Amoris. Noel Harold Kaylor Jr. discusses the number of French translations in The Medieval Consolation of Philosophy: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1992), 107. For an overview of French translations of Boethius, see Rita Copeland, ‘Translation’, in Medieval France: An Encyclopedia, ed. William W. Kibler and Grover A. Zinn (New York: Garland, 1995); and Glynnis Cropp, ‘The Medieval French Tradition’, in Hoenen and Nauta, 243–65. 5 In 1873 Léopold Delisle identified the prose translation as the one executed by Jean de Meun: ‘Anciennes traductions françaises de la Consolation de Boëce conservées à la Bibliothèque Nationale’, Bibliothèque de l’école des Chartes 34 (1873), 5–32. This attribution was not widely accepted until firmly established by Ernest Langlois in ‘La Traduction de Boèce par Jean de Meun’, Romania 42 (1913), 331–69. 6 Kaylor, The Medieval Consolation of Philosophy, 10. See also Ludmilla Evdokimova, ‘La traduction en vers et la traduction en prose à la fin du XIIIe et au début du XIVe siècles: quelques lectures de la Consolation de Boèce’, Le Moyen Âge 109 (2003), 237–60. 7 On the ‘hybrid’ designation, see Julie Singer, ‘Clockwork Genres: Temperance and the Articulated Text in Late Medieval France’, Exemplaria 21 (2009), 225–47. 8 On prosimetric form, see Peter Dronke, Verse with Prose from Petronius to Dante: the Art and Scope of the Mixed Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994);

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and form that late medieval French translations and adaptations of the Consolatio, especially Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune, create alternate ways of healing. In so doing, Machaut exploits a dimension of literature’s therapeutic potential at which Consolation only hinted – pseudoautobiography and fixed-form lyric as both experimental and experiential medicine. With its metaphor of Philosophy and the narrator as healer and patient, Boethius’s Consolatio Philosophiae offers its narrator (and reader) a brand of moral and rational therapy that is firmly inscribed in the body. Philosophy’s medicalized function is explicit from the Book I, prose I, when she orders the tawdry poetic muses (famously dismissed as ‘scenicas meretriculas’), who are impotent to cure man’s ills, away from the sick man (‘aegrum’).9 Their sort of song, ‘associated with an imprisonment in the body’, is presented as anathema to healing; and yet it is with words and songs inspired by her own philosophical muses that Philosophy provides her cure, restoring light to the narrator’s eyes and reason to his mind.10 The initial phase of her cure, a restoration of the narrator’s (figurative) light, is described in metaphoric terms in Book I, metre iii. Like a wind blowing away clouds that prematurely blot out the daylight, Philosophy dispels the ‘tristitiae nebulis’ of the narrator’s mind (Book I, prose iii, 140). Philosophy’s words are a cognitive instrument, providing the suffering narrator with the moral and rational tools with which to withstand adversity. Framed within the metaphor of doctor and patient – the metaphor itself being, according to Umberto Eco, ‘a cognitive instrument, at once a source of clarity and enigma’11 – Philosophy’s discourse is a doubly ‘eye-opening’ process. This quick restoration of light to the narrator’s eyes is only the beginning of his rehabilitation, though. Having assumed the role of the physician, Philosophy outlines her proposed course of treatment in Book I, prose v: ‘nondum te validiora remedia contingunt. Itaque lenioribus paulisper utemur, ut quae in tumorem perturbationibus influentibus induruerunt, ad

Joseph Harris and Karl Reichl (eds), Prosimetrum: Crosscultural Perspectives on Narrative in Prose and Verse (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997). 9 Boethius, Theological Tractates and Consolation of Philosophy, trans. S. J. Tester (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 8. The Boethian text is cited from this edition; I use Tester’s translation. 10 Sylvia Huot, ‘Guillaume de Machaut and the Consolation of Poetry’, Modern Philology 100 (2002), 193. On music in the Consolatio, see David S. Chamberlain, ‘Philosophy of Music in the Consolatio of Boethius’, Speculum 45 (1970), 80–97. The language of light and vision is especially prominent in Books I and II, which were, not coincidentally, the most influential books on later medieval French adaptations. See Sarah Kay, ‘Touching Singularity: Consolation, Philosophy, and Poetry in the French Dit’, in The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Catherine E. Léglu and Stephen J. Milner (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 21–38. 11 Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 102.

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acrioris vim medicaminis recipiendum tactu blandore mollescant’ (you are not yet ready for strong medicines, so we shall for a little use milder ones, so that by our gentler touch what has swollen hard under the influence of all these passions and worries may soften and become fit to be treated with a sharper, stronger physic: 164–5). As Philosophy indicates, her consolation is a gradual and graduated course of therapy, beginning gently and increasing in intensity until the cure is complete.12 Robert McMahon has noted that, while Book I of the Consolatio ends with Philosophy’s diagnosis, ‘Book II is explicitly presented as the clearing of the prisoner’s vision.’13 This overt medical discussion, however, comes only after the initial, metaphorically based phase of the cure has been effected. Philosophy’s breezy dispelling of the clouds provides us a first opportunity to interrogate the therapeutic function of metaphor in general before moving on to the specific figures deployed in fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury France. Metaphor is perhaps the most obvious of all vehicles for literary medicalization, as metaphor implicates the transfer of a word or phrase to an object or action different from, but analogous to, that to which it is literally applicable. Medicalization, then, as defined in the Introduction, is at its core a metaphoric process: when poetic constructs are referred to with language typically reserved for medical therapies, the literal language of medical and surgical treatment is transferred from its own practical context. ‘Real’ physical treatments are verbalized in a manner that can only be comprehended through the establishment of a system of analogies between medical and poetic practice. As the poet becomes a doctor, his or her words become balms, diagnostic tools, surgical instruments. Medieval ‘remedy’ texts deriving their central metaphor from Boethius thus provide another manner, beyond the distraction that poetry can offer the lovesick or the gentle visual exercise that large-print books provide, in which a book might serve as a remedy. The fact that Philosophy’s therapy begins with a metaphor is also of considerable significance insofar as it signals a type of textual healing that

12 Philip Edward Phillips, ‘Lady Philosophy’s therapeutic method: the “gentler” and “stronger” remedies in Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae’, Medieval English Studies 10:2 (2002), 5–27. John R. Fortin argues that Philosophy’s cure is never really complete, however, as the prisoner rejects her programme and the only consolation the book offers is thus ironic. ‘The Nature of Consolation in The Consolation of Philosophy’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 78 (2004), 293–307. 13 Robert McMahon, ‘The Structural Articulation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy’, Mediaevalia et Humanistica n.s. 21 (1994), 55. For Elaine Scarry, the Consolatio is structured according to hierarchy of cognitive faculties, with Book II representing the imaginative faculty. ‘The Well-Rounded Sphere: The Metaphysical Structure of the Consolation of Philosophy’, in Essays in the Numerical Criticism of Medieval Literature, ed. Caroline D. Eckhardt (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1980), 91–140.

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will become more pronounced in medieval adaptations of the Boethian work. As Sarah Kay has noted, medieval rewritings of the Consolatio tend to offer a form of consolation that is ‘more physical’, making ‘more concessions to the here and now of the embodied individual’.14 The Consolatio’s more physical, medical metaphor fits neatly with a late medieval penchant for medicalized language and for metaphor pertaining to the body: in medieval Europe, Edward Wheatley contends, ‘metaphor and reality structure each other synergistically’, with blindness in particular functioning as ‘both fact and metaphor’.15 Furthermore, the adaptation of Boethian metaphor inscribes itself within a larger cultural project of translation, both linguistic and disciplinary. Metaphor and translation are, etymologically speaking, of a pair. ‘As is well known’, Rita Copeland reminds us, ‘the standard rhetorical term for metaphor, translatio, also denoted translation in medieval usage’; both terms capture a sense of transfer, of displacement.16 The translation of Boethian metaphor to a late medieval French context at once reinforces the analogy between poesis and medicine and inserts it within a newly medicalized milieu. While derived from earlier models, the late medieval metaphor of poet as healer takes on surprising new dimensions as verbal remedy is imbued with greater specificity and novelty. By not just blowing away clouds but removing cataracts and improving digestion, late medieval adapters of Boethius are able to experiment with the latest therapies without subjecting their first-person narrative personae to any physical risk. Later medieval French translations of the Consolatio, many of which focus and elaborate on their source’s medicalized discourse, tend to elevate the language of medical therapy from a recurring figure to a guiding metaphor. Jean de Meun’s prologue to his translation, for instance, explicitly identifies the protagonists as ‘li malades et li mires’; because this prologue was also commonly appended to fifteenth-century copies of the Livre de Boece de consolacion, it provided a framework through which a large number of late medieval French readers encountered the Consolatio.17 The medieval translator thereby foregrounds the metaphor that, while omnipresent in his Boethian source, was previously more of a leitmotif than a conceptual anchor for the text. Indeed, in later medieval readings of the Consolation the doctor–patient metaphor has become one of the prosimetrum’s most salient features. That this figure had become a key characteristic of the Consolatio 14 15

Kay, ‘Touching Singularity’, 36. Edward Wheatley, ‘“Blind” Jews and Blind Christians: Metaphorics of Marginalization in Medieval Europe’, Exemplaria 14 (2002), 353. 16 Rita Copeland, ‘Rhetoric and Vernacular Translation in the Middle Ages’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 9 (1987), 42. 17 The text of Jean de Meun’s translation was edited by V. L. Dedeck-Héry, ‘Boethius’ De consolatione by Jean de Meun’, Medieval Studies 14 (1952), 171. On the inclusion of his prologue in manuscripts of the Livre de Boece de Consolacion, see Glynnis M. Cropp’s introduction to her critical edition (Geneva: Droz, 2006).

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by the late Middle Ages is clear, not just from direct translations of Bothius’s work into European vernaculars (leading up to John Bracegirdle’s evocatively titled English Psychopharmacon, the Mindes Medicine or the Phisicke of Philosophie, 1602) but from literary adaptations of the Consolatio such as Christine de Pizan’s Avision Christine, 1405; Alain Chartier’s Livre de l’Espérance, 1429; and especially the extension of its central healing metaphor in Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune (c.1341).18 Each of these texts experiments to some degree with ‘hybrid’ or prosimetric form. Already in Boethius the metra reinforce yet stand apart from the prose’s expository discourse, effecting a sort of therapy that has prompted Victoria B. Jordan to characterize them as ‘medicinal poems’.19 The therapeutic role of the verse seems to be well acknowledged in the medieval Boethian tradition. Just after the comparison to ‘li malades et li mires’, Jean de Meun’s prologue, as appended to the Livre de Boece de Consolacion, underlines the therapeutic function of form: ‘es proses il use de raisons qui font a consolacion et es vers rymez entremesle aucunes delectables raisons qui font oublier la douleur’ (in the prose sections he relies on arguments that lead to consolation and in the rhymed verses he mixes in some delectable arguments that cause one to forget one’s misery).20 While prose is presented as the domain of reason, verse provides the distraction and delight needed to move beyond one’s pain. Medieval French adaptations thus seem to present a somewhat less complicated stance on the healing power of music than does Boethian Philosophy, with her reliance on some muses and dismissal of others.21 The Livre Boece de Consolacion’s gloss more explicitly confirms what Petrarch has also shown us, that rhetoric can provide remedy, when explaining Philosophie’s reference to ‘lesquelz turbacions il me couvient appeticer par legiers remedes, c’est a dire par legieres sentences de rethorique’ (which troubles it behooves me to diminish with light remedies,

18 The Remede de Fortune is typically thought to have been composed c.1341, but no clear consensus exists as to the exact date. Hoeppfner places the Remede before 1342 because of its usual manuscript placement preceding firmly dated Dit dou Lion, but concedes that the earliest concrete reference to the Remede is in the Confort d’ami, providing a terminus ante quem of 1356–7. Oeuvres de Guillaume de Machaut, vol. 2, ii. Daniel Poirion, however, has proposed a composition date c.1350, though the reasons he cites do not exclude an earlier date. Le Poète et le Prince: l’évolution du lyrisme courtois de Guillaume de Machaut à Charles d’Orléans (Paris: PUF, 1965), 201, n. 28. 19 Victoria B. Jordan, ‘Form and Function in Boethius’ Consolatio philosophiae: The Role of the Carmina’, Carmina Philosophiae 1 (1992), 1–18, 3. 20 Livre de Boece de Consolacion, ed. Cropp, 88–9. 21 Boethian Philosophy has not, however, rejected ‘the medicinal potential of verse [but] only the misuse of poetry in pure lamentationes.’ Phillips, ‘Lady Philosophy’s Therapeutic Method’, 4.

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that is, with light rhetorical statements).22 In late medieval post-Boethian texts, the formal play of lyric and narrative verse or prose figures the convergence of rhetoric and music in Philosophy’s cure, often privileging the therapeutic function of lyric.23 In Machaut’s Remede de Fortune and Alain Chartier’s Livre de l’Esperance in particular, it is not just medical metaphor, but the hybrid or prosimetric form through which it is expressed, that offers a cure.

Surgery and Remede The medieval French elaboration of Boethius’s remedial metaphor is most developed, and most apparent, in Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune.24 Composed in the 1340s, this text is a medieval ‘hybrid’ par excellence, integrating seven notated lyric pieces in a narrative that stages the fictive circumstances of the songs’ composition and performance.25 The narrator, who is probably identifiable with the pseudoautobiographical narratorial persona Machaut develops throughout the greater corpus of his dits, composes verse for the lady whom he secretly loves.26 Caught with one of his poems and forced to read it publicly before his lady and her companions, he refuses to admit to its authorship and flees. The bashful lover roams through the park of Hesdin castle, eventually falling into a melancholic faint. Esperance (Hope) arrives to restore and inspire the lover, and with her encouragement, he declares his love to his lady and they exchange rings; his beloved’s subsequent behavior, however, leads him to question her sincerity. The grafting of Boethius’s metaphor onto a more complex narratorial 22 Livre de Boece de Consolacion, ed. Cropp, 116. As in Cropp’s edition, italics indicate the gloss. On these glosses see Glynnis M. Cropp, ‘Les gloses du Livre de Boece de Consolacion’, Le Moyen Âge 92 (1986), 367–81. 23 Sarah Kay points out that ‘French fourteenth-century poets found the poetry in Boethius’ Consolation more consolatory than Philosophy’s reasoned prose.’ ‘Touching Singularity’, 21. 24 This dit is also identified as ‘le confort de Fortune’ in the table to the duke of Berry’s manuscript, per Hoepffner, Oeuvres de Guillaume de Machaut, vol. 2, i. On manuscripts of the Remede, see Le Jugement du roy de Behaigne and Remede de Fortune, ed. James I. Wimsatt and William W. Kibler (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 17–18, 40–46. 25 The insertions are, in order: lai, complainte, chanson royal, baladelle, ballade, virelai, and rondeau, all notated. There is also an eighth intercalated poem, a priere situated between the ballade and the virelai, that is not set to music. 26 On the notion of pseudoautobiography and its deployment in the works of Machaut, see Laurence de Looze, ‘“Pseudo-Autobiography” and the Body of Poetry in Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune’, L’Esprit créateur 33:4 (1993), 73–86; Laurence de Looze, Pseudo-autobiography in the Fourteenth Century: Juan Ruiz, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, and Geoffrey Chaucer (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1997). I have elsewhere argued that the first-person narrator of many of Machaut’s dits is a single character appearing in multiple works: ‘Lines of Sight’, 184–99.

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persona, developed over the author’s entire body of work, lends depth to the physiology of the narrator’s suffering; the fact that this narrator is himself a poet, exploring the healing potential of words, facilitates the actualization of the metaphorical shift. Machaut’s moment of metaphoric healing accompanies Esperance’s arrival at the midpoint of the Remede de Fortune. The discourse of Esperance, and the surgical analogy with which it is introduced, constitute the heart of Machaut’s text, prompting readerly reflection on what it means to translate and to adapt, and to transform consolation into remedy, or philosophy into hope. It also marks the turning point between the narrator’s descent into melancholy and his later rise to the joy of love, a moment of transition from a conventional love-narrative to a more recognizable rewriting of the Consolatio. Indeed, Esperance’s intervention represents at once the author’s most direct adaptation of Boethius and the moment at which the allegorical figure’s medical capabilities come to the forefront.27 As Jean de Meun does in his prologue, Machaut foregrounds the doctor–patient figure as essential to the dit’s pedagogical function. But while contemporaneous Middle French translations tend to highlight Boethius’s medical language without elaborating on it, Machaut develops the metaphor by inscribing Esperance’s initial therapeutic gesture specifically within contemporary surgical practice. Esperance’s therapy arises in a context more courtly than surgical. Guillaume, depressed at having humiliated himself in front of his beloved, lies in a garden. His mental and sensory faculties are already diminished, love, shame, beauty, fear, and secrecy having conspired to strip him of ‘le memoire et les .v. sens’ (his memory and his five senses: vv. 708–12).28 Weakened by his melancholy, he is only able partially to open one eye: ‘Et entre ouvri l’un de mes yeus / Un petit, car je ne pos mieus’ (And I opened up one of my eyes a bit, for I could do no more: vv. 1499–1500). Guillaume then recounts how his first glimpse of Esperance, who has come to bolster his confidence, restores both his moral strength and his sight. When he sees her through his one squinting eye, her ‘face blanche et vermeille … Si clerement resplandissoit / Que sa clarté esclarcissoit / Les tenebres’ (pale and rosy face shone so brightly that its brightness lightened the darkness: vv. 1516–21). Just like Boethius’s Philosophy, Esperance has begun to dispel the clouds of

27 Machaut is presumed to have worked from the Latin text, not from a medieval French translation of the Consolation: Oeuvres ed. Hoepffner, vol. 2, xx. Sylvia Huot points out that Esperance is not only a clear echo of Boethian Philosophy, ‘but she is also a courtly figure, finding her source in the Roman de la Rose’. ‘Guillaume de Machaut and the Consolation of Poetry’, 171. On the change from Philosophy to Hope, see Douglas Kelly, Medieval Imagination: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Courtly Love (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 130–37, and Oeuvres, vol. 2, xxiii. 28 The Remede is cited, by verse number, from Wimsatt and Kibler’s edition. Translations are my own.

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psychological darkness. Machaut’s physician does not stop there, however, but takes the idea of the restoration of light to its next logical extension. Car tout aussi com d’une drame Le bon maistre guarist et drame L’ueil empechié de cataracte, Dou quel il couvient qu’il abate Par soubtil enging une toie Qui la clarté tient et desvoie, Et li rent sa clarté premiere, Tout einssi me rendoit lumiere De cuer, de memoire, et de l’ueil, Et me mettoit d’umbre en solleil Sa clarté et sa resplandour. (vv. 1533–43) For just as a good master uses a drame to cure and mend the eye afflicted with cataract, from which he must, with subtle intellect, remove a cover that holds back and diverts light, returning it to its original clarity; thus she restored the light of my heart, my memory, and my eye, and I was brought from shadow to sun by her [Hope’s] brightness and splendor.

The resplendent woman whose brilliant luminosity restores the narrator’s eyesight is already familiar to readers of Boethius, but the instrumentwielding surgeon is not. The innovative conceptual link of the narrator’s hopeless state to a specific diagnosis (cataract) and cure (surgery) not only medicalizes the medieval text but also simultaneously incorporates the narrator’s condition in poetic and medical models of the eye. The medicalization of the narrator’s complaint is not as thorough as it may first appear, however, as Machaut’s language creates instead a stylized and poeticized version of a surgery. The terminology with which Machaut refers to his narrator’s affliction and cure – drame, cataracte, abattre, toie – demonstrates the mixed linguistic registers of poetic medicalization. Cataracte is, in Middle as in modern French, a technical term, and while common in medical and surgical texts, its appearance in a dit is rare to say the least. The meaning of drame is far more obscure, as the drame (or drachme), a unit of weight current in medical and scientific usage, does not figure among the instruments typically used in cataract couching.29 The verb abattre or rabattre, on the other hand, is typically used in reference to cataract surgery, and an abasseur is a specialist in cataract surgery. Toie and taie designate cataracts

29 The meaning of the term drame was perhaps not apparent to some readers either: this verse in the duke of Berry’s manuscript (BN fr. 9221), executed c.1390, reads ‘dame.’ Remede, 252.

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or opaque spots on the cornea in popular and learned texts alike.30 Thus poetic medicalization, as practised by Machaut, is a linguistic manipulation combining technical terms (some apparently misused) with popular terminology. Figurative surgery involves not just adoption but deformation of medical and surgical language. The translation of cataract surgery from the practical to the verbal sphere offers the poet-practitioner greater latitude for experimentation. Unlike actual cataract surgery – which in the fourteenth century was potentially dangerous, unpleasant given the lack of anesthesia, and probably not highly successful, statistically speaking31 – Machaut’s verbal cataract operation moves beyond the sort of remedy conventional surgery can offer the blinded patient. The transformation of this procedure discouraged by responsible practitioners32 allows the poet to play with the operation (as he has done in causing it to be performed with a drame) and with its outcome. Metaphor gives rise to bodily cure and nonphysiological effects, as it links the restoration of eyesight to the production of verse. Machaut’s cataract surgery, like the representations of blindness to which Wheatley alludes, seems to be at once metaphoric and literal: it heals not just the narrator’s soul and intellect, but also his eye (‘me rendoit lumiere / De cuer, de memoire, et de l’ueil’). The fact that the lover’s eyesight has been restored in addition to his emotional health indicates that while the Remede’s surgery should be understood figuratively, a metaphoric interpretation should not be adopted to the exclusion of a more literal reading. After all, as stated in the preface to the Avision Christine in ex-Phillipps 128, ‘est la poisie belle et subtille quant elle puet servir a plusieurs ententes et que on la puet prendre a divers propos’ (poetry is beautiful and subtle when it can serve several meanings and be taken in different ways).33 Moreover, Machaut’s metaphor, his first tentative step toward poetic models of remedy for blindness, applies medicalized language to a problem not explicitly treated in his Boethian source: the role of eyesight in love. More than an updated analogy based on Boethian antecedent, Machaut’s surgical 30 Taie and toie are often confused with toile, though Isabelle Vedrenne-Fajolles points out that toile is a distinct word rather than an orthographical variant of the same term. ‘Tradition hippocratique et pseudo-hippocratique aux 13e–14e siècles’, in Lexiques scientifiques et techniques: Constitution et approche historique, ed. Olivier Bertrand, Hiltrud Gerner, and Béatrice Stumpf (Palaiseau: Éditions de l’École Polytechnique, 2007), 81–103, esp. 90–92. 31 Of course, there are no statistics available; Michael McVaugh lays out available data on medieval cataract surgery in ‘Cataracts and Hernias: Aspects of Surgical Practices in the Fourteenth Century’, Medical History 45.3 (2001), 319–40’. See also Chareyron, ‘Chirurgien et patient au Moyen Âge: l’opération de la cataracte de Gilles le Muisit en 1351’, Revue Belge de Philologie 74.2 (1996). 32 McVaugh, ‘Cataracts and Hernias’, 336; Michael McVaugh, ‘Therapeutic Strategies: Surgery’, in Grmek, 289. 33 Reno, ‘The Preface to the Avision-Christine’, 208.

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comparison is a new type of verbal remedy, one that rewrites medical inquiries into aetiology, diagnosis, and therapy instead of simply reproducing them.34 This medical language is then made to serve a poetic construct, that of the love-imprint. Thus, while the simile of the cataract (like medicalization in general) might seem to subsume philosophy to medicine, it in fact inscribes medical terminology and treatment within poets’ ophthalmic model of love. The figure of the cataract is a crucial component of Guillaume’s meditation on profane love, for rarely is the relationship between psychological and physiological blindness so clear. As previously noted, Esperance restores Guillaume’s heart, his memory, and his eye – the three major sites impacted through the process of love-imprint, in reverse order. It would seem, then, that metaphoric surgery is capable of reversing and regularizing poetic physiology. The specific diagnosis of cataract offers rich possibilities for the exploration of the love-imprint and its implications. It is not insignificant that cataracts are mentioned in the Remede de Fortune, a dit that is, though not a full-blown ars poetica, in many respects a handbook of love poetry. Love is, like cataract, an affection involving fantasmatic images. While love arises from such images, cataracts can produce them: medieval writers list, among early symptoms of cataract, seeing things that are not there. Guy de Chauliac, for example, draws an association between cataract and fantasia during the first phase of cataract: ‘Quantum ad sui principium, dicitur ymaginatio seu fantasia, et quia facit apparere in aere diversas res que non sunt’ (At its beginning it is called imagination or fantasy, because it makes different things appear in the air that are not there).35 And again, in providing diagnostic guidelines, Guy states that the signs of unhardened (and thus not yet operable) cataract include the perception of images and phantasms in the air: ‘Signa vero catharactarum non confirmatarum sunt conturbacio pupille et minoracio visus et apprehensio ydolorum et fantasiarum dictarum in aere.’36 The words with which Guy describes the cataract sufferer’s visions – fantasia, ymaginatio, ydolorum – display a striking similarity to the language of love-imprint. We may suppose that, even more than an able-bodied lover, a lover afflicted with cataract risks falling in love with an image that is not truly there. By the time the cataract has reached an operable state, the psychological damage is done and the false phantasm is already imprinted in the lover’s 34 For Hoepffner, Machaut’s medicalized language is a sign of the times: ‘la comparaison d’Espérance avec le médecin procédant à l’opération de la cataracte, comparaison que Boèce ne donne pas, est certainement prise d’un fait familier aux contemporains de Machaut, et c’est encore une invention personnelle de celui-ci que la façon dont sa consolatrice découvre la maladie dont il souffre, en examinant tout particulièrement “la veine qui vient du cœur”’. Oeuvres, vol. 2, xxiii–xxiv. 35 Guy de Chauliac, Inventarium sive chirurgia magna, ed. Michael McVaugh (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 338. 36 Ibid., 339.

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heart. Blindness of the eye leads to emotional blindness and renders the lover vulnerable to delusion or deceit. The transformation of Philosophy into Hope, and the transformed character’s lecture to the lover, are but the most extended example of the rewriting of Boethius in the Remede de Fortune.37 Lest that allusion prove too obscure, there are more obvious hints throughout the dit, such as the narrator’s references to himself as a prisoner: he is the ‘prisonnier’ of Fortune in line 1235, ‘pris et rendu’ in line 1240, compared by Esperance to ‘uns oyselez en une cage’ in line 3128. Machaut’s narrator, though, is a prisoner in a cage of his own making. The Remede de Fortune alludes to Boethius by name, as well, in the narrator’s complainte on Fortune: the poet remarks that ‘Boeces si nous raconte / Qu’on ne doit mie faire conte / De ses anuis’ (Boethius tells us not to pay any mind to our troubles: vv. 982–4). This allusion, however, appears within a larger context that engenders deliberate confusion as to Esperance’s medical role. In the stanza immediately following this pithy summation of the Boethian message, the narrator assigns a medical analogy not to Esperance – she will arrive, and her surgical skills will come into play, several hundred lines later – but to Fortune. Fortune scet plus de pratique Que ne font maistre de fisique, De divinité, de logique, Et mendiant, Pour trouver une voie oblique. (vv. 985–9) Fortune knows more ways to find a crooked path than do masters of physic, of divinity, of logic, and mendicants.

Fortune is compared at once to a theologian, a mendicant friar, a logician, and a medical doctor; the medical profession is grouped with other prevaricators and sophists, rather than being accorded a special position, and furthermore, medicine is associated here with the wrong character (as far as Boethian tradition is concerned). Far from curing man’s ills, Fortune causes them: ‘lorde, borgne, fausse et enfrune’ (thick, squint-eyed, false, and cruel: v. 953), she harms man by finding a devious course of action and an oblique visual path. She wounds the Remede de Fortune’s lover when she ‘fait de travers un regart’ (looks crosswise: v. 2692), an action consistent with Guy de Chauliac’s description of strabositas (a condition clearly akin to that of the ‘borgne’ Fortune) as a ‘visio tortuosa et obliqua’ (tortuous and oblique vision: p. 327). Cross-eyed or squint-eyed Fortune blinds her victims but is none37 For an enumeration of the passages directly inspired by Boethius, see the notes to Wimsatt and Kibler’s edition.

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theless compared to a physician, just as Hope will later be.38 At this early point in the Remede de Fortune, it appears that the Boethian metaphors are all mixed up. Indeed, the salient characteristics of Boethius’s Philosophia are variously assigned in the Remede de Fortune to the beloved lady, to Love, to Hope, and even to Fortune. The lady’s brilliant eyes and her ability to heal, as expressed in the chanson baladee ‘Dame, a vous sans retollir’, recall Boethius’s moral healer.39 Yet the Remede narrator’s beloved also has the capacity to wound with her eyes; she is, as Sylvia Huot remarks, ‘endowed with both curative and destructive powers’.40 Car ja ne te sera si fiere Qu’elle te laidenge ne fiere, Se ce n’est de ses tres douz yeus Rians, atraians, et soutieus. Mes je les tesmoigne pour tieus Que leurs coups ne sont pas mortels, Car douce en est la bleceüre Et aggreable la pointure. (vv. 2825–32) For she will never be so vicious as to insult or harm you, unless it is with her very sweet, smiling, attractive, and seductively artful eyes. But as for these I attest that their blows are not mortal: their wound is sweet, their sting agreeable.

The ambiguity of the lover’s prayer points to this same potential for harm: ‘se son doulz oeil me repart / Par amours de l’amoureus dart, / De riens n’aray jamais regart’ (if her sweet eye uses Love to launch the amorous dart at me, I will never have eyes for anything else: vv. 3320–22). De riens n’aray jamais regart: the poet could mean, figuratively, that he will ‘never have eyes for anything else’ (or ‘anyone else’, as Wimsatt and Kibler translate the verse), or, literally, that upon receiving a dart through the eye he will permanently lose his eyesight. Just as the lady’s impact on the narrator’s eyes is ambiguous, she is at once 38 This commonality between Fortune and Esperance is perhaps an indication that the latter is not to be trusted. Katherine Heinrichs has called Esperance a deceiver, arguing that her discourse is not a true remedy but a parody of Boethian Philosophy. As to the Remede de Fortune, she claims, ‘none of its speakers is entirely to be trusted’. ‘“Lovers’ Consolations of Philosophy” in Boccaccio, Machaut and Chaucer’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11 (1989), 103. The Remede is discussed on pp. 98–103. 39 In his chanson baladee the lover tells his lady, ‘Et vos regars puet garir / Toute doulour’, vv. 3469–70. According to William Calin, ‘Esperence ought to be envisaged as a double of the Lady, a surrogate Lady and transference figure.’ ‘Medieval Intertextuality: Lyrical Inserts and Narrative in Guillaume de Machaut’, The French Review 62 (1988), 5. 40 Huot, ‘Guillaume de Machaut and the Consolation of Poetry’, 177.

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the antagonist and the double of Hope. The latter counsels the lover in parting to call upon her if he finds himself unable to endure the lady’s gaze (‘ne peüsses endurer / Ses doulz yeus n’encontre eulz durer’: vv. 2835–6), and yet, in his weakened state, the lover had compared Esperance’s beauty with that of his lady. Likewise, Love and Fortune are assimilated: like Fortune, Love blinds his victims’ eyes and their hearts (‘Amour qui maint cuer aveugle / D’eus et de cuer te fist aveugle’: vv. 2711–12). Through such reshuffling of narrative and allegorical personas the simplicity of Boethian medical language is complicated, as wounds are amplified and healers multiplied. The narrator is undone by Love, his lady, and Fortune (a group to which we will return in Chapter Five); he is healed by Hope and (at least possibly) by the same lady who contributed to his wound; all the while avoiding two-faced Fortune, who blinds him (as does Love) but who, like Hope, can also take on the persona of a ‘maistre de fisique’. Esperance’s remedy, too, is utterly unlike Philosophy’s. While the language of medicine is a consistent presence in the Consolatio, it never extends beyond generic analogies; that is, Boethian Philosophy never engages in specifically medical behavior. Machaut’s Esperance, on the other hand, proceeds from diagnostics to treatment to a post-operative consultation and even a follow-up visit with her patient. After the initial ‘surgery’ she takes the lover’s pulse in order to ascertain his condition. Si senti mon pous et ma vaine Qui estoit foieble, mate, et vaine. Mes sa main n’ostoit a nul fuer De la vaine qui vient du cuer (vv. 1577–80) She felt my pulse and my vein, which was feeble, weary, and weak. But she never removed her hand from the vein that comes from the heart.

Following this examination, Esperance knows his suffering ‘sans couverture’ (1587) – an expression probably signifying that she has a sincere and thorough knowledge, but that permits an alternate reading wherein Esperance has determined her patient to be cataract-free (sans couverture). While the Boethian Philosophy was, if anything, a medical theorist, Machaut’s Esperance is gifted in the theoretical and practical domains, in medicine and in surgery: she is ‘celle qui la theorique / Toute savoit et la pratique / Qu’il falloit a ma medecine’ (she who knew all of the theory and practice needed for my cure: vv. 1591–3). She demonstrates this practical knowledge, examining the narrator’s emotions just as a medical practitioner performs uroscopy: ‘bien congnoissoit l’orine / Des yeus du cuer’ (she knew all about the urine of the eyes of the heart: vv. 1594–5). Esperance speaks ‘com fisicienne subtive’ (like a subtle physician: v. 1603), which would inspire

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more confidence could we forget that Fortune ‘scet plus de pratique / Que ne font maistre de fisique … Pour trouver une voie oblique.’ Fortune is both an agent of suffering and a ‘maistre de fisique’; likewise, her inherent contradictions give rise to the narrator’s suffering but also provide the key to its cure. Esperance reveals to the narrator that Souffissance (Contentment) and Pacïence (Patience) are the virtues needed to remove one’s mental cataract and lose sight of ‘Fortune au double regart’ (two-faced Fortune: vv. 2773–96).41 Yet the narrator, and the reader, might remember that Fortune herself is described in the complainte as ‘souffisance couvoiteuse’ (covetous contentment: v. 1146) and as ‘pacïence dongereuse’ (dangerous patience: v. 1149). It seems, then, that in addition to her initial surgical intervention Esperance seeks to remedy the sufferer’s ills not with contraries – which are more akin to contradictory Fortune’s ‘voie oblique’ – but with likes. The final phase of this therapeutic regimen is the composition and transcription of the book in which Esperance’s discourse appears. Not only is consolation medicalized, it is rewritten in the body and, ultimately, on the page. Et par maniere de memoire Tout le fait de li et l’ystoire, Si com je l’ay devant escript, Estoit en mon cuer en escript Par vray certain entendement Mieus .c. foys et plus proprement Que clers ne le porroit escripre De main en parchemin ne en cire. (vv. 2939–46) And everything about her and the story, just as I’ve written it above, was inscribed by true and sure understanding within my heart, in the guise of memory. It was written there a hundred times better, and more precisely, than a clerk could write it by hand on parchment or wax.

Everything pertaining to Hope is imprinted in the lover’s heart, just as would be the image of a beloved. The text becomes analogous to the beloved image through a cognitive process akin if not identical to the love-imprint, a process preferable to traditional writing because of its fidelity of representation stemming from true understanding. Like the love-imprint, the composition of the Remede de Fortune is described as a direct, quasi-physiological process. The 41 On the concept of sufficientia in Boethius, see William J. Asbell Jr., ‘The Philosophical Background of Sufficientia in Boethius’s Consolation, Book 3’, in New Directions in Boethian Studies, ed. Noel Harold Kaylor, Jr. and Philip Edward Phillips (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), 3–16.

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narrator declares that he has ‘en mon cuer la douce emprainte / De ses ensaingnements emprainte’ (imprinted the sweet impression of her teachings in my heart: vv. 2967–8); the imprinting of words in the lover’s heart suggests that as love shifts ever farther from contact with another person and into the domain of representation, words can themselves become objects of love. True bibliophiles do exist. The enhanced function of the word, not just as mode of communication but as object of love, underlines the importance of the Remede de Fortune’s identity as a poetic manual. Weak as the poet-narrator is, he has created his own object of affection (i.e., the object to be imprinted in his heart) and in so doing has created his own cure. Furthermore, he demonstrates poetic composition to the reader in such a way that the reader too becomes a wordsmith, and therefore a healer. The Remede de Fortune makes explicit a process implicit in Boethius: to internalize Philosophy’s lessons, and to be able to repeat them to oneself, is to heal oneself. Poetry is a form of therapy, and poesis, autotherapy.

Medical metaphor, therapeutic form Medical metaphor also plays a prominent role in other late medieval ‘hybrid’ texts inspired by the Consolatio: Book III of Christine de Pizan’s Avision Christine (1405), designated the ‘confort de philosophie’,42 and Alain Chartier’s Livre de l’Espérance (1429), also called the Consolation des Trois Vertus.43 The medical manoeuvres attempted in these texts, though, are less focused and precise (in the case of the Avision) and less directly anchored to contemporary medical practice (in the Espérance) than Machaut’s cataract surgery. Although sight is privileged in the Avision’s title, for instance, it is no longer cataract couching, or indeed any ophthalmological treatment, that stands in for Philosophy’s intervention. The Avision Christine is a dream-vision that stages its author-narrator’s pilgrimage from the chaos that preceded Creation to the Latin Quarter of present-day Paris. Following the first two books, in which Christine speaks 42 Christine de Pizan, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, ed. Christine Reno and Liliane Dulac (Paris: Champion, 2001). On the specific translations Christine used as sources, see Glynnis M. Cropp, ‘Boèce et Christine de Pizan’, Le Moyen Âge 87 (1981), 387–417. See also Benjamin Semple, ‘The Consolation of a Woman Writer: Christine de Pizan’s Use of Boethius in Lavision-Christine’, in Women, the Book and the Worldly, ed. Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), 39–48. 43 Alain Chartier, Le Livre de l’Espérance, ed. François Rouy (Paris: Champion, 1989). The alternate title Consolation des Trois Vertus is not uncommon in the fifteenth-century manuscripts inventoried by Rouy in the introduction to his edition. On this treatise’s Boethian inspiration, see Douglas Kelly, ‘Boethius as Model for Rewriting Sources in Alain Chartier’s Livre de l’esperance’, in Chartier in Europe, ed. Emma Cayley and Ashby Kinch (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 15–30.

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respectively of the history of the French monarchy (at the court of a crowned lady representing France) and of intellectual history (with lady Opinion at the University of Paris), her journey continues as a Boethian encounter with Philosophie. Noted for its wealth of autobiographical detail, this third book of the Avision also quotes extensively from the Livre de Boece de Consolacion as it illustrates metaphoric strategies of healing in the late medieval Boethian tradition.44 Christine’s Philosophie is, like Machaut’s Esperance, a ‘vraie phisicienne’ (p. 95); but the cures she effects are of a different variety, pertaining mostly to digestive rather than visual disorders. Though she scolds Christine, calling her a ‘creature aveuglee’, Philosophie immediately begins mixing her physiological metaphors. Et que tu es deceue, je prouveray par pratique de gros exemple: tout ainsi comme l’expert medecin qui considere la faculté de la nature et complexion de son pacient et selon sa force ou foiblece lui donne purgatoire et medecine, ainsi useray en toi de regisme tenve et legier pour la foiblece de l’estomach de ton entendement … (p. 117) And that you are mistaken I will prove to you practically with a concrete example. Just like the expert physician who considers the faculty of the nature and complexion of his patient, and according to his strength or weakness gives him purgative or medicine, thus I will prescribe for you a light regimen for the weakness of the stomach of your understanding.

Unlike Boethius’s Philosophy, whose cure grows harsher as her patient’s endurance builds, Christine’s Philosophie proposes only a light diet (‘tenue et legier’), suggesting that her patient either is less capable of withstanding treatment or is simply less ill. As the digestive metaphor continues, the avoidance of visual metaphor seems willful – not just in the substitution of digestion as a figure for insight or comprehension, but in the deformation of common figures of speech, as when Philosophie seeks to convince Christine that tribulation opens the ears, rather than the more familiar eyes, of the heart (‘tribulacion euvre l’oreille du cuer’, p. 126).45 Philosophie’s healing strategy still relies on medical metaphors, as is consistent with her preface’s already-cited praise of poetic polysemy. However, the inherent inconsistency of Christine’s/Philosophie’s language, and her various diagnoses of blind44 On Christine’s citations from the Livre Boece de Consolacion, see Glynnis Cropp, ‘Boethius and the Consolatio philosophiae in XIVth and XVth-century French Writing’, Essays in French Literature 42 (2005), 37. 45 As Mary Carruthers notes, ‘there simply is no classical or Hebrew or medieval tradition regarding an “ear of the mind” equivalent to that of the “eye of the mind”’. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 27.

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ness, deafness, and intellectual indigestion, decrease the potential for parasurgical experimentation. Whereas Machaut’s Remede de Fortune assimilates the narrator’s suffering to a single bodily disorder, thereby allowing for a coherent therapeutic program, the Avision’s less lucid physiology of suffering leads to a light and inconsistent regimen. The Avision’s form, too, seems to offer less therapeutic potential than does the rich lyric treasury of the Remede de Fortune. While the Avision does mix prose narration and lyric verse, Book III contains only one ballade (pp. 105–6). The ballade is consistent with the notion of lyric as therapeutic tool: coming immediately after Christine’s pitiable (and self-pitying) autobiography, this poem, with its opening verse ‘Helas ou donc trouveront reconfort’ (Alas, where, then, will they find consolation), takes on the appearance of an attempt at a home remedy.46 It remains the only such attempt in the Avision’s final book, though; like its medical metaphors, this text’s prosimetric form is highly irregular in comparison to its predecessors. Instead of integrating the ‘therapeutic’ lyric, as Machaut did before her, Christine alludes to the manner in which she has sought comfort in the composition of verse: describing, rather than illustrating, poetry’s therapeutic potential. From the cathartic grief of ‘mes premiers dictiez ou principe de mes premieres Cent Balades’ (my first ditties at the beginning of my initial Cent ballades: p. 107) to the ‘ditz amoureux et gays d’autrui sentement’ (amorous and gay tales of other people’s experience) she has written in order to lift her own spirits (‘pour passer temps et pour aucune gaieté attraire a mon cuer doulereux’: p. 107), Christine clearly acknowledges the role that poetic composition can play in healing – despite her awareness that Boethius had rejected those same poetic muses (‘Non obstant que les boutasses arriere et chaças de la compaignie de Bouece ou temps de sa tribulacion’, p. 107). Why, then, does Philosophie offer no verse interventions modeled on Boethian Philosophy’s legitimately remedial lyric? The key is to be found, perhaps, in Philosophie’s choice of a gentle therapy (‘regisme tenue et legier’). The near-elimination of lyric insertions underlines the lightness of the Christinian Philosophie’s regimen, and signals a less developed healing strategy. Chartier’s Livre de l’Espérance, on the other hand, provides more efficacious treatment as it combines highly medicalized content with a purely prosimetric form. In this unfinished prosimetrum consisting of sixteen poems alternating with sixteen prose passages, the Acteur, beset by Dame Melencolie and her minions, becomes separated from his lethargic Entendement. The divided patient’s impaired faculties, both sensory and intellectual, 46 Such a remedial function would be consistent with the broader textual project of writing as therapy: witness Claire Le Brun-Gouanvic’s contention that in the Avision, ‘c’est l’écriture qui est donnée à voir comme remède au malheur.’ ‘L’écriture médecine: une relecture de L’Avision Christine (1405)’, in Dans les miroirs de l’écriture: la réflexivité chez les femmes écrivains d’Ancien Régime, ed. Jean-Philippe Beaulieu and Diane Desrosiers-Bonin (Montreal: Paragraphes 17, 1998), 17.

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are then repaired by Foy and Esperance (and, presumably, Charity, though the unfinished book neither provides her dialogue nor reveals the identity of the ‘debonnaire et bien encontenancee damoiselle’ who accompanies the three theological virtues). The Acteur’s (and his Entendement’s) malady is more psychological than physical; throughout the book, however, Chartier establishes analogies between his persona’s bodily and mental condition. Immediately after her arrival, Dame Melencolie ‘de ses mains me tenoit la teste et les yeulx embrunchés et estouppés, si que n’avoye laisir de voyr ne ouir’ (held my head and my eyes covered and obstructed with her hands, so that I could not see or hear: Prose 1, lines 22–4); her impairment of the Acteur is completed in prose 2 when she removes his ‘partie qui au meillieu de la teste siet en la region de l’ymaginative, que aucuns appellent fantasie’ (part seated in the middle of the brain in the imaginative faculty, which some call the fantasy: lines 7–9). She has thus removed a part of the brain that is instrumental in the process of love-imprint. Chartier’s descriptions of psychological suffering depend in large part on comparisons with sensory impairments, particularly blindness. As the Acteur explains in Prose 1, les quatre vertus sensitives dedens homme, que nous appellons sensitive, ymaginative, estimative et memoire, sont corporelles et organiques, et se pevent grever par trop souvent ou en trop fort oeuvre les exploicter, ainsi que entre les cinq sens de dehors l’oeil se trouble par regarder clarté trop resplendissant, ou par trop souvent lire, ou fichier son regard sur choses menues, de deliee ou differente figure. (lines 39–46) the four cognitive faculties of man, which we call sensitive, imaginative, estimative, and memory, are corporeal and organic, and can be damaged by using them too often or for too tough a task, just as, among the five external senses, the eye is clouded by looking at excessively bright light, or reading too often, or fixing one’s gaze on things that are tiny or delicate in appearance.

The arrival of the theological virtues only confirms the validity of this initial comparison, as Entendement, his eyes weakened by his melancholy, cannot withstand the ladies’ luminosity. Before proceeding to her particular brand of psychotherapy, ‘la puissant medicine / Qui l’esprit purge et affine’ (the powerful medicine that purges and refines the spirit: Poem 6, vv. 26–7), Foy heals Entendement’s eyesight: ‘et comme elle eust mis sa main sur les yeulx d’Entendement, la veue luy esclarcy’ (and when she had put her hand on the eyes of Entendement, his eyesight cleared: Prose 5, lines 142–3). This is a fitting use of Foy’s powers, for, as Janice C. Zinser notes, ‘Entendement must rely on his senses for knowledge of the divine.’47 Foy’s sister Esperance 47 Janice C. Zinser, ‘The Use of Exempla in Alain Chartier’s Esperance’, Res publica litterarum 3 (1980), 184.

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continues the treatment, offering prayers as ‘la balsme de consolation’ (the balm of consolation: Prose 10, line 101) and ‘l’oingture d’esperance’ (the ointment of hope: Prose 11, line 35). These thoroughly verbal remedies, couched in the terminology of faculty psychology and medical therapy, mend the Acteur’s split psyche and heal his sensory as well as his mental infirmities. The Livre de l’Espérance is an exemplary late medieval Boethian adaptation insofar as it extends and foregrounds the curative powers of metaphor, while experimenting with ‘hybrid’ or prosimetric form.48 Interestingly, it is at moments of textual transition – from prose to poem, and especially from the discourse of Foy to that of Esperance – that the Acteur speaks most explicitly of the importance of comparison and metaphor. In Prose 10, for instance, the passage that represents the end of Foy’s speech and the beginning of Esperance’s, the Acteur chooses to describe Foy ‘par metaphore’ (line 50) and Esperance ‘par analogie’ (line 66). The relationship between the prose and verse passages, too, illustrates a similar procedure, as the virtues’ lessons are applied to specific circumstances: principles of good government, for instance, or even the composition of literary texts, as in Poem 15. As ‘le signe cede a la chose’ (the sign gives way to the thing: Poem 13, v. 34), the poems render the literal message of the text’s metaphors explicit. Although the Livre de l’Espérance’s poems rarely contain medicalized language, Sylvia Huot argues that in it ‘poetry … is unambiguously associated with the consolatory powers of theological teaching’.49 Esperance does indeed tell the Acteur that prayer functions ‘comme une medicinal requeste pour remede dez maladies dez amez’ (like a medicinal request for a remedy to the maladies of souls: Prose 15, lines 329–30); the text’s unfinished state, however, does not permit the reader to determine if, and how, its intercalated songs may perform a similar function. Thus, while the Livre de l’Espérance closely mimics Boethian prosimetric form, in its unfinished state it provides a rather less detailed and subtle exposition of the curative powers of the prosimetrum than does Guillaume de Machaut’s earlier Remede de Fortune. In both texts – but especially in Machaut’s dit – ‘hybrid’ form plays a significant role in the (auto)therapeutic function of verse and provides a concrete visualization of the binarity of metaphor, the simultaneity of the literal and metaphoric registers.50

48 For a thorough formal analysis of the Livre de l’Espérance’s lyrics, see François Rouy, L’esthétique du traité moral d’après les oeuvres d’Alain Chartier (Geneva: Droz, 1980), 337–49. 49 ‘Re-Fashioning Boethius: Prose and Poetry in Chartier’s Livre de l’Espérance’, Medium Aevum 76 (2007), 274. 50 This simultaneity of the literal and metaphoric registers is akin to the phenomenon of figuration as described by Erich Auerbach, ‘Figura’, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. Ralph Manheim (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 11–76.

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Hybrid remedies The Remede de Fortune illustrates the curative potential of poesis not just through medical metaphor but through its staging of the composition of verse. Like its Boethian intertext, Machaut’s Remede – a text that Jody Enders has described as an ‘extended metacommentary on the traditional commingling of declamation and song’51 – is a composite of narrative and lyric. Hope’s lesson, situated at the very centre and core of Machaut’s text, accordingly unfolds ‘en rime, en musique, et en dit’ (in verse, in music and in speech: v. 2100). Her prosimetric instruction seems to have a profound impact on the narrator’s poetic production, too. Throughout the Remede de Fortune the poet composes fixed-form poems: first a lai and a complainte sung before Esperance’s arrival, then a chant royal and a baladelle (both sung by Esperance), a ballade, a chanson baladee (that is, a virelai), and a rondelet. The lyric ‘insertions’ are arranged, as Wimsatt and Kibler point out, from the forms that are poetically most complex (the lai) to the simplest (the rondeau).52 To their cogent and convincing explanation of the lyric order one should add that this formal trajectory also mirrors the narrator’s suffering and cure. The lai (longer and less internally consistent than other fixed forms53) corresponds to a lover’s first, less ordered rush of amorous emotion; the complainte, a non-amorous form, represents his period of ‘illness’; and the poetic forms featured after Esperance’s intervention are typical of lovers’ songs. Indeed, the narrator confirms early in the dit that his compositions are tied to his moods and perceptions. Et pour ce que n’estoie mie Tousdis en un point, m’estudie Mis en faire chansons et lays, Baladez, rondeaus, virelays, Et chans, selonc mon sentement, Amoureus et non autrement; Car qui de sentement ne fait, Son oeuvre et son chant contrefait. (vv. 401–8, emphasis added) And since I wasn’t always in the same mood, I applied myself to making chansons and lais, ballades, rondeaux, virelais, and songs, 51 Jody Enders, ‘Music, Delivery, and the Rhetoric of Memory in Guillaume de Machaut’s Remède de Fortune’, PMLA 107 (1992), 453. 52 Guillaume de Machaut, Jugement, 413. 53 Paul Zumthor calls the lai a ‘forme complexe et dont l’histoire et la définition posent des problèmes.’ Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 261. According to Calin, the lai is ‘the most complex of all medieval lyric forms, containing twelve stanzas, each diverging from the others in meter and rhyme-scheme except for the first and last, which are identical’. ‘Medieval Intertextuality’, 4.

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according to my sentement, about love and nothing else; for he who does not work from sentement falsifies his work and his song.

The fluctuation of the narrator’s emotional state gives rise to a variety of poetic forms, verbalizing the condition of the lover’s body from ailment to rehabilitation. Moreover, the repetition of the polyvalent term sentement (denoting knowledge, sentiment, or sensory experience) demonstrates why eyesight must be healed in order for the poet to resume composition of love lyric. ‘Qui de sentement ne fait, / Son oeuvre et son chant contrefait’: acts performed in the absence of reliable sensory cues, like songs composed in the absence of amorous sentiment, are doomed to failure. Esperance, having healed all types of sentement, enables the narrator to become a more confident lover and a better, not to mention a more conventional, love-poet.54 Even as we observe that the diminishing verbal complexity of the lyrics seems to echo the lover’s mental state, we must also take into account their musical complexity, for all seven pieces are notated. The presence of the musical partitions, interspersed with the narrative text rather than consigned to an appendix (as in notable manuscripts of the Voir Dit), textualizes a compositional process that had, before Machaut’s day, been an affair based in orality and memory.55 The metaphoric cure of song must be ‘translated’ to the visual register if it is to remedy the poet-narrator’s figurative blindness. The easy accessibility of the notation within the Remede manuscripts also highlights for the reader the formal differences between the interpolated songs. William Calin points out, following Sonnemann, that ‘the increasing simplicity of the lyrics as verse corresponds to, is set off against, or is compensated by, the increasing complexity of the lyrics as music. In musicological terms, the sequence from lai to rondelet is one of increasing difficulty.’56 Lyrics, an instrument of healing (in their musical setting) as well as a representation of the lover’s frame of mind (in their words), illustrate in their melodic form a similar progression to Boethian Philosophy’s ‘gentler and stronger remedies’. The Remede’s staged performances straddle a fine line between inspiration and affliction. From Esperance’s first appearance her voice is linked to her capacity to heal. She comes to the lover

54 On sentement, see Didier Lechat, ‘La Place du sentement dans l’expérience lyrique aux XIVe et XVe siècles’, Perspectives médiévales, supplement to no. 28 (2002), 193–207. 55 See Anna Maria Busse Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), especially Chapter 6, ‘Visualization and the Composition of Polyphonic Music’, 198–251. 56 Calin, ‘Medieval Intertextuality’, 7. Anne Stone, however, has taken issue with this description of the songs as increasingly complex: she notes that the Remede’s ballade, with its rich contrapuntal setting, is ‘experimental’ and arguably more complex than the two pieces that follow it. Personal communication, 16 January 2010.

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Com fisicienne soubtive, Sage, apperte, et confortative, D’une belle vois, clere et saine, Plus douce que nulle douçaine (vv. 1603–6) Like a subtle, wise, clear, and comforting physician, with a beautiful, clear, healthy voice, sweeter than any reed instrument57

Not surprisingly, then, the first two songs in the Remede to display the healing potential of lyric are the chant royal and the baladelle nominally composed and performed by Esperance. David G. Lanoue characterizes the chant royal as ‘a poetic example of medieval music therapy’, for in it Esperance counsels the lover that he who possesses Souffissance requires no further reward.58 In her baladelle she further urges the lover to seek healing by embracing his ‘doulz mauls a soustenir’ (sweet malady to sustain: v. 2866), taking pleasure in his illness: ‘tant plaist la maladie / Quant norrie / Est en amoureus desir’ (the malady is so pleasant when it is fed by amorous desire: vv. 2860–62). These paeans to the honor of virtuous love and the pleasure of love’s sweet malady represent, according to Kevin Brownlee, ‘the beginning and the end of Amant’s ‘cure’ at the diegetic level’;59 the figurative cataract surgery, then, was a preparatory rather than a therapeutic measure. In her ultimate cure, her songs, Esperance offers two models of virtue and reward, two evocations of a lover’s joy, which the narrator will thenceforth adopt in his own compositions. The reversal of the narrator’s amatory fortune is signalled by his adoption of the ballade, rondeau, and virelai, three forms often characterized as ‘round’.60 These round fixed forms, more than other poetic types, are strongly linked to dance, and their particular breed of constraint is ultimately tied to the rhythmic movements of the human body: as Jacqueline Cerquiglini notes, ‘Par son lien privilégié à la musique, par son rythme surtout, il est en rapport avec le corps dont il exprime les mouvements’ (Because of its privileged link to music, above all because of its rhythm, [the fixed-form poem] 57 The douçaine is sometimes called the ‘mystery instrument’ of the Middle Ages. See Ross W. Duffin, A Performer’s Guide to Medieval Music (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), 393–5. Robert Boenig identifies the douçaine as ‘something similar to a bagpipe chanter without the bag’ in ‘Musical Instruments as Iconographical Artifacts in Medieval Poetry’, in Material Culture and Cultural Materialisms in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Curtis Perry (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), 1–15, 11. 58 David G. Lanoue, ‘Music Therapy and Guillaume de Machaut: Hope’s Chanson Royal in the Remede de Fortune’, Romance Quarterly 31 (1984), 363–70. 59 Kevin Brownlee, ‘Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune: The Lyric Anthology as Narrative Progression’, in The Ladder of High Designs: Structure and Interpretation of the French Lyric Sequence, ed. Doranne Fenoaltea and David Lee Rubin (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 20. 60 The ‘roundness’ of these forms will be discussed at length in Chapter 5, pp. 169–76.

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exists in relation to the body whose movements it expresses).61 These poems’ alliance with music and dance helps to illuminate their therapeutic function, as they are constructed in harmony with the body’s rhythms – and can thus be called upon to help restore the natural balance that is upset by melancholic lovesickness. Words, particularly those uttered in musical voice, can serve as balm. After Esperance’s departure it is the narrator, the wordsmith, who has the ultimate power to produce them: ‘Car se tu vueus, tu es garis’ (For if you want, you are cured: v. 2077). Neither the idea nor the specific image of poetic words as balm is unique to Guillaume de Machaut. As we have seen, in Alain Chartier’s Boethian Livre de l’Espérance, the titular personification refers to prayers as ‘balsme’, ‘oingture’, and ‘mierre’. In perhaps an even more pertinent example, an older contemporary of Guillaume de Machaut – the Tournaisian abbot Gilles le Muisit (1272–1353), himself blinded by cataract – uses such language to characterize the works of Machaut himself.62 It is quite possible that Gilles was familiar with the Remede de Fortune, given his praise of Guillaume de Machaut’s poetic abilities in his ‘Méditations’, composed before 1351: Or sont vivant biaus dis faissant, Qui ne s’en vont mie taisant, C’est de Machau le boin Willaume, Si fait redolent si que bausme.63 Now there are some living poets who compose good dits without quitting: namely the good Guillaume of Machaut, whose creations are as aromatic as balm.

The works of Guillaume de Machaut – a poet who employs the metaphor of cataract surgery – somehow themselves become a balm: his poetry becomes a remedy for another sufferer, an abbot whose poetry only exists as a pastime adopted in blindness. How can lyric poetry at once be a symptom of blindness and its cure? One path to a solution may lie, once again, in the metaphor of cataract surgery. For Gilles is, aside from Machaut, the only French vernacular poet of the fourteenth century of whom I am aware who draws on this precise surgical imagery in his verse. The monastic author, however, uses 61 Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘Syntaxe et syncope: langage du corps et écriture chez Guillaume de Machaut’, Langue Française 40 (Dec. 1978), 66. 62 He is also referred to in modern scholarship as Gilles li Muisis. I have chosen the spelling ‘le Muisit’ because it is the orthography attested more consistently in the manuscript of his vernacular poems, and because, according to Gustave Caullet, it is the form appearing most often in other contemporary documents. ‘Les manuscrits de Gilles le Muisit et l’art de la miniature au XIVe siècle. Le relieur tournaisien Janvier’, Bulletin du Cercle historique et archéologique de Courtrai 5 (1907–8), 200. 63 Poésies de Gilles li Muisis, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, 2 vols (Louvain: J. Lefever, 1882), 88. All of Gilles’s verse is cited from this edition.

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cataract surgery according to a very different convention. Largely resisting the metaphorizing impulse, Gilles instead produces what might today be understood as ‘adjustment literature’, or texts that detail an impaired person’s adjustment to an acquired condition or disability.64 In his verse, the abbot represents cataract surgery as a determiner of, not a figure for, psychological change.

Surgery and Regrasciemens Gilles le Muisit (1272–1353), abbot of the Benedictine abbey of St Martin in Tournai, is the author of a four-book Latin chronicle and a volume of vernacular poetry.65 He had begun losing his eyesight owing to cataract by 1346; in the following year he began composing verse, already finding his vision so impaired that he was obligated to dictate his poems. The abbot was completely blind by 1348, but in 1351 he successfully underwent cataract surgery and partially regained his sight. His literary production was directly linked to the advent of his blindness: ‘quant ches coses pensoie, / Je ne veoie riens, mais aveules estoie’ (when I thought of these things I saw nothing, but was blind).66 He produced no literary texts before the onset of his blindness, and he wrote very little afterward; he specifically refers to the surgical procedure and its aftermath in his Latin chronicle, in the incipit to his long vernacular poem the ‘Regrasciemens’ and in the shorter vernacular pieces ‘Del cure l’abbet Gillion le Muysit’ and ‘Li complainte des compagnons’. The literary use of cataract surgery serves as an interesting point of comparison between the abbot and his better-known contemporary, as both Guillaume de Machaut and Gilles le Muisit seem to have suffered certain ocular impairments – but only the abbot is known to have undergone treatment, and only he writes explicitly about the surgical procedure. His literary works are more prized today for their informational than their poetic value; nonetheless, Gilles le Muisit’s evocation of his blindness, surgery, and recovery are endowed with a

64 On adjustment literature, see Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 98. 65 The writings of Gilles le Muisit survive in three manuscripts: Courtrai 135 (the first three books of the chronicle), Bruxelles 13076 (the fourth book of the chronicle), and Bruxelles IV, 119 (the vernacular poems). All three manuscripts, as well as a Quête du Saint-Graal (Arsenal 5218), are attributed to the Tournaisien workshop of Pierart dou Tielt. Albert D’Haenens, ‘Pierart dou Tielt, enlumineur des oeuvres de Gilles li Muisis. Note sur son activité à Tournai vers 1350’, Scriptorium 23:1 (1969), 88–93. The most complete modern account of the abbot’s life is contained in Bernard Guenée, Entre l’Église et l’État (Paris: Gallimard, 1987). More recently, Edward Wheatley has treated his discussions of his blindness in Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 204–12. 66 ‘Regrasciemens’, Poésies, 230. All of Gilles’s vernacular writings are cited from Poésies de Gilles li Muisis, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove (Louvain: J. Lefever, 1882).

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certain grace and power.67 What’s more, while Gilles describes his surgery in both the Latin Annales and the vernacular lyric, it is only in the latter that the procedure rises above the status of a factual report to take on greater metaphoric significance. Unlike Guillaume de Machaut, who does not attempt to describe his narrator’s (figurative) surgery in any detail, Gilles provides quite a complete account of the various phases of his blindness and cure. The incipit of the ‘Lamentations’, the first poem in his collection – an incipit either dictated by Gilles himself, written with his approval, or written during or shortly after his lifetime68 – describes the symptoms of Gilles’ malady: the inability to read or write, and the vague capacity to perceive light (‘il avoit le lumière des yoels couverte si que vir les gens ne pooit, ne lire, ne escrire, et ne véoit fors clartés et lumières, et grossement’). Gilles became aware of the severity of his affliction in dramatic fashion, as partway through a mass he was suddenly unable to see and had to cut short the service. But this ‘covering’ of his eyes with cataract lasted only a few years, for the abbot was one of the lucky few fourteenth-century cataract sufferers who responded positively to surgical treatment. The incipit of one of Gilles’ final pieces, the Regrasciemens, describes the abbot’s cataract surgery, performed by an itinerant surgeon named Jean de Mayence: Ch’est li loenge et li regrasciemens l’abbet Gillion le Muysit à Dieu, à le Virgène Marie, à saint Martin, à tous sains et à toutes saintes, de chou que li veue li est recouvrée, qui avoit estet aveules trois ans et plus, […] et avoit estet environ siscante-deus ans abbés esleus, se fu aidiés par un maistre nommet Jehan de Meence, qui ouvra en ses yeuls d’un instrument d’argent, à manière d’aiguille, sans pener, à pau d’angosce et tos passée, et fu faite cheste cure, et vey des deus yeuls selonc sen eage souffisçaument, l’an de grâce MCCCLI, environ le fiest saint Rémi; s’est ausi se conclusions des coses qu’il a fait escrire.69 This is the abbot Gillion le Muysit’s praise and thanks to God, to the Virgin Mary, to Saint Martin, and to all of the saints, for the recovery of his sight, he who was blind three years and more, […] and had been elected abbot about sixty-two years hence. He was aided by a master named Jehan de Meence, who worked in his eyes with a silver instrument, like a needle, without causing pain, with slight anguish that was soon over. This cure was 67 A rare discussion of Gilles le Muisit opens Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet’s La couleur de la mélancolie: la fréquentation des livres au XIVe siècle, 1300–1415 (Paris: Hatier, 1993), 9–12. 68 According to D’Haenens, all three of the illuminated manuscripts were commissioned by the monks of the abbey before 1360. The Courtrai manuscript was most certainly copied before Gilles le Muisit’s death. Paul Faider, Catalogue des manuscrits de la bibliothèque publique de la ville de Courtrai (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1936), 94. 69 Poésies, ed. Lettenhove, 230.

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made, and he saw with his two eyes, fairly well for his age, in the year of our Lord 1351, around the feast of Saint Rémi. This is also the conclusion of the things that he had written.

The timing of the abbot’s surgery is not precisely indicated, though the procedure is said to have taken place around the feast day of Saint Rémi, October first. In his Latin chronicle Gilles provides a somewhat longer account of his procedure, this time specifying the dates. One eye’s cataract was removed on 18 September 1351, the other on 22 September, thus falling just within the May to September ‘window of opportunity’ set out by Guy de Chauliac in his Inventarium. […] quidam magister de Alemania venit in Tornacum et, visis oculis meis, promisit cum Dei adjutorio me curaturum. Consideratis omnibus que michi dixit, finaliter contra consilium propinquorum et amicorum meorum omnium ego acquievi ejus consilio, ita quod Dominica post Exaltationem sancte Crucis in uno oculo et feria quinta sequenti in alio permisi in eis artem suam exercere. Qui cum parvo dolore et cito transacto cum quodam instrumentum ad modum acus est operatus, discoperiens lumen oculorum.70 […] A certain master from Germany came to Tournai and, having looked at my eyes, promised that with God’s help he would cure me. Considering all that he said to me, finally, against the counsel of all of my dear ones and friends I agreed to his advice, so that I permitted him to exercise his art in one eye on the Sunday following the Exaltation of the Holy Cross and five days after the holiday in the other. The operation was performed with a certain needle-like instrument, which provoked minimal and short-lived pain, uncovering the light of my eyes.

These descriptions confirm for us, first, that the procedure was performed by an itinerant surgeon of non-local origin, in this case a magister from Mainz; second, that the patient underwent a preliminary consultation during which the surgeon attempted to determine whether the cataracts were of an operable type; and third, that a silver needle-like instrument was used. Additionally, both accounts state that the pain of the operation was minimal and short-lived – a rare evaluation of the discomfort involved. Gilles’ Latin account of the surgery also mentions that he underwent the procedure over the objections of his family and friends, ‘contra consilium propinquorum et amicorum meorum omnium’. In one of his last vernacular poems as well, ‘Del cure l’abbet Gillion le Muysit’, Gilles mentions others’ reactions to his decision to undergo surgery: 70 Gilles le Muisit, Chroniques et annales de Gilles le Muisit, ed. Henri Lemaitre (Paris: SHF, 1905), 306–7.

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Quatre-vins ans ou priés avoit complit d’eage, Quant il fist en ses ioex faire le boin ouvrage. Moult de gens à che temps le tienrent à folage Qu’il ot de chou souffrir et dou faire corage.71 He was eighty years old, or close to it, when he had the work done on his eyes. At the time many people thought it mad of him to have the heart to go through that.

These accounts of the feelings of a patient’s loved ones provide the modern reader with a unique window on the doubt and fear associated with medieval eye surgery. It is perhaps for this reason that the illuminator of the Annales manuscript (Bruxelles 13076–77), identified as Pierart dou Telt, chose to include an illumination (fol. 50v) with side-by-side scenes of the cataract operation and the surgeon’s announcement of his success to the patient’s loved ones (Figure 1).72 The inclusion of this illumination elevates Gilles’ cataract surgery to the same level of importance as the other events depicted throughout the manuscript, such as the Black Death (famously depicted in the manuscript’s best-known illumination, the burial of the plague victims, fol. 24v). The surgical image’s inclusion also reaffirms the pivotal role that Gilles’s physical condition played in the creation of the book. The text’s and image’s foregrounding of the hazards of cataract couching also stands in sharp contrast to Machaut’s surgery, already successfully completed before the patient is even aware of its occurrence. Again we are reminded that the strictly verbal removal of an impediment to vision (à la Machaut) presents no collateral risk of physical harm, permitting greater latitude for playful exploration. Gilles’s double operation was a success, and the author/patient provides us with a direct account of the results. In his Annales he describes his visual capacity after the removal of the cataracts: ‘Visum recuperavi et vidi, non sicut in etate juvenili, sed sicut etas mea requirebat, quia jam eram octogenarius, et videbam celum, solem, lunam, stellas, non perfecte cognoscens gentes, et in omnibus michi bene providebam, excepto quod scribere aut legere non valebam’ (I recovered my eyesight and I saw, not as in my young age, but as was right for my age, for I was already an octogenarian, and I saw the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars, recognizing people (though imperfectly), and I saw everything before me very well, except that they [my eyes] were no good for reading and writing).73 The abbot’s sight was not perfectly restored, but distinctly improved: even after the surgery, Gilles

71 72

vv. 21–4. Despite the prevalence of the theme of blindness in the French poetry of Gilles le Muisit, the vernacular manuscript (Bruxelles IV, 119) contains no pertinent illuminations. 73 Chroniques, ed. Lemaitre, 307.

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Figure 1. Gilles li Muisis undergoing cataract surgery Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique The octagenarian abbot of St Martin in Tournai underwent cataract surgery in 1351, an operation he described in his Latin chronicle and in vernacular verse. This illumination from the unique manuscript of Annales book IV shows the cataract couching at the left, as the abbot’s loved ones, in the right panel, await news of the outcome.

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wrote in the ‘Complainte des compagnons’, ‘J’ay les ioex diffamés, un pau s’en suy honteus’ (My eyes are deficient, I’m a little ashamed of it).74 Still unable to read and write, he could nonetheless see the wonders of God’s creation and recognize people, though with some difficulty. The itinerant surgeon was not able to give Gilles the eyesight of a young man, but considering the abbot’s advanced age and the fact that he had until recently been almost completely blind, the results were more than satisfactory. As stated in the previously cited incipit to the ‘Regrasciemens’, after his surgery Gilles ‘vey des deus yeuls selonc sen eage souffisçaument’. Just as Gilles began composing poetry while he grew blind, the successful treatment of his cataract coincided with end of his poetic production; his writings suggest that he regarded poetry and even chronicle as a pastime for the blind, a frivolous pursuit to be cut short when he regained his sight and was once again able to carry out his duties as abbot. Gilles’ poems reveal not only the impact of his blindness on his means of perceiving the world, but also the manner in which his relatively sudden blindness, and the even more abrupt recovery of his eyesight, affected his personality and attitudes. Before abandoning his literary project, Gilles composed a few final texts that described not just the physiological but the psychological ramifications of his blindness and the ultimate recovery of his sight. Especially in these latest poetic works, designated in the vernacular manuscript ‘Ch’est del cure l’abbet Gillion le Muysit’ and ‘Ch’est li complainte des compagnons’, Gilles describes the manner in which his illness and cure impacted upon his behavior. In the ‘Cure’, Gilles speaks of himself in the third person, explaining that he viewed his affliction as an ordeal much like the trials of Job. In so doing, Gilles also moves toward a metaphorizing tendency absent from the Annales. He appears to have explored all therapeutic possibilities, seeking symbolic and metaphoric explanations for his blindness, spiritual as well as surgical cures. That he both composed verse and underwent surgical intervention, against popular opinion, reinforces the impression that poesis, like surgery, is one therapeutic option among many. Gilles allows for and performs a figurative reading of his own bodily condition, presenting blindness as possible punishment for sins and vowing to be good thenceforth. That he also chooses a second therapeutic path (surgery) does not mean that surgical intervention is anathema to metaphoric devices, or that metaphoric thinking is unhealthy. Indeed, metaphoric and surgical treatment paths converge after the surgery: the abstemious living prescribed by both proves key to the abbot’s well-being, if not to his conviviality. Quant il estoit aveules, il avoit patience, Souvent à Dieu prioit et faisoit convenence

74

v. 137.

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S’il véoit, de tous maus il feroit abstinence, Ses virtus non céleroit, riens n’en feroit silence.75 When he was blind, he was patient. He often prayed and made covenant with God that if he regained his sight he would abstain from all evils, he would not hide his virtue, nothing would stop him.

While the onset of blindness may be interpreted as a punishment of past sin, it also provides a unique opportunity for introspection and penitence: the eyes are the portals through which lust, envy, and other sins gain entry to the spirit, and the blocking of their light thus has positive consequences for human behavior. The implications of the vow made in blindness – ‘S’il véoit, de tous maus il feroit abstinence’ – are illustrated in the ‘Complainte des compagnons’, a mock-dialogue between Gilles and the friends who have abandoned him since his miraculous cure. In the initial complaint, Gilles describes the changes he has undergone since his surgery. Or est illuminés, s’est autres devenus; Che dist-on qu’il soloit compains iestre tenus. Ch’est voirs, il est anchien, tous blans et tous kenus. Mais on dist boins usages doit iestre maintenus.76 Now that he can see, he’s no longer himself. They say he used to be good company. True, he’s old, with white hair, but they say good habits should be kept up.

On behalf of the compagnons, Campion responds that the abbot’s behavior has changed dramatically: whereas during his blindness he regaled his friends with fine food and wine, after the surgery he has become frugal, virtuous, and no fun at all. In reference to both therapies, surgical and metaphoric, he implies that the cure is worse than the disease. Gilles answers Campion’s charges in both spiritual and medical terms. His renewed virtue is due not only to the vow to which he alluded in the ‘Cure l’abbet Gillion le Muysit’, but also to the post-surgery fragility of his eyes: J’ay les deus ioex moult tenres, se me nuyroit lumière, Ayl, vins, tasters et veillers, fèves, feus et fumière. Se m’en convient warder ou revenir arière En l’estat prumerain et cangier me manière.77 My two eyes are tender and sensitive to light, garlic, wines, tasty treats, late nights, fire and smoke. So I’d better keep up new behaviors or else backtrack to my former state and change my condition. 75 76 77

vv. 33–6. vv. 16–19. ‘Complainte des compagnons’, vv. 173–6.

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The abbot cannot maintain the lifestyle he enjoyed during his blindness because his eyes are too delicate. His avoidance of garlic, spicy foods, and airborne contaminants is in keeping both with his moral vow to reform (contingent as it was upon a metaphorical model of blindness) and with contemporary medical advice. Dietary modification was typically recommended as a noninvasive therapy for ocular ailments: witness Guy de Chauliac’s advocation of such regimens in the Inventarium and in his now-lost De subtilianti dieta, written for John the Blind.78 Although Campion clearly regrets the abbot’s return to a more austere lifestyle, Gilles has no desire to revisit the dark days of his handicap: ‘Pour or, ne pour argent je ne vorroye mie / Revenir en l’estat de chel aveulerie’ (Not for gold, nor for silver would I want to return to that state of blindness).79 Gilles le Muisit’s blindness had changed his identity, from cleric to entertainer and from abbot to author, and only the removal of the cataract was able to restore his spiritual and behavioral balance. Inasmuch as it represents a restoration to a previous state, Gilles’s surgery is quite similar to Guillaume’s. Despite the very different emphases of the two writings – an accomplished poet-composer’s manual of love poetry, as compared to a literary novice’s pastime80 – the two authors’ poetic accounts of cataract surgery are somewhat alike in the relation they establish between the condition of the eyes and the sentiment of love. For while Gilles is not writing about a beloved woman, his cataract, like the Remede narrator’s love-melancholy, disrupts his vision and alters his psychological and spiritual reality. The poet seems aware of the common ground between cataract, fantasy, and the love-imprint, as he appropriates the conventions of love poetry in order to express the physiological and psychological changes he has undergone. In his case, though, it is God (rather than Love or the beloved) whose darts penetrate the abbot’s body, rendering his corporeal eyes useless: Que de vos dart m’aves lanchiet Si que j’ay pierdu me lumiere Du corps que molt avoie chiere81 78 Guy de Chauliac alludes to De subtilianti dieta in his Inventarium, p. 341: ‘Verum quia de ordinacione istarum rerum quantum ad istum casum, precipue quantum ad cibaria, Galienus fecit libellum specialem De subtilianti dieta vocatum, et magister Arnaldus etiam de hoc fecit tractatum, et ego pro illustri Johanne rege Boemie, et cum hoc domini phisici in hoc sunt vocandi, et satis dictum est de hoc in apostematibus frigidis, de exquisita ordinacione supersedeo quantum est de presenti.’ 79 vv. 253–4. 80 Albert D’Haenens posits that few people outside of the monastery of Saint-Martin would have known of the abbot’s literary activity. ‘Gilles li Muisis Historien’, Revue Bénédictine 69 (1959), 258–86. 81 Poésies, ed. Lettenhove, 65.

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That you threw your darts in such a way that I lost the light of the body that I held so dear

Similarities with Machaut’s figurative blindness and surgery, however, seem to end at this language of penetrated eyes; the two poets’ impairments stem from different sources and thus require different treatments. Machaut’s ailment is both inward (melancholic) and largely verbalized; his impairment disables him because it precludes the experience of love and therefore impedes the composition of fixed-form love lyric. Gilles’s handicap, though, does ultimately prove to be at least partly external, as a surgical remedy restores much of his vision. The abbot’s physiological impairment is manifested not as a disability but as an increased ability to write; indeed, writing seems almost symptomatic of his broader affliction as it becomes, like wine and garlic, one of the frivolous activities that Gilles casts aside upon regaining his vision. Poesis becomes a player in and a vehicle for a poetic autobiography. This self-writing is, in essence, an autohagiography as well: after a descent into an overly worldly way of life, Gilles undergoes a trial that ends in a redemptive miracle and a restoration or affirmation of faith. Nicole Chareyron points out that just as Saul of Tarsus was blind for three days, Gilles is blind for three years, and his period of affliction prompts a spiritual reassessment and a profound behavioral reorientation.82 The circumstances giving rise to Gilles le Muisit’s poetic activity highlight a set of interrelated problems fundamental to all of the metaphoric therapies we have discussed: how can a therapeutic procedure simultaneously be metaphor and material reality, or a text at once symptom and cure? Metaphoric cataract surgery is perhaps the most paradoxical poetic cure of all, establishing a harmonious complementarity between a surgical procedure, which removes a ‘veil’ from the eye, and a rhetorical figure, a type of ‘parole couverte’ which adds a veil of language.83 Metaphoric therapies can surpass the results of their surgical analogues, as a comparison of the Remede de Fortune and the writings of Gilles le Muisit reveals: Machaut’s narrator regains ‘sa clarté première’, while the abbot, never again able to read or write, ‘vey des deus yeuls selonc son eage souffisçaument’. And yet, as the case of Gilles le Muisit shows us, the relationship between medicine and composition is significantly more complicated than this simple comparison would suggest. For while metaphoric cure allows for (even depends on) the composition of verse, surgical cure eliminates the need for poetic composition altogether. 82 Nicole Chareyron, ‘Voyage au bout de la nuit: Gilles le Muisit, poète de la cécité’, Perspectives médiévales 16 (June 1990), 81. On the significance of Paul’s temporary blindness, see Moshe Barasch, Blindness: The History of a Mental Image in Western Thought (New York: Routledge, 2001), 56–65. 83 The definition of metaphor as ‘parole couverte’ is cited from the ex-Phillipps 128 preface to the Avision Christine: Reno, ‘The Preface to the Avision-Christine’, 208.

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Post-operative conclusion: evaluating therapeutic ‘success’ The lyric components of the Avision Christine and the Livre de l’espérance, the Remede de Fortune’s metaphoric cataract surgery, and Gilles le Muisit’s two surgeries (figurative and factual) are all in their own way successful, as each fulfils the ultimate goal of metaphor as defined by Umberto Eco: ‘to point out, or to teach how to see’.84 Where disability and its treatment are concerned, however, models of success may differ. Christine de Pizan and Alain Chartier’s ‘hybrid’ remedies offer more limited therapeutic potential owing to textual limitations: a highly restricted number of lyric interventions in the former case, a state of incompletion in the latter. Nonetheless, their metaphors of regulated digestion and restored mental equilibrium point in the direction of genuine (figurative) remedy. The type of therapy that these texts can only suggest had reached fuller expression in the Remede de Fortune, which couples formal experimentation with the highly evocative image of cataract surgery. Metaphorically speaking, Machaut’s cataract couching could be said to be more successful than Gilles’s (even though in the reality of lived experience the opposite is true) because it changes the subject’s awareness without modifying the underlying body. In effecting a cure that is couched in somatic terms yet is wholly intellectual at its core, Machaut sidesteps the ‘opportunistic’ traps of which Disability Studies scholars are so wary. Rather than exploiting ‘physical and cognitive anomalies … to lend a “tangible” body to textual abstractions’, a manoeuvre Mitchell and Snyder have termed the ‘materiality of metaphor’, Machaut’s cataract surgeon performs an inverse operation, momentarily lending textual abstractions to a tangible body.85 It is a relatively small leap from this therapeutic strategy to one adopted in Machaut’s late masterpiece, the Voir Dit, in which prosthetic lyric ‘insertions’ supplement and become incorporated in the narratorial and textual body.

84 85

Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, 102. Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 47–8.

5 Metonymy and Prosthesis METONYMY BLINDNESSAND ANDPROSTHESIS THERAPY

The metaphoric operation performed by the Remede de Fortune’s Esperance – lending textual abstractions to a tangible body in order to render that body whole – lies at the heart of the most ambitious late medieval attempts at the textual healing of blindness. But even as we recognize such phenomena in the writings of Machaut, we must remember that the starkly contrasting language of abstraction and tangibility is already a problematic framework to attempt to apply to medieval texts and bodies: just as medieval medicine is a theoretical more than a practical discipline, grounded in an abstract schema of complexions and qualities, so too is the late medieval poetic text an increasingly tangible, even corporeal, entity. The fixed form poem’s ties to the rhythms and structures of the body enable an innovative healing technique wherein the textual body corrects the lover’s physical body by completing it. Unlike metaphor and irony, which involve speaking differently about a problem in order to correct or counterbalance it, this therapeutic strategy consists in the replacement of a missing part with its like, with a related structure or device. In language we call this process of substitution metonymy; in surgery, we call it prosthesis. Metonymy is defined, in rhetoric, as ‘the action of substituting for a word or phrase denoting an object, action, institution, etc., a word or phrase denoting a property or something associated with it’, or, in less specialized usage, as ‘a thing used or regarded as a substitute for or symbol of something else’; the therapeutic procedure of prosthesis consists of ‘the replacement of defective or absent parts of the body by artificial substitutes’.1 These rhetorical and surgical interventions double one another, as both hinge on notions of substitution and representation: a verbal structure can serve as ‘a substitute for or symbol of something else’, just as a mechanical device can replace ‘defective or absent parts of the body’, only on the basis of a presumed functional equivalency between a missing structure and the phrase or facsimile introduced in its stead. Indeed, one of the most complex healing strategies attempted in late medieval poetry – the replacement of the lover’s missing or defective eye with a verbal structure – is at once metonymic and prosthetic in nature. In this chapter I shall argue that such a strategy lies at the heart of the 1

‘Metonymy’, ‘Prosthesis’, Oxford English Dictionary online .

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complex formal play inherent in Guillaume de Machaut’s Livre du Voir Dit (1362–5).

Surgical, narrative, and lyric prosthesis Before arguing for a link between the concepts of metonymy and prosthesis, and for the centrality of both to the practice of ‘lyric insertion’ common in late medieval French dits, it behooves us to untangle the various surgical, linguistic, and critical/theoretical connotations currently attached to the term prosthesis. What is prosthesis, and is a discussion of medieval prosthesis by its very nature anachronistic? Histories of prosthesis (in its literal, i.e. its surgical, sense) typically begin with Ambroise Paré (c.1510–90), who proposed prosthetic eyes (the indwelling hyplepharon and the external eclepharon), noses, and ears in addition to his better-known main de fer.2 While Paré remains ‘the first known person to describe the feasibility of achieving prosthetic replacement of the orbital structures’, it is not with him that Western history of prosthesis begins.3 Many of his proposals build upon earlier but less documented achievements. Evidence of premodern prosthesis is scant, however, and rarely compelling: it is largely limited to ancient Egyptian burials, classical statuary, and depictions on pottery shards and mosaics.4 Such incomplete information has given rise to rampant speculation but little in the way of a coherent history of premodern prosthesis. The Romans’ distinction between the medicus ocularius (a medical practitioner specializing in the eyes) and the faber ocularius (a craftsman who fabricates artificial eyes), for example, has led many to speculate that the ancients did practice ocular prosthesis, though it is not known whether the handiwork of the faber ocularius ever adorned living bodies or only statuary.5 Our knowledge of medieval prosthetic devices likewise stems largely from 2 Ambroise Paré, Oeuvres complètes, ed. J. F. Malgaigne (Paris: Baillière, 1840–41). See also Brian F. Conroy, ‘A Brief Sortie into the History of Cranio-Oculofacial Prosthetics’, Facial Plastic Surgery 9:2 (1993), 89–115; Alan J. Thurston, ‘Paré and Prosthetics: The Early History of Artificial Limbs’, ANZ Journal of Surgery 77 (2007), 1114–19. Some of Paré’s limb prostheses were actually produced – notably the Petit Lorrain, a mechanical hand named after the serrurier who fabricated it – yet there is no evidence to indicate that Paré ever practised craniofacial prosthetic rehabilitation. 3 Conroy, ‘A Brief Sortie’, 93. 4 On evidence of early prosthetics see Arthur H. Bulbulian, ‘Maxillofacial prosthetics: its Origin and Present Status’, Mayo Clinic Proceedings 39 (1964), 3–17; V. Putti, ‘Historical Prostheses’, Journal of Hand Surgery (British and European volume) 30:3 (2005), 310–25, translated from ‘Protesi antiche’, La chirurgia degli organi di movimento IX 4–5 (1925), 495–526; David J. Reisberg and Susan W. Habakuk, ‘A History of Facial and Ocular Prosthetics’, Advances in Ophthalmic Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery 8 (1990), 11–24. 5 Conroy, ‘A Brief Sortie’, 91; Reisberg and Habakuk, ‘History’, 13.

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anecdote: Justinian II (669–711) was reportedly outfitted with a golden nose, as was Otto III (983–1002); Abulcasis of Cordova wrote of ivory facial prosthetics, especially dental bridges, but no known examples survive; lepers are said to have worn masks or false noses to hide the deterioration of their facial tissue.6 Tangible remnants of these practices are few and far between. Literary reference to prosthesis, however, suggests that the later medieval use of prosthetic devices may have been more widespread than surviving material evidence would indicate. In De remediis utriusque fortunae 2.93 (De tristitia et miseria), for instance, Petrarch praises the technological advances by which man has been able to overcome illness and infirmity: ‘Denique modus sese omnibus adiuvat, attolitque, quin amissis artubus pedes ligneos, manus ferreas, nasos caereos, fabricari didicit’ (Indeed, he sustains and conveys himself by all means: in order not to lose his members he has learned to devise wooden feet, iron hands, wax noses).7 Petrarch’s praise of prosthetic technology would seem to allude to real objects and, in fact, the earliest surviving prosthetic hands do date from the fourteenth century.8 Despite the paucity of medieval materials, Antonio Landi, Maria Facchini and others seem justified in stating that ‘prostheses developed considerably during the Middle Ages’ and ‘became a complement to surgical amputation in order to compensate for functional impairment’.9 To Landi et al.’s catalogue of hinged claws and pasty proboscises we may add one more prosthetic device, far more used, and better attested, in the later Middle Ages: eyeglasses. Like artificial limbs, these devices – forged through the application of technical skill to a bodily problem – supplement a physical lack, restore a body part’s function. Or, as Umberto Eco has put it, ‘in a broader sense, [a prosthesis] is any apparatus extending the range of action of an organ. This is why we can also consider hearing aids, megaphones, stilts, magnifying lenses, periscopes as prostheses’.10 In other words, eyeglasses are a perfect fit for Brian F. Conroy’s definition of a prosthesis as a device designed ‘to ease pain, restore function, or disguise disfigurement by

6 On Albucasis, see Conroy, ‘A Brief Sortie’, 92; on lepers see A. Renk, ‘Zur Geschichte der Epithesen’, Deutsche zahnartzliche Zeitschrift 41:12 (1986), 1194. 7 Petrarch, Opera quae extant omnia (Basel: Sebastianum Henricpetri, 1581), 185. 8 Antonio Landi, Maria C. Facchini, Antonio Saracino, and Giuseppe Caserta, ‘Historical Aspects’, in Reconstructive Surgery in Hand Mutilation, ed. Guy Foucher (London: Martin Dunitz, 1997), 7. More limb prosthetics survive from the fifteenth century, notably several in the Museo Stibbert in Florence, and prosthetic technique burgeons in the sixteenth century with such noted cases as Götz von Berlichingen’s articulated hand and Tycho Brahe’s metal nose. See Alfredo Lensi, Il Museo Stibbert: catalogo delle sale delle armi europee, parte seconda (Florence, 1918), 645 and plate CLXXIV. 9 Caserta, ‘Historical Aspects’, 6–7. 10 Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 208.

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the application of engineering and artistic skills’.11 And it seems that Petrarch, in his praise of modern prosthetics, viewed eyeglasses as such: for immediately following the passage cited above from De tristitia et miseria, he names eyeglasses in conjunction with the other prosthetic devices. According to Petrarch the sufferer not only makes prostheses as needed, but ‘visum languidum ocularibus refovet, qua in re maioribus vestris acutius cogitastis, qui vasculis vitreis aqua plenis, ut Seneca meminit, utebantur’ (He refreshes the weak vision of his eyes, in which matter you have thought more sharply than your ancestors who, as Seneca has recalled, used glass vessels full of water: 185). Not long after the completion of De remediis utriusque fortunae Petrarch numbered himself among those who, in their old age, became dependent on eyeglasses.12 The invention of eyeglasses, forged out of the intersection of the sciences of optics and ophthalmology, stands as one of most important technological innovations of the later Middle Ages. Spectacles as we know them today were proposed by Bacon in the Opus Maius (1266–7); the actual invention of eyeglasses probably took place in the last two decades of the thirteenth century.13 The new invention was promoted soon thereafter by the Pisan friar Alessandro della Spina (d. 1313) and appears to have grown in popularity, at least in northern Italy, relatively quickly. Venetian crystal-workers’ guild 11 12

Conroy, ‘A Brief Sortie’, 89. Petrarch complains in the fourth paragraph of his Epistola posteritati (circa 1370–72): ‘Corpus iuveni non magnarum virium, sed multe dexteritatis obtigerat. Forma non glorior excellenti, sed que placere viridioribus annis posset; colore vivido inter candidum et subnigrum, vivacibus oculis et visu per longum tempus acerrimo, qui preter spem supra sexagesimum etatis annum me destituit, ut indignanti michi ad ocularium confugiendum esset auxilium. Tota etate sanissimum corpus senectus invasit et solita morborum acie circumvenit’ (In my youth I was blessed with a body that was agile, if not terribly strong. I do not boast of remarkable beauty, but I was pleasing enough in my prime. I had a complexion between light and dark, lively eyes, and for a long time I had sharp vision, which however deserted me after the age of sixty, and obliged me, much to my chagrin, to resort to the use of eyeglasses. Despite my perfect bodily health, old age invaded and brought with it the usual discomforts). Text and translation from Modelling the Individual: Biography and Portrait in the Renaissance, ed. Karl Enenkel, Betsy De Jong-Crane, and Pieter Liebregts (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 258, par. 4. 13 In a sermon delivered at Santa Maria Novella in Florence on 23 February 1306, Fra Giordano stated that eyeglasses had been invented fewer than twenty years earlier. For a detailed account of the confusion surrounding the date and attribution of the first eyeglasses, see Edward Rosen, ‘The Invention of Eyeglasses’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 11 (1956), 13–46, 183–218. Prior to the late thirteenth century, weak eyesight was remedied with other types of ground lens. Arabic opticians had been producing lenses since the eleventh century and similar magnifying glasses are also attested in Germany at least as early as the thirteenth century. These early European lenses were most often made from pieces of rock crystal, or beryl – hence the modern term ‘bésicles’ as well as the Middle French ‘bericle’ (found in the Inventory of Clémence de Hongrie, 1328); ‘bezique’ (from the Inventory of Charles VI, 1399); or ‘berille’, the form attested by Meschinot in his Lunettes des Princes.

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regulations refer to ‘roidi … da ogli’ as early as 1300, ‘vitreos ab oculis ad legendum’ (1301), and ‘oglarios de vitro’ (1317). Other evidence of the early proliferation of eyeglasses in Italy includes a 1316 bill of sale, a 1322 inventory of a deceased bishop’s possessions, and a 1329 theft complaint lodged by a merchant. The first known figural representation of a person wearing glasses, a portrait presumed to represent Hugh of St-Cher, was executed at Treviso by Tommaso da Modena in 1352.14 These early spectacles or bericles are first mentioned in medical texts during the course of the fourteenth century. Rosen highlights the debate as to whether the ‘oculo berillino’ mentioned in Bernard of Gordon’s Lilium medicinae (1303–5) is in fact a reference to eyeglasses (201–2). There is no doubt, however, that Guy de Chauliac’s prescription of ‘ocularios vitri aut berillorum’ (rendered in the first printed French-language edition, Lyon 1478, as ‘auculaires de voyre ou de bericle’, eyepieces of glass or beryl), refers to the new invention. Eyeglasses are evidently no longer exceedingly rare in the mid-fourteenth century, as their use comes to be regarded as a part of the aging process. In the chapter ‘De debilitate visus’ of his treatise Nonum ad Almansorem (1365), Jean de Tournemire states that old men typically need glasses when they reach their mid-fifties: ‘Indigent bericulis in primo seni, in LV anno vel circa’ (eyeglasses are necessary at the beginning of old age, around fifty-five years).15 References to eyeglasses become progressively more commonplace throughout the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in Latin and vernacular texts as varied as medical treatises (Guy de Chauliac’s Inventarium, 1363), antifeminist tracts (Jean Le Fevre’s translation of the late-thirteenth-century Lamentations de Matheolus, c.1371–2), verse narratives (Pierre Chastellain’s Temps recouvré, 1454, Jean Meschinot’s Lunettes des princes, 1461–5, and, in the early sixteenth century, Pierre Sala’s Tristan), and lyric poetry (Charles d’Orléans, 1450–55, and François Villon’s Testament, 1461).16 In the late Middle Ages the use of eyeglasses was typically associated with old age, as we see in Charles d’Orléans’ ballade XCV, ‘Par les fenestres de mes yeulx’: Or, maintenant que deviens vieulx, Quant je lys ou livre de joie, Les lunectes prens pour le mieulx, Par quoy la lettre me grossoye (vv. 8–11)17 14 For a more complete account of early references to (and representations of) eyeglasses, see Rosen, ‘The Invention of Eyeglasses’, esp. 204–13. 15 Quoted in Hermentaire Truc and Pierre Pansier, Histoire de l’ophtalmologie à l’école de Montpellier (Paris: A. Maloine, 1907), 138. 16 On Meschinot’s Lunettes des Princes and Villon’s Testament, see Julie Singer, ‘Eyeglasses for the Blind: Redundant Therapies in Meschinot and Villon’, FifteenthCentury Studies 35 (2010), 112–31. 17 Charles d’Orléans, Poésies, ed. Pierre Champion. 2 vols (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1956).

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But now that I’m getting old, when I read from the book of Joy I’m better off using my glasses that enlarge the letters for me.

It is of crucial importance to note that the only medieval eyeglasses are reading glasses, magnifiers that enlarge objects at close range. That eyeglasses are popularly associated with scholarly activities, especially reading and writing, is further suggested by their earliest pictorial representations.18 All of which is simply to say that, firstly, it is by broadening our definition of prosthesis that we must write the history of medieval prosthetics, and, secondly, the most commonly used prosthetic devices at the close of the Middle Ages – reading glasses – are a facilitator of textual production and consumption, one that invites reflection not only on physical impairment but on authorship, readership, and reception. Beyond its material history, prosthesis is a fundamental concept in the field of Disability Studies, having served as the guiding premise of David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s book Narrative Prosthesis (2000). Just as a consideration of eyeglasses prompts us to broaden our conception of material prostheses, Mitchell and Snyder’s usage invites an expanded definition of prosthesis as a rhetorical tool. According to Mitchell and Snyder, disability is typically represented in narrative literature as a problem in need of a solution; ‘prosthesis’, then, is a sort of shortcut that propels narrative – either as ‘a stock feature of characterization’ or ‘an opportunistic metaphoric device’.19 As posited by Mitchell and Snyder, ‘Narrative prosthesis (or the dependency of literary narratives upon disability) forwards the notion that all narratives operate out of a desire to compensate for a limitation or to reign [sic] in excess.’20 However, while late medieval courtly narratives may bear the mark of deviance as their ‘basis and common denominator’, as Mitchell and Snyder say of modern prosthetic narratives,21 their peculiar formal and stylistic characteristics resist efforts to read them as prosthetic texts, at least as Mitchell and Snyder have defined the term. Indeed, it is by returning to a somewhat more literal notion of prosthesis – one that sees prosthesis not as a narrative expedient but as a restoration of function through, as B. F. Conroy puts it, ‘the application of engineering and artistic skills’ – that I propose to account for certain formal peculiarities in the sort of late medieval narrative typified by the Voir Dit. Late medieval prosthesis is not an ‘opportunistic

18 See Charles E. Letocha and John Dreyfus, ‘Early Prints Depicting Eyeglasses’, Archives of Ophthalmology 120 (2002), 1577–80. A number of medieval representations of eyeglasses are reproduced in Chiara Frugoni, Books, Banks, Buttons, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 8–25. 19 David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 47. 20 Ibid., 53. 21 Ibid., 55.

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metaphoric device’, as Mitchell and Snyder characterize modern narrative prosthesis, but, rather, a metonymic strategy. Late medieval French romances are marked by their conventional love plot, often incorporating situations or allegorical figures from the thirteenthcentury Roman de la Rose and also, as we have seen in the preceding chapter, by their mixed or ‘hybrid’ generic form combining narrative verse, lyric insertions, and prose passages. Machaut’s Voir Dit is (along with the Remede de Fortune) the very example of this textual type, particularly in terms of its formal structure, for it is a long narrative poem interspersed with prose letters and lyric pieces, some of which are set to music. This text confounds the archetypal narrative structure put forth as prosthetic by Mitchell and Snyder: according to Mitchell and Snyder’s schematic, a narrative consists first of the exposure to the reader of a certain deviance, followed by an elaboration of the deviance’s origins, a foregrounding of the deviance within the central narrative, and the rehabilitation of the deviance.22 Machaut’s Voir Dit ‘deviates’ sharply from this model, as the protagonist’s impairment is revealed midway through the narrative (and not in the narrative portion of the text), its origins and formative consequences are never discussed, and the impairment is never mentioned again, nor is it definitively resolved. The dit’s ‘deviant’ protagonist does nonetheless attempt to correct his own physical impairment. The means by which he does so differs sharply from ‘narrative prosthesis’, though, in that the prosthetic portions of Machaut’s text – the poems known as ‘lyric insertions’ – are both more literally prosthetic (insofar as they mimic the form of the impaired body part they are designed to supplement) and less narratively focused, as indeed the lyric insertions divert the Voir Dit away from its narrative axis. For the late medieval courtly romance, then, of which the Voir Dit serves as a paradigmatic example, I propose a different sort of literary device, founded on a metonymic and mimetic logic of substitution: not narrative, but lyric prosthesis. Lyric prosthesis, as I define it, is the use of lyric forms to bridge gaps or compensate for lacks, be they in the body of the narrator, in relationships between characters, or in the structure of a text. Such ‘inserted’ lyric is metonymic insofar as it replaces the explicit and prosaic language of narrative with a contiguous – similar, but not overlapping – discourse. This type of prosthesis joins together that which was previously missing, and just as a knee replacement restores the leg’s articulated function, a lyric prosthesis allows for the free articulation of a ‘hybrid’ text’s formally diverse components. While lyric prosthesis is not necessarily limited to narratives of disability, the problem of physical impairment inherent in Machaut’s narrative does make for an especially clear illustration of the concept. The narrator’s imperfect eyesight presents a gap to be filled in order to restore 22

Ibid., 53.

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physiological and psychological function and thus to permit the development of a conventional love narrative. The successful expression of ocularcentric love-imprint discourse through the voice of a visually impaired narratorial persona is a poetic challenge; for a visually impaired subject to experience the love-imprint in its typical form is theoretically impossible. Were the narrator’s non-functional eye replaced with another cognitive tool – be it a heightened sense of hearing or touch, or a prosthetic device – the path to love would be restored. Lyric prosthesis is, therefore, along with other rhetorical remedies enumerated in the preceding chapters, a key strategy for enabling the blind poetic subject.

Machaut, the Borgne Vallet The narrator of the Livre du Voir Dit, Guillaume, is an older cleric whose love relationship with a very young girl called Toute-Belle transpires mostly through letters and through Guillaume’s contemplation of the lady’s portrait. Their amorous and lyrical correspondence begins when the aging poetnarrator receives a letter and a poem from Toute-Belle; they meet, kiss, and consummate their relationship before malicious gossip and a long separation lead the narrator to mistrust his young beloved. He locks away Toute-Belle’s portrait, but, in a vision, that ymage persuades him to renew his faith in her. The fate of their amorous union remains unclear at the end of the dit, whose ambiguous ending suggests an open-ended love story for this far-fromidealized lover-narrator. The Voir Dit is composed with a double frame. A verse narrative recounts Guillaume’s love story; that narrative is punctuated by prose letters supposedly exchanged by the lovers; and sixty-three lyric poems are enclosed in these letters, eight of which are also set to music. While the verse frame narrative makes no explicit reference to the narrator’s physical impairment, we learn in the thirteenth letter that Guillaume refers to himself as a ‘borgne vallet’.23 In fact, this is not the only such self-characterization in Machaut’s works.24 Although Machaut’s first-person poetic persona (henceforth designated ‘Guillaume’) describes himself as borgne only twice – in the Livre du

23 Guillaume de Machaut, Le Livre du Voir Dit, ed. Paul Imbs and Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet (Paris: Poche, 1999), 282. All citations from the Voir Dit will be identified parenthetically by page number and by verse or letter number. 24 Intertextual references and iconographic traditions indicate that the collected works of Guillaume de Machaut share a common first-person narrator. The persona ages from one dit to the next; he alludes, in several texts, to his service to John the Blind; the Prologue and the Dit dou vergier explicitly share a narrator, as do the two Jugement poems, and the Voir Dit narrator repeatedly refers to himself as the author of the Morpheüs or Fontaine amoureuse; and fourteenth-century manuscripts, especially C (BN fr. 1586, c. 1350–56) and A (BN fr. 1584, c. 1370–77), accompany all of the dits with representations of the same narrator.

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Voir Dit and in the complainte ‘A toi, Hanri’, composed around 1359 – he occasionally refers to his impaired vision in less precise terms.25 Both texts identifying Guillaume specifically as a borgne are works of the poet’s old age. In the complainte, the narrator’s self-proclaimed eye condition is exploited as an instrument of satire. Mais ce qui plus va mon mal empirant, C’est ce que bien à mon borgne oeil parçoy Qu’à court de roy chascuns y est pour soy, Car il n’est homs qui tant à moi aconte Que de mes maus face semblant ne conte. (I: 252, vv. 34–8) But what makes my malady even worse is that I can see, with my borgne eye, that everyone at the king’s court looks out for himself; there is no one close enough to me to take any notice of my ills.

In this context, being borgne is an impairment, but one that does not necessarily impede the speaker’s visual perception; on the contrary, the unusual perspective that the borgne oeil offers the poet-critic may enhance his powers of observation and description. Guillaume and his eye(s) are cast to the side, but the clerk, viewing court life from the skewed angle of an outsider, is a perceptive eyewitness despite his infirmity. His very marginalization empowers him to pass, unobserved, among the elite. In this case, at least, the borgne is a clerc voyant.26 The Middle French word borgne describes a rather vaguely defined set of conditions afflicting one eye, from the absence of an eye to a squint or a crossed eye; it is also endowed with a web of social and sexual connotations. Like its precise meaning, the origin of the word is obscure; the adjective apparently derives from the latin ‘bornius’ (one whose eyes have been put out), which derives in turn from ‘borna’ (hole or cavity), a word constructed around the root ‘bher-’ meaning ‘to cut, carve, or cleave’. The etymology suggests the extent to which the word borgne is linked not only to perception but also to piercing and penetration.27 This language of penetration is 25 Such is notably the case in the complainte ‘Sire, à vous fais ceste clamour’, in which Guillaume identifies poor eyesight as one of his many troubles: ‘Et j’y voi po, par Saint Remy, / Qui n’est nie trop bon pour my’ (And I can see very little, by Saint Remy, which isn’t very good for me at all, I: 262, vv. 25–6). Guillaume de Machaut, Poésies lyriques, ed. Vladimir Chichmareff, 2 vols (Geneva: Slatkine, 1973). On the dating of ‘A toi, Hanri’, see Armand Machabey, Guillaume de Machaut (Paris: Richard Masse, 1955), 34. 26 Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet explores the potential of this play on words in ‘Le Clerc et le Louche: Sociology of an Esthetic’, trans. Monique Briand-Walker, Poetics Today 5 (1984), 479–91. 27 As we shall discuss in Chapter 6, the word borgne shares this connotation with the name Fortune which is, likewise, derived from the Indo-European root bher-.

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reflected in one of the common usages of borgne in Middle French, in which the word served as a euphemism for the penis; ‘loger l’aveugle’ or ‘loger le borgne’ meant to prostitute oneself or to engage in sexual intercourse. Furthermore, Jacqueline Cerquiglini mentions that formulae such as ‘être borgne d’un oeil’ can designate sexual divergence and that lacking an eye may imply impotence: ‘the loss of an eye is interpreted in the Middle Ages as a sign of impotence, as the symbolic transposition of another deficiency: the eye is a metaphor for the sexual organ’.28 Such a preoccupation with and anxiety about social status and sexual performance is seemingly in keeping with the Voir Dit’s incarnation of Guillaume, and it fits in with the more generalized pattern of feminization notable in the Voir Dit. Guillaume’s ocular dysfunction aligns him with the stock figures of the clerk and the jongleur. Being borgne is characteristic of the stereotypical clerkly persona because the loss of an eye ‘denies status, that of the noble or the lover’; the cleric is a marginalized eyewitness to the goings-on at court just as the borgne is a marginalized observer of society at large.29 However, along with the borgne’s ironic detachment comes a risk of distortion, for the witness’s eye ‘is at times deficient’, so ‘if the clerc is indeed in control of the point of view of the writing, he also controls its deformation’.30 As we shall see, it is precisely this risk of distortion and narratorial unreliability that underpins, and undermines, Guillaume’s final attempt to experience love and Machaut’s final attempt to write about it. On the other hand, this type of disability or disfigurement is also characteristic of the poet – or more precisely, the jongleur. In La Couleur de la mélancolie Jacqueline Cerquiglini notes that the poetic persona, in the later Middle Ages, is typically described as ugly, drunk, borgne.31 Indeed, ‘la perte d’un oeil semble faire partie du portrait traditionnel du jongleur’ (the loss of an eye seems to be a part of the traditional portrait of the jongleur).32 The connection between Machaut’s poetic persona and the minstrel or jongleur is made explicit in the Voir Dit when Guillaume speaks of his drive to write and 28 Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘Le Clerc et le Louche’, 481. A good summary of the connection between the borgne, the boiteux (lame man), and impotence in medieval folklore is contained in Cerquiglini-Toulet, Un Engin si soutil: Guillaume de Machaut et l’écriture au XIVe siècle (Paris: Champion, 1985), 144–5. 29 Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘Le Clerc et le Louche’, 481; the author later points out that the clerk’s indirect, oblique gaze often feeds a satirical outlook on the court, 486. In reference to earlier texts, see Karl Uitti, ‘The Clerkly Narrator Figure in Old French Hagiography and Romance’, Medioevo Romanzo II (1975), 394–408. 30 Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘Le Clerc et le Louche’, 488. 31 Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, La Couleur de la mélancolie: la fréquentation des livres au XIVe siècle, 1300–1415 (Paris: Hatier, 1993), 147. Emblematic of this is Tristan, who in Gerbert de Montreuil’s Continuation de Perceval (1226–30) returns to court disguised as a jongleur; the hair covering one of his eyes is an essential component of his disguise. 32 Cerquiglini-Toulet, Un Engin si soutil, 113.

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create in spite of his woes: ‘toute voie je fais de nécessité vertus, et ressemble le menestrel qui chante en place et n’i ha plus courecié de lui’ (nonetheless I make virtue of necessity, and I resemble the minstrel who sings in public even though there is none more pained than he: 522, Letter XXXI). Being borgne is not just a physical characteristic but also in many cases a social marker. The connection between blindness or being borgne, low social status, and musical production is typified not only by the traditional portrait of the jongleur, but more concretely by the figure of the blind beggar. The often comical, often morally bankrupt stock character of the blind beggar appears with great frequency in the French popular literature of the Middle Ages, from the fabliau Les trois aveugles de Compiègne to farces such as Le garçon et l’aveugle.33 Perhaps the most visible blind beggars of the later French Middle Ages were the residents of the Hôpital des Quinze-Vingts, an aveuglerie or community for the blind and their families founded by Saint Louis in 1254.34 The Quinze-Vingts begged under strictly regulated condi33 Such blind characters were subject to mockery not only in popular literature, but apparently in everyday life as well. The so-called ‘Bourgeois de Paris’ famously describes a 1425 spectacle that might best be described as public blind-baiting: ‘Item, le dernier dimanche du mois d’août, fut fait un ébatement en l’hôtel nommé d’Armagnac, en la rue Saint-Honoré, qu’on mit quatre aveugles tous armés en un parc, chacun un bâton en sa main, et en ce lieu y avait un fort pourcel, lequel ils devaient avoir s’ils le pouvaient tuer. Ainsi fut fait, et firent cette bataille si étrange, car ils se donnèrent tant de grands coups de ces bâtons, que de pis leur en fut, car quand le mieux cuidaient frapper le pourcel, ils frappaient l’un sur l’autre, car s’ils eussent été armés pour vrai, ils s’eussent tués l’in l’autre. Item, le samedi vigile du dimanche devant dit, furent menés lesdits aveugles parmi Paris, une grande bannière devant, où il y avait un pourcel portrait, et devant eux un homme jouant du bedon’ (Item, the last Sunday in August, there was an entertainment in the hôtel d’Armagnac in the rue Saint-Honoré. Four fully armed blind men were put in an enclosure, each with a cudgel in hand; there was a large pig in there too, which they could have if they were able to kill it. So it happened, and they waged a strange battle in which they gave each other so many great blows that they hurt each other more and more. When they were most sure that they were striking the pig, they were actually hitting each other, and if they had truly been armed, they would have killed each other. The day before, the same blind men had been led through Paris with a large banner with a pig depicted in it, as a drummer marched before them). Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris de 1405 à 1449, ed. Colette Beaune (Paris: Poche, 1990), 221. For an at times reductive overview of blind characters in medieval French popular literature and theatre, see the ancillary materials in Jean Dufournet’s edition of Le garçon et l’aveugle (Paris: Champion, 1982). 34 The foundation of the ‘meson des Aveugles de Paris’ is mentioned in Jean de Joinville’s Vie de Saint Louis, ed. Jacques Monfrin (Paris: Garnier, 1995). According to a later legend, fabricated in the fifteenth century and spread in texts such as Gilles Corrozet’s Fleur des Antiquitez de Paris (1532), the hospital was established in order to house three hundred crusaders whose eyes were put out by their Saracen captors. Works examining the history of the institution include Maurice Baurit, Les Quinze-Vingts du XIIIe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: IGC, 1956); Léon le Grand, Les Quinze-Vingts depuis leur fondation jusqu’à leur translation au Fauboourg Saint-Antoine (XIIIe–XVIIIe siècle) (Paris: Société de l’Histoire de Paris, 1887); Louis Guillaumat and Jean-Pierre Bailliart, Les Quinze-vingts de Paris: échos historiques du XIIIe au XXe siècle (Paris: Société

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tions, remaining in their assigned precincts and wearing a fleur de lis on the chest. The beggars often sang for their alms; the Quinze-Vingts boasted a noted choir active until the eighteenth century. The stereotype of the blind or borgne minstrel-beggar, insofar as it is dependent in large part on the presumption of a relationship between impaired vision and enhanced musical performance, is not unrelated to the type of the blind virtuoso exemplified in the same period by the Florentine poet-composer Francesco Landini.35 By emphasizing Guillaume’s ocular condition in tandem with his literary and musical activities, Machaut identifies his persona with the doubly marginalized categories of clerk and jongleur, thus inserting himself in a small brotherhood of poètes borgnes: this is a tradition typified in French letters by two thirteenth-century cleric-poets, Henri d’Andeli (active c.1220–40)36 and Rutebeuf (active c.1250–80), as well as by later poets like Eustache Deschamps (c.1346–1406/7) and Jean Molinet (1435–1507). The Champenois Rutebeuf is the author of a vast range of works including fabliaux, religious plays and saints’ lives, polemics, and complaintes, one of which identifies its author as borgne. The so-called ‘complainte Rutebeuf de son oeul’,37 possibly written in the winter of 1261–2, paints a substantially less positive portrait of the borgne than does Machaut’s previously cited complainte. De l’ueil destre, dont miex veoie, Ne voi ge pas aleir la voie Ne moi conduire. Francophone d’Histoire de l’Ophtalmologie, 1998); Edward Wheatley, ‘Blindness, Discipline, and Reward: Louis IX and the Foundation of the Hospice des Quinze-Vingts’, Disability Studies Quarterly 22:4 (2002), 194–212; Mark O’Tool, ‘Caring for the Blind in Medieval Paris: Life at the Quinze-Vingts, 1250–1430’ (Ph.D. thesis, UCSB, 2007); Edward Wheatley, Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 42–50. The hospital is now located on the Rue de Charenton and is still devoted to ophthalmology. 35 Francesco Landini, one of the best-known composers of the Italian ars nova, was blind following a childhood illness; contemporary descriptions make much of his achievements in the face of an impairment. See Leonard Ellinwood, The Works of Francesco Landini (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1939); Nino Pirrotta, ‘Francesco Landini: i lumi della mente’, in Dolcissime armonie: Nel sesto centenario della morte di Francesco Landini, ed. Piero Gargiulo (Fiesole: Cadmo, 1997), 7–13; Alessandra Fiori, Francesco Landini (Palermo: L’Epos, 2004); Julie Singer, ‘Playing by Ear: Compensation, Reclamation and Prosthesis in Fourteenth-Century Song’, in Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations, ed. Joshua R. Eyler (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010). 36 For discussion of Henri d’Andeli, see Chapter 2, pp. 57–58. 37 Jacqueline Cerquiglini notes that in BN fr 1635 the poem bears the rubric ‘Ci encoumence la complainte Rutebeuf de son oeul’ while BN fr 24432 reads ‘Ci commance li dit de l’ueil Rustebeuf.’ The composers of both rubrics clearly identify the loss of the eye as a crucial component of the poem. ‘Le Clerc et le Louche’, 479.

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Ci at doleur dolante et dure, Qu’endroit meidi m’est nuit obscure De celui eul. (vv. 23–8) Now I cannot see or conduct myself with my right eye, and that used to be my good eye. I have such harsh pain that with that eye, even midday is like dark night to me.

Unlike Machaut, however, Rutebeuf does not fully exploit the implications of his (or his persona’s) ocular condition in his complainte, where it is merely included among a litany of unfortunate events. And although a large number of Rutebeuf’s poems are explicitly autoreferential, he does not repeatedly or consistently describe himself as borgne; his defective vision is mentioned in just one other poem, the piece identified as ‘la Paiz de Rutebeuf’ (BnF fr 1635) or ‘la Priere Rutebeuf’ (BnF fr 1593). This particular disability is thus not a fundamental identifying characteristic of Rutebeuf’s poetic persona. Writing a century later, Machaut develops a more complex and continuous narratorial persona, Guillaume, and engages in a more sophisticated reflection on the causes, significance, and ramifications of Guillaume’s ocular condition. Whether Guillaume de Machaut suffered the same ocular problem he assigns to his poetic persona is a question that has given rise to significant debate, as confusion between author and persona has until recently colored a great deal of the modern Machaut scholarship.38 The biographical question of Guillaume de Machaut’s blindness has proven to be a particularly vexing problem. It is certainly tempting to embrace wholeheartedly the notion that the author suffered from some sort of ocular dysfunction, as many nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literary historians presumed. This line of argument has not entirely disappeared: R. Barton Palmer, for instance, claims in the introduction to his 1992 edition of the Confort d’Ami that Machaut had a cataract, though he cites no specific evidence, archival or textual.39 Some have sought ‘proof’ of Machaut’s condition in manuscript illuminations (Figure 2). Most famous is the argument over whether the first illumination in manuscript A (BN fr. 1584), which depicts Amours

38 In addition to Laurence de Looze’s Pseudo-autobiography in the Fourteenth Century: Juan Ruiz, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, and Geoffrey Chaucer (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1997), other recent studies addressing the problem of autobiographical ‘truth’ in Machaut’s works include G. B. GybbonMoneypenny’s ‘L’ “autobiographie amoureuse” de Guillaume de Machaut’ and Nicole Lassahn’s ‘Vérité historique et vérité fictionnelle’, both reproduced in Comme mon coeur désire: Guillaume de Machaut, Le Livre du Voir Dit, ed. Denis Hüe (Orléans: Paradigme, 2001), 63–82 and 257–80. 39 Guillaume de Machaut, Confort d’ami, ed. and trans. R. Barton Palmer (New York: Garland, 1992), xxv.

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Figure 2. Guillaume de Machaut, vallet borgne Bibliothèque nationale de France Guillaume de Machaut refers to himself in the Voir Dit and in one of his complaintes as “borgne”, a term that can designate a range of ocular abnormalities. The painter of the prologue illustrations in BnF ms fr 1584, a manuscript presumably produced under the poet’s supervision, offers the image of a cross-eyed clerk.

presenting his children to Guillaume, documents any ocular abnormalities. The possibility of Guillaume de Machaut’s personal involvement with the production of this manuscript makes such an hypothesis especially enticing.40 A close examination of manuscript A reveals that Guillaume is, beyond any possible doubt, portrayed as cross-eyed – not just in the illumination with Amours (fol. D ro), but in the Nature illumination (E ro) as well.41 It is not 40 Scholars have long presumed that Machaut was involved in the manuscript’s production due to the famous rubric ‘vesci lordenance que G. de Machau voet quil ait en son livre’ (Here is the order that G. de Machaut wants there to be in his book, fol. Av). See Sarah Jane Williams, ‘An Author’s Role in Fourteenth-Century Book Production: Guillaume de Machaut’s Livre ou je met toutes mes choses’, Romania 90 (1969), 433–54. 41 These two illuminations are by a different artist and are significantly larger than the vast majority of the illustrations. Each is approximately 16 cm wide by 14cm high, whereas most others measure approximately 6.5 cm square; only three other illuminations exceed this standard format. The other three oversized illuminations are Fortune and her five wheels (fol. 297r, W 16 cm, H 13 cm), two-faced Fortune (fol. 301v, W 16 cm, H 13 cm), and the siege of Alexandria (fol. 309r, H 10 cm, full width of leaf). These images’ large size makes it easier to see the cleric’s eyes, accounting (at least partially) for the degree of attention these particular illuminations have received. But the human figures’ eyes appear rather unnatural – crossed, walled, off-centre – in a number of manuscript A’s illuminations, so it may be possible to interpret this as a peculiarity of the artists and not as any indication of the author’s actual physical appearance. On these illuminations see François Avril, ‘Les manuscrits enluminés de Guillaume de Machaut’, in Guillaume de

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clear, however, whether these images constitute a faithful representation of the poet or whether they simply reflect careful reading of his texts. Indeed, previous efforts to settle the biographical question of Machaut’s blindness might well be characterized as excessive if not futile. As Jacqueline Cerquiglini points out in reference to the Amours illumination in Un engin si soutil, it is more useful to consider the authorial persona’s eye problems as part of the symbolic system of Machaut’s works: ‘Que le strabisme du poète renvoie ou non à une réalité, ce qu’il importe de saisir est que le trait est à interpréter – comme l’est la vieillesse de Machaut, bien réelle au moment du Voir Dit – de manière codée’ (Whether or not the poet’s strabism refers to a real condition, what it is important to grasp is that the trait – like Machaut’s old age, which is certainly real at the moment of the Voir Dit – is to be interpreted in a coded manner).42 It is the narrator Guillaume’s troubled eyesight, not the poet Machaut’s, that comes into play in the Voir Dit. Presuming that the narrator’s self-identification as ‘borgne’ can be taken at face value, we may explore the impact of the narrator’s impairment on the love story, and particularly on the form and content of the short lyric poems.

The V(e)oir Dit For the late medieval poet love is not just an intellectual game, but a physical and physiological reality. Given the Voir Dit narrator’s age, his clerical status, and above all his self-declared infirmity, it is remarkable that he should have a love story to tell at all. The narrator of the Voir Dit describes himself as an ailing and melancholic old man.43 His old age not only poses physical problems,44 but it would also seem to exclude him from love for, according to

Machaut. Colloque-Table Ronde organisé par l’Université de Reims, Reims, 19–22 avril 1978 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1982), 117–33. 42 Cerquiglini-Toulet, Un Engin si soutil, 112. 43 The Voir Dit narrator does not state his exact age, but the author Guillaume de Machaut was born around the year 1300; from 1362 to 1365, when the Voir Dit takes place, he would have been over sixty years old. If we assume that the ‘Guillaume’ persona of the poem is about the same age as the author, he would be considered quite aged when the dit takes place. 44 Other contemporary texts draw a similar connection between old age and medical problems, including melancholia. For instance, in his Amphorismes Ypocras, executed at Avignon from 1362 to 1365, Martin de Saint-Gilles writes that ‘en l’age decrepite, vienent dipnna, catarri, toux, strangurie, douleurs de jointure, douleurs des rains, advertin de teste, apoplexie, calthecie, mengne ou gratelle par tout le corps, melencolie, veilles, ventres moistes, flux de humiditez par le nez et par les yeulx, glaucité, deffaut d’oir’ (in the decrepit age, there come dyspnea, catarrh, cough, strangury, joint pains, back or kidney pain, vertigo, apoplexy, stones, scabies all over the body, melancholy, insomnia, humid stomach, flux of humidity through the nose and eyes, glaucoma, hardness of hearing). Martin de Saint-Gilles, Les Amphorismes Ypocras, ed. G. Lafeuille (Geneva: Droz, 1954), 71, III.31.

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Andreas Capellanus, love is forbidden for men over the age of sixty. ‘Aetas impedit, quia post sexagesimum annum in masculo et post quinquagesimum in femina, licet coire homo possit, eius tamen voluptas ad amorem deduci non potest’ (Age is an impediment, for after the sixtieth year in men and after the fiftieth in women one can have sex but pleasure cannot lead to love: 38, I.5). His clerkly status is another obstacle to love: ‘sed quo ad hanc nobilitatem ad amorem clericus spectare non potest’ (But because of this nobility a cleric cannot turn his eyes to love: 210, I.7). The same holds true in Machaut’s day: the clerk, especially when depicted as cross-eyed or myopic, has access neither to perfect eyesight nor to a firsthand knowledge of love. His knowledge, like that of the blind man, is based not on direct experience but on hearsay; in an era when sentement and ‘concern for the experiential world’ reign supreme, the borgne finds himself in a disadvantageous position.45 The Voir Dit’s Guillaume himself is fully aware of his quandary: ‘Car vous savés qu’il n’est si juste ne si vraie chose comme experience; et vous poez assez savoir et veoir par experience que toutes mes choses ont esté faites de vostre sentement’ (For you know that there is nothing as right or as true as experience; and you may well know and see through experience that I have written all of my lyrics through my experiential knowledge of you: 168–70, Letter VIII). But what is the nature of Guillaume’s sentement if it stems neither from personal experience nor from an intact sense of sight? The Voir Dit’s narrator, the unsuccessful lover, cannot see perfectly: the pathway by which love ought to imprint itself in his heart is disrupted. A man who cannot see clearly cannot provide his mental faculties with an accurate image of the beloved, and hence Andreas Capellanus excludes the blind from love: ‘Caecitas impedit amorem, quia caecus videre non potest unde suus possit animus immoderatam suscipere cogitationem; ergo in eo amor non potest oriri’ (Blindness impedes love, for the blind man cannot see and so cannot provide an object to his soul for immoderate contemplation; thus love cannot develop in him: 40, I.5). The Voir Dit’s Guillaume expends a great deal of effort attempting to sidestep Capellanus’s dictum. Despite his physical shortcoming – and despite the distance between himself and his beloved – Guillaume’s love for Toute-Belle is firmly anchored in the visual. The narrator falls in love first with an internal image, then with a painted image of her, before ever meeting the object of his affection. Like Machaut’s earlier dits, the Voir Dit begins with a seemingly standard innamoratio: he falls in love with an image painted in his heart. ‘Souvenirs la figuroit / En mon cuer’ (Memory figured her in my heart: 66, vv. 405–6). Françoise Ferrand therefore feels justified in saying that ‘au sujet de la formation du fantasme, Machaut n’innove pas, mais reprend les théories antiques qu’ont fait leurs les penseurs médiévaux’ (as to the formation of the 45

De Looze, Pseudo-autobiography, 42.

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phantasm Machaut does not innovate, he reuses the classical theories appropriated by medieval thinkers).46 It is only at the very beginning of the Voir Dit, however, that this affirmation seems justified. Machaut’s innamoratio follows the formula laid out in the Commentum Terenti, ‘prima visus, secunda alloquii, tertia tactus’, and Guillaume explicitly evokes this hierarchy when he writes of his desire to ‘veoir, oÿr et tenir’ (see, hear, and hold) his lady (78).47 When the poet and his beloved meet for the first time, his description of the scene likewise follows the order set out by earlier love-manuals: he first describes the moment ‘quant je vi sa contenance’ (when I saw her countenance: 208, v. 1909), then describes how ‘je oÿ sa douce parole’ (I heard her sweet voice: 208, v. 1916) and ‘me prist de sa main blanche’ (took hold of her white hand: 208, v. 1924); their first kisses come later (240, 266). That said, Guillaume’s love-process nonetheless diverges from the standard scenario in two major respects. First of all, he never sees Toute-Belle before falling in love, and hence does not have an accurate representation imprinted in his heart; and second, his ocular condition prevents the accurate apperception of his beloved even after they do meet face to face. Even if the language of the love-imprint in the Voir Dit is relatively conventional, the love affair itself is not. Given the fundamental complications of blindness and distance, it would be most exact to say that rather than simply following convention, Machaut employs the topos as faithfully as possible given his persona’s condition. Guillaume makes his awareness of these problems all too evident. He is quick to point out that his failure to see his lady before falling in love with her does not preclude the possibility of a conventional innamoratio. The problem is by no means glossed over, as even the first lyric piece of the Voir Dit – a rondeau inserted in the lady’s first letter – bears the refrain ‘Celle qui unques ne vous vid’ (She who never saw you: 52). Guillaume, too, goes to great lengths to explain how their love is still possible. Mais Amours est si tressubtive Qu’elle se boute et [si] s’avive Es cuers qui unques ne se virent, De loing së aimment et desirent, Et les fait par amours amer Et sentir les doulz maus d’amer. (56, vv. 254–59) But Love is so very subtle that she projects herself, and thus makes herself live in hearts that never saw each other. Thus they love and 46 ‘Le mirage de l’image: de l’idole à l’icone intérieure chez Guillaume de Machaut’, in Le Moyen Age dans la Modernité, ed. Jean Scheidegger (Paris: Champion, 1996), 203–20, 205. 47 Commentum Terenti quoted in Cerquiglini-Toulet, Un Engin si soutil, 127; on the quinque lineae see also Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 510–14.

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desire each other from afar, and Love makes them love truly and feel love’s sweet pains.

Later in the narrative he revisits and expands upon this explanation. Et comment se puet cecy joindre Qu’elle me puet de si loing poindre Sans ce qu’onques je la veÿsse Ne que son doulz parler oÿsse? On y puet assez bien respondre. Amours ne scet mettre et repondre – Et de ce ne fais je pas doubte – En tel qui unques ne vit goute Ne qui ja goute ne verra, Mais tant de sa dame enquerra Et de sa bonne renommee Qu’elle sera de li amee (132–4, vv. 1167–78) And how can it come to pass that she can weigh on me from so far away, without my ever having seen her or heard her sweet speech? That can be answered quite easily. Love knows how to place and hide itself – and of this I have no doubt – in someone who never saw his lady and never will, but heard so much about her and her good reputation that she will be loved by him.

Guillaume’s second explanation relies in large part on allusions to chivalric love or amor de lonh, with a hero ‘d’outre la mer’ (from across the sea) who loves a distant lady (134, vv. 1199–204). Later, the poet attempts to include himself in a list of great lovers. ‘Onques Lancelos ne ama Genevre ne Paris Helaine ne Tristan Yseult plus leaulment que vous serés de moi amee et servie’ (Never did Lancelot love Guinevere, or Paris Helen, or Tristan Yseut, more loyally than you will be loved and served by me: 154, Letter VI), he writes. These are, in fact, couples who exemplify the ideals of fin’amors, but one must also note that these three examples evoke forbidden passions that ultimately failed. With these allusions to chivalric romance Guillaume attempts to distance himself from the image of the clerk and the borgne, grouping himself instead among the noble knights with experiential knowledge of love. Such an attempt sets the narrator up for later ridicule, as Guillaume is repeatedly feminized and mocked. The poet’s own secretary calls him ‘uns tenres homs’ (a delicate man: 612, v. 6608), and Toute-Belle’s messenger pulls fewer punches, telling Guillaume, ‘Vous avés maniere de fame’ (You have the ways of a woman: 756, v. 8697). Unable to escape from his clerkly identity and take on a more masculine, knightly role, Guillaume’s feminization extends even to his means of travel. The lover rides not a destrier, as would a knight, but a ‘haguenee’ (130, vv. 1115–16; 188, v. 1651; 366, v. 4154).

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Unfortunately, Guillaume’s stance – that love can be generated without initial sensory experience – is not really backed up by the authorities he purports to cite. Aristotle affirms in De anima that ‘visions appear to us even when our eyes are shut’ or when the object is absent (III.3, 428a),48 but the passage containing this assertion clearly indicates that one can reconstuitute such an image through memory; Guillaume has never seen his beloved, so he has no remembered sensorial experience on which to base the creation of his internal love-image. Guillaume has only seen a representation of his unnamed lady, a portrait he names Toute-Belle. The portrait takes on the character of a fetishistic substitute for Guillaume’s beloved: as the lady herself writes, ‘je vous envoie mon ymage faite au vif si proprement comme on la peut faire, pour vous conforter de ce que nous ne nous poons veoir’ (I am sending you my image made from life as well as anyone could do, to comfort you over the fact that we cannot see each other: 172, Letter IX). The old narrator’s adoration of the young girl’s portrait borders on idolatry, as the image is ‘bien amee, bien gardee, honnouree, aouree, nuit et jour enclinee, desiree et loee’ (well loved, well cared for, honored, adored, venerated night and day, desired and praised: 153, Letter VI). He speaks of the portrait as he would speak of his beloved: it is ‘vostre doulz ymage / Que j’aim amoureusement’ (your sweet image which I truly love: 196, vv. 1738–9). Guillaume’s love is doubly narcissistic, for he loves the image painted in his heart, which is in turn derived from an image painted on wood (the portrait) which was created by a painter who presumably saw Guillaume’s love-object.49 Thus Guillaume’s love is filtered through the eyesight of a third party as well as through his own imperfect eyesight. If we accept Michael Camille’s assertion that the impossibility of attainment is implicit in the visual, the lady’s unavailability is only compounded by the narrator’s faulty eye.50 The poet loves the image of an image of a lady – and as the dream of the portrait indicates, the portrait and the lady are not one and the same. And yet the entirety of Guillaume’s massive artistic production, the Voir Dit, stems from misapprehension of a mediated image. The book is created ‘pour l’amour de sa douce face’ (for the love of her sweet face: 74, v. 501), a face that Guillaume has imagined without having experienced it for himself. Such a leap of faith is indeed dangerous, for, as Aristotle remarks in De anima, ‘sensations are always true, imaginations are for the most part false’ (III.3, 428a). Without clear eyesight, sensation gives way to illusory imagination. 48 Aristotle, Introduction to Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, trans. J. A. Smith (New York: Modern Library, 1947). 49 Like Petrarch’s sonnets addressed to Simone Martini (RVF 77 and 78), Guillaume’s idolatrous adoration of his beloved’s ymage extends and further externalizes the discourse of the internal painter that accompanied Giacomo da Lentini’s early elaboration of the love-imprint in the canzone Maravigliosamente. 50 Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 314.

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Over the course of the Voir Dit Guillaume engages in a number of strategic actions designed to counteract the ill effects of his impairment. First, he apparently attempts to circumvent his physical shortcoming by placing his beloved’s letters directly on his heart: ‘Mais je mis mes lettres sur mi, / C’est a dire desseur mon cuer, / Car ce n’oubliaisse a nul fuer’ (But I put my letters directly on myself, that is, on my heart; I would not have forgotten to do this for anything: vv. 793–5). The lover thereby manages to bypass the primary physiological gateway of love, allowing his beloved’s words to engrave themselves directly in his heart without the risk of misperception inherent in the standard pathway. However, this method is abandoned relatively early in the Voir Dit and the narrator’s primary strategy becomes not to bypass the afflicted eye, but to rebuild it through the creation of a prosthetic textual body. The eye is the fundamental unit upon which the Voir Dit is constructed. The text’s insistent reliance on round forms – the sun, the wheel of Fortune, and most of all the rondeau and other fixed lyric forms – constitutes an attempt to compensate for Guillaume’s disability, to prevent it from becoming a handicap. All of these roundnesses stand in for the primary round form that cannot be restored, as the Voir Dit is a cyclical text that turns around the poet’s borgne oeil.

Prosthetic textual form Let us pause now to consider the Voir Dit’s form in greater detail, for it is not just at the level of plot – the question of the ‘borgne’ protagonist – that the problem of eyesight, and the remedial strategy of metonymic prosthesis, come into play. The Voir Dit, like other generically complex texts of the later Middle Ages, is often characterized as a ‘hybrid’ blending lyric, prose, and narrative verse. The lyric pieces that constitute one of the three major structural components of the work are typically referred to, somewhat oddly, as ‘lyric insertions’.51 The assignment of generic designations to late medieval texts – not to mention the definition of literary genre itself with regard to the period – is a slippery task, as lengthy composite texts such as the Voir Dit combine diverse formal elements ostensibly expressed through a multitude of voices. Recent efforts to account for such complex amplification and reconfiguration of literary form have often fallen back on references to a ‘hybridization’ of genre and the ‘insertion’ of lyric.52 But I maintain that it is a 51 Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet has classified these ‘insertions’ as being composed according to the logic of the anthology, the ars poetica, or the edition: ‘Pour une typologie de l’insertion’, Perspectives médiévales 3 (1977), 9–14. 52 See, for instance, Maureen Boulton’s pioneering study of lyric insertions, The Song in the Story, which builds on the initial premise that ‘a narrative in which lyric poems or songs are inserted is essentially a hybrid creation, combining two disparate forms’. The Song in the Story: Lyric Insertions in French Narrative Fiction, 1200–1400 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 1.

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fundamental mistake to regard these texts primarily as narratives in which lyrics have simply been inserted; this implies a self-sufficient narrative studded with extraneous pieces unnecessary to its development. Generally speaking, that which has been inserted can easily be removed without disrupting or compromising the structure into which it was inserted; such is evidently not the case with the Voir Dit’s lyric poems. Rejecting the language of insertion, then, means rethinking the interplay of prose, narrative verse, and lyric. Rather than a ‘hybrid’ narrative dotted with lyric ‘insertions’, I propose that we think of the Voir Dit as an example of what I have elsewhere termed ‘articulated’ texts: lyrics not just inserted, but integrated, allowing the narrative portions of the text to articulate, to interact with one another in a dynamic and mobile fashion.53 In other words, the lyrics serve a prosthetic function enhancing the text’s range of mobility. While I am somewhat loath to refer to these lyrics as ‘insertions’, they are potentially independent literary units, here integrated and reworked into a new context. But contrary to what the terminology of insertion seems to suggest, were the lyric pieces removed from the Voir Dit, the text would suffer a loss of mobility. The conceptual relationship between lyric insertion and prosthesis becomes more manifest when we think of the Voir Dit’s lyrics as form of citation and, in many instances, autocitation. A number of the lyrics are Machaut poems that, prior to the composition of the Voir Dit, had previously circulated separately; others, though composed by Machaut, are attributed within the text to Toute-Belle; and one ballade, sharing a refrain with one of Machaut’s own pieces, is ascribed to Thomas Paien.54 The lyric portion of the Voir Dit, then, is forged from a blend of old and new compositions; of citations of others’ work, autocitations, and pretended citations of others that are in fact autocitations. And what is citation, after all, but a quasi-surgical operation whereby matter from one textual body is introduced into, sewn into, made to become one with a second textual body? The very project of citation undertakes a ‘metonymic canonization’, as Antoine Compagnon has put it, by excising and grafting a textual unit that is at once a mutilated organ and a self-sufficient body.55 Or, as David Wills has written (albeit in a very different context), a literary quotation can be prosthetic ‘in its sense of articulation, relation of part to other parts and to a whole, and in the sense of a radical rewriting of that relation […] For’, he continues, ‘the writing of pros53 Julie Singer, ‘Clockwork Genres: Temperance and the Articulated Text in Late Medieval France’, Exemplaria 21 (2009), 225–47. 54 See Elizabeth Eva Leach, ‘Machaut’s Peer, Thomas Paien’, Plainsong and Medieval Music 18 (2009), 91–112. On the cited ballade, see Lawrence Earp, Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research (New York: Garland, 1995), 362–3. 55 Antoine Compagnon, La Seconde main ou le travail de la citation (Paris: Seuil, 1979), esp. 29–31.

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thesis […] is inevitably caught in a complex play of displacements; prosthesis being about nothing if not placement, displacement, replacement, standing, dislodging, substituting, setting, amputating, supplementing’.56 Machaut’s lyrics, too, highlight the relations of the Voir Dit’s ‘hybrid’ parts to one another, to the text as a whole, and, as we shall see, to the authorial body. Read in conjunction with other formal and narrative devices in the text – such as anagrams and details about the compilation of a manuscript, both of which, as Laurence de Looze has shown, refer to a process of authorial reconstitution – the prosthetic function of the Voir Dit’s lyric shows itself to be consistent with Machaut’s larger poetic project.57 The Voir Dit’s insistent attention to the bundling and binding of the leaves of Guillaume’s book becomes, along with the intercalated lyric, a means of putting the authorial body back together. For if the all-important sentement can be experienced only through the body, then the poetic subject’s world-view and his love-experience must necessarily be shaped by the narratorial body, and specifically by the narratorial eye. Poetry becomes a means of re-membering – in Machaut’s case, not by dismembering the love-object, but by correcting, supplementing, or even replacing the defective eye. He does so by grafting onto his textual body an ensemble of lyric citations, the sort of sententiae Quintilian famously terms the eyes of eloquence (oculos eloquentiae).58 The centrality of prosthesis to a book that is in a sense about the composition and compilation of poetry should come as no surprise, given that prosthesis and poesis are founded upon (as Wills puts it) ‘the same logic, that of the stand-in or supplement, which is that of language itself’.59 As Gérard Genette notes in Figures II, poetic language compensates for a défaut of language and constitutes an effort to close the gap between word and meaning.60 Machaut’s lyric prosthesis takes this idea a step further, seeking to close this gap not just at the lexical but at the formal level. Machaut’s lyric insertions are, like the prosthetic leg in Wills’s book, at once ‘the pretext for all manner of digressions as well as the one solid piece of evidence that keeps all this together’.61 But it is not just any poem that can serve this dual function of diversion and articulation: the prosthetic function is assigned, in the Voir 56 David Wills, Prosthesis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 9. Metonymy, too, is linked to the concept of displacement by Umberto Eco: Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, 114. 57 In the introduction to Pseudo-autobiography Laurence De Looze points out, in general terms, the analogy between the authorial body and the book, 8. See also the same author’s ‘“Pseudo-Autobiography” and the Body of Poetry in Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune’, L’Esprit créateur 33.4 (1993), 73–86. 58 Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), vol. 3, 422–5; Compagnon, La seconde main, 23. 59 Wills, Prosthesis, 26. 60 Gérard Genette, Figures II (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 144. 61 Wills, Prosthesis, 30.

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Dit, to a specific set of fixed lyric forms characterized, now as in the Middle Ages, as ‘round’. These poems’ roundness compounds the ‘ocular’ nature of citation with a more specifically mimetic formal dimension, lending them increased potency as prosthetic devices. Love is constrained by the body, filtered through the limiting structure of the lover’s eye; late medieval fixed form poetry is constrained by a prescribed quantity and length of stanzas, and by predetermined rhyme schemes. The love poetry composed through the voice of Machaut’s narrative persona, the ‘vallet borgne’, is at least triply constrained: his highly regulated lyric describes an experience filtered through an eye that is itself constrained by an impairment. The forms favored by Machaut – the ballade, virelai, and rondeau – mirror his narrator’s physiological constraint and dramatize the futility of unhappy love, even as their circular form calls to mind the conventional source of that love, the eye. The composition of these same lyric forms, as stated in the Introduction, is frequently listed in late medieval literature, along with depression and fever, as a symptom of love.62 I argue that it is these lyrics’ formal roundness that suits them to describing the process of love-imprint, as it enhances their prosthetic potential. Round love lyrics, often cited in whole or in part from earlier works, can come to supplement or supplant the eye’s generative role in the experience of love. The fixed forms of the fourteenth and fifteenth century are generally characterized by stanzas of a prescribed quantity and length, predetermined rhyme schemes, and a relationship (historical or actual) with musical performance; many fixed forms, but not all, bear refrains.63 Fixed forms, more than other poetic types, are strongly linked to dance, and their particular breed of constraint is ultimately tied to the rhythmic movements of the human body: as Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet notes, ‘Par son lien privilégié à la musique, par son rythme surtout, il est en rapport avec le corps dont il exprime les mouvements’ (Because of its privileged link to music, above all because of its rhythm, it exists in relation to the body whose movements it expresses).64 These poems’ alliance with music and dance helps to illuminate their therapeutic function, as they are constructed in harmony with the body’s rhythms – and can thus be called upon to help restore the natural balance that is upset by melancholic lovesickness. The formal constraints of the ballade, virelai, and rondeau forms also mirror the physiological constraint that manifests itself in 62 See, for example, the works by Pierre de Hauteville and Charles d’Orléans cited in the Introduction. 63 Classic accounts of the fundamental characteristics of fixed-form poetry are found in Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1972); Daniel Poirion, Le Poète et le prince: l’évolution du lyrisme courtois de Guillaume de Machaut à Charles d’Orléans (Paris: PUF, 1965); and Daniel Poirion (ed.), La littérature française aux XIVe et XVe siècles. Grundriss der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters 8:1 (1988). 64 Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘Syntaxe et syncope: langage du corps et écriture chez Guillaume de Machaut’, Langue Française 40 (1978), 66.

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love-imprint poetry. Thus, during the same era when Western love poetry is becoming more medicalized, more focused on the poet-lover’s own body, it is also becoming more ‘fixed’ in forms that echo the movement of the dancing body and the roundness of the eye. In both Italian- and French-speaking areas the language of love-imprint found its greatest expression, and undoubtedly its widest diffusion, in lyric fixed forms such as the ballade, ballata, virelai, and rondeau; the fourteenth century is the period in which these forms become ‘fixed’, as they are so often described.65 In the first half of the fourteenth century ballades, virelais, and rondeaux are for the most part still set to music, often by their author, but by the century’s close lyric is largely separated from music. Machaut thus marks the end of a tradition of poet-musicians, as the composition of music (with the advent of the innovative ars nova and ars subtilior) becomes too complicated for most poets.66 Despite their later fate, though, at their origins these fixed forms are defined by their absolute association with musical accompaniment. One of the dominant musical features of ballades, virelais, and rondeaux is the presence of a refrain. Their inherent repetition leads these to be characterized as round forms, closed in on themselves, endlessly cycling and returning to the same ideas and melodic lines. Because of this nearly hermetic sealing of the poems, tied together by the refrain, the idea of roundness is associated with fixed-form poetry: the term is applied to a certain extent to the ballade but especially to the virelai (and by extension to the Italian ballata, which is, formally speaking, nearly indistinguishable from the virelai67) and the rondeau. The poetic forms most often described as ‘round’ share a number of struc65 On the ‘fixing’ of these forms, see Willi Apel, ‘Rondeaux, Virelais, and Ballades in French 13th-century Song’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 7:2 (Summer 1954), 121–30. Zumthor discusses at length ‘la vogue de toutes les formes de chant à refrain, caractéristique du XIIIe siècle et qui se prolongera jusqu’au XVe. Les poètes d’alors lancent ou, peut-être, remettent en honneur, des variétés poétiques plus ou moins liées originellement à la danse.’ Essai, 249. 66 Eustache Deschamps’ Art de dictier (1393) is a watershed moment in the disengagement of poetry from music. L’art de dictier, ed. and trans. Deborah Sinnreich-Levi (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1994). See Roger Dragonetti, ‘La poésie … ceste musique naturelle. Essai d’exégèse d’un passage de l’Art de Dictier d’Eustache Deschamps’, in his La Musique et les Lettres (Geneva: Droz, 1986), 27–42; and Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘Quand la voix s’est tue: la mise en recueil de la poésie lyrique aux XIVe et XVe siècles’, Littérales 2 (1987), 313–27. 67 The ballata was perhaps one of the most popular danced poetic forms of fourteenthcentury Italy: as Leonard Ellinwood notes, ‘In all of the extant accounts of performance of trecento music – in the Decameron, da Prato’s Paradiso, Sercambi’s Novelli, Prodenzani’s sonnets – it is the ballata which is described.’ Ellinwood, Francesco Landini, xxviii. In many manuscripts the opening words of the ballata are recopied at the end of the poem’s four stanzas, suggesting that performances of these compositions may have concluded with a repetition of the first stanza and its corresponding music. For a basic musicological and textual introduction to the ballata, see Ellinwood, Francesco Landini, xxviii–xxx.

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tural and thematic restrictions: they are musical in origin, they return to a repeated refrain, and they often express themes of love, imprisonment, or entrapment. While the ballade’s name and the presence of a refrain betray the residue of music and dance, and thus bear the lingering imprint of the body and its senses, this roundness and repetition are far more pronounced in the virelai and rondeau. The nature of the formal constraints to which the virelai and rondeau (in particular) are subject raises the specific problem of roundness. In Chapter VIII of Le Poète et le prince, for instance, Daniel Poirion engages in an extended reflection on ‘encerclement’ in these two forms: according to Poirion the poet’s art is itself a circular process.68 Not surprisingly, given its name, the rondeau is most often described as a rounded form.69 Such a view of these forms is not just a modern projection, but is equally reflective of contemporary attitudes. As Evrart de Conty wrote in his translation and commentary on the Problemata Aristotelis (circa 1380), ‘et pour ce dit Aristote que tel chant sont conversif et circuler pour ce qu’il se retournent a maniere de cercle et reprehendent ci de devant souvent, comme font roundel et balades et pluseur si fait chant’ (And therefore Aristotle says that such songs are conversive and circular because they return upon themselves in the form of a circle and often repeat that which came before, as rondeaux and ballades and other such songs do).70 The repetition-driven form of the virelai and rondeau often appears to be echoed in these poems’ content, as the rondeau and the virelai frequently serve as a staging ground for reflections on existential questions (love, Fortune, melancholy) or on circular or closed configurations of bodies (a circle of dancers, an embrace, a kiss).71 The love-imprint, as well, is an inherently circular and ‘existential’ poetic theme, as it portrays the manner in which an image enters the lover’s body through his rounded eye, wherein it cycles between his mind and his heart, never again to leave. A rounded lyric prosthesis is perhaps, then, the ideal vehicle by which to introduce this cycle within a body constrained by a faulty eye.

68 ‘Le travail même du poète est donc circulaire: il tourne autour d’une idée centrale sans avoir la possibilité de se déployer selon les lois du discours’, Poirion, Le Poète et le prince, 320. 69 Zumthor describes the rondeau as ‘exactement clos sur lui-même, discret, allusif ’, Essai, 269. Poirion writes in Le Poète et le prince (p. 317) that ‘le chant, avec la reprise intégrale du refrain par le choeur, se referme sur lui-même, bouclé en un cercle magique qui pourra suggérer, suivant le cas, la consécration religieuse, la réjouissance collective, la contrainte sociale ou l’obsession morale’. 70 Quoted in Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘Syntaxe et syncope’, 67. 71 According to Karin Becker, ‘C’est grâce à ce caractère circulaire et enchanteur que les deux genres se prêtent particulièrement à une méditation sur des thèmes ‘existentiels’ tels que la Fortune ou la mélancolie.’ ‘Présentation littéraire’, in Eustache Deschamps en son temps, ed. Jean-Patrice Boudet and Hélène Millet (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1997), 26.

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Tout par compas The roundness of late-fourteenth-century French lyric forms is most strikingly illustrated in the Compas of Baude Cordier, termed by Etienne Anheim a ‘musical calligram’.72 Two pieces labelled with Baude Cordier’s name are found on a bifolio (fol. 11v–12r) inserted in Musée Condé (Chantilly) ms 564, a repertory manuscript probably copied between 1408 and 1420.73 These ‘spectacular picture compositions’ take the place of the manuscript’s missing first gathering, serving, in effect – as Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone have noted – as a frontispiece to this musical compendium whose other songs are largely datable to the last four decades of the fourteenth century.74 The first and better-known of these two poems, ‘Belle bonne sage’, is inscribed on folio 11v in the shape of a heart; the second, a canonic rondeau known as the ‘Compas’, is transcribed in the form of five circles, with a large circle placed in the centre of the page and four smaller circles arranged closer to the corners (Figure 3). The central circle contains the musical partition (alternating with the lyrics in concentric circles), while each of the outer circles contains one stanza.75 The lines of the stanza in the upper left corner are 72 Etienne Anheim, ‘Le Coeur de Baude Cordier (XIVe siècle): étude d’un calligramme musical’, Les représentations de la musique au Moyen Âge, Cité de la Musique, Paris, 2 April 2004. For an overview of twentieth-century scholarship on Baude Cordier’s picture-songs, see Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone, ‘Introduction’, Codex Chantilly. Bibliothèque du Château de Chantilly, ms. 564 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 112–15. 73 Plumley and Stone discuss the dating of this manuscript in the introductory volume to their facsimile of the codex, esp. 180–81. Their dating stands in contrast to Craig Wright’s contention that it may have been compiled in the 1390s, and that Baude Cordier might have added his two songs, along with the names of the authors of some hitherto unattributed pieces transcribed in the manuscript, during his stay in Avignon from 22 May to 11 July 1395. Wright’s earlier dating depends on the identification of Baude Cordier with a certain Baude Fresnel from Reims, who served as harpist and valet de chambre to Philip the Bold of Burgundy. Craig Wright, ‘Tapissier and Cordier: New Documents and Conjectures’, The Musical Quarterly 59:2 (April 1973), 177–89. Ursula Günther rejects the identification of Cordier and Fresnel in ‘Unusual Phenomena in the Transmission of Late Fourteenth Century Polyphonic Music’, Musica Disciplina 38 (1984), esp. 91. 74 This bifolio was long thought to have been inserted in the manuscript well after its compilation, but in the commentary to their recent facsimile edition Plumley and Stone have argued quite convincingly that Cordier’s songs had already been copied/inserted when the index was made. ‘Introduction’, Codex Chantilly, 124. 75 The music itself, though transcribed in a unique manner, is unexceptional: Carol Williams notes that the compas ‘has notational complexity concealing its basic musical simplicity’. ‘Two Examples of Mannerist Notation in the Late Fourteenth Century’, Miscellanea Musicologica 11 (1980), 111. Raymond Meylan disagrees, however, proposing a duration of thirty-three tactus per ‘spin’ around Cordier’s wheel, indicating not simplicity but perfection. ‘Réparation de la roue de Cordier’, Musica Disciplina 26 (1972), 69–71.

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Figure 3. The Compas of Baude Cordier Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY The “Musical calligram” inserted in the Codex Chantilly renders visible the roundness of fixed lyric forms, and maps a circular route to “consolacïon”

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written in concentric circles, while the words of the other stanzas appear in a more traditional horizontal configuration (but still within the confines of a square inscribed in a circle). The ‘circularity’ of lyric forms with a refrain (or repeated melodic line) is underlined by the physical configuration of the lines, as the words dance around, and are continually tied back to, the central circle.76 The words, too, join in the ‘intellectual game’ of the poem’s notation, drawing attention to the spatial representation of the music’s circularity:77 Tout par compas suy composés en ceste ronde proprement pour moy chanter plus seurement regarde com suy disposés (vv. 1–4) I am composed all in a circle, right within this round. In order to sing me correctly, look at how I am arranged.

The disposition of the words, however, is anything but sure, with the poem’s instability stemming in large part from its very form. The description of its composition ‘tout par compas’ could just as well refer to the song’s internal mathematical perfection as to its elaborate mise en page completed with the aid of a compass.78 The perpetual canon lacks a clearly defined beginning and end, and even the stanzas inscribed in the four outer circles seem to represent theoretical permutations of the text (and its geometry) rather than actual verses meant to be sung to the provided music.79 As John Bergsagel 76 Indeed, Paulin Paris proposed in 1866 that the name ‘rondeau’ might have derived from the geometric form in which Cordier’s canonic work was copied; while such an etymology of the generic designation is of course impossible given the Cordier song’s late date, it is telling that Paris found the canonic rondeau transcribed in a series of circle to be an archetypal example of the rounded poetic form. Plumley and Stone, Codex Chantilly, 109 n. 27. 77 Williams, ‘Mannerist Notation’, 111. 78 Plumley and Stone note the compass holes in centers of the circles, 126. Meylan sees the ‘compas’ as a more figurative instrument: ‘Je crois volontiers que les termes “Tout par compas suy composés” concernent plus la composition dans une forme parfaite que le dessin en cercle, c’est-à-dire que le plan de la composition devait comporter essentiellement des ternarités de détail et d’ensemble et que les cercles que nous voyons en sont la conséquence. Ainsi le dessin de la roue n’était pas le but de la pièce mais une astuce graphique à propos d’une rotondité, d’une perfection interne plus profonde’ (I am willing to believe the words ‘I am composed all in a circle’ concern their composition in a perfect form, more than the circular drawing; that is, that the composition had to include tripartite elements in its details and in its overall design, and that the circles we see are the consequence. Thus the drawing of the wheel was not the point of the piece but a graphic play on a certain rotundity, a deeper internal perfection). ‘Réparation de la roue de Cordier’, 71. 79 John Bergsagel remarks that ‘none of these verses [in the outer circles] seems to fit

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points out, the troubled relationship between the lyrics and notation of the ‘compas’ results from the circle’s perfect symmetry, and from the difficulty of ascertaining which word corresponds to the first note: ‘where does a circle begin?’80 It is all too easy for a fixed form poem’s cycles of repetition to become a dizzying labyrinth with no visible (or audible) means of escape. Baude Cordier’s compas is undeniably a prime example of rounded poetic form. But is it a love lyric, and to what degree does it shed light on the concept of lyric prosthesis? Not surprisingly, much of the piece’s structural ambiguity extends to the text as well, as each of the stanzas seems to come from a completely different poem. The first stanza is dedicated to the piece’s mise en page, the disposition of the words and music on the leaf; the second stanza consists of a request to the reader to pray for the poet; and the third stanza contains a wealth of autobiographical information, including the poet’s name (‘Maistre Baude Cordier se nonme / cilz qui composa ceste ronde’: vv. 19–20), his origins in Reims (v. 23), and his fame as a musician that has spread as far as Rome (vv. 23–4). It is only in the canonic rondeau’s final stanza that love – and, notably, its remedy – enters the circle. If the reader or listener has previously learned what the ‘compas’ is and who made it, now he knows why: ‘Par bonne amour et par dilectïon / j’ay fait ce rondel’ (I have made this rondeau for good love and delight: vv. 27–8). It is not just love, though, but the need to console and distract himself from it, that has inspired the poet: ‘icy peut prendre consolacïon … tout coeur et corps et mon affection’ (Here my whole heart and body and affection can take their consolation: vv. 29–31, emphasis added). The poet’s affection is key to our reading of the circular poem as a remedy for love, for, like mirer, this Middle French word is ambiguous: affection can mean ‘affection’, as it does today; or, in a medical context, it can also mean ‘affliction’. The ‘Compas’ is not directly addressed to a specific beloved, as is Cordier’s other ‘mannerist’ composition, ‘Belle bonne sage’. So what, if any, is the connection between these two pieces, with their disparate themes and their imaginative notational form? Given their somewhat peculiar insertion in an otherwise uniform chansonnier, it is perhaps not unreasonable to read these two pieces as a diptych (or as a song and its counterpoint): a cordiform ars amatoria and its rounded remedia. It is telling – and completely consistent with the connection already drawn between rounded forms and loveremedies – that Cordier uses a heart to represent the simple pleasures of love, while he uses an array of circles to indicate the path to consolation. Inserted convincingly with the music’ and that ‘the problem of the text is something of an embarrassment since Cordier has provided what appears to be so much potential text within the enclosures in the four corners – one of which even imitates the appearance of the canon, being written in circular form’. ‘Cordier’s Circular Canon’, The Musical Times 113:1558 (Dec. 1972), 1177. 80 Bergsagel, ‘Cordier’s Circular Canon’, 1175.

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at the beginning of the Chantilly codex, the two picture-songs, the heart and the circle, serve as a gateway to a compilation of love songs. Insofar as it may be considered a poetic smorgasbord, in which the reader or performer can pick and choose the stanzas to be used, the compas is paradoxically a fixed form poem whose precise form cannot be pinned down. The song could be performed without the fourth stanza and its love-component at all, but this reference to bonne amour et dilectïon is crucial to understanding the rondeau’s form. It is within the labyrinth of the song’s repeating circular structure and melody that the poet’s afflicted heart and body can take comfort and refuge, as the equilibrium between melody and malady is restored; poetic roundness is the key to love’s remedy. The problems of interpretation created by the roundness of Cordier’s poem may well remind the reader of Guillaume de Machaut’s puzzle expressed in the form of a rondeau: ‘Ma fin est mon commencement, / Et mon commencement ma fin’ (My end is my beginning, and my beginning my end). Indeed, the problem of roundness is foregrounded in Machaut’s lyric production as well. It has already been posited that the structure of fixed-form poems is intimately linked to the form and movement of the human body, both through the dances that were often performed to the accompaniment of these songs, and through the songs’ therapeutic function as distractions from, and remedies for, unhappy love. I propose that the roundness of a fixed-form poem describing love can be interpreted as mirroring the form of the poet’s eye, the organ that creates love by admitting the beloved’s image into the body. This seems only appropriate – if one must replace a malfunctioning eye, it is most comfortable, I imagine, to do so with a round prosthetic object. In the case of a blind or visually impaired poetic persona, it follows that a rounded poetic form must move beyond the role of a mirror for the poetic eye/I, as the perfect closure of the fixed form is left to compensate for the imperfection of the eye and of the deficient love that may result from the passage of the beloved’s image along an impaired physiological pathway.

Machaut’s lyric I/eye The Voir Dit’s Guillaume knows that the eyes should be Love’s first entryway to his heart, and from the very beginning of the affair he underscores the importance of vision. The narrator’s first letter to his beloved evokes the power not just of eyesight but of the mere anticipation of it: ‘et quant l’esperance que j’ay de vous veoir me garit de toutes dolours et me fait avoir toute joie, que ce seroit ce, se je pooie bien mes yeulz et mon cuer saouler de vous veoir?’ (and if my hope to see you cures me of all ills and brings me complete joy, what would it be like if I could truly satisfy my eyes and my heart by seeing you? 78, Letter II). But eye imagery is just as prevalent, if not more so, in Guillaume’s lyric insertions. In the first rondeau he sends to Toute-Belle Machaut writes

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Quant vo biauté, qui embelist Tousdis, ne voy, et vo corps gent, Tresbelle, riens ne m’abelist Ne donne paix n’aligement (64; vv. 377–80). When I do not see your beauty which grows every day, nor your fine body, Beautiful, nothing pleases me or brings me peace or comfort.

Seeing his beloved can cure Guillaume’s ills, while not seeing her deprives him of all comfort. In addition to such vague allusions to the importance of eyesight, a great number of the Voir Dit’s lyric insertions, like the pieces from the Louange des dames,81 are more explicitly faithful to a visually based model of love. Machaut expresses the depth of his love in decidedly conventional terms: De mon vrai cuer jamais ne partira L’impression de vo douce figure; Quar vostre ymage emprainte si l’ha, Qu’il n’est cysel ne liqueur ne rasture, N’au monde n’a si subtil creature Qui l’en peüst effacier në oster, Ne qu’on porroit tarir la haute mer. (192; vv. 1683–9) The impression of your sweet face will never leave my true heart, for your image is so imprinted that there is no chisel or liquid or eraser, nor any creature in this world subtle enough to erase or remove it, any more than one could dry up the high seas.

The power of the eyes is also expressed in the chanson baladée ‘L’ueil, qui est le droit archier’ (The eye, which is the sure archer: 112–16, vv. 969–1014) – a poem that at once reprises the imagery of the eye and its penetration by an arrow and, tellingly, speaks of the eye in the singular. Interestingly, TouteBelle repeatedly asks Guillaume to send her the notation for this chanson baladée (in letters XXVIII and XXXII), but instead he repeatedly sends her a rondeau in which her name is encrypted. In other words, when asked for his (singular) eye, the poet substitutes a rounded puzzle made from his lover’s name, a ‘broken’ version of her name that must be pieced back together. Likewise, as he enumerates the causes of his melancholy, Guillaume blames ‘Amours, ma dame et Fortune et mi œil’ (90, v. 697).82 This conjunc81 The two categories often overlap: several of the lyric compositions and their music seem to have circulated separately from the rest of the Voir Dit, with the result that they were known both as independent pieces (some included in the Louange des Dames) and as part of the Voir Dit’s narrative. 82 Machaut’s lament on ‘Amours, ma dame et Fortune et mi œil’ is strikingly similar to the entities blamed in Landini’s ballata ‘Fortuna ria, Amor e crudel donna’ and in

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tion of factors is telling not just in its conflation of the beloved with the blind (or blindfold) allegories Love and Fortune, also seen in the Remede de Fortune, but also in its peculiarly ambiguous reference to the visual organ. The form oeil is used in the Voir Dit as both a singular noun (as in ‘l’ueil qui est le droit archier’) and a plural. In this instance, ‘Amours, ma dame et Fortune et mi œil’, the possessive pronoun mi suggests that the noun is plural. However, with only one other possible exception,83 in the Voir Dit ‘ueil’ is an exclusively singular form, while yeus is the preferred plural. The poet often uses the singular ‘ueil’, rather than the plural ‘yeus’ even in contexts where one might expect the plural. At the very beginning of the dit Guillaume lies in the shade ‘Par quoy la chaleur dou soleil / Ne me grevast n’au corps n’a l’ueil’ (so that the sun would not bother my body or my eye: 42, vv. 55–6). Likewise, in his second letter to his beloved, Guillaume describes the physicality of his desire: ‘je ne me resveille a nulle heure qu’il ne m’em souviengne et que je n’aie l’ueil, et le cuer et la pensee a vous’ (Whenever I wake up I remember you and have my eye, heart, and mind on you: 122, Letter IV). Aphoristic phrases such as ‘quant l’ueil ne voit pas la chose / Il n’i puet riens’ (The eye can do nothing when it doesn’t see: 144, vv. 1281–2) and ‘celle qui lontaine / M’est de l’ueil et du cuer prochaine’ (She who is far from my eye and near to my heart: 132, vv. 1165–6) are thus subtly modified. This repetition of the singular form ‘ueil’ only serves to underline the preoccupation with eyesight, and more specifically with the condition of the borgne, present throughout the text. The singular eye, not the standard pair of eyes, is the fundamental unit upon which the Voir Dit is built, and unexpected uses of ‘ueil’ rather than ‘yeus’ may be seen as attempts to normalize the narratorial persona’s condition. Even when Guillaume admits to his impairment he attempts to minimize its importance: having already identified himself as a ‘borgne vallet’, he adds a mismatched pair of ballades – one original text authored by Machaut, the other a cited work he ascribes to Thomas Paien – both bearing the refrain ‘Je voi asés, puis que je voi ma dame’ (I see enough, as long as I see my lady: 590, v. 6468). But despite such valiant attempts, the poet’s responses to the reader’s doubts are not altogether convincing. The body of the Voir Dit’s narrator has one functioning eye, and the lyrics that the narrator sends to his lover are mostly ‘round’ pieces, many of which

Petrarch’s sonnet ‘Amor, Fortuna, et la mia mente’ (RVF 124). It is interesting to note that Landini omits the mention of the eye, and Petrarch neglects to attribute any of his emotional turmoil to his lady’s actions, while Machaut displaces the site of this turmoil from the mind to the eye. For Landini’s text, see Poesie musicali del trecento, ed. Giuseppe Corsi (Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1970), 170. 83 Recounting the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, Machaut writes, ‘Il furent enclos en .II. tours, / Si qu’il ne fu voie ne tours / Qui lor oeil peüst avoier / Pour eulz ensemble esbanoier’ (580–82, vv. 6317–20). And, as noted earlier, the Louange des Dames includes a ballade bearing the refrain ‘Mort m’ont li oueil dont primiers je la vi’ (122).

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refer to the eye in the singular. The narrator’s impaired vision and his attempts to counteract or circumvent it are in many ways at the heart of the ‘articulation’ between the three formal components of the dit. In the narrative verse Guillaume argues for the possibility of unconventional love, trying desperately to prevent his impairment (that is, his physical difference) from becoming a handicap (a social obstacle) – all the while drawing attention to the singular eye. At the same time he complements these self-affirmations with his lyric prostheses that supplement the single eye and fill in for its missing double, allowing for the expression of a more standard love discourse. The prose letters detail this process of reconstitution and compilation, for it is in the letters that we have explicit descriptions of the narrator’s impairment, and of the compilation of the book. The frank discussion of bodily weakness in the letters and the prosthetic function of the lyric ultimately call attention to a lack in the narrative proper: the lack of a second working eye, and the lack of explicit acknowledgement thereof. When I say that the narrative draws attention to the singular eye I refer not to any outright descriptive language – remember, it is in the letters, not the narrative, that Guillaume calls himself borgne – but to omnipresent reminders of that physical condition: that is, blind and one-eyed characters whose state mirrors that of the narrator. In addition to Love, who, as Irwin Panofsky remarks, began to be depicted as blindfold in the fourteenth century, Guillaume is doubled by two foils: the cyclops-poet Polyphemus and the squint-eyed or blindfold goddess Fortune. Both personages are introduced in order to admonish the narrator, and the narrator ends up being compared to both. The secretary uses the story of Polyphemus as a cautionary tale, while Guillaume comes across Livy’s portrait of Fortune just after having been scolded by the portrait; later, one of Toute-Belle’s messengers provides an alternative portrait of Fortune in order to chastise Guillaume for having doubted his lady and compares the narrator himself to ‘Fortune la foursenee’ (mad Fortune: 750, v. 8591). That the lover, already compared to a cyclops, is influenced by and even assimilated to the blindfold goddess Fortune suggests that he has become doubly blind. Before turning to Fortune in Chapter Six we will briefly consider the cyclops Polyphemus, whose example provides a particularly interesting illustration of the potential pitfalls of textual prosthesis.84 Within the inserted narration the cyclops, himself a poet-

84 On Polyphemus in late medieval literature, see Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘de la voix dans le Voir Dit de Guillaume de Machaut’, in L’hostellerie de pensée, ed. Michel Zink and Danielle Bohler (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1995), 105–18; Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘Polyphème et Prométhée: deux voies de la “création” au XIVe siècle’, in Auctor et auctoritas: Invention et conformisme dans l’écriture médiévale, ed. Michel Zimmermann (Paris: École des Chartes, 2001), 401–10; Estelle Doudet, ‘Polyphème lyrique et Argus éloquent: la poésie à la recherche de son pouvoir, de Guillaume de Machaut à la Renaissance’, in De vrai humain entendement:

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composer, fails in his quest for love; at a metatextual level the strategies of citation evident in the Voir Dit’s version of the myth, heavily dependent on the Ovide moralisé, betray a breakdown in metonymic logic of the stand-in.

Polyphemus, or the poet as Cyclops The secretary’s relation of the myth of Polyphemus midway through the Voir Dit (620–44, vv. 6742–7187) exemplifies the relationship between ocular dysfunction and pathological love. Narrative though it is, this episode also helps us see the question of prosthesis, and of lyric prosthesis, in a slightly different light. In this culminating episode in a series of examples intended to dissuade Guillaume from trusting his Toute-Belle, the parallels between the would-be lover and the mythic monster are numerous. First of all, Polyphemus is a cyclops – cyclops being derived from the Greek for ‘round eye’. More specifically, ‘un seul oeil ha emmi le front’ (He has one eye in the middle of his forehead: 620, v. 6762), just as Guillaume in effect has only one eye (or, at least, one properly focused eye). Both wallow in melancholy and misery: like Guillaume, Polyphemus becomes ‘jaloue et acoupis’ (jealous and betrayed: 642, v. 7140). Each fails in his pursuit of a distant woman, be it Galatea (who hates Polyphemus and runs away)85 or Machaut’s beloved (whom he meets only a handful of times and never sees in the second half of the dit). Like Guillaume, whose bad eye cannot be cured even by the lady who cures all of his ills (Letter II), after his blinding by Ulysses Polyphemus can never again have a functional eye: ‘Mais assés puet braire pour voir, / car son oeil ne puet il ravoir’ (But indeed he can bellow all he wants, he cannot have his eye back: 624, vv. 6840–41). Has the secretary already pointed out to us that lyric prosthesis – Guillaume’s singing, the cyclops’s bellowing – is doomed to failure? What is immediately apparent is that the trajectories of their love experiences follow a similar arc. The secretary summarizes Polyphemus’ story: Or avez oÿ la chanson Du definement jusqu’en son Et d’en son jusques en la fin: Comment li jaians de cuer fin Ama la bele Galatee, Et sa maniere (se) forsenee, Etudes sur la littérature française de la fin du Moyen Age offertes en hommage à Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, ed. Yasmina Foehr-Janssens and Jean-Yves Tilliette (Geneva: Droz, 2005), 29–44. 85 By happy coincidence the name Galatea is shared by both the nymph loved by Polyphemus and the statue created by Pygmalion. Machaut adds Polyphemus to the more standard pairing of Pygmalion and Narcissus, creating a new triad illustrating the dangers of image-love – a triad to which the aged Guillaume is assimilated throughout the Voir Dit.

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Sa traÿson, sa cruauté Et sa tresgrant desloiauté (642–4, vv. 7150–57) Now you have heard the song from end to beginning and from beginning to end: about how the giant with a noble heart loved the beautiful Galatea, and about her frenzied manner, her betrayal, her cruelty, and her very great disloyalty.

Guillaume’s love also begins ‘de cuer fin’, but his ‘maniere forsenee’ leads him into suspicion, mistrust, and doubt. His belief in the meddlers’ lies is ‘traÿson’, and his cruel letters accusing the lady of infidelity correspond to the ‘cruauté’ of the giant. The primary difference rests in the fact that Guillaume’s story nonetheless ends on a note of hope, while Polyphemus loses his beloved forever. But it is possible that Guillaume, too, has lost his Toute-Belle. Beyond the superficial physical similarities between the borgne and the cyclops, both Guillaume and Polyphemus are poets and musicians. They not only endure similarly ill-fated love experiences, but they respond to them in the same fashion, through song. Like Machaut, whose frustrated love affair furnishes the subject matter of the Voir dit, Polyphemus is a composer and poet who sublimates his thwarted desires into artistic creation. Souventes fois estoit assis Sur un perron gros et massis; Et quant deduire se voloit, De sa flahute flajoloit Et de ses .C. rosiaus ensemble, Si que tous li pays en tremble, Ce sembloit a ceulz qui l’ooient, Que plus que foudre le doubtoient. Si que li mauffés chante et note En son flajol ne sçai quel note, Mais il fist le chant et le dit, Si com Galatee le dit. (628–30; vv. 6904–15) He often sat on a great and massive rock. When he wanted to amuse himself, he played on his flute and his hundred reeds together, so that all the land trembled – at least it seemed that way to those who heard it, who feared it more than thunder. So the miscreant sings and plays on his flute: I don’t know what song it was, but Galatea says he wrote the tune and the lyrics.

Polyphemus’s song seems to echo Guillaume’s preceding lyrics: the giant’s description of his ‘dame debonnaire et benigne, / plus blanche que plume de cysne’ (sweet and noble lady, whiter than a swan’s feather: 630, vv. 6940–41) is much like the song in which Guillaume praises the ‘vis cler / de ma dame

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qui n’a per’ (fair face of my matchless lady: 120, vv. 1065–6). William Calin has pointed out some of these superficial similarities between Polyphemus and Guillaume: The Narrator is as inadequate as that other famous one-eyed lover, Polyphemus. Machaut tells the latter’s story at length. We see an ugly, ridiculous personage, who, though he believes himself to be ravishingly handsome, cannot fool Galatea. Both the Narrator and Polyphemus fail in their amorous quests.86

But is Polyphemus truly an ugly and ridiculous figure? The secretary initially does describe him as such, but the pathos inherent in the description of the monster, as well as the numerous ways in which he resembles the narrator, seem to undermine such a reading. Calin continues: How well did he ever see her, this one-eyed old man? The bad lover, Polyphemus, also one-eyed, never discovered the truth about Galatea; he was later blinded by Odysseus, as perhaps the Narrator has been all along by the God of Love.87

This is one of the major problems lying at the heart of the analogy between Guillaume and Polyphemus. The giant is blinded by Ulysses, and Guillaume is blinded as well – by Love, his lady, and Fortune. Amour, ma dame et Fortune et mi oeil. The narrator’s own eye or eyes are also complicit in his suffering. And if Polyphemus is ‘the bad lover’, must we presume that Guillaume, who resembles him in so many respects, is deficient as well? His partial blindness is a sensory and sentimental pathology that frustrates his desires and leaves poetry and song as his only release. The analogy between Guillaume and Polyphemus becomes even more troubling – even as the particular sort of prosthetic citation practised by Machaut becomes more apparent – when we consider that much of the secretary’s description of Polyphemus is lifted, almost verbatim, from another text: the Ovide moralisé, an early-fourteenth-century Christianizing allegorization of the Metamorphoses.88 The resemblance between the two accounts of Polyphemus is unmistakable, for instance, if we consider the parallel established in both texts between the sun and the eye, ‘son sol oeil’ as the Ovide moralisé calls it (458, v. 3792).

86 William Calin, A Poet at the Fountain: Essays on the Narrative Verse of Guillaume de Machaut (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1974), 180–81. 87 Ibid., 195. 88 Ovide moralisé, ed. C. de Boer, 5 vols (Amsterdam: J. Müller, 1915–38). See Robert Levine, ‘Exploiting Ovid: Medieval Allegorizations of the Metamorphoses’, Medioevo Romanzo XIV (1989), 197–213.

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J’ai un seul oeil en mi le vis, Mes bien m’avient, ce m’est avis, Quar je l’ai grant et gros et large Ausi come roonde targe. Ausi com je n’ai c’un seul oil N’a il ou ciel c’un seul soloil N’ou monde c’une roondesce. (Ovide moralisé, 464, vv. 4005–11) J’ai un seul oeil en mi le vis, Mais bien m’avient, ce m’est avis, Car je l’ai grant et gros et large Ainsi comme reonde targe; Ainsi com je n’ai c’un seul oeil N’a il en ciel c’un seul soleil, Au monde quë une rondesse. (Voir Dit, 640, vv. 7086–92)

Not all of the secretary’s parable is quite so close to the source material; in this instance, though, the cited lines blend smoothly with Machaut’s additions. Rather than smoothing over the gaps in the narratorial body, however, this seamless intertextuality renders the parallel between Guillaume and Polyphemus all the more difficult to accept. Not only is Polyphemus a model of the failed one-eyed lover, as Calin suggests, but in the Ovide moralisé’s gloss to the story of Polyphemus the cyclops is interpreted as a figure for the devil, while Acis is read as a Christ figure, and Galatea as the Virgin.89 When Machaut imports the Ovide moralisé’s into his text almost verbatim he would seem to be importing the source text’s connotations and interpretations as well. Since it defies belief that Machaut would align his first-person narratorial persona with the devil – and it is only slightly more credible that the secretary, slyly insulting as he is, would treat his patron in such a manner – we must consider that the extended citation of the Ovide moralisé, direct as it is, is designed to establish something other than a simple parallel between the two one-eyed characters. The logic of this citation is not that of the stand-in or substitute; or, if it is, we have further proof that such logic is faulty. Even though Polyphemus appears in narrative verse, not in lyric, his presence is pertinent to our broader argument about lyric prosthesis because (a) Polyphemus himself composes lyric, so the narrative of his love story might be read as a depiction of failed lyric prosthesis in action; and (b) this citation from the Ovide moralisé, the introduction of a parable whose symbolic logic ultimately fails, gets to the heart of the problem of textual prosthesis, be it narrative or lyric. Can it ever really work?

89

Ovide moralisé, 468.

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Metonymy, language, and the body The Polyphemus episode of the Voir Dit is often treated as a digression, much as the lyrics have traditionally been regarded as a disruption to the text’s narrative flow. What is it about these parts that has seemingly kept them from fully integrating? Has the textual body rejected them? Or do these facsimile eyes fail because, like many prostheses, they ultimately draw attention to the bodily difference that they purport to conceal? Rather than ‘removing the unsightly from view’, as Mitchell and Snyder claim narrative prosthesis does,90 Machaut’s lyric prosthesis does quite the opposite, calling attention to his ocular dysfunction. ‘However much “prosthesis” refers to an apparatus alone, it cannot fail to imply the idea of the amputation – or of a lack or deficiency – that would have preceded it.’91 But in addition to their explicit treatment of the very subject that the narrative verse so carefully elides (namely the narrator’s impairment), both the lyrics and the tale of Polyphemus reinforce the text’s sense of circularity and, ultimately, of futility. Roundness – the very characteristic that should allow these textual parts to stand in for the impaired eye – contributes to a nonlinear narrative structure that effectively emphasizes disjunction rather than healing. Machaut’s lyric prosthesis announces and is to be aligned with ‘literary efforts that expose prosthesis as an artificial, and thus, resignifiable relation’.92 This simultaneous integration and disconnect between body and words is perhaps most keenly felt in the lyric. For all their perfect alignment of form and content (rondeaux about the eye, for instance), the lyric pieces are still somehow misaligned with, and therefore distinct from, the body of narrative. The failure here of lyric prosthesis conforms to a phenomenon Bruce Holsinger has recognized in the writings of music theorists from Thomas of Cantimpré and Hildegard of Bingen to Machaut himself: these writers, he notes, ‘most often cast the human body as the site at which music and language diverge’.93 In other words, music can reflect the experiences and sensations of the body in a manner that words are inadequate to express. Holsinger’s argument bears importantly on our inquiry into lyric prosthesis, and moreover, on lyric generally. Lyric, as the convergence of music and language, might – according to his model – be construed as incompatible 90 Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 8. ‘In order to dissociate one’s disability from stigmatizing associations, disabled people are encouraged to ‘pass’ by disguising their disabilities. Prosthetic devices, mainstreaming, and overcompensation techniques, all provide means for people with disabilities to ‘fit in’ or to ‘de-emphasize’ their difference’: ibid., 3. 91 Wills, Prosthesis, 133. 92 Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 9. 93 Bruce Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 17.

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with the subject of the body, since it is at the body that music and language diverge. Lyric prosthesis is a quixotic endeavor, then, an attempt to corral music and language and to integrate them both into the site of their eventual separation. ‘The music of the body’, Holsinger continues, ‘becomes the music most completely divorced from the language, literature, and linguistic ways of knowing that seek to describe and contain it’. The articulated structure of the Voir Dit is an apparent attempt to hold together the music of the body (round forms, with their ties to rhythm and dance) and linguistic and literary ways of knowing (the textual). This distinction between somatic experience and textual knowledge brings to mind another gap (perhaps as difficult to bridge): the and between prosthesis and metonymy, between replacement limbs and replacement words. It is, again, lyric that can help us bridge that gap, hold the two concepts together, or understand if they are perhaps incompatible after all. Metonymy, broadly speaking, is the replacement of a word or phrase with another word or phrase associated with it. In Machaut’s case, I feel confident in saying that the lyric insertions are metonymic insofar as they replace the eye with something associated with it – in this case, love, and love lyric, whose composition normally springs from the sight of the beloved. The lyric is thus not only mimetic, with a rounded form echoing the shape of the eye; it replaces the missing object with a phenomenon that is normally produced by that object. And, as I have argued, these lyrics also serve a prosthetic function. But this convergence of metonymy and prosthesis in the lyric insertions of the Voir Dit does not necessarily indicate a relationship of identity. Do metonymy and prosthesis simply coexist, occasionally converging as they do in Machaut’s text? Or are they overlapping categories? Is prosthesis a metonymic process, or is metonymy a form of prosthesis? I suggest that lyric prosthesis is a metonymic strategy, but one that writes its own failure owing to the same essential disconnect between artifice and organic experience that marks the divergence of music and language. Metonymy hinges on a contiguity between an utterance and the word or phrase it replaces: that is, on an organic relationship between the two; prosthesis is the introduction of a foreign body, inorganic, functionally similar to but materially unlike the part it replaces. In the Voir Dit we have seen that lyric prosthesis, with its repeated round forms and insistence on the singular ‘oeil’, calls attention to the narrator’s physiological shortcomings; bodily prostheses too, including prosthetic eyes, can likewise end up drawing attention to the bodily difference that they purport to conceal. After all, as David Wills remarks, ‘the body to be found at the scene of prosthesis is deficient, less than whole, and has always been so’.94 Yet lyric prosthesis and actual prosthetic eyes are fundamentally 94

Wills, Prosthesis, 137.

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different in their function. Prosthetic eyes fill in a gap in the wearer’s body, but are no more than a cosmetic placeholder; they make the wearer appear more ‘normal’ to the casual observer but do not in any way normalize the wearer’s visual function. Otherwise stated, prosthetic eyes allow the wearer not to see better, but to be seen as better. Their healing is effected from the outside in: from the point of view not of the sufferer, but of the observer who is already whole. The metonymic process of lyric prosthesis, though, attempts to do both: Machaut’s lyric prostheses fill in formal gaps (by compensating for the malfunctioning eye and bridging the space between prose and narrative verse) – even as their content insists on restoring the narrator’s ability to see, and thus to love. That this project should fail – that Guillaume should remain borgne and Toute-Belle distant and out of sight – is perhaps a further indication that lyric, as the convergence of music and language, is a temporary fix at best. Yet this relief, fleeting as it is, comes of a therapy that lyric prosthesis – but not surgical prosthesis – can provide.

6 Blindfold Synecdoche BLINDNESS BLINDFOLDAND SYNECDOCHE THERAPY

Les yeulx bandez, en mirouer me myre. My eyes blindfold, I admire myself in a mirror. Simonnet Caillau, ballade for the Concours de Blois, v. 201

Treatment with likes, despite the less than unqualified success of Machaut’s lyric prosthesis, continues to provide a fruitful avenue for late medieval attempts at rhetorical remedy. In our final group of texts, composed in the mid-fifteenth century, such therapy is effected through the replacement of key terms with a comprehensive, rather than a contiguous, discourse: that is, through synecdoche rather than metonymy. By means of this figure a whole can stand for one of its constituent parts and, as in the works of Martin le Franc, Pierre Michault, Charles d’Orléans, and Simonnet Caillau, a part (afflicted or otherwise) can come to represent a whole. Synecdoche or sinodoche is characterized in Jacques de Vignay’s translation of the Légende dorée, the word’s first French-language attestation, as a ‘figure de gramaire’ by which a whole – in this case, a day – stands in for a part thereof.2 Despite contemporary semanticians’ reservations about the validity of distinguishing pars pro toto synecdoche from the broader category of metonymy, then, we can see that medieval usage does in fact differentiate synecdoche, and part/whole synecdoche in particular, as a rhetorical figure separate and distinct from metonymy.3 Indeed, drawing upon the theological

1 Charles d’Orléans, Poésies, ed. Pierre Champion. 2 vols (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1956), vol. I, 203. 2 Jacques de Voragine, La Légende dorée. Edition critique, dans la révision de 1476 par Jean Bataillier, d’après la traduction de Jean de Vignay (1333–1348) de la Legenda aurea (c. 1261–1266), ed. Brenda Dunn-Lardeau (Paris: Champion, 1997), 393. The word is attested in manuscripts dating from the mid-fourteenth century onward, such as BNF fr 241 (before 1348). ‘Synecdoque’, Dictionnaire du Moyen Français. ATILF – Nancy Université & CNRS . 3 Synecdoche is discussed in Quintilian 8.6.19–22. On the contemporary debate, see Brigitte Nerlich and David D. Clarke, ‘Synecdoche as a cognitive and communicative strategy’, in Historical Semantics and Cognition, ed. Andreas Blank and Peter Koch (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1999), 197–213; and essays collected in Georges Kleiber, Catherine Schnedecker, and Anne Theissen (eds), La Relation Partie-Tout (Louvain:

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doctrine of concomitance, Caroline Walker Bynum has described synecdoche as a ‘habit of mind’ in late medieval Europe.4 It should come as no surprise to us that this synecdochic ‘habit’, like the other master figures of irony, metaphor, and metonymy, is deployed as a counter to the physiological limitations of the lyric lover. The manner in which synecdoche operates, however, and the personages on whom it may be practised, distinguish it from these other rhetorical remedies. The therapeutic potential of synecdoche, as explored in fifteenth-century texts, stems from its simultaneous capacity for extension and restriction of meaning: to expand the meaning of a word that literally designates only a part, allowing it to stand in for the whole, can have the inverse effect of restricting the whole to that salient feature. The logic of pars pro toto therefore offers the possibility of an effective and efficient neutralization of the extramissive (female) eye – the part being easier to neutralize than the lover’s whole tormentor would be. Indeed, synecdoche as rhetorical remedy is performed not just on the injured lover’s eyes but on the offending eyes that have victimized and disabled him. Numerous French texts of the fifteenth century, including Martin le Franc’s Estrif de Fortune et de Vertu (1447–8) and especially Pierre Michault’s Dance aux aveugles (1464), reduce aggressive Love and Fortune to eyes (sometimes a singular borgne eye, in the case of Fortune) – replacing, through synecdoche, a whole threat with a part thereof – and seek to neutralize that threatening part with a blindfold. These poets’ experimentation with synecdoche as defensive medicine is related to a rise in the iconography – textual and visual – of blindfold Love and, especially, Fortune. The depiction of Love and Fortune wearing blindfolds is not a fifteenth-century innovation: indeed, notions of blind Love and blind Fortune had previously existed in disparate forms, some literary and some iconographic. However, these discrete images are crystallized, brought together, and systematically linked to the problem of the blind lover in the fifteenth century. When even the eyes alone of Love and Fortune prove impossible to contain, though, some fifteenth-century poets counter these blindfold (and blinding) figures through a repetition of the same synecdochic process, blindfolding the lover himself. Where contraries, surgeries, and prostheses have failed, the willful blockage of sight becomes, perversely, the sole remaining poetic cure for externally inflicted blindness.

Peeters, 2006), particularly Marc Bonhomme, ‘La synecdoque de la partie pour le tout: une notion problématique’, 687–701. 4 Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Living Synecdoche: Parts and Wholes in Medieval Devotion’, Washington University in St. Louis, 24 February 2010. On the doctrine of concomitance as it pertains to the body and blood in the eucharist, see Aquinas, Summa Theologiae.

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Fortune’s blindfold Fortune, as writers of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century France imagined her, wore (both figuratively and literally) many faces.5 This multiplicity of iconographic representations is explicitly flagged by those very authors, from Guillaume de Machaut – whose Voir Dit contains competing portraits of the goddess derived from classical traditions, as I shall discuss below – to Martin Le Franc, who in his prosimetric Estrif de Fortune et Vertu (1447–8) catalogues the deity’s attributes through the voice of Vertu. Se sans reproche le puis dire, dame Fortune, guere de gens ne vous congnoissent, non tant par faulte d’entendement que par la meschance et povreté de vostre estre. Tant estez petite, inconstante, fresle, muable, incertaine, vagabonde, dechepvant, perilleuse, diverse que l’on ne vous scet quel nom bailler. Les ungs considerans vostre ignorance, et que sans discretion disturbuéz les biens mondains, bendent les yeulx a vostre ymage. Les aultres veans vostre varieté vous paignent blanche d’un costé et noire d’aultre. Les pluseurs pour vostre mutation continuele vous figurent tournant une roe, ou le plus hault trebuche en bas, et cil de dessoubz tire amont. Chescun selong sa propre oppinion en parle.6 If I may say so without reproach, dame Fortune, very few people know you, not so much for a lack of understanding as for the meanness and poverty of your being. You are so petty, inconstant, weak, changeable, unsure, wandering, deceptive, dangerous, and fickle that no one knows what to call you. Some blindfold your image’s eyes, out of consideration for your ignorance and the lack of discretion with which you distribute worldly goods. Others, seeing your variability, paint your face white on one side and black on the other. Most, because of your continual changing, depict you turning a wheel, with the highest falling down and the lowest rising. Everyone talks about you according to his own fancy.

Like Le Franc’s Fortune, though, these iconographic representations did not long remain unchanged. For as much as the blindfold has become one of Fortune’s leading attributes by the mid-fifteenth century, this image’s history in French letters does not stretch as far back as many have supposed. In his monumental study The Goddess Fortuna in Medieval Literature, for instance, Howard R. Patch states without qualification that ‘Fortuna is blind, or more 5 Yet, as Daniel Heller-Roazen points out, ‘Fortune … is no sooner given a face [in the Roman de la Rose] than she is literally defaced as such.’ Fortune’s Faces: The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of Contingency (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 91. 6 Martin Le Franc, L’Estrif de Fortune et Vertu, ed. Peter F. Dembowski (Geneva: Droz, 1999), 34.

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often blindfolded, to show us that she has no regard for merit.’7 But while he illustrates the notion of blind Fortune with numerous examples stretching back to late antiquity, his earliest example of blindfold Fortune comes from Jean de Meun’s continuation of the Roman de la Rose: ‘Pour ce li oeill bendé li furent / Des anciens qui la connurent’ (6168–9). It bears mentioning that Jean de Meun (through the voice of Raison) attributes this iconography to ancients, not to his contemporaries, and that Raison’s other references to Fortune’s eyes make it clear that the latter’s metaphoric blindness should not be taken literally: she sits in the middle of her wheel ‘comme avugle’ (like a blind woman: 5899), she falls to the ground ‘com s’el n’i veïst goute’ (as if she couldn’t see anything: 6146). Nor is Jean de Meun alone in characterizing Fortune as behaving like one who is blind, rather than depicting her as blind: in fourteenth-century texts like Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune and Livre du Voir Dit there is still doubt as to whether Fortune is actually visually impaired. In these texts, as in the Roman de la Rose, Fortune’s blindfold is understood as a metaphor for behavior that is like that of a blind person, and not as a concrete attribute. While Patch correctly notes that the Rose’s Raison is underlining Fortune’s lack of regard for merit, he fails to see how careful Jean de Meun is to portray Fortune as neither blind nor blindfold. The rest of Patch’s examples of blindfold Fortune are more straightforward and also decidedly later, from a reference to ‘ses oeulx bandez’ in Eustache Deschamps’s ballade CLXXXI, bearing the refrain ‘En tous temps est Fortune decepvable’,8 to Martin Le Franc’s Estrif and Pierre Michault’s Danse aux aveugles. Similarly, Italo Siciliano lists the most prominent and ‘picturesque’ attributes of Fortune as her wheel, her blindfold, her halfbaldness, her double or particolored face, and her palace.9 In the following pages he returns at some length to discuss all of these characteristics except her blindfold, which merits a single note citing only Deschamps’s ballade.10 Even Catherine Attwood, whose discussion of ‘Fortune et cécité’ in Fortune la contrefaite provides the most recent synthesis, adds only two fifteenthcentury examples (Simonnet Caillau’s ballade for the Concours de Blois and Olivier de la Marche’s Débat de Cuidier et de Fortune) to the repertory of literary blindfolds.11 As familiar as the image of blindfold Fortune has become, and as much as Patch and Siciliano suggest that Fortune is ‘more 7 Howard R. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), 44. 8 Eustache Deschamps, Œuvres complètes de Eustache Deschamps, ed. Queux de Saint-Hilaire. 11 vols (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1878–1903), vol. I, 316–17. 9 Italo Siciliano, François Villon et les thèmes poétiques du Moyen Âge (Paris: Nizet, 1967), 291. 10 Ibid., 293 n. 6. 11 Catherine Attwood, Fortune la contrefaite: L’envers de l’écriture médiévale (Paris: Champion, 2007).

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often blindfolded’, their own textual evidence seems to indicate otherwise: examples of this iconography proliferate only in the fifteenth century.12 The addition of a blindfold to Fortune’s most frequent attributes links her to another personified deity, Love, who himself has been represented textually as blindfold or blind since antiquity, and visually as such from the fourteenth century onward. ‘Love is blind’, as the adage would have it, and beginning in the fourteenth century the allegorical figure of Love himself is represented visually as blindfold or blind. Erwin Panofsky, in his Studies in Iconology, describes the pseudomorphic process through which (classicizing) literary characterizations of Love as blind inspire a change in the standard iconographic representation of the deity: the use of the blindfold to represent Love’s blindness, not just in literature but in the plastic arts as well, gives ‘visible form to a metaphor’.13 The iconography of blind love is firmly established by the late sixteenth century, when in the fourth of his Neuf matinées (1585) Nicolas de Cholières caps off his description of the ways in which sexual activity weakens the body by declaring that lovers ‘se chargent si fort que, pour loger ou heberger l’aveugle, on devient aveugle. Les poëtes ont eu esgard à cecy quand ils ont feint leur dieu Cupidon aveugle’ (exert themselves so strongly that in order to lodge the blind man [engage in sexual intercourse], they go blind. The poets had this in mind when they made their god Cupid blind).14 It is significant that Cholières states that poets first made Cupid blind: he describes the pseudomorphosis whereby literary form, shaped by popular beliefs, determines visual iconography. The identification of Love and Fortune, already present in some high medieval texts, becomes stronger and more evocative as emerging iconographic conventions promulgate images of both figures as blindfold. As Howard R. Patch notes, the resemblance between Love and Fortune was already noted in verse as early as the eleventh or twelfth century, but this association was by no means predominant or even widely accepted; he provides counterexamples, in which Love and Fortune are opposed to one

12 Siciliano and especially Patch seem to have been unduly influenced, in their discussion of literary images, by visual iconography: miniatures in fifteenth-century manuscripts and in Jean Cousin’s sixteenth-century Livre de Fortune, which Patch cites extensively. Friedrich Wolfzettel has noted the shortcomings of Patch’s synchronic approach, namely its tendency to gloss over historical changes in the figure of Fortuna, in ‘La Fortune, le moi et l’oeuvre: Remarques sur la fonction poétologique de Fortune au Moyen Age tardif ’, in The Medieval Opus: Imitation, Rewriting, and Transmission in the French Tradition, ed. Douglas Kelly (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 197–210. 13 Erwin Panofsky, Essays in Iconology (New York: Harper, 1962), 110. 14 Interestingly enough, the fourth morning of Les Neuf matinées is devoted to ‘les chastrez’; this remark is made during a defence of eunuchs. Other mornings’ topics include the relative merits of jurisprudence and medicine, or of ugly and pretty women. Nicolas de Cholières, Oeuvres du seigneur de Cholières, ed. Édouard Tricotel, 2 vols (Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1879), vol. I, 154.

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another, from Boccaccio, Machaut, and Christine de Pizan, among others.15 Nonetheless, the textually constructed affinity between these two personages and their ‘royaumes voisins’ does recur.16 Armand Strubel dates the increasing prevalence of this conceptual link to the late thirteenth century: ‘Fortune et Amour ont connu une évolution comparable: divinités mineures du Panthéon romain, elles ont été adaptées par la littérature allégorique du XIIIe siècle […] Un lien étroit s’établit entre les deux dans la deuxième moitié du siècle’ (Fortune and Love underwent comparable evolutions: minor divinities of the Roman pantheon, they were adapted by the allegorical literature of the thirteenth century … In the second half of that century, a close bond is forged between them).17 Daniel Heller-Roazen notes, for instance, that the Rose’s Reason defines erotic love as ‘the love that comes from Fortune’.18 The development of Love and Fortune’s paired image only increases from this period – exemplified by Amors’s declaration of his alliance with Fortune in the Roman de la poire – to the Livre des echecs amoureux (1370–80), a century later, in which ‘we find Venus turning a wheel and exalting and debasing mankind’.19 The latter text’s substitution of Venus for the more commonly blind (male) Cupid feminizes Love, as does his iconographic association with the blindfold figures of Fortune (and, to a lesser degree, Death). This conflation of mother and son, of female and male deities, recalls the gender indeterminacy of the word amour in Middle French. For although the god of love is most often personified as male, especially in the tradition of the Roman de la Rose, the underlying word for love is unanchored to gender. It is important that we recognize this potential feminization of Love, for it permits us to see the logical underpinnings of synecdochic remedies for love. Reducing Love and Fortune to one constituent part, the eyes, and then obstructing those eyes with a blindfold, protects the intromissive male lover’s eyes by blocking the source of harmful rays. These penetrative weapons are launched from the eyes of the lady, from Love, and now, owing to her association with the latter, from outrageous Fortune. Interestingly, it is during just this transitional period, the fourteenth century, that we begin to see lyric poems that conflate the beloved lady with Love and Fortune. This slippery set of identifications, which we already remarked in Machaut’s Remede de Fortune, is prominent in both Italian and French lyric traditions. The association is apparent in Francesco Landini’s ballata ‘Fortuna ria, Amor e crudel donna’ (Wicked Fortune, Love and cruel 15 16

Patch, The Goddess Fortuna, 90–91and 91 n. 1. On these long-standing associations see Attwood, Fortune la contrefaite, chapter 2, ‘Fortune et Amour’, 51–82. 17 ‘La personnification allégorique, avatar du mythe: Fortune, Raison, Nature et Mort chez Jean de Meun’, in Pour une mythologie du Moyen Âge, ed. Laurence Harf-Lancner and Dominique Boutet (Paris: École normale supérieure, 1988), 62. 18 Heller-Roazen, Fortune’s Faces, 66. 19 Patch, The Goddess Fortuna, 92, 96.

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lady),20 in Machaut’s ‘Amours, ma dame et Fortune et mi œil’ from the Voir Dit, and notably in Petrarch’s Canzoniere, in which similar language recurs. The Rime sparse’s poetic persona is undone by ‘Amor, Fortuna, et la mia mente’ (Love, Fortune, and my mind: sonnet 124, v.1); by ‘Fortuna agli occhi miei nemica’ (Fortune enemy of my eyes: sonnet 205, v. 9); by struggles ‘et col mondo et con mia cieca fortuna, / con Amor, con Madonna et meco’ (with the world and with blind Fortune, Love, my lady and myself: sonnet 223, vv. 7–8); and by ‘blind’ Love and his own ‘deaf’ mind, which lead him so far astray that he ends up approaching Death (‘Ma ‘l cieco Amor et la mia sorda mente / mi traviavan sì ch’andar per viva / farza mi convenia dove Morte era’: sonnet 290, vv. 9–11).21 In late medieval French letters this idea reaches perhaps its fullest development in Pierre Michault’s Danse aux aveugles, in which, as I will discuss below, the resemblance of Love and Fortune leads the Acteur and his Entendement to approach Death in the prosimetrum’s concluding verse ars moriendi. In order to understand more fully this convergence of Love and Fortune, and the late medieval emergence of the blindfold model of Fortune, I now propose to look back to Machaut’s Voir Dit before proceeding to a discussion of synechdoche in two fifteenth-century prosimetra. Aside from the one-eyed Polyphemus – who, as demonstrated in the preceding chapter, doubles the Voir Dit’s narrator and embodies the prosthetic function of citation – Fortune is the other mythical figure of visual impairment appearing in Machaut’s masterwork. The vocabulary with which Machaut describes her, and his explicit recognition of her multiple portrayals, illustrate for us Fortune’s varied identifications with Love, the lady, and the visually impaired lover’s borgne oeil.

Fortune and the Borgne Fortune is the Voir Dit’s third borgne, after the narrator and Polyphemus; she is moreover the sole allegorical personage, visually impaired or not, to whom both Guillaume and Toute-Belle are compared. But, unlike Polyphemus, Fortune is at once is Guillaume’s double and his antagonist. Fortune’s interrupted eyesight recalls Guillaume’s condition as the two struggle for control of the narrator’s destiny. The personage of Fortune is important in the Voir Dit and is associated both with blindness (or the blindfold) and with her wheel, which, like the text’s round lyric forms, mirrors the shape of the lover’s eye. Fortune is already familiar to Machaut’s readers, of course, as the author devotes a large portion of his Remede de Fortune to a description of the 20 Poesie musicali del trecento, ed. Giuseppe Corsi (Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1970), 170. 21 This despite having seen Amor ‘cieco non già’ (v. 9) in sonnet 151 (‘Non d’atra et tempestosa onda marina’, 297).

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goddess and her ways. In the Remede de Fortune, as in many late medieval texts, her physical appearance, and particularly her eyes, are characterized as outward manifestations of her dual nature: ‘d’un oeil rit, de l’autre lermie’ (She smiles with one eye and cries with the other: Remede 233, v. 1162). The asymmetry and unpredictability of Fortune’s actions extend to the form and focus of her eyes, or even those of her victims. The portrait of Fortune contained in the Remede is undeniably based in the visual: she blinds her victims (‘les yeus esbloe / Et aveugle de mainte gent’: 227, vv. 1053–4), or, more tellingly, she is herself blind or borgne (‘Lorde, borgne, fausse, et enfrune’; thick, squint-eyed, false, and cruel: v. 953). The peculiar choice of the adjective borgne to describe Fortune reappears in the Voir Dit, and, as I will argue, this word choice lies at the heart of the blindfold’s function in blocking extramissive threats. Machaut provides two different, or complementary, portraits of Fortune in the Voir Dit.22 In the first, identified as being derived from Livy, the goddess Fortune ‘.II. petis sercle[s] a sa destre / Havoit et .II. a sa senestre, / Et un grant qui environnoit / Les .IIII. petis et tenoit’ (had two little circles to her right and two to her left, and one great one that surrounded and held the four little ones: 714, vv. 8207–10). A later description, said to follow pagan tradition, situates Fortune ‘enmi une roe qui tourne’ (within a turning wheel: 752, v. 8614). Like her wheel, this version of Fortune turns between two faces, one fair and joyful, the other dark and sad. Jacqueline Cerquiglini sees in these double faces a parallel with Guillaume’s ophthalmic malady: Toute comparaison du poète à Fortune féminise ce dernier. Machaut se transforme donc, par l’art du ‘mestre de logique’ en Fortune ‘au double regard’. Est-ce en dernière analyse la signification de son oeil ‘borgne’, de son oeil qui louche?23 Any comparison of the poet to Fortune feminizes him. Thus Machaut transforms himself, through the art of the logician, into two-faced Fortune. Is this, after all, the significance of his ‘borgne’, squinting eye?

Indeed, the associations between Fortune and blindness continue to multiply. In the Voir Dit’s first description of the goddess her third wheel bears the inscription La pensee aveugle et enhorte, Que d’amer son Dieu se deporte (I blind thought and encourage it to abandon the love of God: 714, vv. 8221–2): thus Fortune interrupts both sensory experience and spiritual health. And in the second portrait the goddess herself may be blind. The messenger initially 22 On the remarkable illustrations of these two Fortunes in manuscript A, see Deborah McGrady, Controlling Readers: Guillaume de Machaut and his Late Medieval Audience (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 115–17. 23 Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, Un Engin si soutil: Guillaume de Machaut et l’écriture au XIVe siècle (Paris: Champion, 1985), 150.

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claims that ‘la deesse ne vëoit goute’ (the goddess sees nothing: 752, v. 8628), but later retreats to the claim made in the Voir Dit’s first portrait of Fortune – that is, the contention that she blinds her victims. Comment que Catons pas ne doubte, Ains deffent son fil qu’il ne croie Que Fortune tresbien ne voie Ne qu’elle soit borgne ou avugle, Mais elle deçoipt et avugle Les siens qui desirent les tas Des florins et les grans estas. (752, vv. 8629–35) Cato doesn’t believe, and forbids his son from believing, that Fortune does not see very well or that she is one-eyed or blind; rather, she deceives and blinds her subjects who want to obtain money and grandeur.

It is not without interest to note that the above is the only passage of the Voir Dit, aside from Letter XIII, that includes the word borgne. This same word, then, is used to make reference at once to the poet-narrator who wrote the text and to the goddess who determines human destiny. Their instruments are the same: Fortune figures the world (and shapes its fate) with her wheel, and Guillaume/Machaut figures it (and shapes the content and poetic form of his love-narrative) with his eye. The poet-narrator’s borgne oeil, representative of his perception and judgement, controls the rise and fall of his love affair. The affinity of the ‘borgne vallet’ and ‘lorde, borgne, fausse, et enfrune’ Fortune runs deeper than the external appearance of the two personages’ eyes, straight to their linguistic heart. As Daniel Heller-Roazen points out, ‘Nineteenth-century philologists and historians of religion already observed that the name Fortuna […] is originally derived from the Indo-European root *bher-, “to bring,” “to bear,” and “to carry”.’24 Yet we must also consider a related etymological chain that has not, to my knowledge, previously been noted with regard to Fortune: the same root, *bher-, signifies ‘to bore, cut, carve, or cleave’, whence it apparently gives rise to borna (hole or cavity), the Latin bornius (one whose eyes have been put out), and ultimately, the French

24 Heller-Roazen, Fortune’s Faces, 66. See also Émile Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes (Paris: Minuit, 1969), vol. 1, 11: ‘A l’intérieur même d’une langue, les formes d’un même vocable peuvent se diviser en groupes distinct et peu conciliables. Ainsi de la racine *bher-, représentée par fero, le latin a tiré trois groupes différents de dérivés qui forment autant de familles lexicales: 1º) fero “porter” au sens de la gestation, d’où forda “femelle pleine,” fait groupe avec gesto; 2º) fero “porter” au sens de “comporter” désigne les manifestations du sort, d’où fors, fortuna, et leurs nombreux dérivés, qui entraînent aussi la notion de “fortune, richesse”; 3º) fero “porter” au sens d’“emporter,” fait groupe avec ago et se définit par la notion de rapt et de butin.’

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borgne.25 The (presumed) etymology suggests the extent to which the word borgne is linked not only to perception but also to piercing and penetration; the gifts Fortune bears are also the means by which she bores out the recipient’s eyes. Fortune not only proffers riches or woes, but she ‘deçoipt et avugle’ the borgne who is at once her victim and her etymological double. The word borgne is crucial to the relationship between Fortune and one of her victims in at least one other text, namely Jean d’Arras’s’s Mélusine (c.1390). Although the victim in question, Raymondin, suffers from no ocular malady (unlike many of his malformed sons), he nonetheless has recourse to the same word in order to describe himself and Fortune in quick succession. Overcome with regret at having rashly spied on his serpent-wife, Raymondin blames Fortune: ‘J’ay fait le borgne ! aveugle Fortune, dure, sure et amere, bien m’as mis du hault siege de ta roe ou plus bas et ou plus boueux et ort lieu de ta maison’ (I’ve acted like a one-eyed man! Blind, hard, harsh, bitter Fortune, you’ve sent me from the highest seat on your wheel to the lowest, muddiest, dirtiest part of your house).26 The expression ‘faire le borgne’ could be read in multiple fashions: as a figurative expression of moral blindness or as a literal recreation of the one-eyed squint with which he must have peeped through the hole he bored in the door in order to see the bathing Mélusine.27 Or it could mean that Raymondin has, like Fortune, acted with no regard for his well-being – for he again uses the word borgne, just a few sentences later, to vilify Fortune as ‘faulse, borgne, traitre, envieuse’ (false, one-eyed, treacherous, envious: 664), all vices that Raymondin, who just broke his vow to his wife out of senseless jealousy, now embodies. Conceiving of Fortune as a borgne further complicates the interwoven lines of sight that give rise to the lines of late medieval love poetry. While Fortune, Love, and the Lady are all sources of extramissive assault, borgne Fortune participates in a privileged relationship with the lover who comes to resemble her, his tormentor. In order to escape the tripartite assault of Fortune, Love, and the Lady, the lover must first (re)differentiate between his body and the dangerous other before attempting to block their extramissive blows. Since it wouldn’t be terribly courteous for a lover to cover his lady’s eyes, he must find a means to block those harmful rays without disrupting the integrity of his or his beloved’s body: in a number of fifteenth-century French 25 For this proposed etymology, see, for example, ‘Borgne’, in Trésor de la langue française, 16 vols (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1975), vol. 4, 705; or ‘Borgne’, in Grand Robert de la langue française, 2nd edn, 9 vols (Paris: Dictionnaires le Robert, 1992), vol. I, 1546. 26 Jean d’Arras, Mélusine ou La Noble Histoire de Lusignan, ed. Jean-Jacques Vincensini (Paris: Poche, 2003), 662. 27 Given that ‘borgne’ is also Middle French slang for penis, it is also tempting, but ultimately not philologically defensible, to translate ‘j’ay fait le borgne’ as ‘I’ve been such a dick.’ Giuseppe di Stefano, Dictionnaire des locutions en Moyen Français (Montreal: CERES, 1991).

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texts, blind Love is commingled with blindfold Fortune to divert the love-imprint. In these poetic dialogues, the tradition of the jeu-parti becomes, in a more real sense, a game of parts.28 But instead of healing, this action seems to inflict a very different sort of damage on the lover.

Synecdoche and strife: Martin Le Franc’s Estrif de Fortune et Vertu Blindfold Fortune bears a particularly troubled relationship with synecdochic speech in Martin le Franc’s Estrif de Fortune et Vertu (1447–8), a prosimetrum in three books, written largely in prose punctuated by twenty-three poems of varying forms. In it the Acteur, musing upon the opposing forces of Fortune and Virtue, imagines their debate (and Fortune’s ultimate defeat) before Reason. The difference between Fortune’s speech and that of her interlocutors is remarkable: the blindfold goddess is snappy, entertaining, and usually far more succinct than her opponents, but, unlike them, she seems incapable of abstract reasoning. Moreover, Fortune’s discourse differs from the others’ in its form, as she is the only character to speak exclusively in prose.29 Lyric is the domain of Reason and Virtue and thus, perhaps, of intellectual and moral remedy. In content as well Fortune’s discourse differentiates her from other characters – and most notably from humanity – in large part by means of synecdoche. Fortune’s discourse, as a general rule, privileges part/whole relationships. At times Fortune promotes, even enacts, the fragmentation inherent in pars pro toto synecdoche; at other moments she cautions against taking a part as representative of a whole, as when she uses material analogies to illuminate her place within the divine order: Veritablement, comme tu voys ou en painture ou en tapisserie monlt de couleurs diverses assortiez en plaisant ordonnace et en ordonnee plaisance, ja soit ce que les aulcunes a par elles n’aient trop grand beaulté. Ainsy de tant de choses, non obstant que entre elles aulcunes semblent sans cause et rayson faictes, desplaisans ou horribles a veoir, est ce monde merveilleusement et plaisaument basti. […] Regarde aussy les parties de corps humain, comme par une necessité les unes joinctes aux aultres rendent belle figure. (24) In truth, just as you see many colors in a painting or tapestry, arranged in a pleasing order and an ordered pleasantness, nonetheless some of those colors aren’t very pretty in and of themselves. So it is with many things: though some are unpleasant or horrible to see, and seem to have been made

28 Attwood employs the wordplay of jeu-parti and game of parts in Fortune la contrefaite, 169, though not with reference to synecdoche. 29 The first poem is written from the Acteur’s point of view, while the rest are divided among Vertu (13) and Raison (9).

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without cause or reason, still the world is marvelously and pleasantly constructed … Look at the parts of the body, too: they are necessarily joined together to yield a beautiful form.

Fortune suggests a whole that is more (or at least more beautiful) than the sum of its parts, seemingly denying the feasibility of synecdochic expansion and reduction. Elsewhere, however, the same personage seems to advocate the division of a whole into parts: in her exemplum of Apelles, for instance, she links specialized knowledge to the partitioning of a body, be it the body of a painted figure or a body of knowledge (72). We learn at the end of the Estrif that precisely such division is Fortune’s aim: the final words of the book reveal that she seeks to sow discord by disrupting the unity of the Church, ‘partir et diviser l’Esglise, en unité et sur ferme pierre, comme l’on dit, fondee’ (parting and dividing the Church, which is grounded in unity, as they say, and built on a firm rock: 291). Furthermore, Fortune is associated in other characters’ speech with attempts to manipulate the part/whole relationship. More specifically, her role in monstrous births, specifically in deformities that cause children to be born lacking members or organs, becomes a point of contention. Reason explains: Chascuns scet que par commun et naturel cours le pié n’est party et divisé que en cinq doys, maiz force a matiere generative fut sy habondant et redondant qu’elle fournist le doy sixiesme; ou nature en sa generation fust sy flebe et impotente qu’elle ne poeut duire et mener la matiere selonc la fourme accoustumee. Ainsy qu’il advient par defaulte ou diminution de matiere les uns naissent aveugles, sans bras et sans mains. Telles choses, et generalement tous monstres, disons venir par aventure … (42–3) Everyone knows that it is the common and natural course for the foot to be divided into five toes, but generative matter had such abundant force as to provide him [Pyrrhus] a sixth toe; or nature, in his generation, was so feeble and impotent as not to be able to lead matter according to the customary form. Likewise, by fault or reduction of matter, it happens that some people are born blind, without arms or without hands. We say that such things, and all monsters in general, are random occurrences …

Reason goes on to attribute monstrous births more precisely to Fortune. Fortune, in turn, celebrates such monstrous births and monstrous (mythical) races as marvels of human diversity: ‘telles diversitéz de corps et de courages’ (such diversities of hearts and minds), she maintains, attest to the wonders of God’s creation (49). The varied and wide-ranging nature of the collections of parts from which humans can be assembled points, once again, to the tricky stance Fortune and her colleagues must adopt with regard to synecdochic logic.

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Virtue and Reason appear to resolve this ambiguity by conceiving of different types of beings as displaying dissimilar relationships of part to whole. According to these virtuous ladies, humankind cannot be reduced to the human body’s constituent parts – but their speech demonstrates that Fortune can be subjected to reduction through synecdoche. Man is insusceptible to division: not because his body comes in so many shapes and sizes, as Fortune suggests in her defence of monstrosity, but because of the fundamental rupture between man’s body and his soul/will/intellect. The same ‘loy des membres’ cited by Jacques Bauchant in his preface to Des remedes ou confors des maulz de fortune qui aviennent ou pevent avenir aux hommes separates man into rational and corporeal parts, parts whose fundamental incongruence denies the possibility of synecdochic logic.30 In this manner man is, as Reason states, an imperfect reflection of divine indivisibility (259). Fortune, on the other hand, can (even should) be divided.31 Not content merely to advocate such action, Virtue illustrates it in poem 16: ‘Fortune sieus quant elle est douche, / Fuys s’elle te fait oeul louche’ (Follow Fortune when she is sweet, flee if she gives you the squinty eye: 169). While good Fortune is presented as a whole, misfortune is reduced to a single eye, and an irregular (‘louche’) one at that. Virtue’s attack does seem to be informed by reason. The multiplicity of Fortune’s images and faces would, after all, be difficult to combat; a single eye, on the other hand, is easier to neutralize. It perhaps follows, then, that the best way to protect the poet from being blinded by Love and Fortune is to reduce these assailants, through synecdoche, before they can do the same to the lover. This is precisely what happens in a slightly later text, Pierre Michault’s Danse aux aveugles (1464), in which the explicit linking (and joint neutralization) of Love and Fortune is attempted through the application of a blindfold.

Dancing parts and wholes: Pierre Michault’s Danse aux aveugles Preserved in nineteen manuscripts, Pierre Michault’s prosimetric Danse aux aveugles recounts a dream in which the Acteur and his disembodied Entendement travel to the ‘sale trispartie’ (tripartite room) that serves as 30 This continued recourse to the ‘law of members’ is but one of many points of contact between Le Franc’s text and those discussed in Chapter 3. Much of Book Three of L’Estrif de Fortune et Vertu (238–59 and 268–84) is a transformation of De remediis utriusque fortunae, a loose adaptation that strips the Petrarchan text of its irony by translating the latin text’s chapter titles while reducing its dialogic form to a series of monologues delivered by Vertu. On connections between the two texts, see Arthur Piaget, Martin le Franc, prévôt de Lausanne (1888; repr. Caen: Paradigme, 1993), 183; Oskar Roth, ‘Martin Le Franc et le De remediis de Pétrarque’, Studi francesi 45 (1971), 401–19. 31 These divisions are perhaps not always intentional. For instance, in Brussels Bibliothèque royale ms 9573, the base manuscript for Dembowski’s edition, the page break from 77r to 77v divides the word ‘contente’ in a most evocative manner: ‘je suis con / tente’. Estrif de Fortune et Vertu, ed. Peter F. Dembowski (Geneva: Droz, 1999), 166.

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dance floor for humans under the sway of three blindfold figures: Love, Fortune, and Death. Of these three, Love and Fortune are the most strongly identified with one another – they are the ‘deux aveugles’ to whom humanity has entrusted itself, according to the Acteur’s lament (106) – while Death remains somewhat of an outlier. However, Death is the one entity whose dance cannot be avoided. Having traversed the great hall, the Acteur and his Entendement exchange a series of septains, a stanzaic dialogue that constitutes ‘les remedes de la dance d’Atropos’ (the remedies for the dance of Atropos: 122). While the Danse’s prosimetric form appears to provide an opportunity for healing, as it did in the texts discussed in Chapter Five, in this case it is not Hope but Love who causes songs to be composed – songs that are not therapeutic, but ‘doulcement empoisonnees’ (sweetly poisoned: 109). Clearly, then, the relationship between prosimetric form, lyric, and remedy is very different in this synecdochic poem than it was in the metaphoric world of Machaut’s Remede de Fortune. In the Danse aux aveugles Love and Fortune are presented as two separate entities, but are associated in a manner that suggests their eyes function similarly. Cupid (Love) is described first and is used as a point of reference in the following description of Fortune: according to the Acteur, the latter ‘pareillement avoit les yeulx bendés comme le dieu Cupido’ (had her eyes blindfold just like Cupid: 97). Fortune forges a similar comparison – though, unlike the narrator, who continues to see the first two ‘aveugles’ as equals, she declares herself more powerful than her counterpart Love (103). Similarly impaired, they have a similar effect on the Acteur, as ‘la double puissance de ces deux aveugles, c’est assavoir Cupido et Fortune, [lui] donna double merveille’ (the double power of these two blind figures, Cupid and Fortune, was doubly marvelous to him: 106). Their impact is unlike that of Death, who cuts a far more frightening figure (‘assés et trop pluis m’espoanta la dame Atropos par ses dictz’: 120–21) and proves far more powerful. The association of Love and Fortune is so strong that by the end of the text the Acteur refers to them simply as ‘ces deux’ (those two: 135). The prosimetrum’s title identifies the Acteur’s three antagonists as ‘aveugles’, while the text repeatedly refers to them both as ‘aveugles’ and as having ‘les yeulx bendez’. While most modern readers would consider the distinction between blindness (a bodily impairment) and a blindfold (an extracorporeal barrier leaving the underlying physiological function intact) to be of considerable significance, Pierre Michault makes no such distinction.32 32 Interestingly, Fortune’s blindfold is not (despite what the text’s title would suggest) her most salient feature – perhaps reinforcing our rejection of Patch’s and Siciliano’s claim that medieval Fortune is ‘more often blindfolded.’ If this were the case the blindfold would provide an important clue to the second figure’s identity; instead, the Acteur recognizes Fortune by her two-colored face and her wheel. Pierre Michault, Oeuvres poétiques, ed. Barbara Folkart (Paris: 10/18, 1980), 98.

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The Rose’s ‘com s’el n’i veïst goute’ (as if she saw nothing) has become ‘je n’y voy goute’ (I see nothing: 102): Fortune’s metaphorical blindness has become real (and yet unreal, since it is not definitively located either in the body or in the blindfold). Her blindness is functional, not physiological. This peculiar form of blindness and the synecdochic strategy by which several fifteenth-century poets counter it are easier to understand if we accept Daniel Heller-Roazen’s reading of Fortune as a persona ficta whose body exists in language alone.33 Blinding is effected by (verbally) isolating the eyes, declaring them ‘gasté et destruit’ (ruined and destroyed: 87), and generalizing that condition to the whole. Indeed, in the Danse aux Aveugles – even more than in the Estrif de Fortune et Vertu – explicit discussions of synecdochic processes recur as the Acteur seeks to understand how blindfold entities can hold sway over humanity.34 These discussions of part and whole often participate in a broader reflection on the relationship of music to dance and, thus, to the body. Cupid (and his blindness) are strongly associated with the act of poetic creation: ‘je faiz rondeaux et balades parfaire, … bouquetz garnys de tresamoureux vers’, he declares (I cause rondeaux and ballades to be composed, bouquets adorned with most loving verses: 90). Love arises because of minstrels, ‘menestreux’, who lure people of all nations (‘touts ces nacions’) into love’s dance (87): the emphasis on the diverse origins of the lovers – ‘tant Payens, Yndois, Caldees, Juifz, Turcs, Sarrasins que autres’ (as many pagans, Indians, Chaldeans, Jews, Turks, and Saracens as others: 86) – suggests that, despite poetry’s role in the facilitation of amorous passion, love is a phenomenon that transcends language. Yet it is also a phenomenon that leads to (corporeal) destruction, effected through synecdochic process whereby the blind king Cupid represents all of his subjects. ‘Il souffit que le chief soit aveugle, malade, ou ait quelque inconvenient a ce que le tout soit gasté et destruit’, Entendement explains (Because for the whole to be ruined or destroyed, it suffices that the head be blind, sick, or have some impairment: 87). Humanity is blinded, then, via a synecdoche (a blind part ruins the whole) that in turn depends on a metaphor (head of state as head of a body). The sentiment is repeated in poem VII: ‘Ha! quel douloureux meschief, / … d’avoir ung aveugle chief / qui ses membres en temps brief / met a dangereuse dance!’ (Ah, what painful misfortune to have a blind head that sets its members to dangerous dancing in no time at all: 96). The rule of law, in Love’s kingdom, is the law of members. The blind god, the chief, causes his members – that is, lovers – to dance. Love and the lovers form one disabled body, and when a lover loses his head, Cupid, unwhole as he is, takes its place. By extension it 33 34

Heller-Roazen, Fortune’s Faces, 96–7. According to Entendement, ‘Aussy ne peut une personne tout veoir ne savoir, car il fault que particuliers sachent parties et tous sachent tout’ (94): collective knowledge depends on such a part/whole relationship, as literature becomes an experience by proxy.

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is not just love, but the lover, whose perception is obscured by the blindfold. Has the synecdochic remedy backfired? Perhaps more importantly, given the centrality of music and lyric form to metaphoric and metonymic healing, does Love’s synecdochic dance undermine the established link between music and remedy? While the Dance aux aveugles is, like the Remede de Fortune, the Avision Christine and the Livre d’Espérance, a prosimetrum, in this later text the relationship between lyric and healing is far less clear-cut. Entendement presents music as a path to sin, not to remedy, let alone redemption. ‘Par ouÿr cithariser / tu veulx ton corps desguiser / et vices auctoriser / contre le saint evvangile’, Entendement warns in poem VII (Listening to strumming, you want to disguise your body and authorize vices contrary to the holy gospel: 96); music contributes to an ‘avuglement’ that ‘murtrit doleureusement / le fruit et le sentement / d’entendement’ (painfully destroys the fruit and the consciousness of understanding: 96–7). Instead of leading the sufferer to the right path, it causes him to ‘circuyr’ (circle: 97): Entendement warns against precisely the sort of cyclical trap that ensnares the first-person lover of the Voir Dit. In case such admonitions weren’t clear enough, Entendement provides an even more explicit warning against music and the ‘perdition’ it precipitates in poem XI (108–10). Nonetheless, the remedy that the text ultimately proposes does resemble that offered by the prosimetric tradition outlined in Chapter 5. ‘Les remedes de la dance d’Atropos’ (122) are to be found in an art de mourir in stanzaic form, composing the last quarter of the prosimetrum (122 to 139). Explicitly introduced as remedial in function,35 this sequence of septains exchanged by the Acteur and his Entendement introduces the notion of ‘souffisance’ as key to the conquest of Fortune (131). Entendement’s definition of ‘souffisance’ is framed quite differently than was Esperance’s in the Remede de Fortune, however. In the Danse aux aveugles contentment comes from reconceptualizing the relationship of part and whole. It means being satisfied with a part as a part, without desiring the whole from which that part comes. Entendement offers the real-world examples of smoked meats and real estate: Il est vray car concupiscence desrieuglee ou desordonnee prive du cuer une science qui a l’ame estoit adonnee, et veult, aprés la charbonnee, tout le lard, et aprés, cent mille, et aprés deux maisons, la ville. 35 The association is flagged via a reference to remedy in the poem’s final stanzas, in which author’s name is lightly encrypted. ‘Pierre ne peut humeur de basme rendre, / ne dure teste actaindre a bien hault stile’ (139).

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It’s true, because unbridled or disordered concupiscence deprives the heart of a wisdom with which the soul was endowed. Having had a piece of meat it wants the whole salted pork, then a hundred thousand of them; after two houses, it wants the entire city.

Part/whole synecdoche is but the first step, it seems, on a slippery slope to hyperbole. But if synecdoche can be manipulated in the right way – if it can permit man to see the part of which he is possessed as a whole, leaving nothing further to be desired – then it can free him of the concupiscent gaze that Love’s and Fortune’s blindfolds seem to reinforce rather than block. Almost immediately, though, the efficacy of synecdochic remedy is seemingly called into question: Entendement’s revelation that ‘vraye souffisance / est donnée sans fiction’ (true sufficiency is provided without fiction: 134–5) suggests that fiction – meaning untruth, but also poetic invention, including figures of rhetoric? – is not the key to satisfaction after all. The poetic veil, like the material veil blocking the aggressive deities’ eyes, affords mankind no protection. Even blindfolded, Love and Fortune do harm the lover; blindfolds and synecdoche, rather than blocking danger, merely displace it from the eyes. Hence the logic of several late medieval poets’ inward turn, exemplified in Charles d’Orléans’s quest for indifference – that is, nonchaloir – as the key to souffisance.36

Blindfolds and nonchaloir Fortune and the god (or goddess) of love have a way of blinding their human victims, whether the two divinities are working in conjunction (as in the Danse aux aveugles) or in contention. In a ballade by Charles d’Orléans (LXIII) it is the collusion between Love and Fortune that leads to the lover’s blindness, a condition that is at first figurative, but later literal. In the ballade’s refrain Charles’s poetic persona describes himself as ‘L’omme esgaré qui ne scet ou il va’ (the lost man who doesn’t know where he’s going); whereas the first three stanzas clearly indicate that the speaker has lost his way because of Fortune, the envoi reframes the refrain in order to indicate that the speaker has also lost his way because he quite simply cannot see his path. ‘Aveugle suy, ne sçay ou aler doye. / De mon baston, affin que ne forvoye, / Je vois tastant mon chemin ça et la’ (I am blind, and I don’t know where I ought to go. I move forward, feeling out my path with my cane so that I won’t stumble off track: vv. 25–7). The courtly metaphor of a wanderer in a wood has suddenly been rendered far more concrete, tied to the poetic persona’s physical being. Such tension between literal and figurative readings, focused on or in the lover’s body, is a hallmark of the 36 On Fortune in the works of Charles d’Orléans, see Alice Planche, Charles d’Orléans ou la recherche d’un langage (Paris: Champion, 1975), 375–96.

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duke’s brand of synecdochic therapy: a therapy effected by or through nonchaloir. The blindfold as attribute of Fortune and of Love is, of course, an emblem of their indifference: to the circumstances of their victims, to the consequences of their actions.37 Likewise, another sort of indifference figures prominently in the ‘remedies’ to Fortune proposed by Charles d’Orléans and his poetic circle.38 Where a literal blindfold fails to protect the eyes, the figurative blindfold of nonchaloir provides the lover with the distance needed to deflect extramissive threats. It is this added barrier that provides, as Shigemi Sasaki puts it, genuine clarity (‘la véritable clairvoyance’).39 Nonchaloir serves, in the poetic universe of Charles d’Orléans, as a reflection of and an influence on the poetic subject’s mental and bodily state.40 Even before we consider its deployment within the duke’s lyric, the word’s etymology already suggests a potential connection to medieval medical theory, evoking as it does the principal quality of heat (or the absence thereof).41 More precisely, nonchaloir’s medical or therapeutic function, catalogued by Costanza Pasquali, is dependent on the frequent partitioning of the body in Charles’s verse. As is evident to even the most casual reader, Charles d’Orléans often revisits the debates of the eyes and the heart that are so popular in fifteenth-century lyric.42 Such language is especially prominent in Charles’s chansons and rondeaux, which frequently retreat to what Sarah

37 38

Attwood, Fortune la contrefaite, 57. As Shigemi Sasaki points out, though, ‘Charles d’Orléans does not seek ‘consolation’ in the Boethian sense … What is ‘consolation’? It is a compensation for adversity; a relief, a counterweight to an ill. True tranquillity lies elsewhere; back-and-forth movement continues even in the prison of Thought. The state of Nonchaloir is stripped of all possible alternatives: utter indifference.” (“Charles d’Orléans ne cherche pas de ‘consolation’ dans le sens donné par Boèce et ses successeurs. […] Qu’est-ce que la ‘consolation’? C’est une compensation pour les infortunes; le soulagement, uncontrepoids à un mal. La tranquillité authentique n’est pas là; le mouvement pendulaire n’en continue pas moins dans la prison de Pensee. L’état de Nonchaloir est un état dépouillé de toute possibilité d’alternative: indifférence du oui et du non.’) Sur le thème de nonchaloir dans la poésie de Charles d’Orléans (Paris, Nizet, 1974), 142. 39 Ibid., 146. 40 This defensive nonchaloir has been beautifully explicated by Costanza Pasquali and elaborated by Shigemi Sasaki. Yet it is most often treated as a psychological defence mechanism and has not, to my knowledge, been linked to frequent partitioning of the body in the lyric poetry of Charles d’Orléans and his circle. Costanza Pasquali, ‘Charles d’Orléans e il suo “Nonchaloir”’, in Studi in onore di Angelo Monteverdi (Modena: Società Tipografica Editrice Modenese, 1959), vol. 2, 549–70. 41 Planche, Charles d’Orléans, 613. 42 See Daniel Poirion, Le Poète et le Prince: l’évolution du lyrisme courtois de Guillaume de Machaut à Charles d’Orléans (Paris: PUF, 1965), 572. ‘Le combat du coeur et de l’oeil, thème favori du badinage amoureux, se confond avec d’autres épisodes d’une lutte qui tend à rétablir une certaine discipline intérieure et à assurer la maîtrise de soi.’

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Spence has called ‘a space in which fragmentation dominates’.43 Of all his autonomous parts, the poet cites the eyes with the greatest frequency, while rarely mentioning the body as a whole.44 It must be pointed out, however, that the poet’s reduction of the body to a set of constituent parts often defies convention rather than simply observing it. In rondeau CCCI, for instance, Charles declares that he has taken the eye–heart debate into his hands (‘Je prens en mes mains vos debas / Desormais, mon cueur et mes yeuls’: vv. 1–2): the introduction of these members transfers the conventional language to a realm of action, grounding the disembodied language in a more physical realm. The tendency toward bodily partitioning takes on a decidedly comic tone in rondeaux such as CCCVII, in which the organs are themselves endowed with parts of their own: ‘Mon cuer, estouppe tes oreilles’ (My heart, cover your ears: v. 1). The discrete parts of the poetic subject’s body stand in for his physical being and for his consciousness;45 what Daniel Poirion calls a ‘métonymie courtoise’ is, more properly, a therapeutic synecdoche.46 This therapeutic (and courtly) function of synecdoche differs sharply from the same figure’s treatment at the hands of Charles’s contemporary and collaborator in the Concours de Blois, François Villon. For Villon, the compartmentalization of the human body is most often applied to two ends: the vituperative punishment of the poetic persona’s enemies, or the compounding of his own sensory experience.47 In texts such as the ‘Ballade des langues ennuieuses’ Villon dismantles his opponent’s body in order to batter it (in this case, providing a ‘recipe’ for tongue). While the poet remains an integral human being, his addressee is reduced to a source of meat.48 The ballade thus differs from its apparent model, Eustache Deschamps’s ballade

43 Sarah Spence, ‘Reg(u)arding the Text: The Role of Vision in the Chansons of Charles d’Orléans’, in Chaucer’s French Contemporaries: The Poetry/Poetics of Self and Tradition, ed. R. Barton Palmer (New York: AMS Press, 1999), 309. 44 Alice Planche catalogues and comments on references to the eyes and the gaze in Charles d’Orléans, 655–62; references to the integral body, 667–73. 45 In reading Charles’s partitioning of the body as synecdochic and therapeutic in nature I differ from Florence Bouchet, who has described such manoeuvres as signalling the end of the unified subject: ‘toute instance particulière de la personne (coeur, bouche, yeux …) est susceptible de prendre son indépendance et d’exprimer un sentiment discordant de celui du je’. ‘La joie dans la peine au XVe siècle: du paradoxe à la sublimation’, Le Moyen Français 62 (2008), 12. 46 Poirion, Le Poète et le prince, 573. 47 Oddly, the texts in which this procedure is most pronounced – such as the ‘Ballade des langues ennuieuses’ and the ‘Louenge et requeste a la cour’ – have been largely ignored by modern critics. 48 On this mode of ‘degradation, defilement, and insult’, see David A. Fein, ‘Villon’s Disgusting Recipe for Fried Tongue’, French Review 81 (2007), 328–38. Fein also considers this ballade’s placement within the Testament in ‘Joined Hearts and Severed Tongues: An Illustration of Antithetical Juxtaposition in Villon’s Testament’, Philological Quarterly 66 (1987), 315–24.

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featuring the refrain ‘Soient servis au disner mesdisans’, insofar as Deschamps leaves his enemies’ bodies intact; Villon not only rips out their tongues (figuratively speaking), but he prepares them in a disgusting concoction that is itself composed of legs, feet, anuses, blood, and other severed parts.49 In this case the reduction of a body to its parts is clearly not a protective measure, but an aggressive one. When Villon practises synecdochic reduction upon his own poetic persona, however, he does so without compromising his bodily integrity. In the ‘Debat du cuer et du corps’, for instance, Villon modifies the sort of bodily debate one more often encounters in late medieval poetry – debates of the body and soul, or of the heart and eyes, as in a number of Charles d’Orléans’s rondeaux50 – by staging a dialogue between a body and one of its constituent parts.51 The body is simultaneously fragmented and whole. Likewise, in his ‘Louenge et requeste a la cour’, ostensibly composed in gratitude for a death sentence being commuted to a ten-year banishment, Villon creates a complementary tension between his whole body and its constituent parts.52 Because ‘la langue seule ne peut suffire / A vous rendre suffisantes louenges’ (the tongue alone cannot offer you sufficient praise: vv. 7–8), Villon separates and enumerates the sensory faculties and the inner organs so that each might separately render homage: the five senses, the eyes, ears, mouth, nose, touch, and members (stanza 1); the heart (stanza 2); the teeth, liver, lung, spleen, and, ultimately, the whole body (stanza 3). In so doing Villon creates an effect not of fragmentation but of compounding or even overload; the evocation of the entire corps at the end, though, demonstrates that the poet’s self-dismembering is effected with an eye toward an eventual reintegration. Such reintegration does not figure in Charles of Orleans’ lyric, however, as the fragmentation of the body is a key element of his therapeutic strategy. Nonchaloir, depicted as a physician or as a medical treatment, is thus engaged to heal a body that is already divided and must remain so. In Charles’s poetic universe indifference is ‘un bon medecin’ (ballade LXV), ‘mon medicin’ (ballade XCVI and rondeau III), or, more unconventionally, an ‘emplastre’ to 49 Sarah Spilsbury notes the relationship between the two ballades in ‘The Imprecatory Ballade: A Fifteenth-Century Literary Genre’, French Studies 33 (1979), 385–96. 50 See, for instance, James Holly Hanford, ‘The Debate of Heart and Eye’, Modern Language Notes 26:6 (1911), 161–5. 51 On this poem see Denis Hüe, ‘Propos cordiaux: le coeur dans les poèmes dialogués’, in Le ‘Cuer’ au Moyen Age, réalité et senefiance, ed. Margaret Bertrand (Aixen-Provence: Université de Provence, 1991), 121–43. 52 This ballade has traditionally been read as a banal, yet somewhat troubling, autobiographical piece. More recent critics have dissented, reading the text as parodic. Sarah Spilsbury, ‘Villon’s Louenge a la court reconsidered’, Neophilologus 59 (1975), 482–93; Catherine Deschepper, ‘“La Métamorphose Villon”: pièce en trois actes’, Lettres romanes 52 (1998), 3–20; Erik Spindler, ‘La fin de Villon: Tous mes cinq sens (Louenge a la court) et la date du bannissement’, Lettres romanes 59 (2005), 3–16.

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be placed on the heart (ballade LXXIII). Similar language is adopted by poets of the duke’s circle: rondeau CXVII by Jehan de Lorraine reads ‘De Non Chaloir, pour adoulcir / La medecine de Desir, / Prendre fault la plus grande partie, / Pour brief [du mal d’amer guerir]’ (to sweeten the medicine of desire you should take a bigger dose of nonchaloir, to recover quickly from lovesickness: vv. 6–9). Other poems suggest that Nonchaloir operates most effectively on two of the poet’s constituent parts: his tongue and, above all, his eyes. Nonchaloir immobilizes the tongue, thus interfering with the composition of poetry: ‘mon langage trouveray / Tout enroillié de Nonchaloir’ (I will find my tongue all rusted by Nonchaloir: ballade LXXII, vv. 10–11). The ‘bon medecin’ thus prevents one of love’s primary symptoms from presenting; this cure is effected through a chemical process, rusting, that in a real-world context would probably be seen as corrosive rather than salutary. Similarly, Nonchaloir also prevents love by blocking the most important bodily sense, closing the would-be lover’s eyes. ‘Tant sont les yeulx de mon cuer endormis / En Nonchaloir, qu’ouvrir ne les pourroye’ (The eyes of my heart are so drowsy with Nonchaloir that I couldn’t open them: rondeau XXVI, vv. 1–2). The specifically medical nature of Nonchaloir’s suppression of eyesight is underlined in Jehan Caillau’s response to this rondeau, which repeats Charles’s refrain while adding further diagnostic details: ‘J’y voy trouble, car es yeux ay la taye, / Et n’y congnois le blanc d’avec le bis’ (I see poorly, for I have a film on my eyes, and I can’t tell white from fawn: rondeau XXVII, vv. 10–11).53 But rather than calling on the physician Nonchaloir to cure their ocular problems, both Charles d’Orléans and Jehan Caillau revel in the protective value of blindness. Valorizing blindness as a means of protection against temptation is nothing new: we have already seen similar language in the pseudo-Senecan De remediis fortuitorum and in the late medieval texts and translations it inspired. The idea is present in vernacular verse, too, including a ballade bearing the refrain ‘Tien toy de mal faire et fay bien’ (MCCXXI) in which Eustache Deschamps exhorts his reader ‘Soyes sourt, aveugle’ (be deaf, blind: v. 23).54 But the idea is elaborated to a remarkable degree in the lyric of Charles d’Orléans and his circle, because the willful self-imposition of blindness, effected by closing one’s eyes (or, in one instance that I will discuss below, applying a blindfold to oneself), is the ultimate product of Charles’s synecdochic language. Once separated from the rest of the body, the eyes are easily disarmed. Charles adopts this therapeutic course in a number of his lyrics, closing his own eyes in order to protect himself: for instance, in chanson XX (‘clignez les yeulx hastivement’; shut your eyes fast: v. 6), 53 The reference to the taye constitutes the only explicit reference to cataract I have yet located in fifteenth-century French poetry. For a handful of fourteenth-century examples, see Chapter 4. 54 Deschamps, Œuvres complètes, vol. 6, 218–19.

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chanson LIII (‘Fault il aveugle devenir?’ must one go blind: v. 1), chanson LXXII (‘Crevez moi les yeulx / Que je ne voye goutte, / Car trop je redoubte / Beaulté en tous lieux’; gouge out my eyes so that I can’t see, for I fear beauty everywhere: vv. 1–4), rondeau XCIV (‘Faitez les portes fermer’; have the doors shut: v. 4), and the Songe en complainte (‘Mes yeux cligniez et mon oreille close / tendray, afin que n’y entrent jamais / par plaisance les amoureux atrais’; I’ll keep my eyes and ears shut so that the amorous darts can never use my pleasure to get in: vv. 125–7). A similar logic lies behind one of the paradoxes of the so-called Concours de Blois: ‘Aveugle suis, et si les autres maine’ (I am blind, and yet I lead others: ballade C, v. 3). Read in light of nonchaloir’s therapeutic blinding of the lover, we may understand the Concours ballades’ antiphrastic play as another sort of remedy, wherein a combination of metaphor and irony creates the conditions for a synecdochic cure.55

Les yeulx bandez, en mirouer me myre The Concours de Blois, dated by Champion to 1457–60, was a poetic game (or, as Daniel Poirion suggests, a sort of festschrift or ‘hommage collectif’56) prompted by Charles’s ballade ‘Je meurs de soif en couste la fontaine’ (C). The original poem and the responses are all, as ballade C’s first line suggests, built on a series of paradoxes.57 As Charles compiled his poetic album58 this initial ballade gave rise to an increasingly complex play of contrasts and contradictions: the paradoxes within the original ballade, the contrasts between the original text and the eleven responses composed by the duke’s poetic interlocutors, including François Villon and Jehan and Simonnet Caillau (CXXIIIb–e, g–m), and the opposition with Charles’s own follow-up pastiche, ‘Je n’ay plus soif, tarie est la fontaine’ (CXX). This poetic sequence, as recorded in BNF fr 25458, constitutes what Jane H. M. Taylor has called a

55 Or, as Florence Bouchet has written, ‘la synthèse s’opère à travers l’ironie’. ‘La joie dans la peine’, 16. 56 Daniel Poirion, ‘Le fol et le sage “auprès de la fontaine”: La rencontre de François Villon et Charles d’Orléans’, Travaux de linguistique et de littérature VI.2 (1968), 53. 57 On the concours, see Champion’s introduction to his edition; also R. A. Dwyer, who found that Charles’s line was probably derived from a ballade that, tellingly, occurs in its sole manuscript as an interpolation between books IV and V of a French verse translation of Boethius’s Consolatio philosophiae. ‘Je meurs de soif auprès de la fontaine’, French Studies 23 (1969), 225–28. 58 The duke’s autograph album is identified with BnF ms fr 25458, copied in the early 1450s from a manuscript Charles had begun in England; later poems were inserted on new folios and in blank spaces possibly left for musical notation. See Pierre Champion, Le Manuscrit autographe des poésies de Charles d’Orléans (Paris: Champion, 1907), and Mary-Jo Arn, The Poet’s Notebook: The Personal Manuscript of Charles d’Orléans (Paris, BnF, MS fr. 25458) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008).

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‘cultural conversation to which we are allowed privileged access’.59 It is a conversation built on sets of opposing metaphors, which, when applied to a partitioned body, push the logic of rhetorical remedy to its (seemingly) illogical extremes. The state of blindness, and the seeming paradox of a blind man leading others, figures in the duke’s initial ballade and reappears in several of the responses. As noted above, ‘Aveugle suis, et si les autres maine’ is the third of the initial ballade’s apparently contradictory complaints. But is the notion of a blind man leading others paradoxical after all? The image is not without analogues: we have seen in the slightly later Danse aux aveugles that blind Love, Fortune, and Death lead man – to his ruin.60 A far more positive model of blind leadership stems from Charles’s own verse: in touting the curative blindness brought on by Nonchaloir, the duke’s poetic persona teaches others how to avoid the pain of lovesickness and thus, in a sense, leads them. The poem’s third paradox is therefore linked to the later statement ‘Maladie m’est en santé donnee’ (sickness is granted to me in health: v. 20), as the apparent handicap of blindness can also be read as a therapeutic gift. In presenting as paradox a scenario that he has himself promoted (albeit figuratively) elsewhere in his lyric corpus, the duke creates yet another contradiction, an action that is at once possible and impossible. Three of the responses to ‘Je meurs de soif en couste la fontaine’, including the duke’s own follow-up, revisit the paradox of the blind man. Charles declares in ‘Je n’ay plus soif, tarie est la fontaine’ that ‘Je voy bien cler, ja ne fault c’on me maine’ (I see perfectly clearly, which doesn’t stop people from leading me: v. 3), while the anonymous respondent of CXXIIIi writes, ‘Aveugle suis en clere vision’ (I am blind with perfect sight: v. 23). Both formulations are contradictory in their literal sense but are perfectly consistent with the duke’s model of vision: when opening one’s eyes means exposing oneself to love’s assault, the man who literally sees is the one who is figuratively blind, who requires guidance. The most evocative of the responses to Charles’s original ballade, though, is the one contributed by Simonnet Caillau (CXXIIIm). Simonnet reconsiders the problem of being led from a standpoint not of blindness but of mobility: ‘Tout aresté, sans marchier, l’on me maine’ (completely stopped, without walking, someone 59 Jane H. M. Taylor, ‘Courtly Gatherings and Poetic Games: “Coterie” Anthologies in the Late Middle Ages in France’, in Book and Text in France, 1400–1600, ed. Adrian Armstrong and Malcolm Quainton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 15. On Charles’s earlier English poems as revealing a poetic persona ‘in conversation with parts of itself ’, see A. E. B. Coldiron, Canon, Period, and the Poetry of Charles of Orleans: Found in Translation (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 39–75. 60 At least some of Charles’s late medieval readers must have been well aware of this point of contact: the Arsenal manuscript (Champion’s ms A), dating from the second half of the fifteenth century, contains the Danse aux aveugles as well as fifty-three folios of Charles’s verse. Poésies, ed. Champion, ix.

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leads me: v.3). Again, the enigma is soluble only if one reads the verb ‘mener’ figuratively. More telling, though, is Simonnet’s reintroduction of blindness – more properly, of the blindfold – in an ambiguously medical context. Just as the duke of Orléans had used the twentieth verse of his ballade to confound the categories of sickness and health (‘Maladie m’est en santé donnee’), Simonnet Caillau uses his twentieth line to suggest the therapeutic effects of the blockage of sight. ‘Les yeulx bandez, en mirouer me myre’ (My eyes blindfold, I admire/doctor myself in a mirror): a blindfold permits the poetic subject to myre himself: that is, to look, to reflect, or to heal. Like Chastelain in his Miroir de Mort, Simonnet’s blindfold persona punningly examines himself in a mirror and, in so doing, cures himself. The poetic dialogue of the Concours de Blois takes on the character of a hall of mires and mirrors, whose textual echoes reflect and correct one another. Charles’s ballade and Simonnet Caillau’s response are linked by the problem of maladie and the counter-action of mirer, an act that in its polyvalent ambiguity raises the possibility of healing, of accurate representation, and of visual deformation.61 The dual language of vision and healing inscribes itself in a synecdochic model of the body and its functions, in which functionally and morphologically discrete parts are pitted against one another; fragmentation of the body, rather than constituting an obstacle to a lover seeking wholeness, is here constructed as a therapeutic end unto itself.62 Thus we see that in Simonnet Caillau’s contribution to the Concours de Blois the blindfold has shifted from an emblem of aggressive indifference (on the part of Love and Fortune, for example) to one of protective indifference. An apotropaic charm and a bandage for psychic wounds, the blindfold does not privilege inner sight (as Petrarch’s Ratio might have suggested, had the laureate composed a remedy for blindfolds) but stifles sight altogether for the greater good. In mid-fifteenth-century lyric of the tradition exemplified by Charles d’Orléans and his circle eyesight is still fundamental to the generation of love; but the purposeful, therapeutic blockage of sightlines rewrites the rules of the game.

61 On deforming mirrors see Umberto Eco, ‘Sugli specchi’, in his Sugli specchi e altri saggi (Bologna: Bompiani, 1985/2001), 9–37. 62 This interpretation of the Concours and especially of Simonnet Caillau’s ballade contrasts with Gert Pinkernell’s reading of Villon’s contribution to the Concours, according to which ‘le texte exprime le désir d’une meilleure intégration, formulée à l’adresse du chef d’un groupe élitaire par un membre récent et peu prestigieux’ (emphasis added). It is telling that Pinkernell, too, seems to have picked up on the tension of synecdoche and integration inherent in this sequence of poems. ‘La Ballade du concours de Blois de François Villon, ou les affres d’un courtisan marginal’, Le moyen français 17 (1985), 53.

Epilogue Just Words BLINDNESS EPILOGUE:AND JUSTTHERAPY WORDS

Ross: I’m Dr. Ross Geller. Rachel: Ross, please, this is a hospital, okay? That actually means something here. Friends, ‘The One Where Joey Speaks French’, aired 19 February 20041

During his Fall 2000 seminar on the Old French language the philologist Edward Montgomery once related a quip he attributed to his mentor, the great Urban T. Holmes, a quip that I cannot help but call to mind as I conclude this investigation into poetic and medical models of the body. At a cocktail party, the Old Man (as Holmes was fondly called in Montgomery’s yarns) was conversing with a physician who wondered why Ph.Ds, though not ‘real’ doctors, were granted that title. ‘Sir’, Holmes is said to have replied, ‘we were called “doctors” back when you were still known as “barbers”.’ More than just a witty defence of the oft-misunderstood doctorate of philosophy, Holmes’s bon mot inspires reflection on shifts in disciplinary boundaries, and in popular perception of the academic disciplines, from the Middle Ages to the present: a rumination that cannot but help us situate medieval poetic alternatives to medical treatments within a broader cultural context. The title of ‘doctor’, and the learned authority it affords its bearer, is seen today – in non-academic circles, especially – as the exclusive privilege of the medical practitioner. Such a widely held attitude is apparent in this conclusion’s epigraph, taken from the popular televised comedy Friends, in which the character Rachel mocks paleontologist Ross’s invocation of his ‘meaningless’ academic title; the uproarious canned laughter that follows Rachel’s line demonstrates that the show’s average weekly audience of more than twenty million viewers was expected to identify with Rachel’s point of view. The twenty-first-century perception is that physicians are considered doctors, whose practical training allows them to work miracles. Ph.D.s, on the 1 Friends Episode Guide, Season 10, Episode 13 .

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other hand, are considered out of touch with reality, and poets are not considered much at all. In our era, rife with false dichotomies between the ‘practicality’ of science and the ‘uselessness’ of arcane humanistic pursuits, many have lost sight of one of the love-imprint’s underlying principles: the power of poetry, as late medieval writers demonstrate, extends far beyond the reach of the scalpel. The ‘rhetorical remedies’ discussed in this book – such as Petrarch’s irony, Machaut’s prosthesis, Alain Chartier’s metaphor or Charles d’Orléans’s synecdochic nonchaloir – constitute a set of literary alternatives to medical and surgical therapies, indicating that the gulf between poetry and practicality has not always been so wide. Literary remedies provide but one example of the manner in which the boundaries of knowledge have hardened, shifted, emerged over time. We know from studies of medieval university education that the disciplines taught at universities, and the boundaries between these disciplines, have changed much over the last eight centuries.2 The emergence of Aristotelianism and the rise of faculties of medicine contributed to a perceived crisis of disciplinarity in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.3 And, as Jacques Verger has recently shown, the period in which love-imprint texts were most popular was a particularly transitional era in university teaching, marked by an increased emphasis on practical disciplines.4 I point this out not to suggest that the majority of love-imprint poems arose from a university context, but to indicate that the love-imprint’s amalgam of poetic and medical language emerged at a moment when theory and practice, science and rhetoric, intermingled to a remarkable degree. The Middle Ages, as Allen J. Frantzen remarks, were interdisciplinary.5 Some medieval writers responded to this disciplinary fluidity, as did Petrarch in his Invective, with an attempt to redefine rigid boundaries; others, like the poetic practitioners of late medieval France, took advantage of the ambiguity to move beyond medicalization and into a fully embodied poetics of therapy. Given that it was the Italian poets’ introduction of precise scientific language that enabled the use of lyric as therapeutic tool – earlier French 2 See Hilde de Ridder-Symoens (ed.), A History of the University in Europe, vol. I. Universities in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); John Van Engen (ed.), Learning Institutionalized: Teaching in the Medieval University (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000). 3 Cornelius O’Boyle links these two phenomena, the rise of Aristotelianism and the emergence of faculties of medicine. ‘Discussions on the Nature of Medicine at the University of Paris, ca. 1300’, in Van Engen, 197–227. 4 Jacques Verger, ‘La norme pédagogique dans les écoles et universités médiévales: stabilité ou évolution?’, in Progrès, réaction, décadence dans l’occident médiéval, ed. Emmanuelle Baumgartner and Laurence Harf-Lancner (Geneva: Droz, 2003), 157–70. 5 Allen J. Frantzen, ‘Prologue: Documents and Monuments: Difference and Interdisciplinarity in the Study of Medieval Culture’, in Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies, ed. Allen J. Frantzen (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), 10.

EPILOGUE: JUST WORDS

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poets, as we have seen, having employed such vague language as to render any verbal instruments too dull for surgical use – then why did French poets experiment so much more fully with lyric therapies? After Petrarch, the love-imprint occupies a far less important place in the Italian lyric tradition; when it does re-emerge, the language of eyesight and love serves a different, neoplatonic model of vision. In France, however, the neoplatonic current arrived much later;6 in the meantime, the Roman de la Rose remained a culturally dominant text, and while its notion of healing differs from that explored in this book, its focus on the relationship of love and vision spurred a continued interest in these phenomena, within the sort of allegorical framework that facilitated playful experimentation with the therapeutic potential of language. The strong Boethian trend in French letters, too, offered a model of the physician–patient metaphor, with Jean de Meun’s translation of the Consolatio constituting a medicalized pendant to his optical Rose. Successive generations reconfigured these two components of Jean de Meun’s literary corpus, playing the role of ‘mire’ to amorous ‘malades’ of their own creation. Whether their remedies proved successful or not, the fact that fourteenth- and fifteenth-century French poets could effect figurative therapies on their literary personas’ bodies shows that the love-imprint and its concomitant models of the lover’s body must be perceived as more than ‘just words’. The disciplinary fluidity and the rhetorical ‘remedies’ of late medieval Europe present interesting parallels with the modern cultural context in which this study was undertaken: for I, too, am writing in an era of academic interdisciplinarity,7 and of momentary hope in the power of rhetoric.8 In making such an observation I reflect (or fall prey to?) what Stephen G. Nichols has described as ‘a powerful contemporary fascination with the Middle Ages as an era that has much to tell us about ourselves’9 – not because I set out to draw such parallels, but because it is incumbent upon the author of any twenty-first-century study of the Middle Ages to examine the assumptions that underlie her methodologies. As I negotiate the contrasts and the correspondences between the late medieval West and the present-day 6 For instance, Marsilio Ficino’s De amore was completed in 1469, and his translation of the Symposium published in the Opera platonis in 1484; the French translation, by Louis le Roy, was not executed until 1558. 7 See Joe Moran, Interdisciplinarity, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2010). For a thoughtful exploration of the role of interdisciplinarity in the contemporary academy, see Frederick Luis Aldama, Why the Humanities Matter: A Commonsense Approach (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2008). 8 This epilogue’s title alludes to Barack Obama’s well-received, though unoriginal, ‘just words’ speech of 16 February 2008. For an illustration of new (popular) points of view about rhetoric in the age of Obama, see Deborah F. Atwater, ‘Senator Barack Obama: The Rhetoric of Hope and the American Dream’, Journal of Black Studies 38:2 (2007), 121–9. 9 Stephen G. Nichols, ‘Writing the New Middle Ages’, PMLA 120 (2005), 423.

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American academy, I consistently run up against medieval models of (and modern obstacles to) interdisciplinary inquiry. For while claims of interdisciplinarity are abundant in today’s universities, training and support for such research can be considerably more scarce. Love-imprint texts, on the other hand, both model an interdisciplinary approach and require one of their modern reader. Beyond its immediate reflection of a pluridisciplinary body of late medieval writing that often defies modern categories of genre and discipline, love-imprint poetry of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries raises important questions about present-day constructions of knowledge. What does it mean for our contemporary rift between science and literature that, in medieval texts, writing can both literally and physically shape the body? In acquiring and privileging an observationally and experimentally based understanding of human anatomy, have we lost a valuable notion of environmental conditioning of the body? Has our contemporary brand of medicalization, unlike its medieval counterpart, come to preclude a sense of fun? And if indeed medieval understandings of the power of writing and of the functioning of the body are as different from ours as they seem to be, then how can we write the history of the (medieval) body?10 The answers lie not just in interdisciplinarity – using medical texts and visual materials to supplement our readings of literary texts – but in imagination of both the medieval and the modern varieties. A notion of mental and material image-formation accounts for the scholar’s fashioning of her own object of study, just as it clarifies how a verbal body might respond to varied therapies. The sick lover-poets of late medieval verse embody this process in their imagined and image-forming anatomies. So too must we imagine the medieval body, using words to recreate the distant beauty that we can no longer, or perhaps never could, see. Tu dois en ton cuer concevoir, Ymaginer, penser, pourtraire La biauté …11 You must conceive, imagine, ideate, and portray beauty in your heart …

10 Jacques Le Goff and Nicolas Truong arrive at this question, from a different methodological starting point, in Une histoire du corps au Moyen Âge (Paris: Liana Levi, 2006). 11 Guillaume de Machaut, Confort d’ami (Comfort for a Friend), ed. and trans. R. Barton Palmer (New York: Garland, 1992), 112, vv. 2160–62.

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Index INDEX

Accident (in Aristotelian philosophy) 12 Adjustment literature 192 Aimeric de Peguilhan 35, 36 Alain Chartier La Belle Dame sans mercy 4 Livre de l’espérance 118, 128, 130–32, 136, 146 Alhazen 24, 46 Amor de lonh 30–32, 164 Anagrams 177 Andreas Capellanus, De amore 25–27, 52, 162 Antimedical discourse 8, 55–61 see also Familiares, Invective contra medicum, Seniles under Petrarch Apelles 198 Aristotelianism 3, 19, 24, 29, 42, 212 and intromission 46 Aristotle De anima 15, 165 Ethics 91, 112 Problemata 1, 1 n.2 see also Livre des problemes under Evrart de Conty Arnald of Villanova 25, 62, 63 Asclepiades of Bithynia 107 Asclepiades of Phlius 99, 105–8 Aucassin et Nicolette 48 Averroës 73 Avicenna 15, 24 Avignon papacy 62–64 Baude Cordier 172–76 Benvenutus Grassus 16 Black Death 56, 140 Boethius Consolatio philosophiae 112, 113–18 as adapted by Christine de Pizan 128–30 as adapted by Guillaume de Machaut 123–24, 128

De institutione musica 6 Borgne 154, 155–57, 195–96 Cataract surgery 17, 79 in the writings of Gilles le Muisit 138–42 as metaphor 120–24, 135, 140, 145 Charles V of France 89, 91, 110 Charles VI of France, madness 59, 61 Charles d’Orléans 7, 12, 20, 151–52, 187, 203–5, 206–10 Cholières, Nicolas de 191 Chrétien de Troyes, Cligés 2, 28–29 Christine de Pizan Avision Christine 113, 118, 122, 128– 30, 146 Cent Ballades d’Amant et de Dame 47– 48, 52 Cicero 82, 112 Tusculanae disputationes 99, 105–6, 108 Cino da Pistoia 44 Dante, quando per caso s’abbandona 45 Veduto han gli occhi miei sí bella cosa 40, 42 Complexional theory, see Humoral theory Concomitance (theological doctrine) 188 Concours de Blois 205, 208–10 Constantine the African, Viaticum 13, 25 Contraria 19, 80–81, 95, 97–98, 109, 111 Dante Alighieri 2, 10, 43 Dante da Maiano, Di ciò che stato sei dimandatore 9–11 Deafness in Pseudo-Seneca 88, 97 n.48 linked to blindness in lyric 193, 207 Death, personified 200 Dolce stil novo 2, 18, 39–44, 50

236

INDEX

Envy, link to eyesight 70, 70 n.52 Eustache Deschamps 12 n.35, 58–59, 190, 207 Evrart de Conty Livre des problemes 171 Livre des echecs amoureux 192 Exempla 101, 103–104 Extramission 46–50, 196 Eyeglasses 17, 79, 108, 149–52 Faculty psychology 15, 18 Ferrand, Jacques 25 Fixed form poetry 19, 133–134 roundness of 135–36, 169–76 Folquet de Marselha 33, 37 Fortune and blindfolds 189–91, 200–201 and borgne 124, 155 n.27, 179, 193–95 and contraries 97–98 and Love 124, 126, 191–93, 199–200 and medicine 126–27 Francesco Landini 42 n.70, 45 n.78, 158 n.35 Benché crudele siate stat’e fera 50 Fortuna ria, Amor e crudel donna 177 n.82, 192 Gli ochi che ‘n prima tanto bel piacere 42 Ne la tuo luce tien’ la vita mia 44 François Villon 151, 205–206, 208, 210 n.62 Frederick II 34, 35, 64 Galen 64, 76, 80 Le Garçon et l’Aveugle 157 Gendered models of eyesight 47–49 Geoffrey Chaucer 5 George Chastelain, Miroir de Mort 8, 210 Giacomo da Lentini 36–39, 40–42, 43 Amor è un desìo che ven da core 37 Maravigliosamente 36–37, 42 Or come pote sì gran donna intrare 38–39, 40 Sì come il sol, che manda la sua spera 38, 40 Gilles li Muisis 136–46 Giovanni Boccaccio 5, 72, 73 Guido Cavalcanti 3, 49–50 Donna me prega 7, 49 n.94 Le mie foll’occhi, che prima guardaro 51 Vedeste, al moi parere, onne valore 10

Guido Guinizelli 44 Lo vostro bel saluto 50–51 Tegnol di folle ‘mpresa, a lo ver dire 44 Guilhem de Poitiers, Farai un vers de dreit nien 30–31 Guillaume de Lorris 27–28 see also Roman de la Rose Guillaume de Machaut 2, 18 A toi, Hanri 155 Confort d’ami 214 Livre du Voir Dit 4–5, 180–86, 202 eye imagery 176–80 ‘hybrid’ form 146, 152–54, 166–69 narrator as borgne 154–61 portrayal of Fortune 193–95 see also Polyphemus Louange des Dames 51, 52, 177 Remede de Fortune 115, 132 Boethian intertext 118, 124–26 healing metaphor 118, 120–24, 127– 28, 145 ‘hybrid’ form 119, 133–36 portrayal of Fortune 126–27, 193–94 and Petrarch 45–46, 45 n.80, 46 n.81, 51, 80 n.5, 177 n.82 as depicted in manuscript illuminations 154 n.24, 159–61 narratorial persona 119–20, 154 n.24 Guy de Chauliac 64, 75–76 Inventarium sive chirurgia magna 16–17, 76, 123, 124, 139, 151 De subtilianti dieta 144 Henri d’Andeli Bataille des VII Ars 57–58 Bataille des Vins 57 Hippocratic tradition 55 Honorat (Honoré) Bovet, Apparicion maistre Jehan de Meun 57, 59–61 Hôpital des Quinze-Vingts 157–58 Humoral theory 1, 2, 79–80, 95, 111 Hybrid texts see Lyric insertion, Prosimetrum Interdisciplinarity 212–14 Intromission 46–50, 192 Irony see Socratic irony Isidore of Seville 1, 80, 82, 107 Jacques Bauchant, Des remedes ou confors des maulz de fortune qui aviennent ou pevent venir aux hommes 85–86, 88–95, 98, 199

INDEX

Jacques de Vignay, Legende doree 187 Jacques de Vitry, Ad leprosos et alios infirmos 86 Jaufre Rudel 30, 31–32 Lanquan li jorn son lonc en mai 31 No sap chantar qui non so di 31 vida 31–32 Jean d’Arras, Mélusine 196 Jean Buridan 83 Jean Daudin, Des Remèdes de l’une et l’autre fortune 109–12 Jean Froissart Mi oel ont mis mon coer en grant dangier 45 Orloge amoureus 5 Jean Gerson 110 Jean de Meun 2 Roman de la Rose 24, 79, 190 De consolatione, translation of Boethius 114, 117, 213 as literary character 60 see also Roman de la Rose Jean Molinet 158 Jean de Montreuil 109–10 Jean de Tournemire 151 Jehan Acart 44–45 Jehan Caillau 207, 208 Jehan de Lorraine 207 Jehan Yperman 16 John the Blind, Count of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia 75, 99, 101–104, 105 John Gower, Confessio Amantis 40 n.65 Juan Ruiz, Libro de buen amor 40 n.65 Lanfranc Cigala 36 Lapo Gianni 51 Laurent de Premierfait 89 Livre de Boece de consolacion 114, 117, 118–19 Love (deity/personification) 20 depiction as blind or blindfold 191 see also Fortune and Love Lovesickness 5, 6, 6 n.15, 12, 13, 13 n.36, 31 and eyes 50, 50 n.96 Lyonnese school 46, 49 Lyric ‘insertion’ 148, 153, 166–168 Martin le Franc, Estrif de Fortune et de Vertu 187, 188, 189, 197–99 Medicalization 2, 7–13, 18, 24, 54, 116, 170

237

Melancholy 51, 52, 131, 161 Montpellier (university) 62–64 Music Therapy 5–7, 135 Neoplatonism 49, 213 Nicole Oresme 82, 108, 110 n.78 Nonchaloir 203–204, 206–207, 209 Non-naturals 5 Olivier de la Marche 190 Ophthalmology, emergence as surgical specialization 13, 16, 19 Ovid Ars amatoria 25, 26 Remedia amoris 26 Ovide moralisé 180, 182–83 Paré, Ambroise 148 Paul see Saint Paul Peter of Spain 50 n.96, 51 n.98 Petrarch 2, 3, 18, 62 De remediis utriusque fortunae 67, 85, 86–87, 95–112, 149–50, 199 n.30 Epistola posteritati 150 n.12 Familiares II.9 83, 108 Familiares V.19 64–65, 74 Invective contra medicum 20, 54–55, 56, 65–71, 77 RVF 15, 44, 50, 51, 52, 62, 77–78, 83–84, 193 Secretum 67 Seniles III.5 72 Seniles III.8 72 Seniles V.3 72, 74 Seniles V.4 72 Seniles XII.1 72–75 Seniles XII.2 17, 72–73 Seniles XVI.3 64, 74, 75 Trionfi 77 and John the Blind 102 anti-Muslim rhetoric 73–74 favorite books 86 n.33 Pier della Vigna 39 n.63 Pierre de Hauteville, Confession et testament de l’amant trespassé de deuil 3–4 Pierre Michault, Danse aux aveugles 5, 18, 187, 188, 199–203 Pietro d’Abano 3, 66 n.42 Plato, Timaeus 46 Polyphemus, in the Voir Dit 179–83, 184 Prosimetrum 114, 118, 130, 132, 133, 197, 200, 202

238

INDEX

Prosthesis surgical 108, 147–152, 186 narrative 113, 152–53, 184 lyric 21, 146, 153–54, 166, 167–69, 179, 180, 183, 184–86 Pseudo-Seneca, De remediis fortuitorum 85–88, 97, 98, 99, 207 Quinque lineae perfectae ad amorem 14, 163 Quintilian 82, 168, 187 n.3 Richard de Fournival, Bestiaires d’amour 23 Roger Bacon 46 Roman d’Eneas 25 Roman de la poire 192 Roman de la Rose 2, 24, 27–28, 49, 153, 192, 213 see also Guillaume de Lorris, Jean de Meun Rutebeuf 158–59

Saint Paul 91 Salerno (medical school) 27, 34, 57, 63 Seneca 112 see also Pseudo-Seneca Sicilian School (of poetry) 2, 18, 34–42 Simonnet Caillau 187, 190, 208, 209–10 Socratic irony 19, 82–84, 108–109 Sordello da Goito 35 n.50, 36 Stilnovisti see Dolce stil novo Surgery 57–58, 79 Thibaut de Champagne 29–30 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica 91 n.38, 188 n.4 Thomas Paien 167, 178 Les Trois Aveugles de Compiègne 157 Troubadours 2, 30–34 Trouvères 29 Uroscopy 7, 9–12, 59, 69–70

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BLINDNESS AND THERAPY IN LATE MEDIEVAL FRENCH AND ITALIAN POETRY Julie Singer

Julie Singer

JULIE SINGER is Assistant Professor of French at Washington University, St Louis.

BLINDNESS AND THERAPY IN LATE MEDIEVAL FRENCH AND ITALIAN POETRY

This book argues that late medieval love poets, from Petrarch to Machaut and Charles d’Orléans, exploit scientific models as a broad framework within which to redefine the limits of the lyric subject and his body. Just as humoral theory depends upon principles of likes and contraries in order to heal, poetry makes possible a parallel therapeutic system in which verbal oppositions and substitutions counter or rewrite received medical wisdom. The specific case of blindness, a disability that in principle forecloses the possibility of love, serves as a laboratory in which to explore poets’ circumvention of the logical limits of contemporary medical theory. Reclaiming the power of remedy from physicians, these late medieval French and Italian poets prompt us to rethink not only the relationship between scientific and literary authority at the close of the middle ages, but, more broadly speaking, the very notion of therapy.

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